One of the first jobs in pulling out to sea was hauling up the anchor — also called “heaving” or “weighing” the anchor. In the earlier sailing days this was done by windlass, sort of a barrel on a spit with holes all around it. The sailors stuck wooden staves (called “manspikes”) into the barrel, hauled it down a turn, took the stave out and stuck it in again, hauled it down … A long, long series of short, hard pulls. Sometimes, if the ship had been in port for long and the anchor was sunk in the silt, you had to “rock and roll” the windlass to work the anchor loose. And you thought rock and roll was new, didn’t you?
I initially called the windlass staves “pawls”. Hank Cramer corrected me, informing me that a “pawl” is “the tooth or catch in the gears that keeps the windlass (or capstan) from going backwards. (Your Sears ratchet has a little one inside, and it’s reversible…)” I don’t actually have a Sears ratchet, but I think I know what he means…
Some of the chanteys applicable to working the windlass were:
Later, the capstan was developed. This was a great wheel that went around horizontally, with fixed staves; each man took a bar (called, mysteriously enough, “capstan bars”) and plodded around the capstan like a draft animal, winding up the anchor. This lent itself to slightly longer, slower rhythms, like: