Cecil Sharp's Note 12 (1916)

No. 12. The Coasts of High Barbary

A version of this song, which the Rev. S. Baring-Gould collected in Devonshire, is published in English Folk Songs for Schools. I have collected only one other version, the first stanza of which runs thus:

⁠Two lofty ships of war from old England set sail;
⁠Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we,
⁠One was the Princess Charlotte and the other the Prince of Wales,
⁠A-coming down along the coasts of Barbary.

The ballad is evidently related to an old broadside sea-song, which Mr. Ashton reproduces in his Real Sailor Songs. It is headed “The Sailor’s Onely Delight, shewing the brave fight between the George-Aloe, the Sweepstake, and certain Frenchmen at sea,” and consists of twenty-three stanzas, the first of which runs:

⁠The George-Aloe and the Sweepstake, too,
⁠with hey, with hoe, for and a nony no,
⁠O, they were Merchant men, and bound far Safee
⁠and alongst the Coast of Barbary.

Mr. Ashton thinks that the “ballad was probably written in the latter part of the sixteenth century,” and he points out that it is quoted in a play, “The Two Noble Kinsmen,” written by “the Memorable Worthies, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare.”

To the six verses which the singer sang to me I have added three others; two from the Devon version (with Mr. Baring-Gould’s kind permission), and one—the last one in the text—from the broadside above mentioned.

The third phrase of the tune, which is in the Æolian mode, is not unlike the corresponding phrase of “When Johnny comes Marching Home Again.” Compare, also, “Whistle, Daughter, Whistle” (No. 59).