“Lie down, lie down, my bold A.B.,
We drift upon her beam;
We dare not ram, for she can run;
And dare ye fire another gun,
And die in the peeling steam?”
It was our war-ship Clampherdown
That carried an armour-belt;
But fifty feet at stern and bow
Lay bare as the paunch of the purser’s sow,
To the hail of the Nordenfeldt.
“Captain, they hack us through and through;
The chilled steel bolts are swift!
We have emptied the bunkers in open sea,
Their shrapnel bursts where our coal should be.”
And he answered, “Let her drift.”
It was our war-ship Clampherdown,
Swung round upon the tide,
Her two dumb guns glared south and north,
And the blood and the bubbling steam ran forth,
And she ground the cruiser’s side.
“Captain, they cry, the fight is done,
They bid you send your sword.”
And he answered, “Grapple her stern and bow.
They have asked for the steel. They shall have
it now;
Out cutlasses and board!”
It was our war-ship Clampherdown
Spewed up four hundred men;
And the scalded stokers yelped delight,
As they rolled in the waist and heard the fight
Stamp o’er their steel-walled pen.
They cleared the cruiser end to end,
From conning-tower to hold.
They fought as they fought in Nelson’s fleet;
They were stripped to the waist, they were bare to
the feet,
As it was in the days of old.
It was the sinking Clampherdown
Heaved up her battered side—
And carried a million pounds in steel,
To the cod and the corpse-fed conger-eel,
And the scour of the Channel tide.
It was the crew of the Clampherdown
Stood out to sweep the sea,
On a cruiser won from an ancient foe,
As it was in the days of long ago,
And as it still shall be.
Seven men from all the
world, back to Docks again,
Rolling down the Ratcliffe
Road drunk and raising Cain:
Give the girls another
drink ’fore we sign away—
We that took the Bolivar
out across the Bay!
We put out from Sunderland loaded down with rails;
We put back to Sunderland ’cause our cargo
shifted;
We put out from Sunderland—met the winter
gales—
Seven days and seven nights to the Start we
drifted.
Racketing her rivets loose,
smoke-stack white as snow,
All the coals adrift adeck,
half the rails below,
Leaking like a lobster-pot,
steering like a dray—
Out we took the Bolivar, out
across the Bay!
One by one the Lights came up, winked and let us by;
Mile by mile we waddled on, coal and fo’c’sle
short;
Met a blow that laid us down, heard a bulkhead fly;
Left the Wolf behind us with a two-foot list
to port.
Trailing like a wounded duck,
working out her soul;
Clanging like a smithy-shop
after every roll;
Just a funnel and a mast lurching
through the spray—
So we threshed the Bolivar
out across the Bay!
