How Shanties and Songs of the Sea Helped Me Weather the Storm of Depression

The language of depression can be curiously maritime. It comes in waves; it drowns us; it’s the Mariner’s albatross around our necks.

There is no express contraindication to attending a sea shanty festival two days after quitting heavy mood stabilizers. But medical science notwithstanding, it’s still a questionable choice, even if the biggest question is who actually goes to sea shanty festivals?  Well, me: a landlubbing millennial woman who does not know how to sail and hates the taste of fish. The tickets had been in hand for months, but my abrupt discontinuation of Seroquel hadn’t been planned. After a blood test revealed my blood sugar had finally crept to pre-diabetic levels, my doctor advised me to taper off my nightly dose, splitting the peach-colored pills into halves and quarters until I was free and clear. I figured I’d make it—really, I barely thought about it.

And so my dad and I set up camp in Mystic, Connecticut, and roved its damp, salty Seaport Museum, wandering in the shadows of schooners from stage to stage. We watched acts ranging from a lusty group of broad-shouldered, bearded Torontonians to thin old men with silky voices and tiny concertinas. We determined that the average age was about sixty—“I feel young,” my father said—and everyone wore a peculiar style of hat we both could identify by sight but not name until Wikipedia’s “List of Headgear” identified it as the Greek fisherman style. Many also wore suspenders. Through it all, I felt spacey, not fully corporeal, viciously nauseous. I couldn’t get my bearings. I posted the requisite mugging, thumbs-up photos for social media and immediately wanted to lie down. It was, honestly, like being seasick.

My obsession with sea shanties had crept in the way a lot of musical proclivities do these days: algorithms, “you might likes,” mixtapes made by internet strangers with intriguing taste. By the end of college, I was blasting Great Big Sea from my ancient stereo and pumping Stan Rogers through CVS-brand earbuds hardly equal to his rich bass. I would shout-sing “Barrett’s Privateers” in my ancient Volvo, spitting out the “god damn them all” refrain with gusto, and committed all the shanties in spiral-bound folksy classic Rise Up Singing to memory, ever-ready to annoy family and friends with a rendition of “Captain Kidd.”

But until that drizzly weekend in Connecticut, I had never heard a shanty sung live by another person. When I sat on a splintering bench under a dripping canopy or crowded into a weathered dockside shack and listened, I was flooded, overwhelmed by the electrifying sensation of a crowd singing the same words I knew. When I saw haggard-looking men with faces as rough and graying as figureheads sing with disarming tenderness, or watched a ragtag bunch of adolescents—the Shanteens (no, really)—get up on stage in matching lime-green t-shirts and doggedly reel their way through “Bold Riley,” I was hit right in the chest with the generousness of it all: the quiet dedication to an art that was slipping over the horizon and had no real use any longer, but still struck so deeply in at least a few hearts.

Sunday morning, at a sort of impromptu worship service, two young men sang in gorgeous tight harmony, and a veteran shantyman got up and boomed out, “These men are our future! Look at us—we’re all getting old. We need more folks like them getting involved.” And I cried: I cried, in a ramshackle church in a reconstructed fishing village in Connecticut, because we were all losing everything one day at a time: me, the shantymen, the ruddy young Canadians, the Shanteens, everyone. I cried because the cells of my body and brain were getting pulled in every direction and I no longer had the muscle to stop them.

Tired, sore, aching, I sang shanties all the way home.

*

“Shanties were the work-songs of the sailing-ship man,” writes Stan Hugill in Shanties from the Seven Seas, the modern bible of shanty lore, practice, and music. “To the seaman of America, Britain, and northern Europe a shanty was as much a part of the equipment of a sheath-knife and a pannikin.” Shanties were songs of utility, evolving from the wild, yelping “sing-outs” of working men on the decks to melodies and refrains, polished and honed for heaving or hauling—never frivolous, but indispensable. “A good song was worth ten men on a rope,” as the sailors’ saying goes.

Shanties, like the ships themselves, traveled the world. The sea was no man’s land, or every man’s land, and so shanties stole their form from anywhere with a port: from Liverpool and New York, from Jamaica and Trinidad, from the Low Countries and Ireland, from hymns and from plantation songs. “All,” as C. F. Smith, author of 1927’s A Book of Shanties, put it, “was fish to the shantyman’s net.”

In the shanties, there are gals: the gals o’ Dublin Town, the gals o’ Chile, New York gals, Spanish ladies, the girl in Portland Street, Maggie May, Lucy Long, Susiana Brown. There is food—salt beef, salt bread, oatcake, codfish—and (of course) there is drink: grog, rum, whiskey, lime juice, beer. There are ports in Quebec, Bonnie Scotland, South Australia, ’Frisco Bay. There is longing, there is forward motion, there is purpose; a shore behind and a shore before.

But there is also endlessness, the futility of a horizon that spills wave over wave. A life adrift is the only life that can endure, one journey after another the only way to earn your keep. There is certainty without stability, there is solid ground only briefly under your feet. Then poor old Jack must understand / There’s ships in docks all wanting hands; / So he goes on board as he did before, / And bids adieu to his native shore. / For he is outward bound, hurrah, he is outward bound.

In the preface to Shanties from the Seven Seas, a quote from seaman Dr. Kurt Hahn attributes the globality and staying power of this music to “the international common denominator—seasickness and song.” Our human bodies get weary from the motion of travel, and the work of the journey can only be achieved through our songs.

*

After the festival in Mystic, the rest of the summer saw me back and forth to the water’s edge. I road-tripped to Long Beach Island with my best friend from high school, sat in the ocean, did not sleep, almost threw up the hot dogs we grilled. My parents rented a house in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where I sat and smelled the salt and clawed at the insides of my mind, desperate to find the normalcy I’d once lived with no effort. I broke up with my boyfriend; I faked headaches to leave work early. I was breathless with pain, constantly nauseous. Some days I just could not leave my bed—I’d thought people who said that were making it up, and yet there I was. I lost thirty pounds that I hadn’t even realized I’d gained. I cried so often that it stopped feeling like a distinct action, just another bodily reflex.

And through it all I listened to shanties—clinging, for whatever reason, to the Assassin’s Creed: Black Sails soundtrack (which I will defend to my death as unnecessarily excellent). Music as a respite from feeling isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and yet even at the time—curled into the fetal position on my couch, or stuffed into the corner of a commuter train, or hot-eyed and sleepless at midnight with my laptop warm on my lap—I felt I had something all to myself. I was lost in music about loss, about being lost, about real troubles of body and spirit that both mirrored and dwarfed my own privileged struggles. Simple and spare, the melodies closed over my head and made everything soft and slow and just a bit bitter, as if I were swimming and had let go just enough to drift below the surface.

The language of depression can be curiously maritime. It comes in waves; it drowns us; it’s the Mariner’s albatross around our necks. We long for smooth sailing, for hope on the horizon, an even keel. And the summer I stopped taking Seroquel, my depression was a riptide. I could see the shimmering okayness of everything around me, all the way to the edge: I was employed, insured, well-fed, loved. And yet it was useless to me: I was either plunged into hopelessness, or dying slowly of thirst.

My uncle, a former sailor on a Navy submarine, had told me once about the men crazed out of their minds with the overwhelm of water everywhere around them, above, below, and on every side; men who’d had to be lashed to their bunks until the ship surfaced. Even then, I’d known that would have been me if I were ever to enlist and don a pair of white bellbottoms and go to sea. Some of us just can’t weather the storms.

*

After his own bout of seafaring, Felix Fabri, a fifteenth-century Dominican friar, wrote that “work at sea is very heavy, and is only carried on by a concert between one who sings out orders and the laborers who sing in response [. . .] great weights are dragged by their means.” For a time in my life there was a great weight to be dragged, and with the sea shanties, I dragged it.

Eventually, I found a new doctor, I got new drugs, I fell in love. I started taking, hilariously, fish oil (a helpful source of mood-regulating fatty acids, said my psychiatrist, for those who can’t choke down a single salmon filet). But the music of the sea didn’t leave me. It was imprinted inside me, a throughline both to the hollowness I felt for those months and to the hollow heart of the songs themselves, of the men who had sung them.

There had been no rope tearing at my palms, no journey more perilous than a daily train trip to and from an air-conditioned office, no excess of whiskey (mostly) and no distant sweetheart fearing for my safety. But I had been adrift, desperate to get to a place where I was not yet, and I missed the place where I had been. I could not have kept going without the heave and haul of these songs that gave me, in some impossible way, a path forward.