Naval Songs and Ballads

SELECTED AND EDITED BY

C. H. FIRTH, M.A.

REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY, OXFORD

PRINTED FOR THE NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY

MDCCCCVIII

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THE COUNCIL

OF THE

NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY

1907–1908

PATRON

H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES, K.G., K.T., K.P.

PRESIDENT

EARL SPENCER, K.G.

VICE-PRESIDENTS

Bridge, Admiral Sir Cyprian, A. G., G.C.B. Clarke, Col. Sir George S., G.C.M.G., F.R.S Desart, the Earl of, K.C.B. Firth, Professor C. H., LL.D.

COUNCILLORS

Atkinson, C. T. Corbett, Julian S. Dartmouth, the Earl of. Fanshawe, Admiral Sir Arthur, K.C.B. Field, Captain A. M., R.N., F.R.S. Geary, Lieut.-General Sir Henry, K.C.B. Ginsburg, B. W., LL.D. Godley, Sir Arthur, K.C.B. Gordon, the Hon. George. Gray, Albert, K.C. Hordern, Lieutenant Lionel, R.N. Loraine, Rear-Admiral Sir Lambton, Bart. Markham, Admiral Sir Albert H., K.C.B. May, Vice-Admiral Sir William, K.C.B. Mowatt, Sir Francis, G.C.B. Newbolt, Henry. Prothero, G. W., Litt.D., LL.D. Seymour, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward H., G.C.B. Tarleton, Lieutenant A. H., R.N., M.V.O. Thursfield, J. R. Watts, Sir Philip, D.Sc., K.C.B., F.R.S. White, Commander J. Bell, R.N.R. White, Sir William H., D.Sc., K.C.B., F.R.S. Yorke, Sir Henry, K.C.B.

SECRETARY

Sir J. Knox Laughton, D.Litt., King’s College, London, W.C.

TREASURER

W. Graham Greene, C.B., Admiralty, S.W.

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The Council of the Navy Records Society wish it to be distinctly understood that they are not answerable for any opinions or observations that may appear in the Society’s publications. For these the responsibility rests entirely with the Editors of the several works.

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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 [viii] 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 [ix] 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.

says the writer of one upon a sloop of that name. [x] Another on the Robin Hood privateer concludes defiantly:

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:

(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 [xi] 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 [xii] 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 [xiii] 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.

(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 [xiv] 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,

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. [xv] 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 [xvi] 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, [xvii] 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 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).