Ok,
Does anyone know a sea shantie that goes:
Something like:
A Pirate I was meant to be
Burn the land and boil the sea
I know this line was in one of the Monkey Island 4-6 series, but I don’t know of the name of the shanty.
I don’t know if it’s from a shantie or Monkey Island, but the second line is from the theme to Firefly.
Would this be it?
A pirate I was meant to be, trim the sails and roam the seas!
That could be it. But was there a real shanty with those lyrics?
We’ll avoid scurvy if we all an an Orange.
Yeah, that’s it. It’s from The Curse of Monkey Island, and it’s a shanty that the barbershop pirates sing (with your dubious assistance) once they join your crew.
That’s right. It’s an original shanty written for the game. Guybrush’s crew keeps on singing rhymes to whatever he says, until he comes up with the unrhymeable line HPL mentioned.
I think you’re really confused. Given the sentence structure of “Pirate I was meant to be”, it’s obvious you’re talking to Yoda.
Well, it was made by Lucasfilm…
Okay, I have played The Curse of Monkey Island at least four times, so why do I have no memory of this part?
It’s normally spelled chantey.
At last! A subject I know alot about!
It’s spelled Shantie, Chantie, Shanty, chanty, all kinds of ways. They were work songs for cordinating the efforts of running a sailing ship. The call and response were used to make the men pull the ropes and such all at the same time for instance. There were shanties for pulling up anchor chains, bracing sheets, scrubbing the decks (“holy stoning”) and almost every chore requiring a group working in synch. A good “Shanty-man” was worth 10 other men as the old saying goes. They seem to have as their origin a blend of slave work-songs and Irish work songs.
Pirate Shanties? A hollywood invention I’m afraid.