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Law in Popular Culture collection

Journal of Maritime Law & Commerce 
Vol. 31, No. 4 (October 2000) 

Reprinted from "Admiralty Law in Popular Culture", a special 
issue published in 2000 by the Journal of Maritime Law and 
Commerce, a quarterly devoted to maritime law, with the 
permission of the Journal and the Jefferson Law Book Company.

Admiralty Law and Popular Musical Culture

WILBUR WATKIN LEWIS*

I
INTRODUCTION

     The assignment to write on admiralty law and popular musical culture at first seemed a simple task. Surely there would be no significant works of program music based upon such learned subjects. However, the author reckoned not upon the vast amount of popular music with themes pertinent to the topic. In fact, humankind's fascination with all things nautical has produced a vast amount of material to draw upon. Consequently, this article does not claim to be a comprehensive account of admiralty law as reflected in popular musical culture, but merely the author's gleanings of the most interesting bits from a vast repertoire.

II
GILBERT AND SULLIVAN

     The first logical stop is Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore (1878). Here we have not only a nautical theme, but also a character, the Right Honorable Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., who is the First Lord of the Admiralty. Unfortunately, Sir Joseph's links to admiralty law, even though he is a barrister, are tenuous. This becomes obvious when we learn that the First Lord of the Admiralty is not a judicial post but a political appointment to the cabinet. However, Sir Joseph's word is law on the good ship Pinafore and he manages to turn its orderly world upside down.
     First he commands Captain Corcoran to end all his orders with the phrase "if you please." As Sir Joseph tells us:
For I hold that on the seas
The expression, "if you please,"
A particularly gentlemanly tone implants.
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     Before this, he gives a copy of a song he has composed to the story's hero, Able Seaman Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Rackstraw. This song is dedicated to "the principle that a British sailor is any man's equal, excepting mine." The glee, entitled A British Tar, so inspires Ralph that he decides to tell Josephine, Captain Corcoran's daughter, "I am a British sailor, and I love you!" Josephine at first rejects his offered love and only relents when Ralph prepares to blow his brains out.
     In the second act, Josephine has second thoughts on life as the bride of a common mariner. Sir Joseph, unaware that he is doing so, persuades her to elope with Ralph by telling her, "Madam, I desire to convey to you officially my opinion that love is a platform upon which all ranks meet."
     Captain Corcoran, learning that Ralph and Josephine plan to elope, lies in wait and spoils the plan. When Rackstraw shocks Corcoran by declaring his love for Josephine, all Corcoran can do is swear the "big D." Overhearing this, Sir Joseph sends Corcoran off to his quarters. After learning that Josephine had planned on eloping with Ralph, Sir Joseph has him "loaded with chains" and put in the ship's "dungeon."
     All ends happily, however, when Mrs. Cripps (Little Buttercup), a Portsmouth bumboat woman, reveals that Corcoran and Ralph were mixed up in "childhood's happy hour." This means that Ralph is the captain and Corcoran is the seaman. They then appear together, having exchanged roles, the accident of birth having made Ralph an officer and Corcoran a simple sailor.
     H.M.S. Pinafore was Gilbert and Sullivan's first great commercial success. The opera was so well received that it was pirated in the United States, beginning a bitter legal fight over the copyright. In an effort to prevent further infringement upon their creative works, Gilbert and Sullivan subsequently traveled to the United States to personally oversee the premier of their next work, The Pirates of Penzance (1879). Some have suggested that the American piracy of Pinafore prompted the choice of this new work.1
     The pirates in this work are a particularly softhearted lot. They make it a point never to attack a weaker party. The result is they are habitually trounced whenever they do attack. They also refuse to molest orphans, because "we are orphans ourselves, and know what it is." Unfortunately for the pirates, word of this peculiarity has gotten around and every ship they capture is found to be manned entirely by orphans.
     The pirates are eventually brought to justice, but are suddenly pardoned when it is revealed they are all members of the House of Peers. All is then forgiven upon their promise to resume their official positions and marry the daughters of Major General Stanley.

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     Lastly, in Ruddigore (1887), Gilbert and Sullivan give us a character named Richard Dauntless, "a Man-o'-war's man." Dauntless serves on a Revenue sloop, "a patrol boat engaged on coastal duties to deter smuggling,"2 and in Act I sings a ballad that gives an interesting view of England's enforcement of its smuggling laws.

III
OPERA

     In traditional operas (as opposed to the "light" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan), we find the rule of law on the seas exemplified in several supernatural scenes. In Monteverdi's Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (1641), for example, Neptune, the god of the oceans, condemns Ulysses to wander the seas because he has blinded the Cyclops, Neptune's son. In Gluck's Iphigenie en Aulide (1774), the gods demand Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenie before they will allow a favorable breeze to take him and his army to war with Troy.
     In Mozart's Idomeneo, re di Creta (1781), Idomeneo, the king of Crete, encounters a ferocious storm at sea while returning from the Trojan War. He offers to sacrifice the first living thing he sees if the gods allow him to make it home safely. His wish is granted, but the first living thing he sees upon his return is his son Idomante. Idomeneo refuses to fulfill his vow and the gods send a monster to wreck havoc on the countryside. Just in the nick of time, however, Idomante kills the monster and Neptune announces that all will be forgiven if Idomeneo abdicates his throne to Idomante.
     In perhaps the most bizarre example of supernatural admiralty law, Richard Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander (1841), a Dutch sea captain who has uttered a blasphemous oath is condemned to sail the seas until judgement day. Once every seven years, this "Flying Dutchman" is allowed ashore to search for a woman who will love him faithfully until death. If he is successful in this quest, the curse will be broken and he will be allowed to die.
     In the opera's first act, the Dutchman comes on land and, while showing Daland, a Norwegian sea captain, a large fortune, tells him that he is looking for a wife. Daland, unable to resist the promise of riches, informs the Dutchman that he has a daughter who he is sure will be willing to marry him.
     Act II introduces Daland's daughter, Senta, who remarks that she would love the Dutchman faithfully until death if given the chance. As will happen only in an opera, in the next moment whom does her father bring home for dinner but the Dutchman himself? A marriage is swiftly arranged, but a former lover, Erik, tries to persuade Senta to reject the Dutchman.

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     Overhearing the conversation between Erik and Senta, the Dutchman concludes that he has been betrayed and returns to his ship to continue his wanderings. Accompanied by much fanfare, Senta, ever faithful, declares her love for the Dutchman and then throws herself off a cliff to her own death. The play ends, of course, with Senta and the Dutchman embracing and seen ascending to heaven.
     No discussion of opera would be complete without a word about the most famous opera composer of the 20th century, England's Benjamin Britten. Two of his greatest works were written to nautical themes: Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951). In Peter Grimes, an unfortunate string of events leads to the downfall of the title character, who is suspected of murdering his apprentice at sea. The prologue of the opera takes place at an inquest into the apprentice's death. Billy Budd, of course, is an adaptation of Herman Melville's stirring novella of the same name.

IV
SEA SHANTIES

     Sea shanties are the working songs of seafaring men. They were used to lighten the daily tasks of raising sails, hoisting anchors, and all manner of group efforts on shipboard. In his standard work, The Shanty Book (1921), Sir Richard Runciman Terry gives the arrangements of 65 shanties, grouped according to the work they were used for and the area of the ship those jobs were performed on.
     A particular favorite in terms of words (and a rollicking good tune to boot) is What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor? Various suggestions are made, all ending with the injunction to do it, "Early in the morning." The most prim and proper versions suggest five possible punishments for a drunken sailor: 1) putting him in the longboat until he's sober; 2) pulling out the plug and wetting him all over; 3) putting him in the scupper with a hose-pie; 4) heaving him by the leg; and, 5) tying him to the taffrail when she's "yard-arm under." Such treatment must surely have turned many a mariner into landlubbers or at least prompted them to vow to go to sea no more.

V
POPULAR SONG

     Where to begin? There is so much in this area to consider. For instance, issues of the freedom of the seas are evident in such stirring patriotic songs as The Star Spangled Banner and The Marine Corps Hymn ("From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli.")
     Shipwrecks and their legal ramifications also have provided topics for a 

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number of popular songs and ballads, such as Woody Guthrie's The Reuben James (about the sinking in October 1941 of a U.S. warship by the Germans), Gordon Lightfoot's The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald (about a freighter's disastrous final voyage on Lake Superior in November 1975), and Stan Roger's 1979 ballad The Mary Ellen Carter (about a fictional shipwreck caused by weather and drink).
     Sabotage plays a very important part in a number of folk songs about shipwrecks. One song in particular, The Golden Vanity, concerns a ship which is attacked by Turkish pirates. The crew and captain panic and all seems lost until a cabin boy asks what reward he can expect if he sinks the enemy's ship. The captain offers to pay him gold and silver and, as an extra incentive, give his daughter's hand in marriage.
     Now sufficiently motivated, the cabin boy swims to the pirate ship and secretly bores enough holes in her sides to sink the vessel. But when he swims back to claim his reward, the captain refuses to pay him. In some versions, the boy dives to the bottom of the ocean and drowns, while in others he is rescued by his shipmates only to expire on deck.
     Of course, no discussion of sailing disasters would be complete without some mention of the Titanic, particularly in light of the success of James Cameron's 1997 film and its Oscar-winning theme song, "My Heart Will Go On." Interestingly, a popular ballad entitled The Titanic, written almost immediately after the actual sinking, reminds us of just how much class divisions determined who among the passengers would survive the tragedy:
Oh, they sailed from England, and were almost to the shore,
When the rich refused to associate with the poor,
So they put them down below, where they were the first to go.
It was sad when that great ship went down etc.3
VI
CONCLUSION

     This excursion into various types of music dealing with aspects of admiralty law has only scraped the surface. There are more materials out there and those interested will be amply rewarded by pursuing their own studies of the subject.

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ENDNOTES

*  Instructor, Lafayette School (Elizabeth, NJ). B.A., Montclair State College; M.M., Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ). 

1. See further A. Goodman, Gilbert and Sullivan at Law (1982).

2. The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan 674 (I. Bradley ed. 1996).

3. 2 I. Silber, Sing Out! 22-23 (1960). 

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