STUDIES IN FOLK-SONG AND POPULAR POETRY,
By Alfred M. Williams.
With A Prefatory Note By Edward Clodd,
London:
Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row, E,C.
1895.
PREFACE
|Mr. Williams's essays merit a few words of commendation from
folk-lorists on this side of the Atlantic as being calculated to
interest readers in a subject which is full of profound significance,
but against which they may possibly be prejudiced in the degree that
science claims it as material for analysis.
For within the last few years folk-lore has been promoted to the rank
of a serious study and the Folk-Lore Society of London, aided by its
numerous and lusty offshoots, both American and Continental, is busily
applying the scientific method to fireside tale, custom, song, and
ballad seeking what old philosophies lie at the heart of these, and what
they have to tell about intercourse between peoples in the past.
Nevertheless, the folk-lorist treats his subject-matter as tenderly as
Isaak Walton bade the angler hook his worm, for he remembers what poetry
the song and saga hold, and that laughter and tears are ever young.
These essays range over a wide field, both of space and time. The
earlier in arrangement deal with subjects which are purely literary and
modern, and justify their presence only in the reasons advanced by the
author. But the major number come within the ken of the folk-lorist,
and appeal not to him only, but to all who are moved by the passion and
sincerity of primitive poetry, in the skill and sympathy with which the
varied note of folk-song in East and West is interpreted. In some of the
examples, however, notably those from Roumania, Mr. Williams does not
sufficiently allow for the modern dress in which the peasant verse is
clothed.
Edward Clodd.
STUDIES IN FOLK-SONG AND POPULAR POETRY.
AMERICAN SEA SONGS.
|Oh, fare ye well, my pretty, fair maids,
I'm bound for the Rio Grande!
Ri-o-Rio I
I'm bound for the Rio Grande!
No one who is old enough to remember the glorious spectacle of a
full-rigged American clipper ship getting under full sail outside of the
headlands of a harbor, after having been cast off by the tug, is likely
to have forgotten the sight: the white sails dropping from the yards,
being sheeted home, and swelling out to the fresh wind, until a cloud of
canvas sparkled in the sun; the strong and graceful life which the ship
took on under their power; the foam curling up under the bow with her
forward rush; the great plain of the ocean, with all its free airs and
salt scents, beckoning to life and adventure seaward round the world.
To this, to one on board or near enough to hear, will be added the
indefinable and mysterious charm of the sailors' chants, as they haul
in the bowline, and tauten up the tacks and sheets by a pull requiring
unison of effort; and the cadence, at once long-drawn and vigorous,
fills the air with a magic voice of the wind and the sea. It has the
melopoeism, if it may be so called, of the cadence of nature, and takes
its note from the solitude and melancholy of the world, never more
impressive than upon the vast plain of the sea. It has been heard from
immemorial time, since the first oarsmen pulled together along the
coasts of the Indian Ocean, and possesses the same essence in whatever
language it is uttered; and, while it has its practical purpose in
securing unison and accentuation of effort, it would be a mistake to
suppose it without origin in and appeal to the innate impulse for the
expression of sentiment in melody in the heart of man. Every sea captain
knows, or used to know, how much more quickly the anchor came up, or
how much more hearty were the pulls on the bowlines, if there were a
full-lunged and melodious leader for the "shanty;" and his practical
minded mate would at times shout, when the chorus was going faintly and
mechanically, "Sing out there, can't ye?" with the same purpose with
which he would exhort the men to take a stronger pull. Conversely, a
poor leader, or a second who could not or would not keep in proper time,
was a decided injury to the effectiveness of the labor; and it sometimes
happened that an energetic captain, when his ship was being got under
way, would step up to a sailor, apparently heaving sturdily at the
windlass, and knock him sprawling, for the reason that he had detected
him giving the wrong time to the chant, out of mischief, or for the sake
of testing the sharpness and intelligence of the "old man."
The words of these windlass and bowline "shanties" have, of course,
little of the element of finished poetry about them. They are not songs,
but chants, whose purpose is to give accentuation and force to the
exertion of united strength rather than to the expression of sentiment,
and of which the rhythmical melody is the essential element. Whether
they be new or old, they always have been essentially improvisations,
capable of being stopped at any moment or added to indefinitely, and,
like the refrains of the old ballads, are dependent upon the sound
rather than the sense for their effect. Nevertheless, however imperfect
and indefinite their expression, they took their tone and color
originally from the elements in which they were born, and gave out not
only the voice of the sea and the wind, the notes of the never silent
Æolian harp of the cordage and the bellying sails, but the prevailing
sentiment of the human heart upon the great deep, its underlying
oppression, its longing for home, its craving for relief from monotony;
and it is a dull ear that would not detect this, under the most absurd
and uncouth words ever strung together in a sailor's shanty.
As among the seamen of all races, the chants of the American sailors,
before they were so reduced in quality and number by the combined
influence of steam vessels and a protective tariff, were of ancient
and indefinite origin, and were constantly being altered or added to
by circumstance and improvisation. They came, of course, first from the
English seamen, who were our sailors' ancestors and associates, to whom
at least the element descended from the songs to which the galleys of
the sea kings of Scandinavia were impelled over the foaming brine, or
the Celtic coracle was paddled on the lonely lake; and it is impossible,
in a mass of rude verse, of little definite meaning, of a fluid and
fluctuating form, and handed down from lip to lip without ever, except
incidentally, having been put into print and preserved, to fix the
origin or the date of creation of any of these songs. There are traces
of old phrases and archaisms, ancient words strangely metamorphosed into
a semblance of modern meaning, and all such settlings and deposits as
are to be found in the geological strata of spoken language,--references
to mermaids, sea-serpents, and survival of myths regarding the powers of
the sea and air; but they are of no such distinct historic value as are
the indications to be found in the more definite folk-lore in prose or
verse, which have the element of dramatic interest and narrative. It is
to be remembered that these chants, as we have said, were essentially
improvisations, with a purpose different from ordinary song,--that is,
to give the governing power of melody to united exertion,--and that
whatever color and substance they have are extraneous, and not inherent.
What is distinctively American can be determined only by local allusions
or by definite knowledge of their origin: the first are of very little
value, for an English chant, with its local allusions, might be very
readily altered into an American one by the substitution of American
names; and in regard to the second, as has been said, the songs were
born, and passed from mouth to mouth, and from ship to ship, without
any one's knowing or caring where they originated. Nevertheless, the
American sailors, when there were American sailors, had as strong a
national and provincial feeling as those of any other country;
were capable of making their own chants, if not as much given to
improvisation as those of the Latin races; and had a selection of local
names as sonorous and as readily adapted to the needs of a rhythmical
chorus as those of any English-speaking people. The Rio Grande and the
Shenandoah were as mouth-filling and sonorous as the High Barbarie or
any of the refrains of the English shanties, and the American sailor
sheeted home his canvas with Virginia Ashore, or Baltimore, or Down to
Mobile Bay in his remembrance as well as on his lips.
Premising that American shanties are not American sea songs in any
definite sense of the term, and fulfill only the conditions to which
they are subject as aids to labor and stimulants to exertion, we may
take a specimen or two to show what they were like. It is needless to
say that neither the words nor a musical notation would give any idea
of their effect when sung with full-throated chorus to sea and sky, and
that their peculiar melodious cadence and inflection can be caught
only by hearing them. Like the chants of the negro slaves, which they
resemble in many respects, musical notes would give only the skeleton
of the melody, which depends for its execution upon an element which
it defies the powers of art to symbolize. They have various forms,--a
continued and unbroken melody, as when turning the capstan or pumping,
or they show an emphatic accentuation at regular intervals, as when
stretching out a bowline with renewed pulls; and such as they are,
they are given precisely as sung, with a dependence upon the reader's
imagination to supply in some degree the cadence and accentuation. The
following are good specimens of the bowline chants.
Solo. I wish I was in Mobile Bay,
Chorus. Way-hay, knock a man down!
Solo. A-rolling cotton night and day,
Chorus. This is the time to knock a man down!
And so on _ad infinitum_, until the hoarse "Belay!" of the mate or the
"bosun" ends it.
Oh, Shenandoah's a rolling river,
_Hooray_, you rolling river,
Oh, Shenandoah's a rolling river,
_Ah-hah_, I'm bound away to the wild Missouri!
Oh, Shenandoah's a packet sailor, etc.
My Tommy's gone, and I 'll go too,
Hurrah, you high-low!
For without Tommy I can't do,
My Tommy 's gone a high-low!
My Tommy's gone to the Eastern shore,
Chorus.
My Tommy's gone to Baltimore, etc.
A favorite and familiar pulling song is Whiskey for my Johnny:--
Whiskey is the life of man,
_Whiskey_-Johnny!
We 'll drink our whiskey while we can,
_Whiskey_ for my Johnny!
I drink whiskey, and my wife drinks gin,
Chorus.
The way she drinks it is a sin,
Chorus.
I and my wife cannot agree,"
Chorus.
For she drinks whiskey in her tea,
Chorus.
I had a girl; her name was Lize,
Chorus.
And she put whiskey in her pies,
Chorus.
Whiskey's gone, and I 'll go too,
Chorus.
For without whiskey I can't do, etc.
A very enlivening windlass or pumping chant is I'm Bound for the Rio
Grande:--
I'm bound away this very day,
Oh, you Rio!
I'm bound away this very day,
I'm bound for the Rio Grande!
And away, you Rio, oh, you Rio!
I'm bound away this ve-ry day,
I'm bound for the Rio Grande!
Another is Homeward Bound with a Roaring Breeze:--
We 're homeward bound with a roaring breeze,
Good-by, fare you well!
We 're homeward bound with a roaring breeze,
Hurrah, my boys! We 're homeward bound!
I wrote to Kitty, and she was well,
Good-by, fare you well!
She rooms at the Astor and dines at the Bell,
Hurrah, my boys! We 're homeward bound!
There were many, with slight American variants, which were undoubtedly
of English origin, and have been heard on English merchant ships from
time immemorial; some which relate especially to the operations of
whaling; and some which had their origin on the river flatboats and in
the choruses of the roustabouts on the Ohio and Mississippi, and have
been only slightly changed for salt-water purposes, the quality being as
little varied as the number is endless. Their essential quality was that
of an improvised chant, and the dominant feeling was to be found in
the intermingling of the words and the cadence, as in the apparently
meaningless refrain of the old ballads. They expressed, through all
their rudeness and uncouthness, and more through the melody than the
words, the minor chords which distinguish all folk music, the underlying
element in the human heart oppressed by the magnitude and solitude of
nature, as well as the enlivening spirit of strong exertion; and no
sensitive ear could ever call them really gay, however vigorous
and lively they might be. The shanties are passing away with the
substitution of iron cranks and pulleys for the muscles of men, and
the clank of machinery has taken the place of the melodious chorus from
human throats. It is not probable that they will ever entirely disappear
so long as men go down to the sea in ships; but whatever life and flavor
they had will fade away, and the first-class leading tenor among the
"shanty men" will vanish with the need and appreciation of his skill. As
for the old words, they will also be utterly lost, because they have
no existence except in oral recitation and memory, and do not contain
enough of the elements of pure poetry to secure their preservation
in print, as the folk songs and ballads have been preserved. They are
relics of custom rather than of literature; and although any poet or
musician who deals with the sea will miss a source of very valuable
inspiration if he does not possess himself of the spirit of their weird
melody and the unconscious power of their vigorous rhythm, in themselves
they are likely to be lost with the chants of the Phoenician sailors or
the rowers of the galley of Ulysses, which they have succeeded, and some
of whose melody they have perhaps reproduced.
The genuine sea songs differ from the shanties in that they had a
definite poetical purpose to tell a story or express emotion, and were
not merely words strung together to give voice to a rhythm of labor. It
cannot be said that the genius of the American sailor has turned itself
especially to expressing his emotions in song, any more than that of the
English. His nature is entirely too practical, and the touch of tender
sentiment which, in the Scotch nature, produced the beautiful fishing
songs of the coast and the grand rowing and boat songs of the Western
Islands, is wanting alike in him and his English associate.
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,
As often we have proved it;
the Fair American, commanded by Captain Daniel
Hawthorne, which fought a British snow, laden with troops, off the
coast of Portugal, and whose exploits are recorded in a ballad of very
considerable spirit, and evidently by one of the crew; and some others,
who did not happen to have a poet on board or a laureate on shore, and
are not embalmed in verse. To this period, however, belongs what is,
perhaps, the very best of American sea songs. We do not know whether its
authorship was of that time or not, although it probably was, and from
internal evidence would seem to have been composed by one of the very
crew of the Ranger, Paul Jones's ship, which escaped from a British
squadron in the Irish Channel in 1778. It was first published by
Commodore Luce, in his collection of Naval Songs, with the statement
that it was taken down from the recitation of a sailor. It is one of the
gems of forecastle song, has the full scent of the brine and the gale,
and the ship does not manouvre as if she were a wagon on dry land, as
was said of Allan Cunningham's account of Paul Jones's cruises. The
title given is
THE YANKEE MAN-OF-WAR.
'T is of a gallant Yankee ship that flew the stripes and stars,
And the whistling wind from the west-nor'-west blew through
the pitch-pine spars.
With her starboard tacks aboard, my boys, she hung upon the
gale,
On an autumn night we raised the light on the old head of
Kinsale.
It was a clear and cloudless night, and the wind blew steady
and strong,
As gayly over the sparkling deep our good ship bowled
along;
With the foaming seas beneath her bow the fiery waves she
spread,
And bending low her bosom of snow, she buried her lee cat
head.
There was no talk of short'ning sail by him who walked the
poop,
And under the press of her pond'ring jib the boom bent like
a hoop,
And the groaning water-ways told the strain that held her
stout main tack.
But he only laughed as he glanced abaft at a white and sil
very track.
The mid-tide meets in the channel waves that flow from shore
to shore,
And the mist hung heavy upon the land from Featherstone
to Dunmore;
And that sterling light on Tusker rock, where the old bell
tolls the hour,
And the beacon light that shone so bright was quenched on
Waterford tower.
The nightly robes our good ship wore were her three topsails
set,
The spanker and her standing jib, the spanker being fast.
"Now, lay aloft, my heroes bold, let not a moment pass!"
And royals and topgallant sails were quickly on each mast.
What looms upon the starboard bow? What hangs upon
the breeze?
'T is time our good ship hauled her wind abreast the old Sal
tees;
For by her ponderous press of sail and by her consorts four
We saw our morning visitor was a British man-of-war.
Up spoke our noble captain then, as a shot ahead of us
passed,
"Haul snug your flowing courses, lay your topsail to the
mast!"
The Englishmen gave three loud hurrahs from the deck of
their covered ark,
And we answered back by a solid broadside from the decks
of our patriot bark.
"Out, booms! Out, booms!" our skipper cried, "Out,
booms, and give her sheet!"
And the swiftest keel that ever was launched shot ahead of
the British fleet.
And amidst a thundering shower of shot, with stunsails hoist
ing away,
Down the North Channel Paul Jones did steer, just at the
break of day.
The naval war of 1812 was a glorious epoch in American history. The
achievements of the troops were very far from creditable, with a few
exceptions, including, of course, the great one of the repulse of
British regulars at New Orleans; but on the ocean the American sailors
proved themselves quite the equal, if not more, of the English seamen,
who had learned to consider themselves invincible, and despised the
petty fleet of half a dozen cruisers,--not a single line-of-battle
ship in the number,--which they had force enough to sweep off the seas
without a struggle, and which they finally did blockade into inaction.
There was quite an outburst of surprise, incredulity, and indignation in
England, when the news came in that British frigates, one after another,
the Guerriere, the Java, and the Macedonian, had been captured in
singleship fights by American ships of the same grade, and that in
contests between vessels of smaller size, like the Wasp and the Frolic,
the Hornet and the Peacock, Yankee pluck and seamanship had been equally
successful; and British naval historians, then and since, have been
earnest in showing that the victories were due to superior weight of
metal, to the presence of deserters from the British navy on board the
American ships, and to the accidents of naval warfare. Nevertheless,
the facts of the captures remained the same, and privateers ravaged the
seas, plundering and burning English ships, and causing the most bitter
annoyance as well as incalculable loss and damage. To the vindictive
depreciation and abuse of the English writers the Americans were
not slow to respond, with a joyous outburst of national pride and
exultation, and a mighty flapping of the wings of the American eagle;
and the poets and song-writers joined in the shrill cock-a-doodle-doo of
victory. The country was a great deal more boastful and self-assertive
than it has been since it has come to rely on its own strength and has
known the achievement of the great and sobering task of the civil war.
The spirit of the spread eagle pervaded our national literature; the
poets burst into songs,--generally, it must be admitted, very bad,--in
which they celebrated the naval victories of the day. They indulged in
mythological flights of the highest kind, in which Neptune bestowed a
laurel crown upon Hull, Amphitrite smiled upon Bainbridge and Decatur,
and the Tritons and the Nereids joined in a chorus of love and
admiration for the American sailor. America, Commerce, and Freedom
appeared as conjoined goddesses, and everybody was summoned to fill the
bumper and pledge the flowing bowl, to thank the mighty Jove and invoke
Bacchus, and do all sorts of things entirely unfamiliar to a people
whose principal intoxicating beverages were Medford rum and Monongahela
whiskey, and who had not the slightest acquaintance with heathen gods
and goddesses. It is needless to say that none of these songs were
written by sailors, or were ever sung by them, even if they could have
been sung by anybody.
There was, however, better stuff than this in the naval songs of the war
of 1812. The American sailor himself sometimes cleared his cheek of
its quid, and sang in a clear if somewhat nasal voice some of the deeds
which he had seen and done. Thus there is a great deal of rude vigor
in one of the verses of a song describing the fight between the
Constitution and the Guerriere, the first of our naval victories, and a
very favorite theme:--
But Jonathan kept cool,
At the roaring of the Bull.
His heart filled with anything but fears;
And squirting out his quid,
As he saw the captain did,
He cleaned out his mouth for three cheers.
Another song on the same engagement, entitled
Halifax Station, begins thus:--
From Halifax Station a bully there came,
To take or be taken, called Dacres by name;
And who but a Yankee he met on his way;
Says the Yankee to him, "Will you stop and take tea?"
After giving Dacres's high and mighty address
to his crew, and Hull's more modest appeal, it
says:--
Then we off with our hats and gave him a cheer,
Swore we'd stick by brave Hull, while a seaman could
steer.
Then at it we went with a mutual delight,
For to fight and to conquer is a seaman's free right.
The poet naturally takes the privilege of presenting the confounded
Britisher in the most humiliating light, and the manner in which Captain
Dacres signified his surrender is probably more graphic than
historically correct:--
Then Dacres looked wild, and then sheathed his sword,
When he found that his masts had all gone by the board.
And, dropping astern, cries out to his steward,
"Come up and be d----d! Fire a gun to leeward!"
This battle, fought in the North Atlantic on August 2, 1812, between
the American frigate Constitution, Captain Isaac Hull, and the British
frigate Guerriere, Captain James R. Dacres, and one of consummate
seamanship as well as fighting capacity on the part of Hull, was the
theme of the best and most spirited song of the whole war; one which
still keeps its place in the forecastle, and, it may be hoped, will
keep it so long as Uncle Sam has a war-ship afloat. It is set to a very
lively and emphatic air, called, indifferently, The Landlady of France
and The Bandy-Legged Officer, from the coarsely comical words which
George Colman the younger had written to it.
THE CONSTITUTION AND THE GUERRIERE.
It ofttimes has been told
That the British sailors bold
Could flog the tars of France so neat and handy, O.
And they never found their match
Till the Yankees did them catch.
Oh, the Yankee boys for fighting are the dandy, O.
The Guerriere, a frigate bold,
On the foaming ocean rolled,
Commanded by proud Dacres, the grandee, O.
With choice of British crew,
As ever rammer drew,
They could flog the Frenchmen two to one so handy, O.
When this frigate hove in view,
Says proud Dacres to his crew,
"Come, clear the ship for action, and be handy, O.
To the weather-gage, boys, get her,"
And to make his men fight better
Gave them to drink gunpowder in their brandy, O.
Then Dacres loudly cries,
"Make this Yankee ship your prize!
You can in thirty minutes, neat and handy, O.
Thirty-five's enough, I'm sure;
And if you 'll do it in a score,
I'll give you a double dose of brandy, O."
The British shot flew hot,
Which the Yankee answered not,
Till they got within the distance they called handy, O.
Now says Hull unto his crew,
"Boys, let's see what we can do.
If we take this boasting Briton, we 're the dandy, O."
The first broadside we poured
Carried their mainmast by the board,
Which made the lofty frigate look abandoned, O.
Then Dacres shook his head,
And to his officers he said,
"Lord! I did n't think these Yankees were so handy, O."
Our second told so well
That their fore and mizzen fell,
Which doused the royal ensign so handy, O.
"By George," says he, "we 're done!"
And he fired a lee gun,
While the Yankees struck up Yankee doodle dandy, O.
Then Dacres came on board
To deliver up his sword.
Loath was he to part with it, it was so handy, O.
"O, keep your sword," says Hull,
"For it only makes you dull.
So cheer up; let us take a little brandy, O."
Come, fill your glasses full,
And we 'll drink to Captain Hull,
And so merrily will push about the brandy, O.
John Bull may toast his fill,
Let the world say what it will,
But the Yankee boys for fighting are the dandy, O.
The English celebrated their one signal victory of the war--the capture
of the Chesapeake by the Shannon, off Boston Light, a year later--by a
parody of this song, of a decidedly inferior quality.
One of the most notable events of the war was the cruise of the Essex,
Captain David Porter, in the South Pacific, in 1813 and 1814. She did an
immense amount of damage to the British whalemen, and the British ships
Cherub and Phoebe were sent to capture her. After a rencontre in the
harbor of Valparaiso, in which the captain of the Phoebe, taken at a
disadvantage, protested his purpose to respect the neutrality of the
port, and a challenge from which the British ships ran away, the Essex
was caught disabled by a squall, chased into a harbor near Valparaiso,
and captured after a tremendous engagement, in which the calibre of the
British guns gave them every advantage, and in which the neutrality
of the port was not taken into account. There was a poet on board the
Essex, and he produced a long ballad describing the cruise and the
retreat of the British ships after the challenge; but whether he
perished in the later fight, or had no heart to add it to his verses,
is not known. Among the crew of the Essex who did survive the fight was
Midshipman David G. Farragut, who lived to achieve the greatest naval
renown since that of Nelson, and be the theme of The Bay Fight, the
noblest sea poem yet written.
The ballad of the Essex is entitled "A Pleasant New Song. Chanted by
Nathan Whiting (through his nose) for the amusement of the galley slaves
on board the Phoebe, who are allowed to sing nothing but psalms." After
describing the beginning of the trouble caused by "John Bull's taking
our ships and kidnaping our true sailors," and the capture of British
vessels in the first year of the war, the ballad takes up the cruise of
the Essex.
The saucy Essex, she sailed out
To see what she could do.
Her captain is from Yankee land,
And so are all her crew.
Away she sailed, so gay and trim,
Down to the Galapagos,
And toted all the terrapins,
And nabbed the slippery whalers.
And where d' ye think we next did go?
Why, down to the Marquesas.
And there we buried underground
Some thousand golden pieces.
Then sailed about the ocean wide,
Sinking, burning, taking,
Filling pockets, spilling oil,
While Johnny's heart was aching.
The ballad then describes the arrival of the Phoebe and Cherub and the
rencontre in Valparaiso Bay, the challenge and the flight of the Phoebe,
in verses which have a great deal of rude vigor.
At last John Bull quite sulky grew,
And called us traitors all,
And swore he'd fight our gallant crew,
Paddies and Scots and all.
Then out he went in desperate rage,
Swearing, as sure as day,
He'd starve us all or dare us out
Of Valparaiso Bay.
Then out he sailed in gallant trim,
As if he thought to fright us,
Run up his flag and fired a gun
To say that he would fight us.
Our cables cut, we put to sea,
And ran down on his quarter,
And Johnny clapped his helm hard up,
And we went following after.
In haste to join the Cherub he
Soon bent his scurvy way,
While we returned in merry glee
To Yalaparaiso Bay.
And let them go. To meet the foe
We 'll take no farther trouble,
Since all the world must fairly know
They 'll only fight us double.
Ne'er mind, my lads, let's drink and sing,
"Free trade and sailors' rights."
May liquor never fail the lad
Who for his country fights.
Huzza, my lads, let's drink and sing,
And toast them as they run:
"Here's to the sailors and their king
Who 'll fight us two to one."
There were other exploits of American ships told in verse, among them
the gallant repulse, by the crew of the privateer General Armstrong,
Captain Samuel C. Reid, in the Harbor of Fayal, of the boats of three
British men-of-war, which was the subject of a forecastle ballad, but
none of this memorial verse reached the level of poetry. The battles of
Lake Erie and Lake Champlain also had their numerous laureates; and the
raid of Admiral Cockburn and the troops upon Baltimore was the subject
of a song, the opening lines of which have a vigor and strong rhythm not
maintained throughout.
Old Ross, Cochrane, and Cockburn too,
And many a bloody villain more,
Swore with their bloody, savage crew
That they would plunder Baltimore.
The naval service during the civil war did not produce any songs that
achieved popularity in comparison with that won by the songs of land
service, like John Brown's Body, The Year of Jubilo, and Marching
through Georgia, and in fact was singularly deficient in poetry,
with the remarkable exception of the productions of Mr. Henry Howard
Brownell. There were few singleship engagements except the fight between
the Monitor and the Merrimac, and the Kearsarge and the Alabama, and the
blockading service was not calculated to inspire the martial muse.
The two great naval achievements of the war were the capture of New
Orleans and of the forts in Mobile Bay by the fleets under Farragut;
and these were celebrated in poetry worthy of them--and no more can be
said--by Henry Howard Brownell, who witnessed the second from the deck
of Admiral Farragut's flagship. The fire, spirit, and grand fighting
_elan_ of The Bay Fight have never been surpassed in English poetry, and
the accuracy of its pictures is as notable as their vigor. But these
are poems, and not songs, and there is nothing in the naval songs of
the civil war which will compare with those of the war of 1812. It was
rather past the time for the genuine forecastle ballad, and none of the
land poets hit the true vein, as Buchanan Read, Stedman, and others did
when commemorating military exploits.
There was one other field of American seamanship, full of romance and
excitement, which should have produced some worthy poetry and song, and
that was the whaling service before the days of iron steamers and bomb
lances. The chase of the gigantic cetacean in the lonely solitude of the
Arctic and Indian oceans, the fights in frail boats with the maddened
monster and all the perils of sea and storm, the visits to the palmy
islands in the Southern Sea and the frozen solitude of the Arctic, were
full of the materials of poetry. The long watches of the monotonous
cruising during the four years' voyage gave plenty of time for any
occupation, whether it was carving whales' teeth or making verses; and
there were many bright spirits, attracted by the adventure of whaling,
who could have made a literary use of their opportunity. The novels
of Herman Melville, some of the strongest and most original in our
literature, have given the romance of the South Sea islands as they
appeared to the adventurer of that day; and in Moby Dick, or The White
Whale, he has shown both the prose and the poetry of a whaling cruise
with singular power, although with some touch of extravagance at the
end. The whaling songs are, however, not very abundant, nor, it must
be confessed, of a high standard of quality. To this there is one
remarkable exception, which appears to be wholly unknown in American
literature, although it has been in print. It is entitled a "Brand Fire
New Whaling Song Right from the Pacific Ocean. Tune, Maggy Lander. By a
Foremast Hand," and was printed in a little five-cent pamphlet, by E. B.
Miller, in New Bedford, in 1831. It does not seem to have come under the
eye of any critic who could appreciate its spirit and faithfulness, and
no mention is made of it in any of the collections of American poetry.
It is extremely doubtful if the author received enough from its sale to
repay him for the investment of a portion of his "lay" in printing it,
and his name is utterly lost in his modest pseudonym of "Foremast Hand;"
so that he obtained neither fame nor fortune from his epic. The poem,
which is too long for entire quotation, was unquestionably the work of a
sailor on a whaling ship, and probably, as he says, of a foremast hand.
It lacks some of the finish of professional literature, as shown in the
ruggedness of some of its rhymes, and the vigorous compulsion of the
rules of grammar and syntax, when necessary, although the author was
evidently of higher education than would belong to one in his position,
and its jigging measure becomes tiresome; but it is of very great spirit
and vigor, as well as fidelity to its theme, and by no means deserves
to have fallen so entirely into oblivion. Indeed, it seems to me to
be quite as good as, and a great deal more original than, any American
poetry which had appeared up to that time. The song has for its subject
the chase and capture of a whale in the North Pacific, and relates the
course of events from the time of the first sighting of "white water" on
the horizon by the lookouts to that when the monster, stabbed to death
by the keen lances, rolls "fins out" in the bloody water, amid the
hurrahs of the excited boats' crews. All the details of this _grande
chasse_ are given with wonderful vigor, as well as faithfulness, and the
historian of the whale fishery will find it as accurate as a log-book.
Perhaps the account of the chase by the boats and the harpooning will
give as good an idea of the force and spirit of the poem as any part
of it; and, in reference to the emphasis of the language, it may
be remembered that mates of whaling ships in pursuit of an
eight-hundred-barrel whale had a good deal of energy and excitement
to relieve. The boats have been lowered, and are darting toward the
unsuspecting whale with all the speed of ashen oars and vigorous muscle,
while their commanders objurgate and stimulate the crews, as the poet
says, "judiciously."
"Pull, men, for, lo, see there they blow!
They 're going slow as night, too.
Pull, pull, you dogs! they lie like logs,--
Thank Heaven they 're headed right, too."
"The chance is ours!" the mate now roars.
"Spring, spring, nor have it said, men,
That we could miss a chance like this
To take them head and head, men.
There's that old sog, he's like a log.
Spring, lads, and show your mettle;
Strain every oar; let's strike before
He's- gallied, mill-, or-settle-."
And so it is, the chance is his.
The others peak their oars now.
From his strained eyes the lightning flies,
And lion-like he roars now.
"Pull, pull, my lads! why don't you pull?
For God's sake, pull away, men!
Hell's blazes! pull but three strokes more,
And we have won the day, men!
"Stand up there, forward--pull the rest--
Hold water--give it to her!
Stern all, stern all--God damn it, heave
Your other iron through her!
We 're fast, we 're fast--stern out her way!
Here, let me come ahead, men.
There, peak your oars--wet--line--wet--line--
Why, bloody zounds, you 're dead, men!"
The rush of the whale towing the boat, his sounding to the uttermost
length of the line, his reappearance, the lancing, the mad dash at the
boats, and the death flurry are all described with great vividness, but
there is room only for the verses in which the monster comes up from his
long dive, and obliges the poet to appeal to the enemy of sea songs, the
steam boiler:--
Till from the deep, with mighty leap,
Full length the monster breaches,--
So strongly sped, his scarred gray head
High as our topmast reaches;
And, like a rock, with startling shock,
From mountain height descending,
Down thunders he upon the sea,
Ocean with ether blending.
And, hark! once more that lengthened roar,
As from his spout-hole gushing,
His breath, long spent, now finds a vent,
Like steam from boiler rushing.
It does not seem that a poet who could write so vividly and forcefully
as this ought to be without a place in American literature, even if
there were no other interest in his work.
There is another whaling song, entitled The Coast of Peru, and
undoubtedly the work of a forecastle poet, which is worth preserving,
despite its homeliness, for its genuine flavor, and as a relic of
the old days before steam whalers and bomb lances took so much of the
romance out of the fishery.
THE COAST OF PERU.
Come, all ye bold sailors,
Who sail 'round Cape Horn,
Come, all the bold whalers,
Who cruise 'round for sperm.
The Captain has told us,
And I hope't will prove true
That there's plenty of sperm whales
Off the coast of Peru.
The first whale we saw
Near the close of the day.
Our Captain came on deck,
And thus he did say:
"Now all my bold sailors,
Pray be of good glee,
For we 'll see him in the morning,
P'raps mider our lee."
It was early next morning,
Just as the sun rose,
The man at the mast-head
Called out, "There she blows!"
"Whereaway?" cried our Captain,
As he sprang up aloft.
"Three points on our lee bow,
And scarce two miles off."
"Now trace up your yards, boys,
We 'll fasten anear.
Get your lines in your boats,
See your box lines all clear;
Haul back the main yard, boys,
Stand by, each boat's crew,
Lower away, lower away,
My brave fellows, do."
"Now, bend to your oars, boys,
Just make the boat fly,
But whatever you do, boys,
Keep clear from his eye."
The first mate soon struck,
And the whale he went down,
While the old man pulled up,
And stood by to bend on.
But the whale soon arose;
To the windward he lay.
We hauled up 'longside,
And he showed us fair play.
We caused him to vomit,
Thick blood for to spout,
And in less than ten minutes
We rolled him "fin out."
We towed him alongside
With many a shout,
That day cut him in,
And began to boil out.
Oh, now he's all boiled out
And stowed down below,
We 're waiting to hear 'em,
Sing out, "There she blows!"
It is extremely doubtful if the Dago sailors and foreign 'longshoremen,
who now make such a large portion of the crews of the Arctic steam
whalers, are capable of even such rude verse as this, and the poetry of
the whale fishery is now as extinct as the glory of Nantucket and the
sea flavor of New Bedford. Like some greater things it may be regretted,
but cannot be recovered.
FOLK-SONGS OF THE CIVIL WAR.