Several recruits having enlisted in Scotland for the companies at Gibraltar, passage was provided for them on board a ship—the name of which cannot be confidently traced—and they landed or “joined” at the fortress on the 16th April, 1791. When in the Bay of Biscay the vessel encountered a white squall, accompanied by terrific thunder and lightning, which carried, away her main and foremasts. Each moment, indeed, her final plunge was expected, and the passengers and crew, clinging to spars and boxes, shreds of sails, and fragments of the dismantled bulwarks, as the last and only chance for their lives, awaited in suspense the time when the dread alternative must be taken. With the appearance of the morning, providentially came the desired calm. All hands immediately set to work to right the vessel; the jury-mast was rigged, and the shivered ship, once more under weigh, wore on with struggling throes, and made good her passage to the Rock. The wreck and its circumstances gave rise to a song, called “The Bay of Biscay, O!”[85] ----- Footnote 85: There exists two ballads with this title, one justly celebrated in the royal navy, written by Andrew Cherry, and embodied in Dibdin’s “Naval and National Songs,” and the other by a homely mariner, named, it is said, John Williams. Both songs may have taken their origin from the vessel spoken of above. Be this as it may, without doubt, one or the other was written to record the distress and struggles of the ship which conveyed the artificers to Gibraltar. The incidents of the affair related in the first edition of this history were made to correspond with the seaman’s effusion, as there were reasons at the time for believing it referred to the vessel with the recruits on board; but, as on a closer review, there are doubts about its application, the details given in the former edition are omitted in this, leaving the question to be solved at a future day. If the ballad of the seaman have reference to the ship in which the artificers sailed to the Rock, it differs in two known points from the facts of its voyage. The “Caroline” is the ship of the song, and she is said to have _sailed from Spithead on the fourteenth day of April_, whereas the party of recruits _sailed_ apparently _from Scotland, and positively_ landed, or, to use the official word, “_joined_,” _at Gibraltar on the 16th April_. The seaman’s “Bay of Biscay, O!” is worked up in pure Grub-street doggrel; but bad as it is, it has been rendered worse, particularly in the last verse, by the tampering of some grossly vulgar hand. In the lapse of years the precise wording of that Catnach composition has probably been lost, and the version that exists, filled up by the imperfections of tradition, may have had its dates and places disturbed. In a printed form the ballad, seemingly, cannot be obtained.