Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!
We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: Whaling, Fishing & The Sea! Call me Tuesday Trivia! This week is about whaling, fishing & the sea. Let those sea shanties fly, tell us all about hoisting the main, the histories of collecting large and small quantities of animals from the sea, how humans built collection tools, or other tales about human’s relationship with getting good and resources from the big pools of water.
My PhD research is about the role of music in the lives of women who worked as herring gutters, packers and kipperers in the British and Irish fishing industries. The time period of my work spans roughly from the 1870s to the 1970s. There are a couple different places online you can read about my research.
Research blog. I post here sometimes about my research, as this is my official PhD student blog.
Article in Scottish Studies. My first peer-reviewed article, based on my masters research. This one is specifically about the songs that Scottish Gaelic-speaking women sang while gutting herring.
Public lectures and podcasts. On my AH profile, you can find links to some of the talks I've given about my research.
I've also done some AH writeups based on my research, or about the broader topics of work song, Gaelic culture, and the sea.
Finally, one of my most popular answers I've written on AH is about the history of space whales in popular culture. I posted a version with pictures on my blog too.
I had a couple of random Whaling questions related to some research I'm doing.
What significance (if any) did Signy Island have for the Norwegian whaling industry in the Antarctic?
How have Norway, Japan and Iceland been able to resist international pressure and the International Whaling Commission in regard to their whaling industries?
How historically accurate is the whaling portrayed in Moby Dick?
Speaking of sea shanties and human's relationship with the sea- I'd like to add a post I made on this thread sometime ago, wherein a poor user was downvoted for challenging a point of view, one in which I happened to agree with!
The debate was around the song "Nearer My God to Thee", and was it the last played by Titanic's band? Lots of dismissal waves it away, but I actually disagree. Here's my post-
I lean pretty heavily toward Nearer My God to Thee being the last song, and I think there's enough direct evidence to support that. What if... gasp!... it was both?! We have enough evidence for both, and to declare one as myth obliterates the eye witness testimony of hundreds of people. Again, the discussion really is which one was played last.
The debate against Nearer My God to Thee is ... what exactly that is. There are three different tunes, did people know what they were hearing? Would the Methodist Wallace Hartley have played the American version? The British? Bethany? It's likely the orchestra had access to/knew all three. Someone might have denied hearing Nearer My God to Thee, but just didn't realize they weren't hearing the version they knew.
Hartley himself was a fan, introducing it to his own church who's choir was run by his father. We also have one source that reports Hartley had said that if he ever faced death at sea, this is the hymn he would end with.
Those are good sources, but they are second hand and hearsay. However, we can say that the romantic notion of "NMGtT" wasn't created in the press frenzy, as it was being discussed on Carpathia. But our best source is passenger Helen Candee-
And then trembled the last strains of the orchestra's message: >Autumn first, then Nearer My God to Thee.
Candee was picked up in boat 6, which was one of the first boats lowered, so she would have been some distance. If anyone wanted to play devil's advocate with her statement, I suppose that would be it, but it would be a tough.
There's no real debate to me that "Nearer" was played, it seems obvious that they both were, I just tend to think we have enough evidence that pretty much trends that it was the final song, but I recognize that confusion, tune choice, chaos, and the resistance to over romanticize anything makes it pretty tough to state definitively.
I post it here for a few reasons
1)That poor user, I hope he knows his question was legitimate!
It's interesting to me how sometimes we use trivia to try and answer unanswerable questions. Wallace Hartley being a methodist and a fan of this hymn is a fun fact, that may also lead us to answer a historical mystery
The constant battle between academic history, emotions, human nature, and common sense- and the greater question of how and how much to weigh them. For example- I can pull testimony and compare data and poke holes in the argument against Nearer My God to Thee, but ultimately at the end of the day- it lies in knowing the personal trivia of Wallace Hartley that I believe NMGtT was, in fact, the last song played by Titanic's band. That's not academic, in fact it may be downright overly romantic, but if we can lean on romance in any history- surely it has to be with man's relationship with the sea :)