accounting for the material in later collections or on recordings by people who sailed in the 1870s). It is based on the sources we've dug up in this thread. Lots of good work, Gibb. Do we stop here or do we try to figure out how we got from here to the "later collections"? There seem to be some interesting discontinuities, but I'm not sure how to lay them out. You've done an excellent job pointing out on numerous occasions some of the probable "continuities" where someone has "borrowed" from someone else. But is it my reading or something else that a significant number of the chanties that we have found so far don't show up in the "later collections"? And almost all of a sudden "new" ones (albeit somewhat more familiar to us at times) start showing up.   What happened? I have been wondering the same. Perhaps the only really "safe" way to do a literary survey is to go chronologically by date of publication...and yet my own interest is in something other than a history of *writings on* chanties, so the attempt has been to follow the chanties, themselves, chronologically. Considerably less certain, but up until the 1870s I don't think it was so bad. There weren't *too many* instances of the publication date being far later than the time described. And even those later publication dates might be said to have been in the "not yet too contaminated" era which is worth something. As I said, 1870s