The book is based in part on the celebrated work of late nineteenth-century writer, sailor and fervent shanty advocate W. B. Whall. Whall was to become a Master Mariner, but studied first at Oxford and then had a musical training at St Paul's Cathedral, London. He first went to sea in 1861 in an old passenger East Indiaman and took up his task of recording the words and music of the great sea shanties `as they were actually sung by sailors'. These were presented in his book Sea Songs and Shanties (1910) which went into four updated editions in the course of the next decade.
