Chapter I: Part 1

PUBLICATIONS
OF THE
NAVY RECORDS SOCIETY

VOL. XXXIII.

NAVAL SONGS AND BALLADS

_This volume--NAVAL SONGS AND BALLADS, announced for last year, has been unavoidably delayed, but is now issued on the 1907 subscription._

_It is hoped that the VIEWS OF THE BATTLES OF THE THIRD DUTCH WAR, also due on the 1907 subscription, will be ready in May next._

_March 1908._

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

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.

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.

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 40,000_l._ to build and 25,000_l._ 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.