Along with spinning yarns, sailors loved to sing. When Herman Melville decided to portray the ideal seaman as an “upright barbarian,” as close to nature as Adam in the Garden of Eden, Billy Budd, besides being “Invariably a proficient in his calling” and regardless of the fact that he could not read, was a great singer, “and like the illiterate nightingale [he] was sometimes the composer of his own song.” For Melville, and for many sailors, skill as a seaman went hand in hand with skill in music. Just as with spinning yarns, having the talent to carry and create a tune garnered respect among the men who went to sea. Whether on the deck during the dogwatch, idle moments in the forecastle, ashore in taverns, in theaters, or even in the streets, sailors enjoyed the pleasures of song. Samuel Leech described the musical celebrity of two British seamen during his service aboard the HMS Macedonian. The first was a crew member who was “quite popular” with his shipmates “for his lively disposition and his talents as a comic singer, which last gift is always prized in a man of war.” The second was called “happy Jack” and visited the frigate while it was in port. As soon as this jovial sailor came aboard, the crew ran toward him. “Every voice was hushed, all work was brought to a stand still” as the men listened “to his unequalled performances.” Another measure of music's importance to mariners is the number of songs found written in journals and logbooks kept at sea and elsewhere. Privateersman Timothy Connor wrote down more than fifty songs in a notebook while held as a prisoner of war during the American Revolution. Among the seamen in Dartmoor Prison in the War of 1812 “Music was a favourite amusement.” The sailors “met at one another's mess tables with their instruments and note books, and could easily wear away a few hours each day, which otherwise would have hung heavily upon them.” Sailor songs ran the gamut from the sentimental to the sensational and from true love to the bawdy. On the sentimental side, a favorite theme was that of distressed lovers separated by the man going to sea, but sailors also sang about family and an idealized vision of home.