Now when the sea grew soft and still, and all the gale was o’er,
Sam Jackson made himself a raft, and paddled safe ashore.
For fear of fatal accidents—not knowin’ what might come,
He took a gun and matches, with a prudent cask of rum.
Now this island where he landed proved as merry as a fife,
For its indigents had ne’er beheld a white man in their life;
Such incidents as rum and guns they never yet had seen,
And likewise, in religion, they were awful jolly green.
But they had a dim tradition, from their ancestors, in course,
Which they had somehow derived from a very ancient source: