Alfred Bulltop Stormalong

Also Known As: also Old Stormalong, Old Stormy, Mister Stormalong, Stormalong John, Yankee John Stormalong; the shanty texts spell him Storm-a-long and Starm along depending on whose ear was doing the work
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Enormous size and the seamanship to match it, so that he does alone the work of a full crew and holds a wheel built for thirty-two men.
Role in Mythos: He is the ideal sailor of the American merchant fleet, mourned in the work songs for eighty years before anyone in print gave him a body or a first name.
Relation to Humans: He is human himself, the best of the men who sang about him, and his funeral is what they sang while doing the heaviest work aboard. Nobody ever asked him for anything; they measured themselves against him and buried him with a silver spade not one of them could have afforded.

The first thing anyone sang about Stormalong was his funeral. Before he had a face, a ship or a first name he had a grave, and men dug it for him over and over in the heat of a hold at Mobile Bay, four to a jack-screw, forcing cotton bales into a space that did not want them. Old Stormy, he is dead and gone. Carry him along, boys, carry him along. The screw moved a fraction on the beat and they started the verse again.

Charles Nordhoff wrote that chant down in The Merchant Vessel, published in 1855, and called cotton-screwing about the heaviest sort of labour a man could take on. What he recorded is the oldest surviving thing recognisably about Stormalong, and it is not a tale, it is a burial. Dig it deep and bury him safe. Lower him down with a golden chain. Then he’ll never rise again. Collectors caught the same grave being dug for the next sixty years, and the finery kept growing: a silver spade, a shroud of the finest silk, and not one of the men singing it owning a decent pair of boots.

Nobody who sang it could tell you who he had been. Frank Bullen, who had gone to sea himself before he started writing down what sailors sang there, said in 1914 that he had never been able to learn who the antitype of Stormalong could have been, and suspected the man was simply the embodiment of every prime seaman the sailor had ever known. The collectors could not even agree what job the song was for. Tozer gave it for the pumps and Colcord for the capstan, while Cecil Sharp, taking a version from John Short of Watchet in 1914, marked no function at all, the only one of Short’s shanties he left blank.

The name moved around as freely as the tune. He is Stormy, Old Stormy, Mister Stormalong, Stormalong John, Yankee John Stormalong. Stan Hugill traced the whole cluster back to African American song of the 1830s and 1840s, and a related minstrel piece called Stormy Along Stormy was in print in Philadelphia by 1854. In one branch of the family the chorus carries a dead American general to the burying ground instead, with Stormy still in the refrain.

Then, in 1930, he got a first name.

Frank Shay put the tale in the mouth of the oldest skipper on Cape Cod, a man who had served under Stormalong as apprentice and then as second mate, and who was plainly sick of hearing it told wrong. Only the other day a young whippersnapper had claimed the man was fourteen fathoms tall. He was not. He was four fathoms from the deck to the bridge of his nose, twenty-four feet. Alfred Bulltop Stormalong was the name he gave his first captain, who read the initials after it on the ship’s log back to him as Able-Bodied Sailor, which is where the rating comes from, at least on Cape Cod.

The best of Shay’s yarns begins with an anchor that will not come up. The ship is lying in the middle of the North Atlantic after a right whale when the lookout sights a school to the eastward. All hands go forward and nothing happens. The hook gives a little and sinks back into the mud, gives and sinks back, as though there were hands down there taking it out of theirs. When they finally worry it clear they can see what has hold of it: an octopus with half its arms around the anchor and the other half around the weed on the sea floor.

Stormalong went over the side with his sheath knife in his teeth before anyone thought to stop him. For a quarter of an hour the sea boiled white and the old hooker rolled as though she were beam to the wind, and the crew stood at the rail certain their bosun had been pulled to pieces. Then his head broke the surface and he came up the chain hand over hand before anyone could get a line to him. Asked what he had done down there, he said he had tied its arms in knots. Double carrick bends. It would take the thing a month of Sundays to get them out.

He was loyal to any ship until he saw a bigger one, and then he went sullen. His standing complaint was that vessels were not built big enough for a full sized man, and once he got as far as heaving his duffel bag onto a Boston wharf to go and dig potatoes instead.

What brought him back was the Courser, the biggest ship afloat, built in Shay’s telling by Donald McKay, who really did build clippers in East Boston and really did not build this one. Her deck was too wide to cross on foot, so the crew kept horses. Her masts were hinged so they could be laid over to let the sun and moon go by. Her sails were stitched in the Sahara because there was nowhere else flat enough to spread the canvas. Her wheel took thirty-two men, which is why they handed it to Stormalong alone. Some tellings call the ship the Tuscarora instead, and nobody has reconciled the two.

The Courser is where the geography starts getting rearranged. Too broad for the English Channel, she had her sides soaped and was squeezed between Dover and Calais, and the streaks she left on the English cliffs are the reason they are white. A storm later drove her onto the Central American coast, straight through a party of men who were digging, and the furrow she cut is the Panama Canal. These are the claims a Cape Cod skipper makes late in an evening, and Shay set them down knowing it.

He died at a wheel. A steamship captain, provoked past bearing, challenged him to race across the Atlantic; Stormalong won by miles and the crossing killed him. It is the John Henry story with salt water in it, and it reached print in the decade when the last American square-riggers were being broken up for scrap.

Everything he can do comes from one place: he is a working sailor scaled up until the work stops being hard. He holds a wheel meant for a gang, weighs an anchor a whole watch cannot shift, and takes a ship through water she has no business in. Nothing about him is magical. He has no charm, no weapon and no god at his back, only reach and grip and a knowledge of knots.

His limits come from the same scale. No ship built can hold him for long, so he is forever signing off, forever sulking at the rail of a vessel that was the finest in the trade a fortnight earlier. He cannot be accommodated. And the steamship never gets tired.

The awkward part is the dating. The shanties are real, taken down from men at the pumps and the capstan and the cotton screw across eighty years. The tall tales are not old. No Stormalong yarn has been found in print or in a collector’s notebook before Shay’s Here’s Audacity! of 1930, and the name Alfred Bulltop arrives with Shay and then with Charles Edward Brown, whose pamphlet Old Stormalong Yarns was printed in Madison, Wisconsin in 1933, several hundred miles from any ocean and a generation after commercial sail had finished dying on the Atlantic coast. Richard Dorson coined the word fakelore in 1950 for stories built this way, and Marshall Fishwick filed Stormalong in 1959 alongside Febold Feboldson, Tony Beaver, Big Mose and Annie Christmas as literary imitations of Paul Bunyan.

The songs went on regardless, sung by people who knew nothing about any of that, and they still bury him with a silver spade.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Alfred Bulltop Stormalong?

Alfred Bulltop Stormalong is the giant sailor hero of American sea shanties and tall tales, said to stand four fathoms tall and to captain a clipper too large for the English Channel. He began as a name in nineteenth-century work songs, where sailors and stevedores sang about his funeral, and was given a full name and a biography by the writer Frank Shay in 1930.

Was Stormalong a real person?

No sailor has ever been identified as the original Stormalong. The shanty collector Frank Bullen, himself a former seaman, wrote in 1914 that he had never been able to learn who the figure was based on and thought he was an idealised composite of every fine seaman a sailor had known. The full name Alfred Bulltop Stormalong appears only in twentieth-century print, beginning with Frank Shay in 1930.

How tall was Stormalong?

The oldest printed version, Frank Shay’s of 1930, has him four fathoms from the deck to the bridge of his nose, which is twenty-four feet, and Shay’s narrator specifically corrects a younger man who had claimed fourteen fathoms. Later retellings raise him to about thirty feet. No source describes his face, hair or clothing at all.

What was Stormalong’s ship called?

The ship is usually the Courser, described as so wide that the crew crossed the deck on horseback and so tall that its masts were hinged to let the sun and moon pass. Some versions call the vessel the Tuscarora instead. In Shay’s telling the Courser was built by Donald McKay, a real Boston clipper builder who had nothing to do with the legend.

How did Stormalong die?

In the best-known ending, an angry steamship captain challenged Stormalong to a race across the Atlantic; Stormalong won by several miles but the effort of holding the wheel through the crossing killed him. The story mirrors the John Henry legend, in which a man beats a machine and dies of it, and both arrived in print as the technologies they mourned were disappearing.