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NAVAL SONGS AND BALLADS

Selected and Edited by C. H. Firth, M.A.

Regius Professor of Modern History, Oxford

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 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, or 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

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