’Tis war, red war, I’ll give you then,
War till my sinews fail;
For the wrong you have done to a chief of men,
And a thief of the Zukka Kheyl.
And if I fall to your hand afresh
I give you leave for the sin,
That you cram my throat with the foul pig’s
flesh,
And swing me in the skin!
This ballad appears to refer to one of the exploits
of the notorious Paul
Jones, the American pirate. It is founded on
fact.
. . . At the close of a winter day, Their
anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains
lay; And one was Admiral of the North from Solway
Firth to Skye, And one was Lord of the Wessex coast
and all the lands thereby, And one was Master of the
Thames from Limehouse to Blackwall, And he was Captain
of the Fleet—the bravest of them all.
Their good guns guarded their great gray sides that
were thirty foot in the sheer, When there came a
certain trading-brig with news of a privateer.
Her rigging was rough with the clotted drift that
drives in a Northern breeze,
Her sides were clogged with the lazy weed that spawns
in the Eastern seas.
Light she rode in the rude tide-rip, to left and right
she rolled, And the skipper sat on the scuttle-butt
and stared at an empty hold.
“I ha’ paid Port dues for your Law,”
quoth he, “and where is the Law ye boast
If I sail unscathed from a heathen port to be robbed
on a Christian coast?
Ye have smoked the hives of the Laccadives as we burn
the lice in a bunk,
We tack not now to a Gallang prow or a plunging Pei-ho
junk;
I had no fear but the seas were clear as far as a
sail might fare
Till I met with a lime-washed Yankee brig that rode
off Finisterre.
“There were canvas blinds to his bow-gun ports
to screen the weight he bore,
And the signals ran for a merchantman from Sandy Hook
to the Nore.
“He would not fly the Rovers’ flag—the
bloody or the black,
But now he floated the Gridiron and now he flaunted
the Jack.
He spoke of the Law as he crimped my crew—he
swore it was only a loan;
But when I would ask for my own again, he swore it
was none of my own.
“He has taken my little parrakeets that nest
beneath the Line,
He has stripped my rails of the shaddock-frails and
the green unripened pine;
He has taken my bale of dammer and spice I won beyond
the seas,
He has taken my grinning heathen gods—and
what should he want o’ these?
My foremast would not mend his boom, my deckhouse
patch his boats;
He has whittled the two, this Yank Yahoo, to peddle
for shoe-peg oats.
“I could not fight for the failing light and
a rough beam-sea beside,
But I hulled him once for a clumsy crimp and twice
because he lied.
