Studies in Folk-Song and Popular Poetry

by Alfred M. Williams

It would probably astonish most readers to be told that English literature is singularly deficient in sea songs, when they have in memory the noble odes of Campbell, the long list of the Tom Bowlings and Jack Junks of Dibdin, Cherry's Bay of Biscay and The Minute Gun at Sea, and the many good songs about ships and sea fights by Barry Cornwall, Cunningham, and many others. But these songs were not written by sailors. There never has been any English sailor, except the respectable William Falconer, the author of The Shipwreck, in several cantos of desiccated decasyllabic verse, who has written of the sea in verse from the standpoint of actual experience, or to do for it in poetry what Captain Marryat, Michael Scott, and W. Clark Russell have done in prose. English sea songs have been written by landsmen; even the charming Wapping Old Stairs is a song of the waterside, and not of the ocean; and as for the famous heroes of Dibdin's nautical songs, including Tom Bowling himself, they are very much, as Thackeray said, "har-lar" Mr. T. P. Cooke, the actor, who personated the gallant Jack Tar in a very blue jacket with very bright buttons, and very white duck trousers, and appealed to "England, Home, and Beauty" as represented in the cits of the gallery at Sadler's Wells theatre. Dibdin's heroes smell of stage gas rather than of tar, and their purpose and effect were very much more to persuade susceptible landsmen that the British navy was an elysium, in which beating Frenchmen was a glorious episode in an existence devoted mainly to passing the can between decks at sea and basking in the smiles of lovely Nan and faithful Poll on shore, than to tell what the seamen themselves really felt about it. The writers of the ordinary English sea songs had their lodgings in the neighborhood of Drury Lane rather than in the forecastle, and their inspiration was as strictly commercial as that of Mr. Slum, who supplied the anagrams and acrostics announcing the treasures in Mrs. Jarley's waxworks. Some of them are good in their way, as are a few of those of Dibdin and Andrew Cherry, and particularly The Saucy Arethusa, in which there is a real flavor of the sea spirit, and which was written by one Prince Hoare, a comic opera libretto writer of sixty years ago; the author, by the way, of Mrs. Micawber's favorite song, Little Tafflin with the Silken Sash. But when one comes to look for real forecastle songs, written by a sailor, and smelling of pitch and tar, one finds very few. Doubtless some have been lost, although there is a strong vitality to anything that is good; but except Kobert Kidd, Sailing down on the High Barbarie, Captain Glen, Jacky Tar with his Trousers on,—the immortal song which appealed to the feeling heart of Captain Edward Cuttle,—

I know you would have me wed a farmer,

And not give me my heart's delight;

Give me the lad whose tarry trousers

Shine to me like diamonds bright,—

The Mermaid, and few others, there is nothing which indicates that the British sailor was given to expressing himself in verse beyond the simple exigencies of the shanty. The case was very much the same with the American, and, under ordinary circumstances, it would be as vain to look for poetical feeling in the shrewd, practical-minded, and gritty New England seaman as in his more stolid and coarse-fibred English associate. Nevertheless, so much of the best spirit of the American people was once turned toward the sea for its field of action, its naval history has been so inspiring to national pride, and its record of adventure in all parts of the world has been so remarkable that it would have been impossible that it should not have produced some worthy or at least illustrative fruit in poetry.

The era of the Revolution was not distinguished for its naval exploits, except the memorable raid of the Scotch adventurer, John Paul Jones, upon the English seas, and the fight of the Bonhomme Richard with the Serapis and the Countess of Scarborough, for the reason that the colonies had no warships, and no means of procuring any. There were, however, a few privateers: the Hyder Ali, commanded by Captain Barney, which won a victory over the British vessel General Monk, and was celebrated in verse by Philip Freneau, and for which he wrote a recruiting song, with at least one verse of a practical tendency:—

Here's grog enough; come drink about.

I know your hearts are firm and stout.

American blood will never give out,