Tiger Sharks (Dick's tale)

As I’ve restarted my blog (after an absence  of six years) with a shark-related post, here’s another one regarding a piece of music I produced, based around an old sailor's account of an attack by tiger sharks. 

I produced this track about four years ago, and shared it on my Soundcloud site, but my blog was on hold at the time.

On the sound file sharing site Freesound, I came across a remarkable recording of an old sailor telling the tale of the day his captain fell overboard from his sailing ship in the South China Sea (freesound.org/people/dinger154/sounds/396518/ ). 

I contacted the Freesound member who had shared it (dinger154), asking about the sailor and his accent. Dinger 154 replied:

"All the old English sailors had a generic accent that never did identify exactly where they came from. They picked it up over the years of just speaking to each other, similar thing happened in the Army. This old boy's name was Dick. I met him in a pub in Portsmouth 40 years ago when he must have been about 80 years old. One of the last old proper sailors. He had skin burned mahogany colour by the sun and more wrinkles than your grandma."

I found the story incredibly evocative and compelling, and produced this tune incorporating Dick's tale.

https://soundcloud.com/cottishatureboy/tiger-sharks-dicks-tale?utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

No doubt Dick is long gone (he'd be maybe 120 by now) and I am very grateful to dinger154 for sharing his old recording (with Creative Commons 0 licence) and preserving Dick's voice and story for posterity.

My tune also incorporates a recording of gulls shared by another Freesound member, acclivity, (freesound.org/people/acclivity/sounds/38956/ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) Licence) and another by laurent, of the creaking rope of a moored boat (freesound.org/people/laurent/sounds/15553/ also shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) Licence). The Chinese-sounding instrument is a simulated pipa playing a Japanese scale, that I played and recorded through Garageband.

The location that Dick mentions is Zamboanga in the Philippines. I love the way his old sailor's voice pronounces it as 'Zambawanger'.

The story's pretty grim but life was hard before the mast, and full of dangers!