' Forebitters and the Spanish
Armada'
H. E. Piggott
The songs of British seamen, as Mr. Piggott will explain, are as various in kind as British seamen themselves. There are the shanties and the forebitters-the folk songs of the sea; the innumerable ballads and songs about sea-fights or sea-life, generally written by professional ballad-makers to existing tunes, but sometimes by seamen themselves ; and, perhaps the best known of all, the ‘sea-songs’ of such dramatists and composers as Gay, Dibdin, and Braham, songs that were seldom sung afloat.