The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
General
The English and Scottish popular ballads, volume 5 (of 5)
Ballads, English -- England -- Texts; Ballads, Scots -- Scotland -- Texts
9
They threw him a rope oer the larboard side,
And sewed him up in an auld cow’s-hide,
And threw him out to a fair wind and tide,
And sunk him in, etc.
FOOTNOTES:
[102] Scott says at the end, “I will not swear to the accuracy of the
above.”
287
CAPTAIN WARD AND THE RAINBOW
Bagford Ballads, I, 65.
Other black-letter copies are Pepys, IV, 202, No 195; Roxburghe,
III, 56; Euing, No 108; British Museum, 112. f. 44 (19). This copy
is printed in Halliwell’s Early Naval Ballads, p. 59, Bell’s Early
Ballads, p. 167, Ebsworth’s Roxburghe Ballads, VI, 426.
There are Aldermary Churchyard copies, as Roxburghe Ballads, III,
652, 861; Scottish stall-copies, as Greenock, W. Scott, Stirling, M.
Randall; English, by Pitts, Seven Dials, one of which is printed in
Logan’s Pedlar’s Pack, p. 1.
A copy in Buchan’s MSS, II, 245, is nearly the old broadside; another,
II, 417, is the stall-copy. Kinloch, MSS, V, 109, II, 265, has the
stall-copy from oral transmission (with Weir for Ward). Rev. S.
Baring-Gould has recently taken down this ballad (much changed by
tradition) in the west of England.
Captain Ward, a famous rover, wishes to make his peace with the king,
and offers thirty ton of gold as “ransom” for himself and his men. The
king will not trust a man who has proved false to France and to Spain,
and sends the Rainbow, with five hundred men, against Ward. The Rainbow
has easy work with Dutch, Spaniards, and French, but her fifty brass
pieces have no effect on Ward; though the Rainbow is brass without, he
is steel within, 8^2 (suggested by ‘Sir Andrew Barton,’ =A= 27^1, =B=
25^1, ‘He is brass within and steel without).’ The Rainbow retires,
and reports to the king that Ward is too strong to be taken. The king
laments that he has lost three captains, any one of whom would have
brought Ward in: George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, †1605, Charles
Blount, Lord Mountjoy, †1606 (both of whom had a part in the defeat of
the Armada), and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, †1601.
The Rainbow was the name of one of Drake’s four ships in his expedition
against Cadiz in 1587. The Rainbow is mentioned very often from 1589;
as in The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, vol. i, Hist. MSS Commission,
XIIth Report, Appendix, Part I; Index in Part III of the same, p. 296.
John Ward, an Englishman of Kent, is said to have commenced ‘rover’
about 1604, by inducing the crew of a king’s ship in which he had some
place to turn pirates under his command. His race, though eventful,
was, naturally enough, not long. He seems not to be heard of after
1609, in which year Ward and his colleague, Dansekar, are spoken of as
the “two late famous pirates.” See Mr Ebsworth’s preface to the ballad,
VI, 423 ff., founded on Andrew Barker’s book about Ward and Dansekar,
published in the year last named.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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