Chants for desperate sailors (Cánticos para marineros desesperados) is a work by Benetton, one of the Poet Paladins, of which only a rowing chant survives, preserved in Events of Antiterra as “Last Poem”.
| Type | Work |
| Date | 1889 A.D.A. |
| Spanish entry | Cánticos para marineros desesperados |
«… canta marinero,
rema ya, rema
que todavía tu cabeza,
está sobre tus hombrosno pierdas el norte
marinerito ya,
que así tu cabeza,
al fondo se irá…»
(“Sing, sailor, row, while your head is still on your shoulders; lose your north and your head will sink.“)
Description
This deck chant for keeping the stroke is dated “twelve years before” 1901, that is 1889 A.D.A., when the Regulators sailed from Atlantis with three hundred Atlanteans, bound for the Mediterranean coast and Paris; Benetton, out of Helheim, sailed with them.
The compiler’s 1901 gloss (como la de Barbatos) (“like Barbatos’s”) supports the beheading of Barbatos, First Lord of the First Hell, without naming who did it.
Between the colophon of The Reflection of the Soul and the chant stands an unsigned line: “As long as evil beings exist in the universe, a hell will always await them. Not all were lucky enough to have so pleasant a stay in Hela’s Underworld.”
Conflicting accounts
- Barbatos’s killer: one record names Ariel, son of the last Lady of Pain, who beheaded him in his rotten paradise in Avernus under a pact with Lucifer. Other entries credited Benetton’s lance and the “cold steel” of his letters; these were corrected.
- The Hela sentence may be Benetton’s, recalling leaving Helheim “among the cold mists” in the year of the Labrador, or the compiler’s irony. In the Letters to Caro Cuore, by contrast, hell lasts while someone believes it necessary.
Open questions
- The work’s size; whether “Last Poem” is Benetton’s title; whether it was sung aboard.
- Whether Benetton saw Barbatos’s head sink (the chant is from 1889, the head from 1901).