With Wellerman taking over TikTok I’ve seen a few people tweet “Space Shanties” and dropping the thread, but let’s pull on that a little. Let’s dig into what a space shanty would look like. Some reflections from a sailor, historical sailing buff, and a sci fi fan ahead—

Here’s the thing. Sea shanties (or chant-ys) were done to keep time on the boat. They’re practical songs, passed down, but easy to recall. one thing about shanties is that the hand-over-hand beat on refrains are much older than the stories in verse.

How they get pieced together is up for debate, and interpretation and improv has always been a part of the shanty.

The stories as well are hit or miss. sometimes the lyrics are nonsensical. That’s fine, who cares, just keep the time, tu rye ay, all that.

By the time of the steamship shanties had lost their practical use. The shift from practicality to folklore is clear. As soon as you stopped hauling lines, holystoning decks, rowing to get whales, or pulling up a windlass the shanty goes from a work song to a cultural curio.

SO—space shanties. We’ll assume that space shanties are also work songs, but what work?

Imagine space shanties chanted as a group of spacefarers use a neo-holystone to scrub the grime off a radar, a satellite, a sail, a solar-panel. Those things need to be cleaned.

Space shanties to help hackers keep time as they read code; shanties to break up the tedium of trailing wires through the boat, checking their connection at timed intervals. As they clean stocks, with different verses to check details for different weapons.

Space shanties to pass the time in between galaxies.

Space shanties in rounds to keep track of the passage of hours as you patrol the ship, no change of lights feeling as right as singing about the distant shores.

Space shanties sung at home ports to wish away ships, a holdover of the choirs now, part nostalgia, part a reminder of the verses they leave planetoid. Space shanties as the mark of a well-met space farer, one who’s done his time.

The spaceman who don’t know a shanty is the who’s military, or worse, the man who owns the ship you’re working on. Sussing out cops and brass by which verses they know, half a code, half what they were told. Shanties as warnings, as ways to share bad routes, dangerous spaceways.

Space shanties to trade with friends, to help with unloading cargo at a port. Trading new verses with captains and navigators. Shanties put to new time to track the space between stars, helping calculate parsecs with hands and sextants.

Space Shanties at cantinas, all the crew on the table, drinking when you’re dry. Space shanties to tell your legend. To immortalize your name, or better yet, the name of your ship.

Space shanties to keep time as you measure how far you’ve drifted out into space.

Shanties as comfort. As the tunes you’ve sung your whole journey long, learned and melodied with your crew. Songs sung to carefully measure out a heave haul when you have to drag your ship to safety, broken and shattered on a planet.

Shanties to mark the passage of time as you run out of air in your suit. Space shanties you whisper to yourself, comms cut off, when no-one in space can hear you sing.