Brother sailor. An address to sailors. Tune, Indian chief. Together with the Spiritual soldier's uniform

Both songs on Brother Sailor are evangelical songs seeking to convert military men to Christianity—the first directed at seamen, the second at soldiers. Both presumably would work with anyone, the military aspects simply being used as metaphors for life’s passages. The first song uses seafaring terms knowledgeably and was printed on several nineteenth-century slip ballads as “The Mariner’s Compass”; it also appeared in M. E. Bartgis’s Naval Songster as “Mariner’s Hymn. Originally Published in New-York” (75-76; Roud; R. Keller, Early American Songsters). This text was set to the tune of Anne Home Hunter’s “Death Song of an Indian Chief,” but does not draw on that text for its images. Possibly written by Elias Smith, the text appeared as “An Address to Sailors” near the end of Hymns, Original and Selected by Elias Smith and Abner Jones, and in many succeeding collections published by them (311-12).

The militaristic text “Spiritual Soldiers’ Uniform” is an extended metaphor in the mood of Isaac Watts’s “Soldiers of the Cross.” Attributed to J. Berridge in Richard Conyers’s Collection of Psalms & Hymns, it was set to music by Jeremiah Ingalls and published in his Christian Harmony (Klocko 107).