Keeping the ball rolling on my basic fiddler's interest in seafaring gigs, here's some tunes that we assume were played by the mighty William Litten, who sailed through the East Indies on a merchant ship in the years around 1800.
When I say we assume he played them, they were written down in a manuscript book he compiled, the book was preserved by another sailor who settled in the Cape Cod area. The tunes are the Princess of Wales Minuet and the Kiss in the Furz. Minuets are somewhat stately numbers, a 3/4 dance from the courtly era, the second tune, sometimes also called the Blast of Wind, is what's known as a slip jig; slip jigs are still danced in traditional Irish settings, they are unusual today though and are in 9/8 meter, a quick ONE-2-3, FOUR-5-6, SE'N-8-9.
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