Introduction
The object of this volume is to bring together a collection of ballads illustrating the history of the British navy from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. At every period since the invention of printing the exploits of English sailors found someone to celebrate them in verse. They never wanted a vates sacer of some kind or another, from the poet who preferred to give them immortality in elaborate verses, to the ballad-writer whose rough-hewn lines were merely intended to convey to the people the news of the day, or to represent what the people felt at the moment. It is to the last class of composition that the pieces here reprinted belong. They have a certain limited historical value. Though the details which they have preserved cannot be implicitly trusted, they often contain an element of truth, and it is part of the business of the historian to sift this out. Their evidence may not be evidence of the highest value, but should not be entirely neglected. They tell historians what was felt and what was believed by those who wrote the ballads and those who bought them, show how public opinion was formed, and help to explain the growth of popular traditions.
Besides this, the ballads describe with singular vividness and realism certain aspects of maritime life, and supply a life and colour which is lacking in formal records of administration and official letters. They enable the historian to complete his picture and vivify his narrative, and the ordinary reader to realise the life of the past.
Of the ballads here reprinted a great number were the production of professional composers of ballads who had no direct connection with the navy, and no part in the events they described. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ballad filled the place which the cheap newspaper fills now, and professional writers put the stirring incidents of the day into verse for the information of the people as naturally as the modern journalist puts them into prose. Most of the older narrative ballads are of this class: for instance, Deloney’s verses on the capture of the Great Galeazzo and the taking of Cadiz. Often the ballad was simply an adaptation of a prose pamphlet on the same subject. In the registers of the Stationers’ Company for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century there are many examples of this. For instance, on May 15, 1579, Andrew White, a bookseller, entered as his copyright a prose pamphlet relating The Wonderful Victory obtained by the Centurion of London against Five Spanish Gallies, and on the same day registers ‘a ballad of the same victory.’ (Arber, Stationers’ Registers, ii. 274 b.) Often a bookseller entering a prose narrative of this kind provided, at the same time, for securing the copyright of a ballad version which had not yet been written, just as a modern author reserves the right of dramatising a new novel. If this was not done some rival publisher or bookseller seized the opportunity, produced a ballad on the incident of the moment, and spoilt the sale of the original narrative (ib. ii. 162–3, 261–2). Not only incidents in naval history, but stories and items of news of every kind were treated in the same fashion, and to this practice we owe a number of prosaic ballads on every possible subject. The best of the professional ballad-writers did not limit themselves to the versification of actual events, but went further and embodied in verse their conception of the dangers and pleasures of sailors and of typical incidents of seafaring life. Martin Parker’s Saylors for my Money is a typical example of this, and such compositions form the staple of most collections of naval ballads, probably because their more general character and their greater merit gave them wider popularity and a longer life.
Another class of ballads consists of those written by sailors themselves to describe actions in which they had taken part. A ballad was not a difficult thing to write; the metre was usually simple, the rules about rhyme not exacting, and the traditional formulas and phrases to be employed were familiar. Hence it is not surprising that sailors, and occasionally officers, sometimes undertook to celebrate the exploits of the ships in which they served. Such ballads were produced in considerable frequency in the eighteenth century, and even early in the nineteenth, and some specimens are reprinted in this volume. One written by a seaman on board the Burford, Vernon’s flagship, describes the capture of Portobello; a second, written on board the flagship of Admiral Mathews, relates his battle off Toulon; a third, by a lieutenant of the Bellerophon, celebrates Howe’s victory on the first of June, and is said to have been actually sung in the gun-room of the Bellerophon (pp. 177, 186, 271). In some cases the author reveals himself in the last lines of the ballad.
‘I am a saucy foremast Jack, and to the Arrow do belong,’
says the writer of one upon a sloop of that name. Another on the Robin Hood privateer concludes defiantly:
‘My name is George Cook, the author of this,
And he may be hang’d that will take it amiss.’
A third, which narrates the escape of the Princess Royal from being wrecked on the Goodwin Sands, ends by suggesting that the poet should be rewarded for his pains:
‘It was a brisk young sailor that these lines did make,
And over a can of flip his heart would never ache.’
(Pp. 290, 267, 191.)
There are many other ballads in which it is obvious that the writer was personally concerned in the incidents which form the subject of his verses, although no explicit avowal is actually made.
Finally there is yet a third class of ballads, neither written by professional ballad-writers, nor by sailors themselves, but by professional men of letters. The popularity of the ballad induced writers to adopt that form of composition in order to catch the ear of the multitude. Hence a considerable number of satirical compositions cast in that mould, such as the verses against Torrington and Byng, given on pp. 110, 206 of this volume, and other pieces written with a direct political purpose. The typical specimen of this class of ballad is Hosier’s Ghost, by Richard Glover, a professional poet who had already published a blank verse epic, and treated this subject in the fashion most likely to appeal to the multitude in order to secure their support for the attack on Walpole’s foreign policy. Other professional authors, too, without any political object to serve, adopted the same form because they perceived that the sailor was a popular topic, and that his perils, his loves and his diversions, afforded good material for verse, if they were treated on the traditional lines. Dibdin was anticipated by Gay and Stevens, and many others whom the world has forgotten. But whatever popularity they attained in their own day, their productions have no claim to inclusion in these pages, for they merely represent a literary fashion, and are too artificial to possess any value for historical purposes. Moreover the best of them are so well known that it is unnecessary to reprint them, but two or three early examples have been inserted in order to show when this species of naval verse began to appear and how it originated. It has also seemed needful to give incidentally some brief account of the poetical literature which illustrates various periods in the history of the growth of English sea-power.
The earliest celebrations of the exploits of the navy came from the pen of a professional poet, Laurence Minot. His works, first discovered by Thomas Tyrwhitt, were published by Joseph Ritson in 1795 under the title of Poems on Interesting Events in the reign of King Edward III., written in the year 1352 by Laurence Minot. The most accessible edition is that of Mr. Joseph Hall, published by the Clarendon Press in 1887. Of the eleven poems which Minot devotes to the occurrences of King Edward’s reign, two narrate naval victories. The fifth recounts the fight with the French at Sluys on June 24, 1340; the tenth describes the battle known as Les Espagnols sur Mer, which took place off Winchelsea on August 29, 1350. Directly, the historical value of the two poems is small. Indirectly, they are valuable as illustrating the spirit of the time and the methods of naval warfare in the fourteenth century. ‘The battles on the sea,’ writes Froissart, ‘are more dangerous and fiercer than the battles by land: for on the sea there is no recoiling nor fleeing; there is no remedy but to fight and to abide fortune, and every man to show his prowess’ (Chapter L). There was no pity for the defeated, and prisoners were thrown overboard. One ballad exultantly records that ‘the caityffs come out of France were taught to swim,’ the other, that the Spaniards ‘sail in the sea-ground fishes to feed.’ A similar spirit reappears in some of the seventeenth century ballads.
The fifteenth century is represented in this collection by a nautical ballad describing a pilgrimage to St. James at Compostella, which was probably written during the reign of Henry VI. Its interest lies in its description of life on board ship, and in the number of naval terms and phrases it preserves. ‘The song,’ says Sir Cyprian Bridge, ‘is most likely the composition of a sailor on board what was certainly a merchant vessel, and one of its subjects—for it portrays seamen’s life as well—is that which always was, and perhaps is, a matter of unfailing interest and amusement to sailors, viz., the miseries of landsmen afloat in rough weather’ (Stone, p. 196). The period furnished few warlike exploits to celebrate, but a fight off Harfleur in August 1416, in which the Duke of Bedford defeated the Genoese caracks in the service of France, was sufficiently famous to be commemorated at length in Hardyng’s rhymed Chronicle, and to be recorded in the verse tract called the Libel of English Policy. Both passages are reprinted by Sir Harris Nicholas (History of the Royal Navy, ii. 421, 424). The Libel of English Policy, written during the reign of Henry VI., laments the decay of the navy, and the neglect to guard the seas. Hakluyt, who reprinted the poem in his Voyages, described it as ‘exhorting all England to keep the sea, and namely the narrow sea; showing what profit cometh thereof, and also what worship and salvation to England, and to all English men.’ (The Principal Navigations, etc., of the English Nation, vol. ii. p. 114, ed. 1903; the Libel is also reprinted in Thomas Wright’s Political Poems and Songs relating to English History, 1861, ii. 157). It sets forth also the consequences of forgetting to guard the seas, and the damage which English commerce suffered from the pirates who were allowed to prey upon it unchecked. Of these the Bretons, especially the men of St. Malo, and the Flemings were the chief, and two particular pirates, Hankyn Lyons and Pety Pynson, are mentioned by name. Throughout the fifteenth century, and indeed until the close of the sixteenth, the Channel and the British seas in general were infested by pirates. There were Italian pirates as well as Bretons. In a ballad which gives a legendary history of the overthrow of Richard III., a messenger is sent by Lord Stanley to Henry Tudor with money for the intended expedition to England. The great danger the messenger fears is the galleys of the Italian pirates.
‘They will me rob, they will me drown,
They will take the gold from me.’
(The most pleasant Song of Lady Bessy, edited by J. O. Halliwell, Percy Society, 1847, pp. 27, 64). The popular ballad entitled John Dory, which first appeared in print in 1609, seems to embody some tradition of the fights with Italian pirates, or perhaps of some earlier battle with Italian sailors in French service such as that of 1416. The longer ballad, narrating Sir Edward Howard’s battle with Sir Andrew Barton, printed on pages 6–15, describes an historical event which took place in 1511, and is recorded by John Lesley, Bishop of Ross, in his Chronicle. The details embody popular tradition rather than facts. The version of the ballad printed here is a sixteenth century version preserved in Bishop Percy’s MS. It was partially rewritten and adorned with various rhetorical additions by some seventeenth century writer. This late version, which begins,
‘When Flora with her fragrant flowers
Bedeckt the earth so trim and gay,’
is reprinted in Stone’s Sea Songs and Ballads (p. 64), where there may also be found a still later echo of the original ballad, entitled Henry Marten (p. 72).
These few ballads and poems comprise all the verse literature in existence touching the naval history of the period which preceded the accession of Elizabeth. With her reign the literature of the subject at once assumes considerable proportions. Mr. Julian Corbett goes too far when he says ‘It is one of the remarkable features of the Elizabethan age that its higher literature displays hardly a trace of having been influenced by the exploits of the seamen.’ (Drake and the Tudor Navy, ii. 44.) On the contrary Professor Raleigh shows conclusively, in his introduction to the recent reprint of Hakluyt, the extent to which the voyages and discoveries of that time influenced the imagination of contemporary poets. Writers by profession, whether they wrote for a learned audience or the people, began to discover that the character of the great seamen of the time furnished a popular topic for panegyric, and to celebrate their deeds in verse. William Warner inserted in his Albion’s England a spirited description of the fight with the Armada, and a passage in praise of ‘world-admired Drake,’ ‘his brave breeder Hawkins’ and others of less note. It was to be wished, he suggested, that some better poet than himself should write ‘their glorious journeys’ and give them the immortality they deserved, for they would make ‘immortal pen-work.’
Drake had already been the subject of two poems. In 1587 one Thomas Greepe published The true and perfect news of the worthy and valiant Exploits of Sir Francis Drake, which contained, in very halting verse, an account of the taking of Cartagena. In 1596 Charles Fitzgeffrey, poet and divine, published Sir Francis Drake his honourable Life’s Commendation and his tragical Death’s Lamentation. In this elaborate and rhetorical poem ‘that high towering falcon,’ as an Elizabethan critic calls Fitzgeffrey, celebrated not only Drake, but Drake’s predecessors from Cabot to Hawkins. In like manner Gervase Markham devoted a poem of 1,400 lines to The Most Honourable Tragedy of Sir Richard Grinvile, Knight, which appeared in 1595 (reprinted by Dr. E. Arber in 1877 under the title of The Last Fight of the Revenge). There is also extant a poem In Praise of Seafaring Men, in Hope of Good Fortune, which bears the alternative title of Sir Richard Grenfilldes Farewell, referring apparently to Greynvile’s voyage of discovery in 1585. It is reprinted by Halliwell in his Early Naval Ballads (p. 14) and by Stone, Sea Songs (p. 5).
A number of minor poems also deserve mention. There is, for instance, John Kirkham’s Commendation of Martin Frobisher (printed in Halliwell p. 45), another by Thomas Ellis (Ballads from Manuscript, ii. 282), and there are others by Thomas Churchyard (Collier, Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, ii. 47, 51). Better known is George Peele’s Farewell to the most famous Generals Sir John Norvis and Sir Francis Drake, Knights, which refers to their expedition to Portugal in 1589 (Peel’s Works, ed. Bullen, ii. 233). One might mention also Donne’s two poems The Storm and The Calm, both expressly said to refer to ‘The Island voyage with the Earl of Essex,’ i.e. the expedition to the Azores in 1597 (Donne’s Works, ed. Grosart, ii. 3–10). Last of all, and best, there is Drayton’s Ode to the Virginia Voyage (Poems, 1627, p. 295).
The surprising thing is not the paucity of literary references to the exploits of the Elizabethan seamen, which were generally, if inadequately, commemorated, but the limited number of songs and ballads on the subject which have reached us. The popular literature of the period was very extensive in amount and very diverse in character. The registers of the Stationers’ Company for the reign of Elizabeth contain very numerous entries of ballads which deal with the incidents of the day or with aspects of the life of the time. Few of them, comparatively, deal with sailors or seafaring matters, and of those many have perished. There was a famous ballad entitled Row well, ye mariners, registered in 1566, which was sufficiently popular to be ‘moralised’ two or three times over—that is, converted into a spiritual song of an allegorical nature (Collier, Extracts from the Registers of the Stationers’ Company, i. 130, 161, 175). The words are lost, though the tune has survived (Old English Popular Music by W. Chappell, ed. 1893, i. 127). Lost, too, are The Sailor’s New Tantara, published in 1584, a ballad In Praise of the Queen’s Ships (beginning ‘O the Elizabeth Jonas’) published in 1586, The Sailor’s Joy, published in 1595, and A true Sailor’s Song against Spanish Pride that appeared in 1590 (Arber, Registers of the Stationers’ Company, iii. 200, 210, 254, 317). Of the ballads which described life at sea several can be traced. One on ‘the perilous pains of poor mariners’ was licensed on October 13, 1579, and another on March 10, 1582, concerning ‘the danger of sailors and their troubles, turmoil, and pain’ (Arber, ii. 164, 187). One of these is perhaps the Ballad of Sea Fardingers Describing Evil Fortune (Halliwell, p. 16; Stone, p. 6; Masefield, p. 145), or possibly that beginning, ‘I rue to see the raging of the seas’ (Halliwell, p. 79; Stone, p. 8; Collier, ii. 159). Fate has happily preserved a single damaged copy of the comedy called Common Conditions, printed probably about 1576, containing a song sung by pirates, which is printed on p. 17 of the present volume.
Amongst the lost ballads are a certain number relating to piracy, and recording the punishment of some Englishmen who practised that trade. On December 19, 1579, there was licensed The Fatal Farewell of Captain Gilbert Horseley, who managed to escape from the Counter, the prison in which he was confined, ‘in a cloakbag,’ but was recaptured and executed. Another, licensed March 16, 1580, was entitled—
‘A Passport for Pirates wherein they may mark
And shun their abuse by the death of Tom Clarke.’
A third, published in August 1583, was styled Clinton’s Lamentation and a fourth, in 1586, called The Confession of Nine Rovers (Arber, Stationers’ Registers, ii. 165, 167, 197, 210).
As a substitute for these ballads, however, there has been preserved an elaborate poem purporting to be the confession of Clinton and two others, which is to be found in the Bodleian and Lambeth libraries. It is headed Clinton, Purser and Arnold, to their countrymen, wheresoever. Wherein is described by their own hands their unfeigned penitence for their offences past, their patience in welcoming their death, and their dutiful minds towards her Majesty. Their apology for their acts is that they only attacked foreign ships and ‘never made one English prey.’
Comparatively few of the ballads of the Elizabethan period relate to voyages of discovery; plunder and fighting were more attractive subjects to the audience for which they were intended. There is, however, A Commendation of the adventurous Viage of the worthy Captain M. Thomas Stutely Esquire and others towards the land called Terra Florida, which appeared in 1563 (Collier, Old Ballads from Early Printed Copies, Percy Society, 1840, p. 72). Of another on the same subject, dated two years earlier, made by one beynge greatly impoverished by the viage prepared for Terra Floryday, only a fragment has survived. Thomas Cavendish’s circumnavigation of the world was too remarkable a feat to escape attention, and in November 1583 two ballads upon the subject appeared. One was entitled A ballad of Master Cavendish his voyage, who by travel compassed the globe of the world arriving in England with abundance of treasure; the other Of the famous and honourable coming of Master Cavendish’s ship called the Desire before the Queen’s Majestie and her court at Greenwich the 12 of November 1588 (Arber, Stationers’ Registers, ii. 236). Neither of these is now in existence. By a singular contrast Ralegh, whose explorations and exploits deserved celebration, is only commemorated by the ballad Sir Walter Raleigh Sailing in the Lowlands, a romantic story about a little ship-boy of which several traditional versions exist. To a version of this which was printed in the reign of Charles II., accident, or perhaps the craftiness of the printer, attached the name of Ralegh (Child, English and Scottish Popular Ballads, v. 135, reprinted by Stone, Sea Songs and Ballads, p. 74). In much the same way a ballad, first printed in the eighteenth century, Queen Elizabeth’s Champion or Great Britain’s Glory, commemorates the fact that the second Earl of Essex once commanded Elizabeth’s navy by a fictitious account of the capture of the son of the Emperor of Germany by the third earl (Child, v. 145; Stone, p. 84). Probably the distinction gained by the third earl in the expedition to Cadiz in 1625 originated the ballad.
The best ballad on the defeat of the Spanish Armada is Thomas Deloney’s Joyful New Ballad declaring the happy obtaining of the great Galleazzo, which is printed on p. 18. Deloney also wrote one on, The strange and most cruell Whippes which the Spaniards had prepared to whippe and torment English men and women: which were found and taken at the overthrow of certain of the Spanish Shippes; and another on The Queene’s visiting of the Campe at Tilburie with her entertainment there. Both may be found in The Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 387, 391, but since neither specially relates to the navy it was not thought necessary to reprint them. Mr. Ebsworth, in his introduction to these ballads, has brought together four or five ballads relating to the defeat of the Armada, written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 378–383). Three of them are also to be found in Stone’s Sea Songs and Ballads, pp. 80–83.
The entries in the Stationers’ Registers give the titles of several ballads which no longer survive, viz: The English preparacion of the Spaniards Navigacion; The late wonderful Dystres which the Spanishe Navye sustayned yn the late fighte in the Sea and upon the West Coast of Ireland in this moneth of September 1588; A Ballad of Thanksgiving unto God for his mercy toward hir Majestie; England’s Joy and Delight, In the back Rebound of the Spanyardes Spyght.
There were also ballads on the military preparations and the thanksgivings after the victory which have perished, and a number of ballads relating the exploits of squadrons or single ships, whose titles are entered in the Stationers’ Registers. Under November 14, 1588, appears A Ditty of the Exploit of the Earl of Cumberland on the Sea in October 1588; under August 5, 1590, a Ballad made upon the late Fight at Sea between two Ships of Dunkirk and a small Ship of 80 ton appertaining to the Earl of Cumberland (Arber, ii. 236, 262). In July 1590 there was published A Ditty of the Fight upon the seas the 4 of June last in the Straits of Jubraltare between the George and the Thomas Bonaventure against eight gallies with three Frigates; in May 1591 followed a tract and a ballad on The wonderful Victory obtained by the Centurion of London against five Spanish Gallies, the 4th of April being Easter Day 1591; a year later came The Seamans Carol for the taking of the great Carack, and in July 1600 a ballad relating how certain Merchants ships of England fought five Spanish ships of war in the Straits of Gibraltar on May 25, 1600 (Arber, ii. 262, 274, 293; iii. 62). None of these survive.
About the beginning of the seventeenth century new enemies begin to take the place hitherto occupied by the Spaniards in the ballads. Piracy took a new shape after the close of the war with Spain. Captain John Smith devotes the last chapter of his Travels to ‘The bad life and qualities, and conditions of pirates, and how they taught the Turks and Moors to become men of war.’ Because the peace threw them out of employment, and because ‘they grew hateful to all Christian princes,’ they retired to Barbary, and made its harbours their headquarters. Even before that the Barbary coast was a perilous one for richly laden merchantmen, and armed ships that met a likely prize did not always inquire whether their nations were at war. The ballad entitled The Sailor’s Only Delight tells how two English merchantmen sailed for the coast of Barbary (p. 23). The Sweepstake was taken by a French man-of-war, but her consort the George-Aloe captured the French ship later, and made her crew suffer the fate they had inflicted on the crew of the Sweepstake.
‘We laid them aboard on the starboard side
And threw them into the sea so wide.’
Two centuries before, Chaucer’s shipman, who had no very scrupulous conscience, as Chaucer owns, used to dispose of the crews of the ships he took in the same fashion.
‘If that he fought and hadde the heigher hand
By water he sent hem hoom to every land.’
There are other references to this practice in early seventeenth century ballads, but it was now becoming confined to pirates.
Some of the English adventurers who took shelter in the Barbary ports gave up their trade after a time, made their peace, and returned to England: for instance, Sir Henry Mainwaring. Others became renegades and ended their days there. The two most famous were John Ward and a Dutchman called Simon Danzer or Danseker. Two pamphlets on their misdeeds were published in 1609, and also a tragedy by Robert Daborne called A Christian turned Turk in 1612. The ballads upon them which are included in this collection (pp. 25–31) were registered on July 3, 1609. The Famous Sea-Fight between Captain Ward and the Rainbow was written after Ward was dead and his exploits had become legendary, but its popularity requires its insertion.
From Ward, Danseker, and others, the native seamen of the Barbary States learnt much. When they established themselves there, says Captain Smith, ‘the Moors scarce knew how to sail a ship... those were the first that taught the Moors to be men of war.’ Later still, after the deaths of their leaders, the European pirates in Barbary ‘became so disjointed, disordered, debauched and miserable, that the Turks and Moors began to command them as slaves, and force them to instruct them in their best skill, which many an accursed renegado or Christian turned Turk did, till they have made those Sallee men or Moors of Barbary so powerful as they be to the terror of all the Straits, and many times they take purchase in the main ocean, yea, sometimes even in the narrow seas.’
A modern writer, accepting the view that it was in this way the Barbary captains learned the new art of sailing warships, points out that the expulsion of the Moriscoes from Spain in 1609 led to a further result equally disastrous. ‘It led at once to the rise of Sallee as a pirate port, and its launch upon its sinister career’ (Corbett, England in the Mediterranean i. 10–20). Year after year the losses of the English merchants grew greater, and the number of English captives in Barbary increased. In 1620 James I. sent Sir Robert Mansell’s fleet against them, and in May 1621 Mansell made his abortive attack on Algiers (ib. 110–133). In 1624 there was presented to the House of Lords ‘the humble and lamentable complaint of above 1,500 poor captive souls, now under the miserable oppression of the Turks in Argier, Tunis, Sally and Tituane.’ Parliament ordered a general collection throughout the whole of England for the redemption of the captives, and the King issued letters patent for that purpose. (Lords’ Journals, iii. 411–13; Bewes, Church Briefs, p. 117). The verses entitled, The lamentable cries of at least 1500 Christians, printed on p. 31, were evidently printed and circulated in 1624, when this general collection was made. Beyond raising money in this way for ransoming captives, James did nothing, and nothing was done by Charles till Rainborow was sent to Sallee in 1637. ‘The expedition of 1637, whereby 300 or 400 Englishmen were rescued from slavery, was, in design and execution, the solitary success of Charles’s naval administration’ (Oppenheim, The Administration of the Royal Navy, p. 277). Though a True journal of the Sally Fleet, with the Proceedings of the Voyage, written by John Dunton, mariner, was published in 1637, no ballad writer celebrated the achievement. When the reign of Charles I. began he was at war with Spain, and a ballad entitled The Honour of Bristol, better known as The Angel Gabriel, relates a fight between a Bristol privateer of that name and three Spanish ships (p. 34). The ballad was written by Laurence Price: the precise date of its publication is uncertain (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 428). Neither Cecil’s expedition to Cadiz, nor Buckingham’s to the Isle of Ré, inspired anything but satires. A short ballad by ‘a gentleman who was present in all that service’ epitomises the history of the Cadiz voyage (ib. vi. 420). References to both may be found in the volume of Poems and Songs relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, edited by Mr. Fairholt for the Percy Society, in 1850. One ironically sets forth the expectations excited when the Lord High Admiral put to sea in 1627:
‘He’ll cool France and Spain, and quiet the main,
The Dunkirkers passage he’ll stop;
To stay all commotion he’ll plough up the ocean:
God send him a good harvest crop...
And then he will meet with the West India fleet,
And of them will take fast hold,
And bring them away for England a prey,
And choke us with silver and gold.’
(Fairholt, p. 13.)
Buckingham’s part in the reorganisation of the navy was forgotten by satirists, but the king’s panegyrists exaggerated the effort of Charles I. to strengthen the fleet. His attempts to assert the sovereignty of the seas furnished them with a theme. Between 1632 and 1640 Charles built about a dozen new ships, eight of which were a considerable size. The greatest of them was the Sovereign of the Seas, which was over 1,500 tons in size, carried a hundred guns, cost 40,000l. to build and 25,000l. to arm. Mr. Oppenheim describes her as ‘the largest, most ornate and most useless ship afloat,’ but after being cut down by the navy board of the commonwealth she did good service. (Oppenheim, p. 252; Clowes, ii. 6.) Launched in October 1637, she was intended, as her name shows, to assert the sovereignty of the British seas, which since 1634 Charles had been endeavouring to maintain against the French and the Dutch. Selden’s Mare Clausum was published in 1636, to prove his claim; the Earl of Lindsey’s fleet in 1635, and the Earl of Northumberland’s in 1636, were sent forth to enforce it. (Gardiner, History of England, vii. 358, 384; viii. 154.) Lindsey’s fleet consisted of nineteen ships of the royal navy and twenty-six merchant vessels. Northumberland’s contained twenty-seven king’s ships. This display of naval force inspired the poems printed on p. 36, the first a panegyric On His Majesties Fleet, the second an address from Neptune to England, which was probably derived from some masque played at Court during these years. The ballad Upon the Great Ship clearly belongs to 1637 (p. 37). In that year Thomas Heywood published a prose pamphlet entitled A true Description of his Majesties Royal Ship built this year at Woolwich in Kent, upon which these verses seem to be partly based. Heywood also wrote a long poem called An Epigram upon his Majesties Great Ship the Sovereign of the Seas, which is reprinted in Mr. Masefield’s collection (A Sailor’s Garland, p. 94).
A few of the sea songs written during the reign can be traced from the entries in the Stationers’ registers. Ballads were entered On the Kings Navye on June 19, 1625; A narrative of a sea-fight by the Lyon of London against 6 Turkish ships on January 2, 1635; A new relation of 4 Englishmen that brought into Saint Lucar’s Turkish Pirates and their Ship on December 10, 1638; a Ballad of the Seafight with three Turkish piratts on July 13, 1640; A noble and notable Seafight on July 17, 1640. All these have perished. Half a dozen ballads on the sea-fights between the Spaniards and Dutch in the Channel in September 1639, and on the destruction of the Spanish fleet in the Downs by Tromp on October 10, 1639, were published. Of these one survives, in Wood’s collection in the Bodleian, entitled A New Spanish Tragedy or More Strange News from the Seas. In addition there are two amatory ballads, one registered June 13, 1631, called A Sayler new come over; the other, registered on July 18, 1636, A dainty new ditty of the Sayler and his Love, which is possibly the Pleasant new song betwixt the Sayler and his Love reprinted in the Roxburghe Ballads, ii. 470.
Yet the most famous of English naval ballads originated during this period. Martin Parker’s Saylors for my Money is undoubtedly, as Mr. Ebsworth points out, the far back original of Campbell’s Ye Mariners of England (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 797). It has a rival in The Jovial Mariner or the Seaman’s Renown, by Lawrence Price (ib. vi. 639). Neptune’s Raging Fury or The Gallant Seaman’s Sufferings, which begins ‘You gentlemen of England,’ is an adaptation of Martin Parker’s ballad, written probably towards the end of Charles I.’s reign, or perhaps during the Protectorate (ib. vi. 431). All three are here reprinted (pp. 40–46). The third, Neptune’s Raging Fury, came to be known as The Old Mariners to distinguish it from later adaptations, and an abridged version of it, consisting of the first, the eleventh, and the thirteenth verses, was current in Campbell’s time under the title of The New Mariners. Campbell borrowed from it his refrain, and the phrases, ‘roar on the shore’ and ‘sweep through the deep,’ and honestly entitled the verses he sent to the editor of the Morning Chronicle in 1800, an Alteration of the old ballad ‘Ye Gentlemen of England’ (Beattie, Life of Campbell, i. 341).
During the Commonwealth and the Protectorate the English navy became the most powerful in Europe, and yet the naval victories of those ten years left hardly any trace in ballad literature. One reason for this was the rigid censorship of the press which existed during that period. In 1647 and 1648 a flood of abusive ballads and newspapers had appeared in print, directed against the Long Parliament and the army, and designed to further the cause of the King. The Parliament passed on September 20, 1649, an Act for the suppression of unlicensed books and pamphlets, and for the punishment of their authors and vendors. Hawkers of pamphlets, newspapers and ballads, and ballad-singers, were to be apprehended, conveyed to the House of Correction, and whipped as rogues. By this Act, and by an Act against vagrants passed in 1657, declaring that henceforth, ‘persons commonly called fidlers and minstrels’ should be proceeded against as ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars,’ the production and circulation of ballads was effectually checked. Consequently neither the naval commanders of that time nor their victories were commemorated in the usual way. There is indeed a ballad called Admiral Deane’s Funeral describing his interment in Westminster Abbey in 1653 (Rump Songs, 1660, p. 308); but it is merely a Royalist satire, concluding with the statement that though the admiral’s body is solemnly interred ‘In the famous chapel of Henry the Seven,’ yet ‘His soul is scarce gone the right way to heaven.’ But the only ballad directly relating an incident in the wars of this period is one which describes the bombardment of Malaga by five of Blake’s frigates in July 1656, which is reprinted on p. 47. A long narrative poem on The Life and Actions of that valiant Hero Robert Blake, Esq., General of the Fleets of the Commonwealth of England, from the year 1649 to 1657, written during the Protectorate, has survived, but it is too worthless to reprint (Poems on Affairs of State, vol. i. part 2, pp. 274–290, ed.). Of more interest is the Elegy on the Death of the Right Honourable Robert Blake, written immediately after his death by one George Harrison, who appears to have been serving in some capacity in the fleet, since he dates it ‘on board the Dunbar, in the Downs.’ This is given on p. 48.
Poets of greater repute did not neglect the theme which the naval annals of the time afforded. Andrew Marvell, in a satirical poem against the Dutch, entitled The Character of Holland—obviously written about the beginning of 1653, though it was not published till 1665—concludes with some verses on the English navy and its three admirals, Deane, Monck, and Blake. He also wrote a poem on Blake’s victory at Santa Cruz. The address to his captains which he puts in Blake’s mouth breathes at all events Blake’s spirit, although it is fiction:
‘Of speedy victory let no man doubt,
Our worst work’s past, now we have found them out.
Behold their navy does at anchor lie,
And they are ours, for now they cannot fly.’
(Marvell’s Works, ed. Aitken, i. 119; ii. 14.)
A greater poet, and more renowned than Marvell, Edmund Waller, celebrated Stayner’s capture of the Spanish galleons off Cadiz in his verses, Of a war with Spain and a Fight at Sea. That poem contains the famous lines,
‘Others may use the ocean as their road,
Only the English make it their abode,
Our oaks secure, as if they there took root,
We tread on billows with a steady foot.’
These lines, inspired by Blake’s long blockade of the Spanish coasts during 1656 and 1657, helped in their turn to inspire a line in Campbell’s Mariners of England. Waller’s Panegyric to my Lord Protector, written in 1655, strikes the same note. ‘The present greatness of this nation’ he attributes in part to the wise head and strong hand of the Protector himself, in part to the ‘winged navy’ which makes the English ‘Lords of the world’s great waste, the ocean.’ This dominion, which Charles I. had claimed, the victories of the Protector’s admirals had re-established, and its outward sign was the honour paid to the red-cross flag.
‘The sea’s our own! and now all nations greet
With bending sails, each vessel of our fleet.
Your power extends as far as winds can blow
Or swelling sails upon the globe may go.’
The pride in the English navy which found its highest expression in these poems of Waller’s was sadly humiliated by the incidents of the second Dutch war. The first of the naval ballads of the new reign is called The Valiant Seaman’s Congratulations to his Sacred Majesty King Charles the Second (p. 53). It is an expression of loyalty and devotion, protesting a willingness to go anywhere and fight anybody in the King’s cause. At the moment it was written, which was probably in 1662, France rather than Holland seemed the most likely adversary, for Louis XIV. was disputing the ceremonial honours due to the British flag. ‘If you will give commission to war with France we’ll go,’ say the seamen to Charles, promising ‘we will make their topsails unto our fleet shall bow.’ A couple of years later it became clear that the Dutch were to be the enemy, not the French. The next ballad in the series is England’s Valour and Holland’s Terror. It refers to Allin’s attack on the Smyrna fleet, which took place on December 19, 1664, and to De Ruyter’s proceedings in Guinea during the same year. ‘We’ll teach you better manners yet than ever did old Noll,’ it threatens. This ballad was probably published about January 1665, before war was actually declared. Much about the same date appeared Dorset’s famous song, To all you ladies now at land. A tradition handed down by Prior represents it as written ‘the night before the engagement with the Dutch in 1665,’ which has been interpreted to mean the night before the battle of June 3. But Pepys tells us that at an entertainment on the night of January 2, 1665, ‘I occasioned much mirth with a ballad I brought with me, made from the seamen at sea, to their ladies in town; saying Sir William Penn, Sir George Ayscue and Sir John Lawson made them’ (Pepys, Diary, ed. Wheatley, iv. 322). There is no reason to doubt that Dorset’s song was the ballad in question.
The naval battles which began in June 1665 and ended in the summer of 1666 are the subject of a series of ballads which have fortunately survived. The battle of June 3, 1665, is celebrated in The Royal Victory (p. 58), while The English Seaman’s Resolution clearly belongs to the spring of 1666, when Monck and Rupert had succeeded the Duke of York and the Earl of Sandwich as commanders (p. 61). England’s Triumph and Holland’s Downfall is a narrative of the four days’ battle of June 1666. The writer has no doubt that it was a great victory, but is obliged to own ‘we can’t afford such brunts as these’ (p. 63). Hence the joy with which men welcomed the undoubted and decisive victory of St. James’s Day, July 25, 1666. On it there are three ballads: The New Ballad of a famous German Prince and a renowned English Duke, England’s Royal Conquest, and Holland turned to Tinder (pp. 66–79). The series closes with The Dutch Damnified, or the Butter-Boxes Bobbed, which narrates the destruction of 160 Dutch merchantmen in their own harbours by Sir Robert Holmes on the eight and ninth of August, 1666 (p. 79).
The same tone of ferocious exultation marks them all; the populace liked to hear that, after one battle, the Dutch vessels ‘looked more like shambles than ships,’ that in another, six thousand Dutchmen were sent to feed their cousins the fish, and that in a third, thanks to the effect of the British fireships, you ‘might have had Dutchmen boiled or roast.’ A Dutch captain might be praised as a gallant fighter, but ‘he that caught fishes now fishes catch him’ was the sort of epitaph which pleased the man in the street. ‘Why should my nature or conscience repine at taking his life that fain would take mine?’ asks one writer. If one motive for the war was hatred for the ‘Butter-boxes’ and the ‘Hogan-Mogans,’ as the sailors call the Dutch, another was the desire for plunder. ‘We mean to have some of your dollars before that our fleets do part’ declares one writer, while a second rejoices over the store of plate taken on board the Dutch merchantmen, which makes the cabins of the English captains look “like goldsmiths” shops.’
On the British reverses the ballads are silent, but the poets of the period fill the gap. They, too, began by celebrating the successes of the British arms. Waller led off with a long poem of a new kind, Instructions to a Painter for the drawing of the posture and progress of his Majesties forces at sea under the command of his Highness-Royal; together with the battle and victory obtained over the Dutch, June 3, 1665 (Works, ed. Drury, p. 176). He described, one after another, ostensibly for the artist’s guidance, the early scenes of the war—the capture of the Dutch Bordeaux fleet, Allin’s attack on their Smyrna fleet, and finally the sea-fight off Harwich. It was to the courage and conduct of the Duke of York that Waller attributed the victory of the English, and accordingly he made James the centre of the battlepiece. Scorning defensive armour, such as most naval commanders wore in those days; James stands on his quarterdeck, exposed to every ball, but protected by some power unseen:
‘Fierce, goodly young! Mars he resembles when
Heaven sends him down to scourge perfidious men.’
Waller had confined himself to the first year of the war. Dryden undertook to celebrate the second. His Annus Mirabilis is an account of the events of the wonderful year 1666, which appeared early in 1667. ‘I am very much pleased,’ writes Pepys, on February 2, 1667, ‘with reading the poem I brought home with me last night from Westminster Hall, of Dryden’s upon the present war, a very good poem’ (Diary, ed. Wheatley, vi. 156). There were reasons why it should please a man employed in the government of the navy, quite apart from its subject. Waller had treated naval warfare purely as a theme for rhetoric; Dryden attempted to understand it, and to make it intelligible. His description of the Loyal London, the vessel which the City presented to the King, and which Pepys commends as ‘the best ship in the world,’ gives a good picture of a first-rate of the period:
‘With roomy decks, her guns of mighty strength,
Whose low-laid mouths each mounting billow laves;
Deep in her draught and warlike in her length,
She seems a sea-wasp flying on the waves.’
In another passage he contrasts the naval architecture and the naval tactics of the English and the Dutch:
‘On high-raised decks the haughty Belgians ride,
Beneath whose shade our humble frigates go;
Such port the elephant bears, and so defied
By the rhinoceros, her unequal foe.
‘And as the build, so different is the fight;
Their mounting shot is on our sails designed:
Deep in their hulls our deadly bullets light,
And through the yielding planks a passage find.’
In his desire to be true to the facts, and exact in the details, he did not hesitate to employ technical sea terms which no previous poet had dared to introduce in his verse. See, for instance, his description of the refitting of the English fleet after the four days’ battle:
‘... some pick out bullets from the side,
Some drive old oakum through each seam and rift;
Their left hand does the caulking iron guide,
The rattling mallet with the right they lift.
‘Some the galled ropes with dauby marling bind
Or sear-cloth masts with strong tarpauling coats;
To try the shrouds one mounts into the wind,
And one below their ease or stiffness notes.’
Two other poets of the day treated the story of the Dutch war, but their verses were written under the influence of the disgrace of 1667, and they wrote satires instead of eulogies. In a series of poems, four in all, generally known as Directions to a Painter, Sir John Denham parodied Waller’s Advice and carried the story down to the end of the war. All are printed in the collection of political satires published in 1703 called Poems on Affairs of State (i. 24–54). When the first part appeared ‘abusing the Duke of York and Lord Sandwich and Penn and everybody, and the King himself, in all the matters of the navy and war,’ Pepys was sorry because his patron Lord Sandwich’s reputation was involved. Later still he thought the verses witty and amusing. When the last part came out with its description of De Ruyter’s attack on the Thames in June 1667, the satire made his heart ache, ‘it being too sharp and so true.’ (Diary, vi. 101; vii. 1, 116). Another satirist, more vigorous and yet bitterer than Denham, told in indignant verse the story of the same disaster. Andrew Marvell, in The last Instructions to a Painter about the Dutch Wars, devoted about three hundred lines to describing the fight in the Medway, the breaking of the chain, the burning of the English ships, and the capture of the Royal Charles. His attack was directed against the Government itself, rather than against the commanders of the navy, and some of his bitterest sarcasms are aimed at the attempt to screen those really responsible for the Chatham disaster, by laying all the blame on the luckless Peter Pett, the commissioner of the navy in charge at Chatham. Marvell’s satire, though probably circulated in manuscript in 1667 or 1668, was too bold to be printed, and was not published till 1689 (Marvell’s Poems, ed. Aitken, ii. 20–52, 127–157). He did not confine himself to satire, and in a separate poem entitled The Loyal Scot he commemorated in glowing lines the heroism of Captain Douglas, an officer stationed on the Royal Oak, who, refusing to leave his post without orders, was burnt with the ship on June 12, 1667 (Poems, ed. Aitken, i. 126, 212).
While the second Dutch war fills so large a place both in poetry and in the ballads, the third, which covers the period from March 1672 to February 1674, was left comparatively unsung. It was not a national war in the same sense that the first and the second had been, but rather the outcome of a diplomatic intrigue, and excited less public interest. It is represented in this collection by two ballads only, one on the battle of Solebay on May 28, 1672, the other on the capture of a Dutch frigate by an English one in 1674 (pp. 82, 83–6). On the other hand, the war produced a small crop of elegies on the officers who fell in different engagements. The fashion began in the first war. There is an elegy on Captain Henry Terne of the Triumph, killed in the four days’ battle in June 1666. Similarly there is an Elegy on that grand Example of Loyalty, Valour, and Conduct, Sir Edward Spragge, unfortunately drowned (after incomparable proof of heroic gallantry) in the late engagement with the Dutch, August 11, 1673. We have also English Iliads, or a Sea-Fight reviewed, in a Poem occasioned by the death of a Person of Honour slain in the late War (Lord Maidstone, killed in the battle of Southwold Bay). Captain Francis Digby, who fell in the same battle, became more famous in ballads. Dryden wrote a song beginning ‘Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief,’ which was meant to represent Digby’s farewell to the Duchess of Richmond, with whom he was passionately in love. This was expanded into a popular ballad entitled Love and Honour (Roxburghe Ballads, vi. 36). Another ballad-writer produced a supplement, The sorrowful Ladies Complaint, relating how a Damosel lamenteth the loss of her Lover, who behaved himself very valiantly in a late engagement at sea, but was unfortunately slain (ib. iv. 397). An abbreviated version of this, entitled The Drowned Lover, was still sung a few years ago (Baring Gould, Songs of the West, 4th edition, p. xxiii).
Usually these elegies are rhetorical exercises of very little interest, but that on The Death of the noble Knight, Sir John Harman, who died October 11, 1673, contains an account of his career which deserves quotation:
Britannia, Queen of the Ocean, bade me write
Something memorial of this Noble Knight,
It must be Great, or nothing. Nay, said I,
Let Homers then, or Virgils Poetry
Record his deeds. ’Tis not for meaner things
To speak or think of Admirals or Kings.
When first in youth some voyages he made,
To prosecute Experience or Trade,
His worth disclos’d itself, and made men see,
None was more English Mariner than he.
Though hearty, sturdy Oak our ships do frame,
Our Seamen too (if rightly stamp’d) the same,
And such was this well-timber’d man, be sure,
That such hard storms and bickerings could endure.
When British Seas and Honour were assail’d
By Belgian Rivals; when the Plague prevail’d
At home; by which when most Men’s Courage fail’d
He snatched some men from Death’s Commands, and Man’d
The Royal Charles, by Royal Charles Command;
Next year was Sixty-six, (that fatal Time
When Londons old Foundations burnt to Lime)
Rear Admiral of the White he then appear’d
And by his foes he made his Henry fear’d.
Three Etnas did at once beset Her round
Some of her men were Burnt, and some were Drown’d:
Yet then (as if he did both Elements scoff)
He fought his way, and brought her bravely off.
His Leg (but not his Courage) broke; and then
He sympathized with his maimed men.
Knighted, and Admiral made in sixty-seven,
With Fire Ships Two, and Fighting Ships Eleven,
T’America he steers, and did such Feats
Dull Europeans will believe us Cheats
If we but tell the Truth. As how he storm’d
Strong Martinico, wonders there perform’d;
Into their Harbour how he forced his way
When Thirty warlike French and Dutch there lay;
Burnt Nine, sunk More; the rest (to escape his hands)
Did sink themselves, to hide amongst the Sands.
Three Forts he there Attaqu’d and Fir’d. And then
To Syrenham and Chien wafts his Men:
Courage and Conduct, there no less he shew’d.
Whereby he those Two Countreys soon subdu’d.
In Seventy-two Vice Admiral of the Blew,
He like a Tyger ’mongst the Dutchmen flew,
Nine Dutch begirt his Charles. There (sad to tell)
Three or four hundred of his Brave Men fell.
He paid them off; and when no boot to stay
He nobly brought his tattred Hull away.
Lastly in Sev’nty-three, this present Year,
His long-try’d Courage lasting did appear
Vice Admiral of the Red. Though sick and weak,
When scarcely could he go, or stand, or speak,
Yet could he fight, direct, encourage, see
All well perform’d. Meanwhile poor Gallant he
Sate like a Mark for ev’ry shot, in Fight.
We’l not reflect on any Man; nor tell
Who did amiss; only that He did well.
And having done his All, he then gave o’re
He made to Port, dropt Anchor, came ashore,
Never to plough the briny Ocean more.
From midst of Storms, Blood, Noise, Confusion, Fires,
He coolly, calmly, peaceably Expires,
Whose Death Religious: Living Actions were
Valiant, Just, Humble, Patient and Sincere.’
Next in importance to the Dutch war was the struggle with the piratical states in the Mediterranean, which still continued. Though it was marked by many brave exploits it left surprisingly little trace in the naval literature of Charles the Second’s time. There were many engagements worthy of record. On December 19–29, 1669, for instance, Captain John Kempthorne in the Mary Rose, a forty-eight-gun ship, beat seven Algerines, and preserved the merchantmen under his charge. Kempthorne was knighted for this service on April 30, 1670. A picture of the fight was engraved by Hollar, which will be found in Ogilby’s Africa, and the incident apparently inspired a ballad too. The picture of the action at Greenwich bears the following inscription:
‘Two we burnt and two we sank and two did run away,
And one we carried to Leghorn Roads to show we’d won the day.’
These lines are almost identical with two lines in Captain Mansfield’s Fight with the Turks at Sea (printed on p. 86). The ballad on Mansfield’s fight is perhaps an eighteenth century version, or imitation, of one on Kempthorne.
Often merchantmen successfully defended themselves. About October 1671, Captain John Baddison, of the Swallow, a merchantman of 180 tons and twenty-six men, fought an Algiers ship of thirty-eight guns and 220 men, and not only repulsed two desperate attacks, but captured four of the Turks who boarded him. A poem entitled An Encomium on that Worthy Exploit of Captain John Baddison was published in 1671. The only copy known is in the possession of Lord Crawford, who has kindly permitted me to extract the following narrative of the engagement:
From Port a Port our Hero took his flight,
With Canvas Wings, to entertain the Night
On th’ Oceans deep, where Billows lofty rise,
Mounting their Surges to th’ unconstant Skyes;
And after two dayes spent, he lost the sight
Of great Bajona, and prepared to fight
With a proud Turk, who from Argier was sent,
And swiftly gave them chase, to the intent
That they might take, and ransack, and enthral
The Bodies, Minds, and Christian Souls of all.
But those base Pagans never can prevail,
If once our English Banners them assail.
Our worthy Captain first did cause to fly
Two little Ships that by him close did lye;
Who from the Fury of the Foes did glide,
Being befriended by Night, Wind, and Tyde.
Then being ready, and his Guns run out,
He then prepared for a bloody Bout,
Like Thunder, Lightning, and a Tempest great;
Like Raging Waves, which on the Rocks do beat;
Ev’n so our Captain, at his drawing nigh,
Vollies discharged at his proud Enemy;
The Waves did tremble, and the Heavens blush,
When these two Champions did together rush.
The Turks they board us knowing not the strength
Of Valiant English, which they felt at length:
Presumption prompt(s) them on to graple strong,
Which was too hot to be endured long;
For being on Deck, some in the Air did fly,
Others our warlike Engines forced to die;
Yet six remained, which almost laid us waste
By cutting Sails and Rigging from our Mast;
For which bold fact, two made the Sea their grave,
The rest cried Quarter, which we freely gave.
There might you see their Bodies go to wreck,
Heads, Arms, and Legs bestrewed upon the Deck.
This was their fate, which then they could not shun,
Their blood did off the Deck, like water, run.
Our Men between Decks with the great Guns tore
And rent the Hull of the Turks Ship so sore,
Made them leave off, and from our sides to shrink
Lest they should all of the Salt-water drink;
Their Ship lying by to stop her Leaks, and then
Resolves to prove our Valour once agen.
Our Seamen bold, that never daunted were,
To their proud Foes, like Lions did appear,
Threatening destruction, whilst a lucky Gun
Made their Ship tremble, and our sides to shun;
Not once more daring to approach us nigh
But from us at a distance far to lie.
The Night came on, a pleasant gale appears,
They left each other; and directly steers
To her desired Port: safely arrived
Our English Captain, and all that survived.
Sixteen were wounded, and three killed outright;
The Ship sore shattered, and Sails burnt in fight;
Only the Sprit and Mainsail left untore,
Which brought them safely to the English Shore:
Where being arrived, were by his Majesty
And Royal Duke welcomed most graciously.
For which brave Act the King an Order gave
The Captain should a Chain and Medal have.
The Merchants did with honour him commend
Because their goods he bravely did defend.
Prose narratives of this engagement are to be found in the Calendar of Domestic State Papers for 1671 (pp. 536, 554). ‘King Charles in consideration of that stout and memorable action of Captain Baddison... was pleased to order a gold chain and medal for him’ (The Historian’s Guide, 1688, p. 82). Another merchant captain, Robert Robertson, Charles knighted for fighting an Algerine man-of-war (Le Neve’s Knights, p. 2). More often weakly armed merchantmen were captured in defiance of treaties, as the narratives of captives such as Adam Elliot, taken in 1670, Joseph Pitts in 1678, and Thomas Phelps in 1684, all illustrate. A petition dated between 1671 and 1681 affirmed that since the last peace the Algerines had taken not less than 140 British ships, and had more than 1,500 English slaves, ‘who suffer and undergo most miserable slavery, put to daily extreme and difficult labour, but a poor supply of bread and water for their food, stripped of their clothes and covering, and their lodging on the cold stones and bricks; but what is more, their extreme hard and savage lading them sometimes with great burthens of chains, and shut up in noisome places, commonly adding some hundreds of blows on their bare feet, forcing out the very blood, and sometimes on the back, sometimes on the belly, and sometimes on them all, insomuch that many are long decrepit, some for ever, and some dying under their hands.’
The fate of these captive sailors is illustrated by a ballad published about 1684, called The Algiers Slave’s Releasement, or the Unchangeable Boatswain (p. 88). Such captives were usually redeemed by the contributions of the charitable, under the authority of warrants known as ‘briefs’ licensing collections in churches for the purpose. (W. A. Bewes, Church Briefs, pp. 193–206). Some were ransomed by the king himself, others recovered by treaty or recaptured. Squadrons under Allin, Spragge, Narbrough and other commanders were successively sent to the Mediterranean to coerce the pirate states. The Diary of Henry Teonge, who served as chaplain on various ships engaged in that service from 1675 to 1679, contains some account of Narbrough’s proceedings against Tripoli, and throws a flood of light on the conditions of life in the navy during the reign of Charles II. It was published in 1825. Teonge’s Diary contains a ballad on the destruction of a vessel belonging to Tripoli by the English frigate Assistance in 1675 (p. 63), besides other specimens of his muse, mainly of an amatory nature (pp. 73, 79, 168, 241, 259). Still more curious than Teonge’s Diary is along narrative poem describing a cruise in the Mediterranean, from May 1669 to April 1671, under Sir John Harman. It is called The Straights Voyage or St. David’s Poem, was published in 1671, and was written by John Balthorpe, a clerk on board the St. David, Harman’s flagship. It appears to have escaped altogether the notice of naval historians.
One of the heroes of this war was Captain Thomas Harman, sometimes said to be the son of Sir John, and certainly a kinsman. There is a ballad on his capture of the Dutch frigate Schaherlaes in February 1675 (p. 53), but his career began in the Mediterranean. On May 8, 1671, Sir Edward Spragge’s squadron destroyed seven Algiers men-of-war and their prizes in the harbour of Bugia. The boom which defended the Algerines was cut by three of Spragge’s boats, thus making way for a fireship to enter. Harman seems to have been in command of one of the boats. ‘The Admiral,’ says a contemporary letter, ‘had every man killed and wounded in his boat, save Mr. Harman, who is deservedly commended and is said to have cut the boom in half pistol shot under their biggest castel (where the chains reached not) and heads of their men-of-war’ (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1671, p. 249). Dryden, in some lines addressed in 1677 to Nat Lee on his play of Alexander the Great, refers to these two exploits of Harman’s to prove the proposition that some men’s merits are too pre-eminent for rivalry: for instance, Lee’s as a dramatist or Harman’s as a sailor:
‘’Tis here as ’tis at sea; who farthest goes,
Or dares the most, makes all the rest his foes.
Yet when some virtue much outgrows the rest,
It shoots too fast and high to be opprest,
As his heroic worth struck envy dumb,
Who took the Dutchman and who cut the boom.’
When this was written Harman’s brief but glorious career had just ended. In September 1677, while in command of the Sapphire, 34, he engaged an Algerine ship called the Golden Horse, 46, failed to take her, and was mortally wounded in the fight. Elegiac Verses on the death of Captain Thomas Harman, late commander of his Majesties Frigot the Sapphire, addressed and presented to the Duke of York, are amongst the Luttrell collection in the British Museum. Like a sturdy oak, stricken by thunder, says the poet, Harman’s body fell on the deck, but his soul flew upwards to heaven, and the other dead British heroes helped him in to the mansions of the blest,
‘Lawson, Minnes, Spragge and many more beside,
As soon as they the labouring soul espied,
Let down their beams, and pointed out the way
To the bright mansions of Eternal Day.’
Our last ballad of the reign of Charles II. is The Benjamin’s Lamentation. Though no ship of that name can be found in the lists of the navy, it will serve as an example of the class of ballads relating to shipwrecks, and its metrical form is of some interest. Possibly it is an early chanty.
The short reign of James II. affords us only two ballads of interest, both of which come from the collections of Samuel Pepys. One relates the prosperous hunt of William Phipps for the treasure of a Spanish galleon wrecked in the Bahamas (p. 96). He sailed in September 1686 in a King’s ship called the James and Mary, returning in June 1687 with cargo valued at 300,000l. (Luttrell’s Diary, i. 407–8; Hutchison, Massachusetts Bay, i. 397; Ellis, Correspondence, i. 295, 325). James knighted him on June 28, 1687. The second is still more interesting, for it shows that even in time of peace the hostility of the Spaniards to the English in the West Indies was so great that a man of war was treacherously attacked as it lay in a Spanish harbour. The Dartmouth, the vessel in question, was a fifth-rate, carrying twenty-eight guns, and according to a note by Pepys the ballad was composed by Hovenden Walker (subsequently Rear-Admiral of the White) who was then serving on board her (p. 92).
With the reign of William III. there was a great increase in the number of naval ballads published, due to the increased interest which the nation took in maritime affairs.
The war with France was popular both with the navy itself and with the people. ‘Lewis, that Christian Turk,’ was generally hated as a sovereign who designed to ruin all Protestant princes, and sought to ‘lay a heavy yoke’ on the free English nation. This is the argument set forth in The Boatswain’s Call to induce sailors to enter the navy. Impressment was necessary. ‘Some,’ continues the ballad, ‘dread and fear the press as much as dying,
‘And skulk like frighted slaves here in distraction
To hide in dens and caves from warlike action.’
But for the moment popular feeling was in favour of impressment. So at all events the ballad called The Maiden’s Frolic seems to prove, which relates how ‘six lusty lasses pressed fourteen tailors.’ Another ballad, The Undaunted Seaman, describes a sailor resolving to venture his life ‘to subdue the pride of France’ in spite of ‘his love’s sorrowful lamentation.’ A fourth relates a maid’s attempt to buy her lover’s discharge for ten pounds.
‘Not ten pounds or twenty will buy his discharge,
Fair maid, you must patiently bear;
He shall go to sea for his King to engage,
And he must bid adieu to his dear.’
Thus the captain answers, and the maid is convinced, and resigns herself to the parting (pp. 97–106).
The first task the navy took part in was the reconquest of Ireland. Unfortunately there seem to be no ballads extant either on the relief of Londonderry or the fight in Bantry Bay. Crofton Croker’s Historical Songs of Ireland, published by the Percy Society in 1841, contains half a dozen ballads on military operations in Ireland under William III., but none on naval. But the Pepysian collection supplies a ballad on the capture of the Pelican frigate in Dublin Bay, under the eyes of ‘Old James and his Teagues,’ by Sir Clowdisley Shovell (see p. 107). This took place in April 1690, and the account of the exploit given is so detailed that it looks as if it were written by some one who served under Shovell (see Luttrell’s Diary, ii. 35). Next month came a rumour that Admiral Henry Killigrew with a squadron in the Mediterranean had beaten the French fleet under Chateau Renault, sinking two ships and taking three (Luttrell’s Diary, ii. 47, 57, 61). The rumour was untrue, for his attempt to bring them to an engagement was unsuccessful (Burchett, Transactions at Sea, pp. 37–43). Nevertheless the fictitious triumph was embodied in a ballad called The Seaman’s Victory (see p. 108). On June 30, 1690, Torrington was worsted by de Tourville at Beachy Head. ‘Both the admirals,’ says Burnet, ‘were equally blamed—ours for not fighting and the French for not pursuing.’ Torrington was sent to the Tower, and accused by the popular voice of want of courage as well as of want of conduct. Of this feeling the ballad called Torringtonia, or a New Copy of Verses on the late Sea Engagement, is the expression (p. 110).
Another incident which occurred in the same month is related in an elegy, In the memory of the truly Loyal and Valiant Captain John George, late Commander of their Majesties Frigate the Rose, being a full and true Relation of a bloody Fight between the said Frigate and a French man-of-war to the eastward of Cape Sables on Saturday the 24th of May, 1690. John George was in charge of a convoy when he sighted the French ship, which was superior in force to his own. The enemy
‘Twenty odd guns on either side hauled out,
Seamen and soldiers full four hundred [stout].
The Rose a fifth-rate, not full thirty guns,
Six score brave lads, burthen three hundred tuns.’
George was killed by a ball from the Frenchman’s maintop, but David Condon, his lieutenant, carried on the fight (assisted by that ‘gallant spark,’ Captain Ben Clark of Wapping, ‘in the European of London, a mast ship,’ which carried ten guns), and beat off the assailant. When New England rose against the government of Sir Edmund Andros in April 1689, George had been made a prisoner, but was released by order of the King, though much distrusted by the supporters of the revolution. One reason for publishing the relation was that the base Bostonians, ‘cursed sons of Cham,’ said that the captain had betrayed his convoy (see Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1690–1, p. 376; ib. America and West Indies, 1689–92, pp. 66, 121, 269; Charnock, Biographia Navalis, ii. 98, 308).
In 1691 Admiral Russell was in command of the fleet in the Channel, but though he cruised from May to September, achieved nothing (Burchett, pp. 63–91). A satirical ballad, ironically entitled England’s Triumph at Sea, probably by the same author as Torringtonia, hints that ‘the cherry-cheeked Russell’ was very careful not to meet with his foes (p. 112). Two regiments of marines had been raised in April 1690, and served in the fleet, and the first allusion ballads make to this branch of service is contained in the following lines:
‘We had sea colonels o’ th’ nature of otter,
Which either might serve by land or by water,
Though of what they have done we hear no great matter.’
In September 1691 Russell’s fleet put into Plymouth in a violent storm, losing two ships, the Coronation, a second-rate, and the Harwich, a third-rate. This disaster is commemorated in England’s Great Loss by a Storm of Wind, which exaggerates, as ballads generally do, and makes him lose nine ships (p. 113).
The failures of 1690 and 1691 enhanced the glory of the victory of La Hogue in 1692. On that battle there are no less than four ballads. One of them, Admiral Russell scowering the French Fleet, long kept its popularity with sailors, and is to be found in most eighteenth-century collections of songs. A pamphleteer, writing in 1757 about the action off Toulon on February 11, 1744, says, ‘I myself heard the song about the battle of La Hogue sung by almost every man on board one ship the day of the battle of Toulon with very good effect, till the infamous behaviour of some in the fleet put an end to their song, and changed their praises of the dead into curses of the living, and, upon inquiry, I had reason to believe it was sung in every ship in the fleet with the same effect’ (Three Letters relating to the Navy, Gibraltar and Port-Mahon, 1757, p. 18). Rear-Admiral Richard Carter, who was killed at La Hogue, is the subject of an elegy preserved in the British Museum. It shows that he was popular with those who served under him:
‘His virtue was not rugged, like the waves,
Nor did he treat his sailors as his slaves:
But courteous, easy of access, and free,
His looks not tempered with severity.’
There was also published in 1692 a Congratulatory Ode to Admiral Russell and the other Sea-Commanders for their late Glorious Victory. It refers in the last verse to the rumours spread against the loyalty of the admirals:
‘Go on, true sons of Honour, still advance
The English glory by depressing France:
Go on to prove, how much a royal trust
Works upon spirits that are brave and just:
This our great mistress knew, whose piercing eyes,
Unprejudiced by lying calumnies,
Could look through every faithful breast,
And saw the loyal zeal they afterwards exprest.’
The year after La Hogue was marked by the capture of a large part of the Turkey fleet which Sir George Rooke was convoying. On this event the naval muse is silent. On May 10, 1694, Captain Pickard, in command of two third-rates, the Monmouth and the Resolution, and of the Roebuck fireship, fell in off the French coast with a fleet of fifty-two merchantmen bound for Dunkirk, and destroyed thirty-five (Luttrell, Diary, iii. 312; Burchett, p. 214). This is the subject of a ballad entitled The Valiant Seaman’s Courage (p. 125) More interesting is England’s Glory in the behaviour of brave Killeygrove, which relates the capture of two French ships, the Content, of sixty guns, and the Trident, of fifty-two, off Pantelaria, by a squadron of six ships, under the command of Captain James Killigrew (p. 126). The action took place about January 27, 1695, and Killigrew lost his life early in the engagement (Burchett, p. 266; Charnock, Biographia Navalis, ii. 327).
From July 1694 to the autumn of 1695, Admiral Russell, in command of a combined Dutch and English fleet, dominated the Mediterranean and checked the progress of the French arms in Spain. The significance of his operations is brought out in Mr. Julian Corbett’s England in the Mediterranean (ii. 149–184), and the ballad called The Frighted French, or Russell scouring the Seas, represents the feeling which Tourville’s disinclination to come out of Toulon and risk an engagement produced in England (p. 128, post). ‘The honour of commanding the sea and of shutting the French within their ports,’ says Burnet, ‘gave a great reputation to our affairs.’ The ballad, written early in 1695, refers also to the intended operations on the coast of France. It threatens the French:
‘Now the spring’s a-coming, our English will be burning
Your towns that be builded near the sea.’
‘We had another fleet in our own Channel,’ continues Burnet, ‘that was ordered to bombard the French coast; they did some execution upon St. Malos, and destroyed Grandville that lay not far from it; they also attempted Dunkirk, but failed in the execution; some bombs were thrown into Calais, but without any great effect; so that the French did not suffer so much by the bombardment as was expected: the country indeed was much alarmed by it; they had many troops dispersed all along their coast; so that it put their affairs in great disorder and we were everywhere masters at sea’ (Own Times, iv. 277, ed. 1836).
On the other hand, while the French fleet was confined to its ports, English commerce was poorly protected, and it suffered greatly during this period both from privateers and pirates. The pirate now begins to make a figure in ballad literature. The first quarter of the seventeenth century had been marked by the development of the Barbary corsairs, and its last decade was characterised by the growth of a new form of piracy. It is true the buccaneers whose exploits reached their height when Morgan captured Panama in 1668, were little better than pirates (though some of them had commissions of a sort from the Governor of Jamaica), but they confined their activity to the Spanish Main and the South Sea. The new pirates, however, frequented the eastern even more than the western seas, and avowedly preyed on the commerce of all powers. One of the most famous of these was Captain Avery, upon whom in 1720 Defoe published a pamphlet entitled The King of Pirates; being an account of the famous enterprises of Captain Avery, the mock king of Madagascar. In 1713, under the name of Arviragus, he was made the hero of a play called The Successful Pirate. Earlier still there was published the Life and Adventures of Captain John Avery now in Madagascar, 1709. The ballad gives the pirate’s name as Henry Every, but Avery is the commoner form. In May 1694 an English merchant ship, the Charles the Second, commanded by Captain Gibson, was lying near Corunna. She was a stout vessel and carried forty guns. Avery persuaded the crew to mutiny, set the captain on shore, baptised the ship the Fancy, and sailed for the East Indies. Amongst other prizes he captured on September 28, 1695, a ship called the Gunsway, belonging to the Great Mogul. This led to reprisals, and the seizure of the factories of the English in India. On the application of the East India Company a proclamation was issued on July 18, 1696, declaring Avery and his crew pirates, and offering a reward for their apprehension. Five of the crew were seized on their return to England, tried at the Old Bailey, October 29-November 6, 1696, and duly hanged. Others were arrested later. The commencement of Avery’s career is commemorated in A copy of verses composed by Captain Henry Avery, lately gone to Sea to seek his fortune, and the fate of his followers in Villany Rewarded; or the Pirates’ last Farewell (pp. 131, 133).
Avery’s success fired others to imitate him. Captain William Kidd sailed from Plymouth in May 1696 in command of a privateer called the Adventure galley, equipped by private subscription, but with a commission under the Great Seal to seize pirates. Kidd, however, turned pirate himself, was arrested at Boston in July 1699, transmitted to England for trial, and hanged at Execution Dock on May 23, 1701. Captain Kidd’s Farewell to the Seas was a popular song and set to a popular tune. The whole ballad is only to be found in Lord Crawford’s collection, and to him the Society is indebted for permission to reprint it in this volume (p. 134).
During the last ten years of the seventeenth century pirates made the eastern seas and the coast of Africa as unsafe as the buccaneers had made the western. The ballad entitled The Caesar’s Victory tells how an Indiaman successfully beat off five such adversaries (p. 129). The attack took place near Cape Verd Islands on October 31, 1686. A full account is given in Mayo’s Medals and Decorations of the British Army and Navy, i. 61–6.
In the West Indies European pirates continued to be a danger much longer than in the East, and after the peace of Utrecht there followed a great recrudescence of piracy, which lasted for ten years or more. The exploits of these pirates are recorded, with a large mixture of fiction, in Charles Johnson’s General History of the Pirates, published in 1724. On September 5, 1717, George I. issued a general proclamation for the suppressing of pirates, offering a pardon to all who surrendered before September 5, 1718 (Johnson, p. 33). One of the most notorious, Edward Teach, alias Blackbeard, was killed by Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Pearl, in an action in James River in Virginia on November 22, 1718. A ballad called The Downfall of Piracy celebrated Maynard’s exploit, and forms a fitting close to the series illustrating this portion of our naval annals (p. 166).
To return to the reign of William III. During the later years of the war with France the development of privateering was more dangerous to English trade than the growth of piracy. From the very beginning of the war English commerce had suffered greatly. Nearly every year there were loud complaints against the management of the navy, and parliamentary debates ‘on the miscarriages at sea.’ ‘By an odd reverse of things,’ writes Burnet, speaking of the year 1692, ‘as we made no considerable losses when the French were masters of our seas two years before, so now when we triumphed in that element, our merchants suffered the most.’ The same thing happened in 1695 (Burnet, Own Times, iv. 169, 268). Much was attributed to the mismanagement of the admiralty, and as much to the incapacity of some of the commanders. The old controversy as to the relative merits of ‘tarpaulins’ and gentlemen captains revived once more. That question is the main subject discussed in the tract called A Rough Draught of a New Model at Sea, written by Lord Halifax, probably about 1694 (Foxcroft, Life of Halifax, ii. 454). It is also the subject of A Satire on the Sea Officers, apparently written about the end of 1690, from its references to the battle of Beachy Head (p. 137). The author’s conclusion is that tarpaulins should rule at sea. He refers also to the desire of captains to line their pockets by carrying plate for merchants instead of fighting, and he might also have mentioned the habit of exacting money from merchants for convoys, an act for which in 1689 the House of Commons committed Captain Churchill to the Tower.
As the war went on there were loud complaints of corruption in the victualling and shipbuilding departments, and the grievances of the seamen were set forth in pamphlets by Robert Crosfield, William Hodges, George St. Lo and other writers. Hodges published in 1695 Great Britain’s Groans: or an account of the oppression, ruin, and destruction of the loyal Seamen of England, in the fatal loss of their pay, health, and lives, and dreadful ruin of their families. One grievance was impressment, a greater that men, once pressed, were kept at sea continuously, and not allowed any interval of liberty between their cruises. But their greatest grievances related to their pay: their wages were too long delayed; they were transferred from ship to ship without being paid; they were obliged to sell the certificates for their wages at half-price to ticket-buyers, and so on. Besides this, they were badly fed and harshly treated. In the good old days, said a pamphleteer, ‘they were not poisoned by bad provisions, pease bread, and stinking beef and pork.’ Moreover, ‘such men as General Blake, the Earl of Sandwich, Dean, Lawson, Bourne, Minns, etc. were familiar with their sailors, and instead of calling them damned dogs or sons of whores, called them brethren’ (Remarks upon the Navy. In a Letter from a Sailor to a Member of the House of Commons, 1700, part ii. p. 14). These grievances found expression in a ballad called The Sea Martyrs, or the Seamen’s Sad Lamentation of their faithful service, bad pay, and cruel usage, which the vigilant Pepys preserved, but forgot to date (see p. 140). The sailors punished were evidently regarded as popular heroes, and the ballad is a parallel to those written later on the mutiny of 1797.
A grievance still more often mentioned was that the food was defective both in quality and quantity. Balthorpe’s verse narrative of his cruise in the Mediterranean in 1669–1671 is full of complaints. Within a month after leaving England the crew of the St. David were put upon short allowance.
‘What meat before the King for four
Allowed, now six men it devour;
A dollar to each man is due,
Each twenty-eight days ’tis true:
When we can get it we drink wine.’
The wine which the sailors could cheaply procure in the Mediterranean ports compensated for the scantiness of the food:
‘A seaman when he gets ashore
In one day’s time he spendeth more
Than three months short allowance money.
... Their beef and pork is very scant,
I’me sure of weight one half it want;
A kind of horse beans they do get for pease,
No nourishment at all there is in these;
Instead of English cheese or butter
A little oyl we get, God wot, far worser.
A little rice we get instead of fish
Which unto you is known, but a poor dish:
Except good sauce to put it in you had,
For with good sauce a deal-board is not bad.’
On the coast of Portugal and in the Mediterranean a mixture of wine and water was served out instead of beer. It was commonly spoken of as ‘beverage.’
‘Our drink it is but vinegar and water,
Four shilling beer in England’s ten times better—
So that when saylors gets good wine
They think themselves in heaven for the time:
It hunger, cold, all maladies expels,
With cares of the world we trouble not ourselves.’
Balthorpe drew up a verse petition to Sir John Harman on September 4, 1670, denouncing the malpractices of the purser and the victuallers, which is dated ‘written on Ban Yan Saturday, being Kettle Holyday.’ As usual, the complaint made was not against the regulations, but against the officials:
‘Purser, steward, mate, all three
I wish them hanged upon a tree:
Except that we have scoffe for dinner,
It were no harm as I’m a sinner.
They say they give us what the king allows,
They think they speak to fools that nothing knows;
But they’re mistaken in the matter quite,
Were we their judge, they’d hang outright.’
No petition or promise of redress produced more than a temporary amendment. Resignation and an occasional drinking bout was the only course.
‘I know the King far better doth allow,
But how to compass it we do not know,
For mutineers we will be never
If that we keep but life and soul together.’
The same complaint recurs in the eighteenth century, and is set forth at length in the True Character of the Purser of a Ship (p. 233).
Yet the sailor of the seventeenth century, badly fed, badly paid and badly treated, was a cheerful person and pleased with small things. Whitelocke, in his relation of his embassy to Sweden in 1653, describes his life on board ship. The ambassador was affable, and gained the love of all the ship’s company. He ‘got into the favour of the officers and mariners by his kindness and familiarity, by being much on the decks and drolling with them and discoursing, especially by affording them now and then a douse in the neck or a kick in jest, seeing them play, and then giving them some of his own tobacco, wine, and strong waters, as there was occasion, which demeanours please those kind of people’ (Journal, i. 135). As he amused them, so they in return amused him. On his return, when he was wind-bound off the mouth of the Elbe, ‘the mariners, in their usual way of sporting, endeavoured to make him some pastime to divert the tediousness of his stay and of the bad weather’ (Journal, ii. 389).
Of what nature the pastime was we can infer from a few notices. Pepys mentions in the journal of his voyage to Tangiers, under August 27, 1683; ‘Till midnight on the quarter deck, seeing the seamen dance to the harp and sing’ (Correspondence, i. 343). And again on September 3: ‘This evening much mirth among the seamen dancing, the sea running high’ (ib. i. 346). There was music of some kind on board most men-of-war. In the Bristol, during Teonge’s voyage to the Mediterranean in 1675, the only instruments mentioned are trumpets. When the ship left the Downs ‘our trumpets sound “Maids, where are your hearts?”’ and again as a compliment to the English consul at Scanderoon the trumpets played the same tune. In describing the celebration of Christmas Day music is mentioned again. ‘At four in the morning our trumpeters all doe flatt their trumpetts, and begin at our Captain’s cabin, and thence to all the officers’ and gentlemen’s cabins; playing a levite at each cabine doore, and bidding good morrow wishing a Merry Christmas. After they goe to their station, viz. on the poope, and sound three levitts in honour of the morning’ (Diary of Henry Teonge, 1825, pp. 12, 91, 117). Balthorpe’s ship, the St. David, only had a fiddler. On Christmas Day,
‘Our Fidler then did play and sing
At cabin door, made steerage ring,
With cheerful voice bid them good morrow.
I think that he did verses borrow
From some famed poet, for he’d sing
Brave merry songs made all to ring.’
Before the voyage began, as the ship lay in Portsmouth Road,
‘Our Fidler did in triumph fetch
His fiddle from aboard a ketch
Called the Portsmouth, and did play
Oft times to pass the time away.
Sometimes to pass sad cares away
On Forecastle we dance the Hay;
Sometimes dance nothing, only hop about—
It for good dancing passes ’mongst the rout;
Yet, on my word, I have seen sailors
More nimble dance than any taylors.’
(The Straights Voyage.)
Dr. John Covel gives a still more detailed account of the diversions of the sailors. ‘If the weather be fair and permit it we seldome fail of some merry fellows in every ship’s crew who will entertain us with several diversions, as divers sorts of odde sports and gambols; sometimes with their homely drolls and farses, which in their corrupt language they name interlutes, sometimes they dance about the mainmast instead of a maypole, and they have variety of forecastle songs, ridiculous enough’ (September 1670. Diary of Dr. John Covel, p. 104, Hakluyt Society, 1893).
A play written in 1681 represents a captain on shore who makes a companion sing one of these songs. Captain Porpuss is described as ‘a blunt tarpaulin captain.’ When a song is proposed in the drawing-room where he happens to be, he demands a song with some sense in it—not a whining thing about Phillis or Chloris—such a song as he used to hear in the happy days when he was Captain of the Success.
‘Well, she was riding at Sole Bay; ’twas just before the fight (wherein I did such notable service); I had then a lieutenant aboard—a little dapper fellow, but as stout as Hercules; and when we met a-nights in the great cabin, over a jolly bowl of punch, the rogue would sing us the best sea-songs, and so roar ’em out! I think I’ve a fellow can remember one of them. Sing, Sirrah!
Song.
Blow, Boreas, blow, and let thy surly winds
Make the billows foam and roar!
Thou canst no terror breed in valiant minds;
But, spite of thee, we’ll live and find the shore.
Then cheer, my hearts, and be not awed,
But keep the gun-room clear;
Tho’ hell’s broke loose, and the devils roar abroad
Whilst we have sea-room here, boys, never fear.
There now, there’s life, there’s soul, there’s sense. As I’m a living man, gentlemen, the rogue has foxed me three times, one after another, only by singing this song.’
(D’Urfey, Sir Barnaby Whigg, 1681, Act i. scene i. See also Pills to Purge Melancholy, vol. i. ed. 1719, p. 96.)
This song, which was written by D’Urfey himself, was set to music by Purcell, and may be found in his Orpheus Britannicus. The same collection also contains Purcell’s song of Britons, strike home, from the opera of Bonduca, 1695, which is founded on Fletcher’s play of the same name. It was an adjuration to the ancient Britons to avenge the wrongs which their country and Queen had suffered from the Romans, but seems to have been adopted in the navy as a suitable battle-song. An eighteenth-century pamphlet, describing an action between an English privateer and a French ship, relates the following incident:—‘The master-at-arms had one of his arms and part of his body torn away: in this bloody condition he was carried down to the surgeon, who saying it was impossible to save his life, and the poor man finding himself dying, bravely in his last moments sung the song of “Britons, strike home,” and expired with the words in his mouth’ (A faithful Narrative of the cruel Sufferings of Captain Death and his crew, by Samuel Stoakes, 1757 [?], p. 6).
Songs imported from plays or operas were not likely to become popular on board ship until after they had obtained general popularity on shore. One of the characteristics of the ballad literature of the last quarter of the seventeenth century is the great increase in the number of ballads describing the lives, adventures, loves, marriages, meetings and partings of sailors. Most of them were written for consumption on shore, but some doubtless became popular at sea. The printed collection of ballads contain many specimens. In the Bagford Ballads there are reprints of The Mariner’s Misfortune, a tale of a shipwrecked sailor and a maiden who for his sake went to sea in disguise; The Seaman’s Adieu to his pretty Betty, and The Fair Maid’s Choice, which is ‘Of all sorts of tradesmen a seaman for me’ (Bagford Ballads, i. 247, 274, 289). In the Roxburghe Ballads there are several groups of ballads of the same nature. The sixth volume contains, The Gallant Seaman’s Return from the Indies; The West Country Nymph; The Fair and Loyal Maid of Bristow; and The Seaman’s Sorrowful Bride (pp. 415, 441, 443, 444). The seventh includes a still larger number: The Mariner’s Delight, or the Seaman’s seven Wives; Faithful Jemmy and constant Susan; The Gallant Seaman’s Resolution (whose full intent was to try his fortune at sea, and at his return marry his landlady); Love and Loyalty; The two Loyal Lovers; A Farewell to Gravesend; The Valiant Seaman’s happy Return to his Love; The Seaman’s Advice to his pretty Betty, living near Wapping; The Sailor’s Departure from his dearest Love; The Constant Maiden’s Resolution; Loyal Constancy, or the Seaman’s Love-Letter; Virtue the Reward of Constancy; The Faithful Lover’s Farewell; The Valiant Virgin, or Philip and Mary; The Seaman’s Dolefull Farewell; The Seaman’s Folly, in marrying one so quickly for what he has cause to repent at leisure; The Seaman’s Renown in Winning his Fair Lady (pp. 490–559). The eighth volume gives us: The Seaman’s Frolic, or a Cooler for the Captain; The Seaman’s Complaint for his unkind Mistress of Wapping; The Love-sick Maid of Wapping; I father a Child that’s None of my own, being the Seaman’s Complaint, &c.; A Mad Marriage, or the Female Fancy of Deptford (xciii. 433–443). There are also three verses of A Kiss of a Seaman is worth two of Another (ib. pp. 678, 861).
It was obviously impossible to select more than a few specimens of this class of ballads, and it seemed best to choose three or four which for various reasons were of more historical interest than the rest (see pp. 99, 101, 146), and to add two from the Pepys and Druce collections not previously reprinted (pp. 143, 145). The existence of so many ballads of this kind—and there are many more of them in the Pepysian collection, besides others in Lord Crawford’s possession—proves beyond a doubt the growth of popular interest in the navy. Another proof is furnished by the fact that contemporary dramatists represented sailors in their plays with increasing frequency. Shakespeare was one of the first to do this. Everyone will remember the shipwreck scene with which The Tempest opens, and the song of Stephano:
‘The master, the swabber, the boatswain and I,
the gunner and his mate,
Loved Moll, Meg, Marian, and Marjory,
but none of us cared for Kate,’
with its philosophical conclusion, ‘To sea, boys, and let her go hang.’ In Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, performed in 1656, sailors are introduced whose sentiments would do credit to Dibdin’s heroes. ‘What,’ says one of them,
will not the valiant English do
When Beauty is distressed and virtue too?’
In Charles the Second’s time Wycherley in 1677 brought upon the stage, in The Plain Dealer, Manley, a gentleman ‘of an honest, surly, nice humour, supposed first in the time of the Dutch war to have procured the command of a ship, out of honour, not of interest, and choosing a sea life only to avoid the world.’ There is also Freeman, Manley’s lieutenant, ‘a gentleman well educated, but of a broken fortune.’ The first scene introduces some of Manley’s crew, who speak of him affectionately as ‘our bully tar,’ and tell how he sank his ship that the Dutch might not have her nor the courtiers beg the hulk. Manley’s crew love him in spite of his surliness. ‘He’s always as dogged,’ says one, ‘as an old tarpaulin when hindered of a voyage by a young pantaloon captain.’ ‘’Tis true,’ answers another, ‘I never saw him pleased but in the fight, and then he looked like one of us coming from the pay table, with a new lining to our hats under our arm.’ D’Urfey’s Captain Porpuss, already mentioned, belongs to the year 1681. These instances refute Mr. Gosse’s statement that Ben, in Congreve’s Love for Love (1695), is the ‘first of a long line of stage sailors.’ On the other hand, Ben represents the type in its most perfect shape. He is a younger son, ‘half home bred and half sea bred,’ designed to marry Miss Prue, whom he woos in technical language. ‘I don’t stand much towards matrimony. I love to roam from port to port and from land to land: I would never abide to be port bound.’ Nevertheless he confesses Prue has charms. ‘You’re a tight vessel and well rigged, an you were but as well manned.’ This promising beginning ends in a quarrel. She calls him a ‘stinking tarbarrel,’ he terms her a ‘dirty dowdy’ (Act iii. sc. vi. vii.). But if Ben has not the gallantry of a stage sailor, he has the aggressive honesty. ‘Don’t think I’m false-hearted like a landsman,’ he tells another lady. ‘A sailor will be honest, tho’ perhaps he has never a penny of money in his pocket. Mayhap I have not so fair a face as a citizen or a courtier, but for all that I’ve as good blood in my veins and a heart as sound as a biscuit’ (Act iii. sc. xv.).
The reign of Queen Anne, compared to that of William III., is rather barren in naval ballads. Pepys died in May 1703, and later collectors who took less interest in maritime affairs allowed the songs written about them to perish. Yet the history of the reign, if marked by no victory equal in magnitude to La Hogue, was distinguished by the victories of Rooke and Leake and many minor successes. The finest ballad of the time is that which records Benbow’s disastrous battle with Ducasse, of which it has been possible to discover a longer and better version than that given in Halliwell’s collection (p. 149).
Fortune was less kind to the fame of Rooke than to that of Benbow. There is, it is true, a poem addressed To the right honourable Sir George Rooke at his Return from his glorious Enterprise near Vigo. It celebrates his success in forcing the Danes to make peace with Sweden in 1700:
‘To jarring Crowns repose Thy Navy brings,
And Quiet broods beneath Her Halcyon wings.
Those Gathering Clouds, which not long since broke forth
In Storms, and threaten’d to lay waste the North,
Thou at Thy first approach didst drive away,
And on their Wintry Climes let in the Southern day.’
It goes on to refer to the unsuccessful attempt on Cadiz in 1702, and to say that ‘auspicious Heaven’ pointed out to England a nobler quarry than the town first aimed at, and one more worthy of Rooke’s arms:
‘Shows Her, on wing retiring from the Main,
The Wealth of India and the Pride of Spain.
This Prize was worthy Thee; and less had been
Too mean a Present for an English Queen.’
The attack on the allied fleet on Oct. 12, 1702, is related at length in a ballad called The Sailor’s Account of the Action at Vigo (p. 151). But contemporary poetasters in general attribute the victory to Ormonde and the army rather than Rooke and the navy (Poems on State Affairs, ii. 409, 415; Pills to Purge Melancholy, v. 115). Added to this, Rooke’s battle with Toulouse off Malaga on August 13, 1704, gained him neither credit nor popularity, and afforded an opportunity to the satirists, of which they made the most (ib. iv. 112, 113). Specimens of their satires are given on pp. 153, 154.
Nothing has survived on Leake’s exploits excepting a rather poor ballad on the capture of a Spanish provision fleet in 1708 (p. 156). There is also a spirited ballad called The Sea-fight, or the French Prize Taken, published in 1707, which professes to describe an action between two single ships (p. 158).
A contemporary poetaster, describing his voyage to Flanders, inserts some verses ‘in the praise of those heroes commanding the fleet,’ whom he thus commemorates:
‘Russell and Benbow I own to be braves,
And Shovell, like Neptune bred up on the waves;
Be it spoke to the praise of the bold Captain Jumper,
When he met a French ship he bravely would thump her;
Nor ever durst Lewis, or Duke of Burgundy
E’er look in the face of brave Sir John Mundy;
Denbigh and Dursley are lords of great merit,
And Jennings possesseth an heroic spirit.’
On reciting these verses to the captain of a man-of-war, with an appropriate compliment to the captain himself, the poet received an effusive welcome on board. The captain admitted that he was a hero too.
‘I am of the blood of the bold Boanerges,
And fear not the French when I meet them on surges;
... And if you are pleased for to leave your own nation
Most proud I shall be of your sweet conversation.’
Incidentally the poet describes the ship setting sail:
‘Up came the Boatswain, with Countenance stern,
With a great Pair of Whiskers, and Mouth like a Churn,
He lug’d out his Whistle, and up came the Sailers,
And all Hands aloft as nimble as Taylors:
There was Toe-le-ho, and, Boys, heave away,
Whilst another was tearing his Throat with, Belay;
Then Haul Cat, Haul: A damnable Yawling;
The Boatswain a Swearing, the Master a Bawling,
Helm-a-lee, ye Landlubbard Loobies;
Let go the Fore-Bowlings, ye Fresh-Water Boobies;
Haul Aft the Main-Sheet, ye Lump of a Dog,
Whilst another was Singing a Tune to the Log.
Such Language was us’d by the Tarpauling Rabble,
Sure never was such a Confusion at Bable:
The Master cry’d out, Thus, thus, Stedy, Stedy:
A Pox take his Thus, it made my Head Giddy.’
(Rands, Pax in Crumena; or, the Trooper turn’d Poet,
1714, pp. 6–7, The Poet’s Voyage to Amsterdam.)
The reign of Queen Anne was marked by great disasters from fire and storm. In the great storm of November 26, 1703, twelve vessels belonging to the navy were totally lost, according to the list given by Clowes (ii. 389). A ballad on the event entitled The Stormy Judgments or the Tempestuous Wind is printed in the Bagford Ballads (i. 83), but it gives no details. Another entitled The dreadful Tempest or a Divine Poem on the Amazing Hurricane which appeared with Wonderful Violence both by Sea and Land on the 27th of November 1703 describes the loss of four men-of-war:
‘The Mary on the Goodwin-Sands was blown,
And all her Sailors perished but one,
Who on a piece of wreck was wash’d aboard
The Sterling-Castle, and to life restor’d.
‘Thus while a Sinking in the Sand she lay,
Admiral Beaumont to his men did say,
You that can Swim may try your lives to save,
For no reliefe we now can hope to have.
‘Then presently the Ship in pieces Split,
And he himself upon a plank did sit,
Floating a while with Waves encompass’d round,
But was wash’d off and in the Tempest drown’d.
‘The warlike Sterling-Castle perish’d then,
And all her crew Excepting Eight Men,
Who by God’s providence got safe ashore,
Amongst whom was the Man preserv’d before.
‘Twice cast away, and twice deliver’d too,
Here may we see what the Good God can do,
Nay a third time to shew his Mercies more,
The Boat was lost that carried him to shore.
‘The Restoration and Northumberland,
Ere morning light did sink into the sand,
And of eight Hundred Souls of both their Crews,
Not one escap’d to tell the dreadful news.
‘But what was yet more Mournful you shall hear
On board the former as it doth appear,
The Captain had his Wife and Children got,
Which were seen after on the Seas to Float.
‘Nay, and in several other Ships besides,
There many Women with their Husbands died,
Many poor Children are left Fatherless,
And many Widdows mourning in distress.
‘Of men of war Eleven Sail was lost,
Of Merchant men two hundred on our Coast,
Beside the Damage done to many more,
And seven Thousand Sailors lost therefore.’
Over 6,000l. was collected for the widows and orphans who perished in the storm. The order authorising a collection for this purpose is printed by Mr. W. A. Bewes in his Church Briefs, and he also reprints the ballad quoted above (p. 239).
A disaster very little less in its magnitude was the casting away of Sir Clowdisley Shovell on the rocks of the Scilly Islands upon the night of October 22, 1707. The Association, 96, which was Shovell’s flagship; the Eagle, 70; the Romney, 50; and the Firebrand fireship, were totally lost; two others, the Phoenix and the St. George, struck also, but came off without breaking up (Clowes, ii. 411). The best account of the incident is to be found in a pamphlet by Mr. J. H. Cooke, entitled The Shipwreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, read at a meeting of the Society of Antiquaries, February 1, 1885, and printed at Gloucester in the same year. No contemporary ballad on Shovell’s fate has survived, but the British Museum contains A New Elegy on the Lamented Death of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, from which the following lines are derived:
‘The bulging Ship upon the Shore stuck fast,
And scarce two Minutes but she struck her last:
Was quite o’rewhelm’d with the next rolling Wave.
Aid and Endeavours were in vain to save
Whom Fate had destin’d to a Watery Grave.
There Shovel unamaz’d, by nature Brave,
Spreading his Arms embrac’d a briny Wave,
And where he had reign’d with Honour, made his grave.
A Man, till now, that e’er was fortunate
Precisely Good and regularly Great:
The Nations Trust, and Sailor’s joy he prov’d
And still where e’re [he] came he was belov’d;
None ever fought her Cause with more success,
None e’re did more—or ever boasted less;
His early valour did proclaim his Worth
And help’d to set the growing Hero forth;
At Bantree, Beachy and at Malaga
The French too well his dauntless Conduct saw;
There you might see the Brittish glory shine,
And Shovel break th’ Impenetrable Line.’
A third disaster, the loss of the Edgar, seventy-gun ship, which blew up at Spithead on October 15, 1711 (Clowes iii. 529) is the subject of a dialogue in verse of which a copy is preserved amongst Douce’s collections in the Bodleian Library. It is reprinted at p. 160.
Another incident of an entirely different character requires mention—that is, the execution of the traitor Captain Thomas Smith in 1708. Smith had been dismissed from his command and fined six months’ pay in September 1703 for corruption, drunkenness and other crimes. In 1707 he entered the French service, and apparently acted as pilot to the squadron of French galleys which captured the Nightingale frigate off Harwich on August 24, 1707, after the very gallant fight which is described in the Memoirs of Jacques de Marteilhe (ed. by H. Paumier, 1865, p. 169). Smith was given command of the captured ship, but was taken during his first cruise by Captain Nicholas Haddock in the Ludlow Castle. He was then tried at the Old Bailey on June 2, 1708, found guilty of bearing arms against his country, and executed on June 18, 1708 (see the lives of Thomas Smith and Seth Jermy in the Dictionary of National Biography, and an article on The Captains of the Nightingale in the English Historical Review for January 1889). The Last Farewell of Captain Smith (p. 154) purports to be his dying speech.
During the first half of the eighteenth century a change in the character of the sea songs produced becomes gradually apparent. ‘Songs intended to bring before shore-going listeners the ways of seamen,’ as Sir Cyprian Bridge describes them, had been produced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the output of them now greatly increased. They were designed not merely for the ordinary audience to which ballad-writers appealed, but for a higher class of hearers, for the theatre or the drawing-room as well as the street and the tavern. To hit genteel taste they became more sentimental in tone and more polished in diction and metre. They were written mostly by professional poets or men with some literary training. Gay led off. His two celebrated songs, Black-eyed Susan and ’Twas when the seas were roaring, mark the beginning of the movement which culminated in the productions of Dibdin. Both will be found in Mr. Stone’s Sea Songs, pp. 208, 209. Gay had many imitators. To this class belongs Fair Sally loved a bonny sailor (p. 163), which probably suggested Dibdin’s Token. Set to music by Maurice Greene it enjoyed great popularity throughout the eighteenth century. Come and listen to my ditty (p. 162), less artificial in form, obtained a still longer vogue, and was printed as a broadside as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century. It furnished the tune for Hosier’s Ghost. Two other songs, if Smollet is to be trusted, became popular in the navy itself. How pleasant a sailor’s life passes (p. 164) was the favourite of Roderick Random’s uncle Lieutenant Thomas Bowling. A quotation from it supplied the place of argument when the lieutenant persuaded Roderick to go to sea.
‘On our way back to the village, my uncle spoke not a word during the space of a whole hour, but whistled with great vehemence the tune of Why should we quarrel for riches, etc., his visage being contracted all the while into a most formidable frown. At length his pace increased to such a degree, that I was often left behind a considerable way, which when he perceived, he waited for me; and when I was almost come up with him, called out in a surly tone, “Bear a hand, damme!—must I bring to every minute for you, you lazy dog.” Then laying hold of me by the arm, hauled me along, until his good nature (of which he had a good share) and reflection, getting the better of his passion, he said, “Come, my boy, don’t be cast down,—the old rascal is in hell,—that’s some satisfaction;—you shall go to sea with me, my lad.—A light heart and a thin pair of breeches, goes thro’ the world, brave boys; as the song goes—eh!” Though this proposal did not at all suit my inclination, I was afraid of discovering my aversion to it, lest I should disoblige the only friend I had in the world; and he was so much a seaman, that he never dreamt I could have any objection to his design; consequently, gave himself no trouble in consulting my approbation’ (Roderick Random, chap. v. p. 23, ed. 1748).
Another song, The Boatswain’s Whistle (p. 165), which, like the Bonny Sailor, was set by Greene, was the delight of Commodore Trunnion and his ex-boatswain when they made merry together in taverns.
‘Come, Pipes, let’s have The Boatswain’s Whistle, and be jovial.’ This musician accordingly applied to his mouth the silver instrument that hung at a buttonhole of his jacket, by a chain of the same metal, and though not quite so ravishing as the pipe of Hermes, produced a sound so loud and shrill, that the stranger (as it were instinctively) stopped his ears, to preserve his organs of hearing from such a dangerous invasion. The prelude being thus executed, Pipes fixed his eyes upon the egg of an ostrich that depended from the ceiling, and without once moving them from that object, performed the whole cantata in a tone of voice that seemed to be the joint issue of an Irish bagpipe and a sow-gelder’s horn; the commodore, the lieutenant, and landlord joined in the chorus, repeating this excellent stanza,
Bustle, bustle, brave boys!
Let us sing, let us toil,
And drink all the while,
Since labour’s the price of our joys.
The third line was no sooner pronounced, than the can was lifted to every man’s mouth with admirable uniformity; and the next word taken up at the end of their draught with a twang equally expressive and harmonious. In short, the company began to understand one another.’ (Peregrine Pickle, chap. ii., p. 18, ed. 1773).
Smollet published Roderick Random in 1748, Peregrine Pickle in 1751. Not only novels, but ballad operas, in imitation of Gay, began to be written in which sailors were the heroes, and their life at sea or loves on shore the subject. In 1745 appeared The Sailor’s Opera, or a Trip to Jamaica, written by some anonymous imitator of the Beggar’s Opera, while in 1763 Tommy and Sally, or the Sailor’s Return to his Sweetheart, was acted at Covent Garden. George Alexander Stevens wrote two: The French Flogged, or the British Sailors in America, 1761, and The Trip to Portsmouth, 1773. The second contains several good songs.
During the same period also professional poets of higher pretensions began to make the navy their theme. The reign of George I. furnished little for the muse to celebrate. That of George II. begins with an immense blowing of literary trumpets about the navy. George II.’s speech to Parliament on January 27, 1728, contained a passage inviting the two Houses to consider a scheme ‘for the increase and encouragement of our seamen in general; that they may be invited rather than compelled to enter into the service of their country, as often as occasion shall require it.’ With that object the King recommended an addition to the funds for the support of Greenwich Hospital. Edward Young seized the opportunity to publish Ocean: an Ode occasioned by his Majesty’s royal encouragement of the Sea Service. He followed this up by writing in 1729 Imperium Pelagi, a Naval Lyric, which ends up by an admonition to the ‘grovelling sons of verse’ not ‘to tarnish Britain’s Naval bloom’ by inferior strains on the same subject. Next came in 1733 his Sea-Piece containing (i) The British Sailor’s Exultation, (ii) His Prayer before action, and last of all in 1734 The Foreign Address; or the best Argument for Peace. All are bad poetry, but they do illustrate the influence which the strength of our navy exercised upon the maintenance of peace during a period in which it gained no public triumphs.
Young wrote from the point of view of the King’s ministers: another poet, James Thomson, set forth the case of the opposition. His Britannia, written in 1727, but not published till 1729, was, says Johnson, ‘a kind of poetical invective against the Ministry, whom the nation then thought not forward enough in resenting the depredations of the Spaniards.’ It recited, as Glover was to do with more effect twelve years later, the sufferings of Hosier’s fleet during their forced inactivity, recalled the memory of the Spanish Armada, and pictured the indignation with which Blake and other ‘immortal spirits’ must behold
‘their feeble sons
Shrink from that empire o’er the conquered seas
For which their wisdom planned, their councils glowed,
And their veins bled through many a toiling age.’
Thomson’s Rule, Britannia gave him a more lasting claim to remembrance in any collection of naval literature. It was a song in the masque of Alfred, written by Thomson and Mallet, and performed on August 1, 1740, in honour of the birth of the Princess Augusta. The authorship of Rule, Britannia, has been attributed to Mallet, but it was published in 1752 with Thomson’s name attached to it, and the evidence is on the whole in favour of the usual attribution.
The feeling which inspired Thomson’s opposition to Walpole’s Government, and his attack on its pusillanimous policy towards Spain, was shared by the populace in general. It appears also in a satire called The Pacific Fleet (p. 170).
The popularity of the war with Spain is brought out by The English Sailor’s Resolution to Fight the Spaniards. It dwells on the grievances of the merchants, tells the story of Captain Jenkins’s ear, and ends by an appeal to enter under Haddock (p. 172). This probably refers to the sending of Rear-Admiral Nicholas Haddock to the Mediterranean in 1737, when war was expected. A New Song, written after the actual outbreak of hostilities, begins by rejoicing that King George has at length resolved to correct the violence of the Spaniards:
‘And now for to maul ’em they press ’em and haul ’em
To get some brave fellows to man our brave fleets.
And now they’ll unpadlock the sword of brave Haddock,
He’ll thump all the Spaniards that ever he meets.’
War was actually declared by England against Spain on October 23, 1739, and the general satisfaction with which that step was welcomed is shown by England’s Glory in the Declaration of War (see p. 174).
The first engagement of importance in European waters took place on April 8, 1740, when the Princesa, a Spanish 70-gun ship, was taken by three of Vice-Admiral Balchen’s squadron, viz., the Lenox, the Kent, and the Orford (Clowes, iii. 267). The part assigned to the Irish first lieutenant of the Princesa and his fellow-countrymen on board her is a new fact, if it is true (p. 175).
Before this capture took place Vernon, on November 21, 1739, had taken Porto Bello. No event in our naval history called forth more indifferent verse. On p. 177 will be found a ballad, entitled English Courage Displayed, said to be written by a seaman on board the Burford, Vernon’s flagship. Hosier’s Ghost (p. 179), which is the most famous of all the celebrations of Vernon’s victory, was an attempt to turn it to political profit, and to assist in the attack which the ‘Patriots’ were making on Walpole’s policy by recalling Vice-Admiral Francis Hosier’s blockade of Porto Bello in 1726–7 and the heavy losses which it entailed. ‘It is doubtful,’ says Clowes, ‘whether any other British fleet ever suffered from disease so severely as that of Hosier suffered in 1726–7. Its horrible experiences made a deep and lasting impression upon the nation; and it may be hoped that they have had the effect of impressing upon all later British admirals the supreme importance of taking systematic and rigorous measures for preserving the health of their men. During the two years immediately following Hosier’s first arrival off the Bastimentos, the fleet, the nominal complement of which never, roughly speaking, exceeded 4,750 persons, lost, in addition to a flag officer and 7 or 8 captains, about 50 lieutenants and 4,000 subordinate officers and men, by various forms of sickness’ (The Royal Navy, iii. 45).
Vernon attempted to follow up the capture of Porto Bello by taking Cartagena. He bombarded that city for three days in March 1740, but without producing much effect, and made a more serious attack upon it by sea and land in March 1741. The attack began on March 9. Fort San Luis was taken on the night of March 25 and Fort San José followed. But quarrels broke out between the naval and military commanders. The attempted storm of Fort San Lazar failed, and on April 14 it was determined to abandon the siege and re-embark the troops and guns. At the beginning of April, however, the fall of the place seemed imminent, and its capture was actually the subject of two ballads. One, entitled British Courage Displayed, or Admiral Vernon’s Taking of Carthagena, is modelled on the ballad on the taking of Porto Bello bearing the same title. The other, entitled Vernon’s Glory, will be found on p. 181.
Three ballads in this selection relate to the general actions which took place during the war. Admiral Mathews’s Engagement against the Combined Fleets of France and Spain narrates the indecisive battle of February 11, 1744, which led to the trials of Mathews himself, Vice-Admiral Lestock, and several captains. The author was evidently a partisan of Mathews (p. 186). The Lucky Sailor, or the Sailor’s Invitation to go with Admiral Anson, celebrates the victory of Anson and Warren over the French fleet under La Jonquière on May 3, 1747 (p. 195). Hawke’s victory over M. de l’Etenduère on October 14, 1747, is the subject of Tit for Tat, A Sea Kick for a Land Cuff (p. 197). A song on the taking of Port Louis in Hispaniola by Rear-Admiral Charles Knowles, in March 1748, closes the series (p. 199). Several ballads relate to minor actions. Captain Holmes in the Sapphire on January 15, 1743, destroyed five Spanish privateers in Vigo Harbour. The ballad, written by a sailor who lost his arm in the action, dates it January 1744 (p. 184). The true date is given in Samuel Boyse’s An Historical Review of the Transactions of Europe from the beginning of the war with Spain in 1739, published in 1747, vol. i. p. 390; and in Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs, i. 173. During 1744 two small merchantmen fought extraordinarily gallant and successful actions against French privateers, which were celebrated in contemporary ballads (pp. 187, 189).
‘In January Captain Cobb in the Bacchus, bound from Oporto to Lynn, being attacked by a Spanish privateer, of ten guns and 120 men, maintained a fight of four hours, with only fourteen men and two boys; and though the privateer boarded him, he cleared his ship by killing several of the enemy. Soon after, one of his shot took place so luckily, that the privateer suddenly foundered, and all he could do was to save about thirty of the Spaniards, who the next day treacherously rose upon him. However, after an obstinate fight, in which eleven were killed, he subdued the rest and brought them into Dartmouth, where this brave man died of the wounds he received in this last action.
‘In June, one Richard Hornby, master of a small vessel bound from Yarmouth to Rotterdam, mounting six guns, and having only five men and three boys, was attacked on the coast of Holland by the Marquis de Brancos, a French privateer of eighteen guns and seventy-five men, against whom he defended himself bravely for four hours, repulsing the enemy, who attempted to board him twice. At length a shot of his entering the privateer’s powder-room, she blew up, and all her crew perished. This action being represented by the Lords of the Admiralty to his Majesty, he was pleased to reward Captain Hornby with a gold chain and medal of 200l. value.’
(Boyse, ii. 114.)
To this period also belong several ballads commemorating disasters at sea, or escapes from shipwreck. Admiral Cavendish’s distress on board the Canterbury (p. 168) must have been written in the year 1728. It is interesting because its metre is probably an imitation of that of You Gentlemen of England, while the refrain, ‘In the Bay of Biscay O,’ evidently inspired the well-known song of that name written by Andrew Cherry (Stone, Sea Songs, p. 32). The latter was first sung by Incledon in an operatic sketch entitled Spanish Dollars, which was produced in April 1805.
Another ballad dealing with a similar subject is The Princess Royal’s Escape from the Goodwin Sands, written by a sailor on board the ship, and describing a storm which took place in February 1744 (p. 190). Two others deal with the loss of Sir John Balchen and the Victory, a first-rate carrying 108 guns, wrecked on the Caskets on October 4, 1744. About a thousand men perished with Balchen (pp. 192–94).
The War of the Austrian Succession closed with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in October 1748.
The Seven Years’ War commenced in America and India, and spread to Europe. War between France and England was not declared till May 18, 1756, though on June 8, 1755, Boscawen’s fleet captured two French men of war, the Alcide and the Lys, off Newfoundland. As early as February 1755 there was ‘a hot press’ for seamen, and in July Hawke was sent to sea with eighteen ships to intercept the French fleet under Du Guay, and to make reprisals upon French commerce. The story of The Lighterman’s Prentice relates to this cruise (p. 201). Nearly 300 French merchantmen and about 8,000 seamen were captured before the end of 1755 (Entick, History of the Late War i. 137, 187). Britain’s Resolution to fight the French also refers to these captures, but the exultation they caused lasted but a short time (p. 203). Byng’s action with La Galissonière on May 20 and the capture of Port Mahon which followed on June 29, dashed all these hopes, and popular feeling demanded that the admiral’s misconduct should be punished with death. Every scribbler wrote poems and epigrams against him, and political hostility to the Government swelled the cry.
‘To the block with Newcastle and yard-arm with Byng,’ is the chorus of one ballad appropriately entitled Block and Yard-arm. A collection of these was published at the time: Bungiana; or an Assemblage of What-d’ye-call-em’s in prose and verse that have occasionally appeared relative to the conduct of a certain naval commander, 1756. The French commander’s conduct was not thought much better than Byng’s, and one of the squibs in this collection satirises both. It is entitled The Pacific Engagement, a poetical dialogue between two courteous admirals.
‘(Byng.)
At last we are met—but I hope with no other
Intent or design but to spare one another.
Though we seem by our flags to be desperate foes,
Let us part, if you please, without banging or blows.
‘(Galissonière.)
But since fighting and wars are the arts which we trade in,
We must have a little and short cannonading;
Our guns must be fired at a distance, but still
With no wicked intention to wound or to kill....’
Byng’s despatch was frequently parodied in verse, and one of these parodies, The Letter of a certain Admiral, is given on p. 207, together with A Rueful Story (p. 209). Blakeney became the hero of the hour, and a naval officer who had served in the defence of Fort St. Philip was glorified with him in A New Song (p. 206). Another ballad handed down to tradition, of which the tune as well as the words has been preserved, accused Byng of selling Port Mahon, and contrasted his treachery with the courage of West (p. 210).
Next year another fiasco excited popular feeling to fury, namely the abortive ‘secret expedition’ to Rochefort in September 1757. The navy did its part in capturing the isle of Aix; the ships could not get near enough to batter Rochefort, and the soldiers were never landed. Sir John Mordaunt, the commander of the troops, was acquitted by a court-martial. The New Song written on the Isle of Aix (p. 211) is apparently intended to represent the feelings of Hawke, who was vexed and indignant at the decision of the generals not to attempt a landing (Burrows, Life of Hawke, ed. 1896, p. 138).
The year 1758 was more fortunate, but neither Pocock’s engagements in the East Indies nor the capture of Louisbourg are the subject of ballads which have reached us. Keppel’s expedition against the French colonies in Africa attracted more attention. One ballad, Bold Sawyer, relates the capture of Goree, which took place December 28, 1758 (Entick, iii. 271–8). While it gives the names of the ships engaged in the expedition correctly, it calls the captain of the Nassau Sawyer, though his name was James Sayer. Another ballad relates the fate of the Lichfield, Captain Barton, which ran ashore on the coast of Morocco on November 29, 1758 (p. 214). The crew were made slaves, and were not released till April 1760, when they were ransomed for 170,000 dollars by a special ambassador sent for the purpose (Duncan, The Mariner’s Chronicle, iii. 118–30).
The year 1759 was the great year of the war. On August 18 Boscawen defeated De la Clue, taking three ships of the line and destroying two. On November 20 Hawke beat Conflans in Quiberon Bay. Hawke’s victory is the theme of a ballad apparently written by someone on board the flagship (p. 217). Neptune’s Resignation, a pretentious mythological poem ‘written by Mr. Wagnall’ is interesting as a curiosity (p. 218). Twenty-three years later it was adapted to fit Rodney’s victory. Two other pieces of verse—one composed by Paul Whitehead and sung by Mr. Beard at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, the other by Robert English, chaplain of the Royal George—are reprinted in Hawke’s Life (pp. 253–56). ‘Though the rude billows raged,’ sang the chaplain, ‘so close we engaged
That rarely a shot was misplaced;
The troops on the land chilled with horror they stand
To see the white flag so disgraced.
‘No longer they’ll boast of descents on our coast,
The bright Queen of the main to reduce;
The fair English rose more lovely it blows,
While droops the faint Flower de Luce.
‘Each generous heart played so gallant a part
That glory has crowned our endeavours
And what is still more, the lasses on shore
Will esteem us deserving their favours.’
Boscawen and Hawke had effectively ended the French threats of invasion, for which purpose a number of flat-bottomed boats had been built (Entick, iii. 403; v. 50). It is to this project that Garrick contemptuously refers in Hearts of Oak, a song in his pantomime Harlequin’s Invasion, which was produced on December 31, 1759. The text of the song is so altered in the current versions that it seemed desirable to print it in its original form (p. 220). The only French landing effected took place in Ireland. In October 1759 M. Thurot, with six frigates and 1,300 troops, eluding the squadron under Commodore Boys, which was blockading that port, set out on his adventurous cruise. The weather frustrated an intended descent near Londonderry, but on February 21 he landed some troops at Carrickfergus, but put to sea again after occupying the place for six days. Next day, on February 28, Captain John Elliot, with the Aeolus, Pallas, and Brilliant frigates, engaged the three ships that were left of Thurot’s squadron, and captured them all (Clowes iii. 230; Entick iv. 319–333). Thurot fell in the fight, and the ballad called Thurot’s Dream records his fate (p. 220). This is one of the rare cases in which oral tradition has preserved a better version of the original piece than any of the printed broadsides.
Another minor action of much interest, which took place a year earlier, is the subject of the ballad entitled Gilchrist and Hotham’s Bravery (p. 216). On March 20, 1759, the Southampton, 32, Captain James Gilchrist, and the Melampe, 24, Captain William Hotham, engaged two French frigates and captured one of them, the Danae, a 40-gun ship (Clowes, iii. 301; Entick, iv. 266). The capture of three French privateers in the West Indies by Captain O’Brien and Captain Taylor in August 1760 furnished another theme for indifferent verse (p. 222, cf. Entick, v. 55).
After 1759 there were no fleet actions in European waters. Hawke, Boscawen, and Rodney blockaded the western ports of France through 1760. In June 1761 the island of Belleisle surrendered to a naval and military force commanded by General Hodgson and Commodore Keppel. This conquest is the subject of A New Song on the Taking of Belleisle, but the song touches only the service of the soldiers. Pitt meant to tender the island as an equivalent for Minorca in the negotiations for peace which began about this time. For the rest of the war the interest centres in the West Indies. Guadeloupe had fallen in May 1759; Dominica fell in June 1761; Martinique was taken in February 1762, and Grenada, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent with Martinique.
’As soon as this news to the French King was brought
He immediately put on his mourning coat,
Saying “Where shall I go or where shall I run?
They’ve ruined my nation, alas, I’m undone.”’
The New Song on the Taking of Martinico thus pictures its effect:
‘And now for Jack Spaniards we’ll show them a dance,
And humble their pride as well as proud France.’
War had been declared against Spain on January 4, 1762, and the squadron which had helped to reduce Martinique now joined an expedition sent from England under Sir George Pocock and the Earl of Albemarle, and laid siege to Havana. The city fell on August 13, 1762, and a ballad on its capture is printed on p. 223. It is remarkable for the badness of its metre and the correctness of its historical details (see Entick, v. 363–385; Clowes iii. 245). With this capture the war ended. The preliminaries of peace were signed on November 3, 1762, the definitive treaty on February 10, 1763.
Peace was welcome news to the sailors. A ballad called The Sailors’ Dialogue, evidently written about this date, expresses their views. ‘When all the ship is paid, we’ll lead a merry life,’ says Jack, and rejoices with Tom over the prospect of a full pocket and plenty of drink (p. 227). It gave them additional satisfaction to think that their officers would not be equally pleased. What Jack thought good news was bad news to admiral, captain, and lieutenant, as the ballad called Distressed Men of War sets forth at length (p. 228). A fact which made it worse was that a very limited number of subordinate officers received half-pay, and that the rates were extremely low (Clowes, ii. 233; iii. 19, 340).
It is evident from a number of ballads, some belonging to the middle, others to the later part of this century, that there was considerable discontent in the navy. The feelings which found expression in The Sea Martyrs, in William III.’s time, were equally strong when George III. began to reign, and were to manifest themselves later in the mutinies of 1797. One perennial complaint was the badness of the provisions and the cheats of the purser. Musty meat, mouldy biscuit, hard, stinking Suffolk cheese, petty-warrant beer, burgoo ‘fit for nothing but to make a sailor spew,’ were what he provided, ‘though the nation allows men what’s fitting to eat.’ So says The Saylor’s Complaint; or the true Character of the Purser of a Ship (p. 233), and every casual reference to a purser in any ballad is always abusive.
A still greater grievance was the difficulty a man had in getting his pay:
‘My life I have ventured for gold
My king and my country to serve,
Now the wars are all over,
Brave sailors may perish and starve,’
is the sum of a second Sailor’s Complaint (p. 230). Often the sailor received a ticket for his pay, which he was obliged to sell to an usurer at a ruinous reduction—a practice which had existed since the time of Charles II., as Pepys witnesses, but which seems to have been checked towards the middle of the eighteenth century, according to The Ticket-Buyer’s Lamentation (p. 231).
A third grievance was the severity of the discipline. A pamphlet quoted by Entick (v. 59) explains why it is that neither by bounty nor compulsion men enough for the fleet can be found. ‘The reason is known to every common seaman, who, whilst Gazettes are filled with encomiums of their bravery and contempt of danger, and our senators are devising the wisest means for their provision and support, yet languish under the greatest hardships and the most abject slavery, puzzled and perplexed with unnecessary trifles, hard wrought, and ill-used by almost every petty officer of but a month’s standing, who, ignorant of duty, whether performed right or wrong, flourishes his rattan over the head of the ablest seaman, and acts the tyrant over them without control.’
Even ‘snotty boys of midshipmen,’ some hardly ten years old, declares one ballad, ‘strike many a brave fellow.’ In another a sailor declines to volunteer, and gives a captain his reason:
Your damned rogues of officers use men so cruel,
That a man of war is worse than hell and the devil.
(pp. 235, 239).
Ill usage made volunteers scarce and increased the discontent of pressed men. Complaints against impressment, and references to the abuses to which it gave rise, become increasingly frequent during the latter half of the eighteenth century. The pressgang makes its first appearance in fiction in 1748 with Smollet’s account of the seizure of Roderick Random on Tower Hill, and his sufferings in the tender. The earliest caricature representing the operations of a press-gang is English Liberty Displayed, which belongs to the year 1770, when Wilkes and the London magistrates were opposing the execution of press warrants in the City (Catalogue of Satirical Prints in the British Museum, iv. 641). Next came Gillray’s Liberty of the Subject, published October 15, 1779. Our ballads supplement this evidence by stories such as those related in The Lighterman’s Prentice and in the narrative of the eighteen Greenland men (pp. 201, 226, 234–36, 249). Another ballad called a Dialogue between Will and Jack, too long to insert, describes the general terror which prevailed about 1778 or 1779. The people seem all run mad, ‘for fear of the press they won’t lie in their beds’; farmers and millers send boys and girls and old men to the markets for them; carriers and carters, ‘like goats in the mountains, they lie in the fields’; and so with all other trades. The French are at sea to invade us, and now our bold sailors must fight for all. The King wants men and will find them out.
The King found it difficult to get men, not merely because his service was unpopular, but also because there was a more profitable alternative.
One characteristic of the wars of the middle of the eighteenth century was the great development of privateering. ‘The privateers,’ writes Sir J. K. Laughton, ‘were, in their day, a most important item in the naval strength of the country, with this additional and especial merit, that they were most numerous and strongest when the royal navy was weakest or most severely taxed.... In looking for valuable services of privateers we find them not in the periods of our national glory, not during the wars of the French Revolution, when Howe and Hood and Nelson crushed the French navy; not during the later years of the Seven Years’ War, when Hawke and Boscawen and Saunders grandly maintained England’s supremacy; but during the war of American Independence or the war of the Austrian Succession, when the fortunes of the navy were at a low ebb.... In such times of disaster and disgrace the rough and ready work of the privateers appeared more brilliant, and had a very real national importance’ (Studies in Naval History, p. 201). Of two famous privateer captains, Fortunatus Wright and George Walker, the same author gives a full account, and the exploits of many others are recorded in The Liverpool Privateers, published by Mr. Gomer Williams in 1897. Their captures and their battles were sometimes the subject of verse, and therefore a few examples of ballads relating to them have been inserted. In July 1745, Captain Talbot in the Prince Frederick, with Captain Morecock in the Duke, captured two Spanish ships with cargoes worth over 3,000,000 dollars. The share of each seaman amounted to £850 (Laughton, p. 237; Beatson, Naval and Military Memoirs, i. 294; Boyse, An Historical Review of the Transactions of Europe, ii. 171). This capture is celebrated in England’s Glory, or the French King Stripped (p. 194). At the beginning of the Seven Years’ War the Terrible privateer, commanded by Captain Death, was taken by the French privateer Vengeance, of St. Malo, on December 27, 1756. The Terrible had twenty-six guns, the Vengeance thirty-four. The crew of the Vengeance numbered 350, while the Terrible, weakened by sending away some men in a prize, could muster only 116. Out of them the captain and fifty men were killed outright, and over forty wounded before the ship was taken (Entick, History of the Late War, 1765, ii. 110). So desperate a fight, at a moment when the popular indignation against Byng for not fighting it out with La Galissonière was at its height, naturally roused enthusiasm, and Captain Death and the Terrible were celebrated in the ballad and the poem printed on pp. 204–5.
A common form of song is one which takes the form of an invitation to enter on board a privateer under some popular captain. Of this there are many specimens in existence, and two are here reprinted (pp. 225, 226). The Lord Anson and the Hawke were two Liverpool privateers which made many captures in 1756 and 1757 (Williams, pp. 87–95). The Blandford was a Bristol ship, though Captain Stonehouse seems to have been a Liverpool man (ib. p. 186). In these and similar invitations the prospect of plunder naturally holds the first place. A Newcastle song says:
If we should meet with a galloon,
Our own we’ll make her very soon,
The drums shall beat and music play,
To the Antigallican haste away.
To Charlotte’s Head then let’s repair,
We’ll be received with welcome there;
We’ll enter then without delay,
To the Antigallican haste away.
(Rhymes of Northern Bards, by John Bell, 1812, p. 320). Another song, called The Sailor’s Courtship to the Lady’s Waiting-Maid, treats the argument sentimentally:
My love she does wait on a lady so fair,
And I do belong to a stout privateer;
Rich prizes I’ve taken since the wars did begin,
From the lofty monsieurs and brought them all in.
And now of [these] riches my love shall have share,
For she shall be drest in rich silks most rare.
With ribbons and rings my jewel I’ll deck,
And a fine chain of gold to hang round her neck.
And before that my money begins to grow scant,
I’ll away to the sea, for my love shall ne’er want,
And boldly we’ll make the loud cannons to roar,
And bring home rich prizes as heretofore.
You pretty young maids who have sweethearts at sea,
Pray take this advice and be ruled by me,
Slight not a bold sailor while he’s ploughing the main,
Most richly he’ll clothe you when he comes home again.
(Madden Collection, Cambridge). The prospect of manning a privateer depended a good deal on the reputation of its commander, and consequently his character was often set forth, as in the ballad called after Captain Barber of the ship Resolution of Liverpool:
Give noble Captain Barber
A good broadsword in hand;
The French to fight [is] his heart’s delight
When Barber gives command.
He’s kind and tender-hearted
And makes his foes to fly,
He governs men with justice
And great generosity.
(Madden Collection). Or again in A New Song:
Come with me you jolly tars,
We’re talking of the Spanish war,
Come my boys and tack about,
We’ll put the Spaniards to the rout.
Chorus.
I beg you’ll fill your pots all round,
Success to the fleet that’s outward bound;
Likewise unto all true blues
That sails along with Jemmy Askew,
For he’s the man that’s bold and true,
He’ll fight for his King and country too.
Come haste away to the rendezvous,
There’s plenty of good peck and booze;
Askew is a seaman’s friend,
My boys, you’ll find him in the end.
Chorus as before.
When the American war began, the British public expected a series of easy victories—at all events wherever the navy was engaged. The ballad called The Brags of Washington is an instance of this (p. 244). Consequently the repulse of the fleet under Sir Peter Parker, which attacked Charleston on June 28, 1776, was a disagreeable surprise. It is the theme of an English ballad, On the late Engagement in Charleston River, and of an American song parodying Parker’s despatch (pp. 245–47; cf. Clowes, iii. 372). In February 1778 France concluded a defensive treaty with the United States, and in April hostilities between France and England began. The Cruisers celebrates the beginning of this stage of the war; The Arethusa its first action, namely, the fight between that ship and the Belle Poule on June 17, 1778 (pp. 247–248). The song, according to Sir J. K. Laughton, ‘sets truth and seamanship alike at defiance,’ for the Arethusa fought well but was beaten, and would certainly have been taken or sunk if the approach of the English seventy-fours had not scared the Belle Poule away (Sea Fights and Adventures, p. 8). It is to be observed that the crew of the Belle Poule numbered 230 not 500 men, that she was not driven ashore, and that she was ultimately taken by the Nonsuch, 64 guns, in 1780 (Clowes, iv. 13, 99, 114). To the same date or to 1777 belongs a song On the brave Admiral Lockhart, printed in Logan’s Pedlar’s Pack (p. 77). Lockhart took the command of the Shrewsbury in 1777. The verses are to be sung to the tune of Hearts of Oak.
Ye sons of old Ocean who’re strangers to fear
On board of the Shrewsbury quickly repair;
Brave Lockhart commands her, rejoice every tar,
For Lockhart commanded the Tartar last war.
The Shrewsbury formed part of the Channel fleet under Admiral Keppel. When Keppel first put to sea on June 12, 1778, the public voice confidently predicted his success, as Admiral Keppel Triumphant shows (p. 252). On July 27 he engaged the French fleet under d’Orvilliers off Ushant. Two songs give an account of this indecisive engagement, one of which accounts for its indecisiveness by asserting that Keppel had secret orders not to fight (pp. 253, 255). Then followed recriminations between Keppel and Vice-admiral Sir Hugh Palliser, ending with the trial of Keppel by court-martial on the charges of misconduct and incapacity. On February 11, 1779, he was acquitted, and the charges were pronounced malicious and unfounded. The popularity of the verdict is attested by Keppel Triumphant and Keppel for Ever (pp. 255, 257).
In June 1779 Spain declared war, and during August 1779 the combined French and Spanish fleets dominated the Channel. Paul Jones, who had already signalised himself in 1778 by attacking Whitehaven and capturing the British sloop Drake off Carrickfergus, sailed from L’Orient on August 14, 1779, with a little squadron of four vessels threatened Leith and Edinburgh, and projected an attack on the shipping in the Tyne. On September 23 he fell in with a fleet of merchant shipping coming from the Baltic under the convoy of the Serapis of forty-four guns and the Countess of Scarborough, a hired vessel armed with twenty six-pounders. The capture of these two ships by Jones is celebrated in Paul Jones the Pirate. This ballad was evidently written by an American or someone sympathising with the American cause. It was often reprinted in England, but the English versions are full of corruptions and blunders. Nevertheless, by comparison of the various versions, it has proved possible to obtain a more intelligible text than that commonly given (p. 259). Several other ballads, including a Scottish one on the same subject, are reprinted in the Roxburghe Ballads, and with them a political song suggesting that Lord Sandwich and Lord North were in reality worse enemies to England than Jones (Roxburghe Ballads, viii. 330–35).
As the struggle was for America and the West Indian islands, most of the fleet engagements of the latter part of the war took place in American waters. On July 6, 1779, Vice-admiral John Byron, with Vice-admiral Samuel Barrington as his second in command, fought an action with the French fleet under D’Estaing off Grenada, and got very much the worst of the fight. A ballad on the battle, apparently written by someone on board the Royal Oak, expresses the view generally held in the fleet, that if Barrington had commanded instead of Byron the result would have been different (p. 258; cf. Clowes, iii. 434–40; Mahan, p. 367). The Bold Blades of Old England celebrates the capture of Omoa in October 1779, and concludes by a reference to Rodney’s voyage to Gibraltar in December 1779 and his capture of a Spanish convoy about January 8, 1780 (p. 261; cf. Clowes, iii. 448; iv. 44). On January 16, 1780, Rodney defeated Langara off Cape St. Vincent, taking six Spanish ships of the line. Another, the Santo Domingo, was blown up Prince William was serving at the time on board the Prince George, the flagship of Rear-admiral Robert Digby, which formed part of Rodney’s fleet. Reports of the courage and good conduct of the Prince during the battle increased the popular enthusiasm which welcomed Rodney’s victory, and inspired the song entitled The Royal Sailor (p. 262). On April 12, 1782, took place Rodney’s victory over De Grasse, which brought the naval war to a conclusion. It is the subject of a singularly ungrammatical ballad called Rodney’s Glory, and of another entitled Hood’s Conquest over the Count de Grasse, in which Rodney’s name is not even mentioned (p. 263). Rodney captured five line-of-battle ships in the battle. Four of them, with three English 74-gun ships, sailed from Jamaica for England at the end of July 1782, but all save two were lost on the way. Two of the prizes, the Ville de Paris and the Glorieux, foundered with all hands; a third, the Hector, was lost, though 200 of the crew were saved by the privateer Hawke. One of the English seventy-fours, the Ramillies, became unseaworthy, lost all her masts, and was abandoned. Another, the Centaur, went down with all her crew except twelve men on September 23, 1782. The ballad called The Loss of the Centaur (p. 265) commemorates the escape of Captain Inglefield and the twelve survivors (Laughton, Sea Fights and Adventures, p. 153; Clowes, iv. 88).
Several ballads of the period relate to engagements between single ships. Captain Farmer (p. 260) describes the hard-fought encounter between the Quebec and Surveillante off Ushant on October 6, 1779. The Quebec took fire and blew up, and Captain George Farmer went down with his ship.
Others relate to the fortunes of American privateers. On the American side the laureate of the war was Philip Freneau, whose poems appeared for the most part in newspapers published in America during the war. They were collected and published at Philadelphia in 1786, and republished in England in 1861 by Russell Smith. Many refer to incidents in the naval war. One is Captain Jones’s Invitation to American Backwoodsmen to become Sailors; another, On the Memorable Victory gained by the gallant Captain Paul Jones, narrates his capture of the Serapis. There are Stanzas on the new American frigate Alliance; On the Death of Captain Nicholas Biddle, commander of the Randolph, a 32-gun frigate, blown up in action with the British 64-gun ship Yarmouth on March 7, 1778. A third poem, The British Prison Ship, tells of the capture of the American privateer Aurora by the Iris (once the American frigate Hancock) and the sufferings of the prisoners on board the hulks Scorpion and Hunter. The Sailor’s Invitation is an encouragement to ship under Captain Barney on board the Hyder Ally privateer; another ballad, describes the capture of the sloop General Monk by the Hyder Ally on April 8, 1782. (Freneau’s Poems, pp. 144, 146, 164, 183, 235, 239, 241.) Another collection, Songs and Ballads of the American Revolution, edited by Frank Moore, 1856, contains a satirical letter in verse describing the capture of the South Carolina, a 40-gun frigate, by the British ships Diomede and Quebec on December 20, 1782 (Clowes, iv. 91).
The major operations of the war of the French Revolution and the general engagements are illustrated by numerous ballads, though for the most part of very inferior quality.
‘Now Lord Hood is sailed with his gallant crew,
Bold sailors with ships of the line twenty-two,’
begins Success to the Grand Fleet, or the Honest Briton’s Prayer, announcing Hood’s departure for Toulon in August 1793. But the rest is too poor to quote. The temper of the moment is illustrated by some lines from The Taking of Tobago (April 1793), which declares that ‘for murdering of Louis we will make these rebels rue.’ But for the most part very little sign of any feeling against the French as revolutionists appears in popular naval poetry; it is simply the old national hostility. ‘We’ll make them to knock under as we have done before,’ says the same ballad.
Howe’s victory on June 1, 1794, is the subject of at least half a dozen ballads, two of which, with a song written by a lieutenant on board the Bellerophon, will be found on pp. 268–74.
The battle of St. Vincent on February 14, 1797, is celebrated in A new song on the victory over the Spanish Fleet by Admiral Jervis, and in Jervis taking the Spanish Fleet. According to the author of the first, the tactics of the British ships were simple:
‘They, not heedful of orders, in courage confide;
The best line of battle’s a thundering broadside.’
The second thus sums up the result:
‘Here’s a health to Admiral Jervis, our officers and crew;
Spain with your surprising force we’ve made you for to rue.
Two of your hundred and twenties and two of eighty-four
By Britons brave were soon conveyed safe to old England’s shore.’
Neither deserves reprinting. Duncan was more fortunate than Jervis, and at least four ballads on Camperdown have survived. One by J. Pratt will be found on p. 283. Another by J. More, of the Royal Ayr Volunteers, to be sung to the tune of The Garb of Old Gaul, is printed in Ashton’s Real Sailor Songs (p. 9). In one of the ballads Duncan’s religion is commended:
‘No power the pride of conquest has his heart to lead astray:
He summoned his triumphant crew, and then was heard to say,
“Let every man now bend his knee, and here in solemn prayer
Give thanks to God, who in this fight has made our cause His care.”’
(The Fight off Camperdown.)
In the fourth a subscription for the widows of those who fell in the battle is advocated:
‘Fighting their country’s noble cause they near the Texel fell,
No mutiny, but gloriously they died behaving well.’
(The Widow’s Lamentation.)
On the battle of the Nile the two most popular ballads—to judge from the frequency of the reprints—were The Mouth of the Nile and Battle of the Nile. The former begins:
‘It was in the forenoon of the first day of August,
One thousand seven hundred and ninety eight.
After a long pursuit we o’ertook the Toulon fleet,
And soon we let them know we came for to fight.’
The whole is reprinted in Ashton’s Real Sailor Songs. The other poem, more pretentious in style concludes with a sort of apotheosis:
‘In council above rose the deity of war,
Determined to give valour due renown,
And soon on the brow of each hardy British tar
Was placed a resplendent royal crown.
‘While the loud trump of fame on earth and ocean sounded
With Howe, Jervis, Duncan, and Nelson’s name resounded;
But the battle of the Nile was the foremost on the file,
And all the Angel choirs sang the glories of that day.’
Of much greater interest than these is a long narrative ballad, said to have comprised about sixty verses, of which tradition has preserved merely a fragment. From the exactness of the details, it was probably written by some sailor in the fleet. All that survives is printed on p. 287.
The battle of Copenhagen is the theme of two ballads of the ordinary type (pp. 295, 296). To these has been added the original version of Campbell’s Battle of the Baltic, which he enclosed in a letter to Sir Walter Scott written on March 27, 1805 (p. 290). ‘Though wanting,’ says Sir J. K. Laughton, ‘the polish which afterwards brought it to something like perfection, though many of the lines are bald, harsh, or tumid, some of the expressions are happier than in the finished work; and, though we do not go to a ballad for historical detail, it is fuller and more accurate’ (The Nelson Memorial, p. 196). Campbell was in a special sense the laureate of the war which resulted from the coalition known as the Armed Neutrality of 1801, and he published in the Morning Chronicle of March 18, 1801, his ballad Ye Mariners of England headed On the Prospect of a Russian War. The original of this, which differs only in a few unimportant phrases from the later version, is to be found in Laughton’s Nelson Memorial, p. 175, and in Beattie’s Life of Campbell. It is needless to reprint it here.
Nelson’s next engagement was not against the Russians, as he expected, but against the French flotilla which lay in the harbour of Boulogne prepared for the invasion of England. This disastrous attempt was made on August 15, 1801, and is the subject of A New Song composed by the wounded Tars (p. 297). It was evidently meant to appeal to the charitable, and the lines:
‘All you that relieve us the Lord will you bless
For relieving poor sailors in times of distress’
are a too familiar ballad formula. There are many other ballads of the period ending with similar appeals. Two examples will suffice:
‘A splinter knocked my nose off, “My bowsprit’s gone!” I cries,
“Yet well it kept their blows off, thank God ’twas not my eyes.”
Scarce with these words I’d outed, glad for my eyes and limbs,
A splinter burst and douted both my two precious glims.
I’m blind and I’m a cripple, yet cheerful would I sing
Were my disasters triple, ’cause why? ’twas for my king.’
(The Blind Sailor.)
‘A splinter from our ship was forced,
Which took my arm, to my sad loss,
And now I’m found to wander up and down,
Seeking relief where it can be found.
We all are seamen to our right,
And on the seas we took delight,
But by hard fortune you plainly see
We lost our limbs on the raging sea.
All you who extend your charity,
The Lord preserve your family.’
(The Seaflower.)
The last action of importance before the peace of Amiens was that between Linois and Sir James Saumarez in the Straits of Gibraltar on July 12, 1801 (Clowes, iv. 466). The ballad on it is a parody of the despatch in which Linois is said to have represented his escape as a victory (p. 298).
One feature in this war was the attempted invasion of Ireland by the French. A fleet appeared in Bantry Bay under Admiral Morard de Galle in December 1796; a landing was actually effected at Killala on August 22, 1798, by General Humbert; a squadron under Commodore Bompart was engaged by Sir John Borlase Warren on October 12, 1798. A number of ballads relating to these incidents are collected in Crofton Croker’s Popular Songs Illustrative of French Invasions of Ireland, parts iii., iv., published by the Percy Society in 1847, but they are too entirely political in their character. The best is one beginning:
‘Now fair and strong the south-east blew, and high the billows rose,
The French fleet bounded o’er the main freighted with Erin’s foes.
Oh, where was Hood and where was Howe, and where Cornwallis then,
Where Colpoys, Bridport, or Pellew, and all their gallant men?’
The question asked in these lines formed the basis of a motion made subsequently in Parliament. The author of the ballad answers:
‘Nor skill nor courage aught avail against heaven’s high decrees:
The storm arose and closed our ports, a mist o’erspread the seas.’
Captain Mahan, however, points out that the inefficiency of the British dispositions against invasion was to blame (Influence of Sea-power upon the French Revolution and Empire, i. 360). The fleet which reached Bantry escaped with impunity excepting the Droits de l’Homme, seventy-four, which fell in with Sir Edward Pellew, in the Indefatigable, forty-four, and Captain Reynolds in the Amazon, thirty-six, was badly mauled, and wrecked with all her crew on the coast of France. This engagement, which took place on January 13, 1798, is celebrated in The Amazon Frigate (p. 276). An earlier exploit of Pellew’s, the capture of the Cleopâtre on June 18, 1793, is also the subject of a ballad (p. 267). The fight between the Pique and the Blanche on June 4, 1795, and that between the Mars and the Hercule, on April 21, 1798, and an action fought by the sloop Arrow in September 1799, are commemorated in the same way (pp. 285, 289).
In the civil history of the navy the great event was the mutiny of 1797, illustrated here by five ballads. The New Song about ‘the seventeen bright stars’ gives a sailor’s history of the origin and progress of the mutiny of the fleet at Spithead, and was evidently written about the end of May (p. 277). British Tars Rewarded expresses the satisfaction of the fleet at the concessions obtained from the Government, and The Genius of Britain shows the sympathy with which the movement was regarded by the Radical politicians of the time (pp. 279, 280). The more dangerous mutiny of the ships at the Nore, which began on May 20 and lasted till about the middle of June, is represented by A New Song on Parker the Delegate and The Death of Parker (pp. 281, 282). The latter is one of the commonest of all ballads relating to the navy, and the frequency with which it was reprinted seems to show that popular feeling was inclined to regard Parker as a hero and a martyr.
The period from the renewal of the war with France in May 1803 to the general peace in 1815 supplies few ballads of any merit, and the more important the event celebrated the worse, as a rule, is the ballad. Trafalgar produced at least a dozen, of which two are selected here—Nelson’s Glorious Victory at Trafalgar, and another, entitled The Death of Nelson, which begins:
‘Come all you gallant seamen that unites a meeting.’
(pp. 301, 302). A third, beginning Arise, ye sons of Britain, in chorus join and sing, which usually bears the title of Nelson’s Death and Victory, is reprinted by Mr. Masefield (p. 131), and by Mr. Ashton (p. 18), under the title of The Battle of Trafalgar. Mr. Ashton also prints a fourth entitled Nelson and Collingwood (p. 19). There is yet another Battle of Trafalgar, which begins well:
‘Come all you British heroes, come listen to my song,
It is of a noble battle by our brave seamen won;
The 20th of October that was the very day
The combined fleet from Cadiz, my boys, did put to sea;
The Euryalus made the signal, the Defence she did repeat,
The Mars and the Colossus conveyed it to our fleet.
‘It was off Cape St. Mary, nine leagues from the shore,
When the signal they saw down from Cadiz they bore.
On Sunday the twentieth so early in the morn
We espied our enemy, my boys, four leagues astern;
The day it being foggy we lost them all again,
But on the twenty-first, my boys, we met them on the main.’
The rest of the narrative, however, is a mere catalogue of the names of ships.
The Death of Nelson, better known as ’Twas in Trafalgar’s Bay, is from John Braham’s opera entitled The Americans, which was produced at the Lyceum on April 27, 1811. In Bell and Daldy’s Sea Songs and Ballads, 1863 (p. 263), the words are attributed to Samuel James Arnold. There is another Death of Nelson—a rough and ungrammatical popular ballad—which seems to deserve reprinting in spite of its defects, as a testimony to popular feeling in England (p. 302).
Sir Richard Strachan’s victory on November 4, 1805 (Clowes, v. 171), is the next important event celebrated, and it is treated as completing Nelson’s work (p. 304). Clowes describes it as ‘a creditable pendant to Trafalgar’ (The Royal Navy, v. 174). Cochrane’s attempt to destroy the French fleet in the Basque Roads in April 1810 was also made the subject of a song. ‘Cochrane undaunted’ has his due praise; Gambier is not mentioned either for good or evil. The rest of the incidents recorded are cutting out affairs or frigate fights. Yeo’s exploits on the coast of Spain in 1805, and the capture of the Thetis by the Amethyst in November 1808, were both held worthy of recognition in verse (pp. 300, 305; cf. Clowes, v. 362, 427).
In June 1812 the field of the war was widened by President Madison’s declaration of war against England. This provides us with some ballads which give the point of view of England’s opponents, and advantageously supplement the productions of our own soil. A ballad beginning ‘Ye Parliament of England’ states the case of the United States against Great Britain, and summarises the naval history of the war for American hearers (p. 308). ‘It was still,’ says an American, ‘a favourite song in many parts of the country as late as 1859, and it is valuable as a reflection of the spirit in which the war of 1812–14 was regarded by those who fought in it’ (G. C. Eggleston, American War Ballads, 1889, i. 131). The capture of the Guerrière by the Constitution on August 19, 1812, was the subject of an American song subsequently reprinted as a broadside in London (p. 309). The capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon in June 1, 1813, was the subject of three English ballads, two of which are here reprinted (p. 311). The metre of the best known is the same as that of the song on the Constitution and Guerrière, and one was evidently intended as an answer to the other, though it appears uncertain which was published first. The last of the series narrates the capture of the President on January 15, 1815, and is called The Endymion’s Triumph. It just mentions the existence of the rest of the squadron, but does not attribute any part in the result of the fight to the Pomone or the Tenedos (p. 313).
Peace was not wholly welcome either to the younger officers or to some of the sailors. In 1815, as in 1763 there were some who openly expressed their regret. One example is a parody of Dibdin, entitled The Midshipman’s Lamentation. It begins ‘What is it to you if my eye I am piping?’ If the peace is a fact he trembles to think what his next station will be:
‘Four years of my time I’ve served and better,
But what’s that to me? Why, it’s not worth a groat.
Besides, to the purser I am a great debtor—
I have not yet paid for my cockt hat and coat.’
No resource will be left him except to turn shoe-black:
‘How oft in the cabin I’ve studied navigation
Out of a book writ by John Hamilton Moore,
But now I’m afraid I shall soon take my station
With my brushes and black ball close to my door.’
(Madden Collection, Cambridge.)
A sailor took a more cheerful view of the situation:
‘When I was on the yard the topsail for to furl,
The pilot came on board and said “There’s peace with all the world”;
But if war should come again I’m damned if I won’t enter,
And for my country and my king my life and limb I’ll venture.’
(Fragment communicated by Sir J. K. Laughton.)
As at every peace, there were complaints that when the sailor was no more needed a thankless country turned him adrift to starve. The British Tars enforces this moral (p. 316). Sailors who remained in the service had a different cause of complaint, namely, the increasing strictness of discipline in minor matters. ‘About 1806,’ says Clowes, on the authority of Lord Dundonald, ‘undue prominence began to be assigned to what is still vulgarly called in the service “spit and polish.” Too much importance was attached to “the brightening of brass heads, of bitts, and capstan hoops,” and too little to the condition of the ship as a fighting machine’ (Royal Navy, v. 19). After the peace this tendency increased, and the discomforts of a sailor’s life in a smart ship with a martinet for her captain became the theme of several ballads. The Fancy Frigate, The Saucy Scylla, and The Vanguard are examples of this (pp. 316–21).
An older grievance now ended. Impressment had risen to its height during the great war with France. In a volume of Northumbrian Minstrelsy published by the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne are many songs referring to the press-gang.
‘Here’s the tender coming pressing all the men!
Oh, dear hinny, what shall we do then?
Here’s the tender coming off at Shields’ bar,
Here’s the tender coming full of men-of-war.’
Another is a woman’s lament:
‘Oh, the lousy cutter,
They’ve taen my laddie frae me,
They’ve pressed him far away foreign
Wi’ Nelson ayont the salt sea.
‘They always come in the night,
They never come in the day;
They always come in the night
And steal the laddies away.’
A certain Captain Bover was particularly energetic in pressing men, of whom a sailor and his lass thus sing:
‘Where hes ti’ been, maw canny hinny,
Where hes ti’ been, maw winsome man?
Aw’ve been ti’ the norrard,
Cruising back and forrard,
Aw’ve been ti’ the norrard,
Cruising sair and lang,
Aw’ve been ti’ the norrard, cruising back and forrard,
But daurna come ashore for Bover and his gang.’
(L. Smith, Music of the Waters, 1888, p. 112.)
When the war ended the press-gang lost its very real terrors, though their memory long survived in tradition. It became a subject for sentimental or burlesque treatment, as in Oh Cruel! and the Answer to that song. Its special function in the sentimental ballads printed during the first half of the nineteenth century was to prevent the course of true love from running smooth:
‘This jolly young sailor, as true is reported,
Had been but a very few weeks on the shore
But as he and his love together was walking,
By a large press he from her was tore.’
A villainous rival invariably availed himself of its assistance:
‘A friendly voice young William hailed;
A ruffian gang the youth assailed;
’Twas done by cursed gold.
The tender for the offing stood,
The cutter skimmed the yielding flood,
They hatched him in the hold.’
(Young William.)
It afforded opportunities for the more romantic forms of the sentimental ballad, in which the maid disguised herself as a sailor in order to accompany her lover when he was pressed to sea. There are several seventeenth and eighteenth century ballads about disguised women who served as sailors, and there are some genuine instances. One of them, Hannah Snell, became celebrated, and about 1750 attracted crowds to hear her sing a song describing her adventures (p. 200). In the street ballads of the early nineteenth century the theme is a perpetual favourite. Other ballads of the same period celebrated the courage or dexterity with which the maiden contrived to obtain her lover’s release. The most celebrated example of this class of ballad is Billy Taylor, which is a parody on an earlier romantic ballad entitled sometimes William Taylor, sometimes The Female Lieutenant (pp. 326–27). Another example is Cawsand Bay (p. 328), which is a late imitation of an older ballad called either The Valiant Maid or The Undaunted Lieutenant.
Impressment ceased about 1835, though not formally abolished, and its cessation seems to have been somehow connected in the popular mind with King William IV. His sympathy with sailors was the theme of several street songs. The King and the Sailor celebrates his affability; Duke William’s Frolic narrates how he had learned to sympathise with the sufferings of sailors by being himself impressed. Both are reprinted in John Ashton’s Modern Street Ballads, pp. 228, 232.
During the great war, the patriotic sea-song and songs about sailors, such as those written by the Dibdins and their imitators, had attained enormous popularity on shore, and some at sea too. Charles Dibdin’s first naval song, Blow high, blow low, was produced about 1776, and he continued to produce till about 1810. It was said by a biographer that ‘he brought more men into the navy in war time than all the press-gangs could,’ and he boasted in his autobiography, ‘My songs have been the solace of sailors in long voyages, in storm, in battle; and they have been quoted in mutinies to the restoration of order and discipline (Autobiography, i. 8). Except in a very few cases, such as Tom Bowling, this popularity was not lasting. ‘It is doubtful,’ says Sir C. Bridge, ‘if they were even very popular in the forecastle. At places of entertainment on shore, some of them may have been heard with pleasure by seamen, but the great majority of them were either never favourites afloat, or at any rate had but a short-lived popularity. By the middle of the nineteenth century, when the old fore-bitter had still a vigorous existence, C. Dibdin’s songs were very rarely sung on board ship’ (Introduction to Stone’s Sea Songs and Ballads, p. xiii).
Novelists and playwrights imitated Dibdin. Captain Marryat, who brought together a few genuine old songs in Poor Jack, inserted some nautical songs of his own composition in Snarleyow, the best of which is reprinted in this collection (p. 322). Others, apparently never published, which include defences of flogging and impressment, are to be found in his Life by his daughter. Captain Chamier, who published between 1830 and 1849 a number of novels in imitation of Marryat, included in them many nautical songs of his own of little merit. Captain Glascock also in his novels and sketches of naval life printed various lyrics. One seems to be the expression of a genuine feeling, viz. The Lieutenant’s Lament:
‘As sure as a gun
We shall all be undone
If longer continues the peace.’
(Naval Sketch Book, 1834, 2nd series, i. 267.)
Of nautical plays an enormous number were produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. This species of drama reached its greatest vogue about 1830. The most successful example of it was Douglas Jerrold’s Black-eyed Susan; or, All in the Downs, played at the Surrey Theatre in 1829. Another successful play was Fitzball’s Pilot, an adaptation of Cooper’s novel of the same name, in which the hero was transformed from an American into an English sailor. The success of both was due to the acting of T. P. Cooke, who had himself served some six years in the navy and was declared by Christopher North to be ‘the best sailor that ever trod the stage.’ ‘Mr. Cooke,’ says Fitzball in his preface to The Pilot, ‘added a new feature to the sailor’s character. It was that of thoughtfulness and mystery—of deep-toned passion and romance.’
The popularity and the prevalence of conventional representations of sailors and artificial naval lyrics seem to have put an end to the production of genuine sea songs. In the vast mass of street songs issued by various printers between 1815 and 1870 there are many about sailors at sea and on shore, but they are mostly amatory or romantic. The most interesting are stories about shipwrecks or crudely realistic ditties about sprees on shore which illustrate the history of the merchant service rather than the navy. Such titles as The Liverpool Landlady, The Sailor’s Frolic or Life in the East, and Rolling Down Wapping are a sufficient indication of their contents. Amongst this miscellaneous mass there are a few ballads relating to incidents in naval history occurring between 1815 and the Crimean war. They are poor things, lacking in the spirit and the vigorous realism which often redeem the doggerel verses of the previous century.
For that reason it will suffice to quote a few of those which survive, and to print half a dozen of the best as specimens.
The bombardment of Algiers by Lord Exmouth on August 27, 1816, was the first important naval event after the peace of 1815. It is narrated in a ballad printed by James Catnach, in which a sailor who had served on board the Superb undertook to tell ‘how we fought like any lions bold to set the Christians free.’ Three verses may be quoted:
‘On the twenty-seventh of August, just by the break of day,
We espied the city of Algiers to windward of us lay;
“All hands, all hands to quarters,” it was the general cry,
“Come load your guns with round and grape before we draw too nigh.”
‘The first was the Queen Charlotte so nobly led the van,
She was followed by the Superb, Captain Atkins gave command,
The next was the Leander with all her warlike crew,
She was followed by the Impregnable, Rear-Admiral of the Blue.’
Then comes a catalogue of the rest of the fleet, in which the six Dutch frigates taking part in the action are not forgotten. ‘Take pattern by those English lads, they show you gallant play,’ said the Dutch admiral to his crews.
‘Now there’s one thing more that I relate, which is to be admired,
At five o’clock that afternoon we set their ships on fire,
Our rocket ships and bomb ships so well their parts did play
The Algerines from their batteries were forced to run away.’
The last verse concluded with healths to Lord Exmouth and to Captain Atkins (or properly Captain Charles Ekins) of the Superb.
The battle of Navarino, fought on October 20, 1827, inspired several ballads. The Battle of Navarino, which will be found at length in John Ashton’s Modern Street Ballads, 1888, p. 225, begins thus:
‘You’ve heard of the Turks and the Greeks,
For all Europe’s been told their bad habits,
How they cut down each other like leeks,
And the Turks slaughter children like rabbits:
But John Bull could bear it no more,
Said he, you death-dealers, I’ll stop you,
And if you don’t both soon give o’er
I swear by St George that I’ll whop you.’
It concludes with a cheer ‘for the staunch gallant crew, That manned the brave ship the Genoa’—a 76-gun ship whose captain, Walter Bathurst, was killed in the battle—on board of which the author perhaps served.
A second, entitled The Glorious Victory of Navarino, gives more details:
‘On the 20th of October the glorious fight began,
Bold Ibrahim vainly boasted he’d slaughter every man;
But Codrington resolved was the Asia should display
A bright example to the rest, and he would lead the way.
‘The Genoa and the Albion he placed by his side
And near to him De Rigny, commander of the Armide,
The Glasgow and the Cambrian, the Dartmouth and the Rose
Were placed in fine order alongside of their foes.’
A fragment of a third ballad, said to consist of seventeen verses in all, is quoted by Mr. Kipling in The Black Sheep:
‘Our vanship was the Asia,
The Albion and the Genoa,
And next came on the lovely Rose,
The Philomel her fireship closed,
And the little Brisk was sore exposed
That day at Navarino.’
The intervention of England in the Syrian war in 1840, which fills so large a place in James Hannay’s naval novel, Singleton Fontenoy, produced a ballad on The Capture of St. Jean d’Acre which will be found on p. 333. It attributes all the credit of the success to Charles Napier, and makes no mention at all of Sir Robert Stopford. It seems to have been written or at least inspired by someone serving on board the Wasp, from the particularity with which it relates the movements of that ship.
The popularity of Napier comes out very plainly in the whole group of street songs and ballads relating to the Crimean war.
‘We’re off to the Baltic with Charley Napeer
To singe the whiskers of the great Russian bear’
ran the chorus of a song which a friend of mine heard some sailors singing in the streets in 1854. Give it to him, Charley, is the title of another; I am Baltic Charley and no Mistake, is that of a third. In this last, the author, through the form of a dialogue, expresses the sympathy of the British public with the admiral in his quarrel with Sir James Graham:
‘“I have sailed too many miles at sea
For any land-lubber to frighten me,
I fought in Nelson’s victory
Like a Briton,” said Baltic Charley.
Said Jemmy to me “What have you done?
Why did not you into danger run?”
“I wopped the Russians at Bomarsund
And a victory gained,” said Charley.
‘“Now, Jemmy, you shall see by-and-by
I will make you open your weather eye
And like a pig for quarters cry
For insulting Baltic Charley.
Boatswain’s mate, come quickly jump,
Seize old Jemmy up to the pump,
And give him a dozen over the rump
To the tune of Baltic Charley.”’
Another series of this Russian group consists of sentimental verses. Bold Napier, for instance, begins:
‘Old England calls her sons to arms the Russian bear to meet,
Our brave old admiral commands and guides the British fleet,
The battle calls me from thy arms, let not my Susan fear
In the cause of liberty we go to sail with bold Napier.’
Similar in type is Jack and Susan and Long Life to Sir Charles Napier. Bolder is The Baltic Lovers, which relates how a merchant’s daughter of Southampton city:
‘Did fall in love with a brisk young sailor
Who had engaged with Sir Charles Napier,’
and announced her intention of following him to sea in disguise:
‘He said “Mary, my charming fairy,
Are you deranged or what can you mean?—
On board the Wellington you know I’ve entered
To fight the Russians and serve the Queen.”’
In spite of this discouragement and of the active opposition of her father she entered on board the Wellington, and passed for a long time as a man.
‘One lovely morning the fleet had warning
To fight the Russians at seven bells,
And her true lover did her discover
And met his Mary at the Dardanelles.’
Shedding ‘large briny tears’ she was brought on the quarter-deck before Sir Charles Napier, who was much moved by the spectacle.
’Old Charley said, “You are an angel,
You are an angel I plainly see,
You love your Queen, you love a sailor,
And soon made happy you shall be.”’
And thereupon he discharged Mary and the brisk young sailor and sent both back to England singing ‘God save the Queen and Sir Charles Napier.’
In addition to this there are of course many songs of a purely patriotic nature of which the naval glories of England are in part the theme. The most familiar of them is The Red, White, and Blue. ‘It had a considerable vogue during the Russian war,’ writes Sir J. K. Laughton. ‘I often heard it sung up the Baltic: but of course it is a music-hall song. It was always understood that the ‘red, white, and blue’ meant the three admirals’ flags. Since then it has been taken to mean that these are the national colours—a mistake which has led to a thousand absurdities.’
Out of all the popular songs illustrating the naval side of the Russian war only one deserves reprinting in this volume. That is a song called The Russians won’t come out, which reflects the general disappointment of the navy at the absence of any opportunities for fighting at sea (p. 336).
In order to illustrate the work of the navy during the period which intervened between the close of the French war and the beginning of the Russian war four other ballads have been inserted. One, entitled General Campbell, describes the part taken by the navy in the capture of Rangoon in 1824. A second, The Borneo Heroes, narrates an incident in the suppression of piracy in the Eastern seas, viz. the fight at Malluda Bay on August 19, 1845. The third, entitled The Slave Chase, illustrates the suppression of the slave trade. From the style it is clearly an imitation of one of Macaulay’s Lays; however, it is a spirited thing, and was a great favourite with the late Captain Montagu Burrows, who served for some time in African waters. It was also a popular favourite, and was very often reprinted by Fortey, Such, and the later publishers of street ballads. Arctic exploration is illustrated by a fourth, which celebrates the return of Ross in 1833 and the welcome he received at home (pp. 330–334). Another incident, in the search for the North-West Passage, namely the voyage of Sir John Franklin, and the long continued efforts to discover his fate also attracted the attention of the writers of street ballads; but neither Lady Franklin’s Lament nor the Lament on the Fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew deserve reprinting. The last was written in 1860; ten years later the old street ballads practically became extinct. Once they had been the instrument used to convey information about public events to the people, but that function had now passed to the cheap newspapers. Popular opinion had found other modes of expression, and as songs they had been superseded by the more taking melodies of the music-halls.
Sir Cyprian Bridge speaks of the ‘general taking over of the songs of the music-hall of late by sailors.’ The process began long ago. Captain Glascock in 1834 noted the supersession of the old naval songs by ditties fashionable at the moment on shore.
‘For the whole three years as I sarv’d in that there March-o’-Mind man-o’-war I was tellin’ ye about I never hears so much as a sailor’s song—a song as ye could call a reg’lar built seaman’s stave.’
‘No, Ned, you doesn’t now often hear the staves as we used to sing in the war—you never now hears Will ye go to Cawsin Bay, Billy Bo, Billy Bo!—nor the Saucy Arethusa—nor the Bold Brittany—Black colours under her mizen did fly—From Ushant to Scilly is thirty-five leagues, an’ many more of the sim’lar sort.’
‘No, no, Sam—you’re right enough—your March-o’-Mind men must now come your simmy-dimmy quiv’ring quivers—tip ye soft sentimental touches—sigh away like ladies in love, an’ never sing nothin’ but your silly sicknin’ stuff, as often used to frighten the geese an’ make ’em cackle in the coop, for all the world like the comin’ of a heavy hurricane. Moreover, your March-o’-Mind men never will sing a single stave as admits of the main thing—for what’s a song as won’t allow all hands to jine in reg’lar coal-box? (chorus). No, no, your March-o’-Mind men haven’t, you may depend on it, the mind of men—they think far more like people as rigs it in petticoats, nor they as tog in trowsers. Now what looks more young-ladyish nor to see a fellor with a fist like a shoulder of mutton, flinging his flipper about an’ suitin’ his antics to his song, as he snivels out “Strike—strike the light guitar!”... Then, again, we’d another chap—a chap, too, as big and bulky as a bullock—easin’ it off an’ mincin’ it out like a lank boarding’-school miss—“I’d be a butterfly, born in a bower”’ (Naval Sketch-book, 2nd series, i. 236).
Dana noticed the same phenomenon amongst merchant sailors about 1834. ‘I shall never forget,’ he writes, ‘hearing an old salt who had broken his voice by hard drinking on shore, and bellowing from the mast-head in a hundred north-westers, singing with all manner of ungovernable trills and quavers, in the high notes breaking into rough falsetto, and in the low ones growling along like the dying-away of the boatswain’s “All hands ahoy!” down the hatchway, “Oh no, we never mention him!”[sic]:
‘Perhaps, like me, he struggles with
Each feeling of regret:
But if he’s loved as I have loved,
He never can forget.’
The last line he roared out at the top of his voice, breaking each word into half a dozen syllables, This was very popular, and Jack was called on every night to give them his sentimental song’ (Two Years before the Mast, chap. xxix.).
In conclusion it is only necessary to give some short account of the sources from which the present collection has been compiled.
The best account of the collections of old ballads which exist in various public libraries is given by Chappell in the introduction to volume i. of the Roxburghe Ballads, published by the Ballad Society. The British Museum contains the collections known as the Roxburghe and Bagford Ballads, besides others of minor importance. The four volumes of the Roxburghe collection contain 1,466 ballads, the Bagford collection and the smaller ones referred to about 1,500 more. Since 1871, when Mr. Chappell made this estimate, others have been added. The Bodleian Library contains the collections formed by Wood, Ashmole, Rawlinson, and Douce, numbering 1,500 or 1,600. At Cambridge there is the Pepys collection, which consists of 1,800 ballads, and is of special value for naval history, because Pepys, by virtue of his office, was peculiarly interested in that subject. The Society is under great obligations to the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, for permitting the publication of ten of the Pepysian ballads in this volume, and for allowing the editor the opportunity of thoroughly searching the collection for the purpose. The library of the University of Cambridge possesses a large collection of ballads printed during the eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth, which has proved extremely useful as supplementing and continuing the older collections. It was formed by Sir Frederick Madden, and has been hitherto neglected by nearly all students of ballads, but deserves to be searched carefully by anyone interested in the later history of the English ballad.
The University of Glasgow possesses a collection of 408 black-letter ballads presented to it by Mr. Euing. The Euing collection consists mainly of ballads printed during the reign of Charles II., and has supplied several on the Dutch wars and other incidents of the period.
Of collections in private hands, that of the Earl of Crawford has proved particularly useful. The Society is indebted to him for three ballads reprinted in this volume, and the editor has found the catalogue of Lord Crawford’s ballads invaluable throughout his work (Bibliotheca Lindesiana: Catalogue of a Collection of English Ballads of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Privately printed, 1890).
As to printed collections of ballads, the editions of the Roxburghe and Bagford Ballads, published by the Ballad Society, have been freely drawn upon. The labours of Mr. Chappell and Mr. Ebsworth have alone made it possible to select and put together ballads relating to any particular side of English history, and their researches into the questions of the origin and text of the ballads have furnished all students of any special kind of ballads with a solid basis for further investigations. To Mr. Ebsworth the editor is further indebted for personal assistance and encouragement.
Two other collections have also been of special service—The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Professor F. J. Child, 5 vols., Boston, 1895, and Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript, edited by Professor J. W. Hales and Dr. F. J. Furnivall, 3 vols., London, 1868.
There are also several special collections of Naval Ballads, to which references are frequently made in this introduction and in the notes. Of these the most important are:
(1) Early Naval Ballads of England, collected and edited by J. O. Halliwell for the Percy Society in 1851.
(2) Sea Songs and Ballads by Dibdin and others. London, Bell and Daldy, 1863. This contains an appendix consisting of ballads written before Dibdin’s day.
(3) Real Sailor Songs, collected and edited by John Ashton, 1891, which is valuable from the number of modern street ballads it contains.
(4) Sea Songs and Ballads, selected by Christopher Stone, with an introduction by Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, Oxford, 1906.
(5) A Sailor’s Garland, selected and edited by John Masefield, London 1906.
One word as to the text of the ballads and songs contained in this volume. It was at first intended to preserve the exact spelling of the originals. In the older pieces it was possible to do this because there was usually an authoritative text accessible, which it was easy to follow throughout. But the later ballads, issued on broadsheets and slips, and frequently reprinted again by country printers, swarmed with misprints due to mere carelessness which it would have been unnecessary and undesirable to reproduce. Moreover, it was often needful to compare several versions in order to obtain a tolerable text. For these reasons a certain number of obvious errors of the press have been corrected. Some variants, with comments on the text of the ballads, and an indication of the source from which the text is derived, will be found in the notes at the end of the volume. It should be noted that in order to save space two lines have often been printed as one.