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Faraway oceans, cannibals, life-or-death struggles with sea monsters … songs that chronicled the lost culture of whaling are finding a new audience, thanks to Kings of the South Seas

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Oh the whale is free, of the boundless sea
He lives for a thousand years;
He sinks to rest on the billow’s breast,
Nor the roughest tempest fears.
The howling blast, as it rushes past,
Is music to lull him to sleep:
And he scatters the spray in his boisterous play,
As he dashes – the King of the deep.
Whaling song, 1850s

The dreary business of whaling was one of the worst jobs at sea. Not just because you spent your working days in extreme danger in pursuit of the world’s biggest predator, the sperm whale, at risk of being flipped over and into the ocean by the enraged creature’s tail. Or because, if successful, you then had to deconstruct the leviathan on deck, unpeeling its blubber like a gigantic orange, and rendering it down to oil in stinking ovens known as try pots. Or that you then spent days cleaning up only to be faced with the same noisome, bloody scene all over again. No: the worst part for many men on those voyages – which could last as long as five years before they caught sight of home again – was the sheer tedium.

Indeed, it was boredom that resulted in some of the most extraordinary folk art of the 18th and 19th centuries, created in the long intervals between intense action and visceral butchery. The first came in the shape of scrimshaw, the intricately carved whale bones and teeth (and popularised in the 20th century by the collection of John F Kennedy, who was actually interred with a sperm-whale tooth in his coffin).

The other was more fleeting. Whaling songs developed from the tradition of sea shanties. They were singalong songs, measured to the rhythm of working men, exhorting them to climb rigging, haul ropes, scrub decks, chase whales. Songs such as The Bonny Ship the Diamond and The Weary Whaling Grounds may well have vanished with their singers, and a now (generally) dead industry. But they were rediscovered in the mid-20th century as part of the resurgent folk tradition, championed by the celebrated British ethnomusicologist AL Lloyd (1908-82). Lloyd had worked on whaling ships in the southern ocean, an experience that led him to collect and record whaling songs, many with Ewan MacColl, on albums such as 1956’s The Singing Sailor and Leviathan! a decade later.

Ironically, this resurgence came at the same time that we discovered whales themselves could sing. An animal that had been hitherto regarded as dumb – and therefore unable to protest its abuse – suddenly had a voice. And not only a voice, but a song, a beautiful, fluting, gurgling threnody for its own fate. Dr Roger Payne released his recordings as the chart-busting Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970. If anything could be said to have saved the whale, in an era of burgeoning awareness, it was that sound.

That year, the folk singer and activist Judy Collins brought these two disciplines together – human and whale folk art, if you will – in her yearning recording of the traditional Scottish whaling song, Farewell to Tarwathie. The power of her transcendent voice, underlain with the sound of a singing humpback whale, caught an emotional moment in time – and still does. When making a BBC Arena film on the story behind Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, we recorded Collins singing the song (hear it on the BBC Arena website). I challenge anyone not to hear it and weep, freighted as it is with our troubled, shared history, between human and whale.

Now this vexed tale has resurfaced in the newly recorded whaling songs of Kings of the South Seas. This “new folk” trio’s eponymous album, uproariously rousing and darkly disturbing by turns, is invested with the complexities of colonialism, exploitation and hardship. The songs speak, too, of the gothic romance of the whale fisheries, conducted in faraway seas mythically inhabited by cannibals (although, as Melville himself discovered when he deserted from his whaleship to the remote Marquesa Islands, they weren’t myths). The band – Ben Nicholls, Richard Warren and Evan Jenkins – have recreated a ferocious reimagining of whaling songs, recorded live at the historic folk centre of Cecil Sharp House in London - a place resonant with its own atmosphere.

The project came about when Nicholls found a book dealing with the 1820s missionary expeditions to the South Seas, which coincided, disastrously, with the whaling trade in the same area. He was fascinating by this “cultural clash”. “The whaling ships were effectively corrupting the locals living there,” Nicholls says, “whilst the missionaries were trying to convert them to Christianity. So you had this strange cultural boiling pot.” He began to dig about, searching original sources for the songs. Some were found buried in the archive at Cecil Sharp House. Others came from the ships’ logs of the whalers themselves, all but salted in brine.

What Nicholls discovered was a lyrical index of a vanished world. Songs such as King of the Cannibal Islands, an 1850s broadside ballad, invoked the imperial British sway over newly discovered indigenous peoples. As Nicholls notes, it is sung in Melville’s first book, Typee – itself a critique of the missionary activity in the South Seas. Coast of Peru was taken from the logbook of the Nantucket whaleship, Bengal, 1832. Its title calls to mind the original Moby-Dick, Mocha Dick, a rogue albino whale that roamed South American waters and was said to be impossible to capture. And Terrible Polly addresses “a sailor’s view of Polynesian girls”, as Nicholls says. “The going rate for sexual favours was an iron nail or two.” Such songs are records of another kind of transaction: as anthropologist Greg Dening noted, the whalers left behind their genes, rats and venereal disease.

Disinterred, these raw songs reek of an industry predicated on plunder and death. “It’s a pretty brutal scene,” Nicholls adds. “The conditions on the ships were appalling. They could be stuck on the other side of the world, shipwrecked, eaten by cannibals. I was trying to get some fairly brutal-sounding musical background, rather than use the straight traditional sound. So we just went with electric guitar, concertina and drum kit. The idea was to create a fairly fluid feel around the music.”

It’s a tribute to the trio’s talent that the resulting album excites as much as it challenges. Nicholls hopes that the improvised nature of the music evokes “an expansive, boat-rolling-on-the-sea, not-going-anywhere feeling, before they would kick off, into this mental frenzy where they would end up in this bloodbath, trying to kill the whale”.

These songs were the soundtrack to the first global industry. Whaleships bore men of every nation around the world. (And not only men, but women in drag too – there’s even a sea shanty to celebrate the fact, The Handsome Cabin Boy, as contemporary artist Vanessa Hodgkinson has discovered). Portuguese and Azorean sailors brought the lilting sadness of the fado traditional; Scottish and Irish whalers contributed a Celtic legacy. American ships often carried freed African slaves; British crews included Aboriginal Australians and Maori. A modern ethnomusicologist would find traces of their cultures in these songs, too. In many ways, this was the first multicultural art, produced by a bringing together of peoples in the colonial explosion of the industrial revolution. Out of hardship and, yes, courage came their songs – a potent, plangent legacy that we are still discovering, as the Kings of the South Seas so lustily declare.

Kings of the South Seas play Cecil Sharp House, London NW1, on 18 November, with a pre-concert talk by Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan, or The Whale. The self-titled album is released on 17 November.

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