"Fire Down Below" is a pumping shanty. When wooden ships were replaced by iron ships, the shanty was used for the capstan. Hugill states it was one of the shanties sung aboard a British squarerigger. He was the shantyman who sang it on the four masted barque Garthpool a week or so before it wrecked on Ponta Reef, Cape Verde Islands in October 1929. Hugill gives three different tunes for the chanty. The song was printed in Davis' Fifty Sailors' Songs or "Chanties" (1870) and Hugel's Shanties from the Seven Seas (1994).