In Praise of Seafaring Men, in Hope of Good Fortune

DESCRIPTION: "Who seeks the way to win renown, Or flies with wings of his desire... Let him his native soil eschew, Let him go range and seek a new." "I must abroad to try my lot." Hard work at home has no value. The singer recalls Jason and the Greeks going to Troy
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1841 (Halliwell, Early Naval Ballads of England, according to Palmer-OxfordBookOfSeaSongs), but probably from the late sixteenth century; see NOTES
KEYWORDS: sailor travel nonballad
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Palmer-OxfordBookOfSeaSongs 4, "In Praise of Seafaring Men, in Hope of Good Fortune" (1 text)
Stone-SeaSongsAndBallads III, pp. 5-6, "In Praise of Seafaring Men, in Hope of Good Fortune" (1 text)
MANUSCRIPT: London, British Library, MS. Sloane 2497, folio 47
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Another of Seafarers, describing Evil Fortune" (also found in Sloane 2497; they perhaps were intended to go together)
NOTES [989 words]: I know of no evidence that this piece is actually traditional. Stone-SeaSongsAndBallads says this is in MS. British Library Sloane 2497, folio 47. Since the British Library has not yet digitized this manuscript, I can't verify this directly.
From the little I can find out about the manuscript, based on the list of items in Scott, it seems a strange miscellany of poetry, history, and scientific works, plus deeds and contracts. Extracting the data from Scott as best I can, here are the contents:
-- Latin Grammar, De Figuris. 14th century Folio 1
-- W. Herbert, "Stanzas on a Brother's Death," 16th century, Folio 2
-- Rules and Examples in Arithmetic, 16th century. Folios 3-32b
-- Sir Edward Dyer, "My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is," 1592. Folio 27b
-- Bond to Richard Brown of Glocester from J. Hill, 1579. Folio 33
-- Epitaph in verse, 16th century. Folio 33
-- Thomas Jones, Merchant of Bristol. Power of Attorney to John More, 1592. Folio 33b
-- Edward Barston, Merchant, of Tewkesbury. Acknowledgment of his debt to R. Portman, 1592. Folio 34 [It appears this Richard Portman owned the manuscript. It includes other information about his trading, with poetry, but Scott does not list the folios that include Portman's records.]
-- Descriptions of ordnance, with drawings, 16th cent. Folios 38-44 b/Chemical receipts, processes, and experiments. Folios 41-44b
-- Francis Drake, orders for his forces, 1589. Folio 47
-- Sir John Norris, orders for his forces against Spain and Portugal, 1580. Folio 47.
-- Stanzas in praise of Seafaring Men (presumably refers to this item or the next item in Stone, or both), 16th century. Folio 48.
-- Queen Elizabeth I, Form of summons to abide the execution of the Royal Commission on a bill of complaint, 1592. Folio 48b
This hints to me that the manuscript was assembled from earlier booklets.
There is a notation at the end of the text, "Sir Richard Grinfilldes, farewell." Stone refers this to Sir Richard Grenville (who, to be sure, was contemporary with several of the items in Sloane 2497), and Palmer accepts this without question. I'm not convinced, although I don't deny the possibility.
According to Herman, p. 63, "Grenville was a hardy seaworthy Cornishman, son of the Richard Grenville who had gone down with the Mary Rose." He helped supply the fleet that fought the Spanish Armada, although he was not one of the captains who actually fought the Spanish fleet (Herman, p. 119). The Spanish came to call him "el gran corsario" (Herman, p. 138), presumably because of his many raids on them.
His own men weren't overly fond of him either: "'his own people hated him for his fierceness and spoke very hardly [harshly] of him'" (Rodger, p. 280). He does seem to have liked music; he "'was serve elaborately on silver and gold plate, by servants. Many musical instruments were played when he dined'" (Rodger, p. 320).
Jameson, p. 280, gives this biography of Grenville: "Grenville, Sir Richard (1540-1591), an English navigator, set out with seven vessels and 108 colonists for Carolina on a colonizing expedition for Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585. He landed the colonists are Roanoke Island, but they soon returned to England on account of the troubles with the Indians. In 1591, with only one ship, he attacked a Spanish fleet of fifty vessels and sunk four of them, but was mortally wounded." (According to Herman, p. 138, he had been off the Azores when the Spanish trapped him; he fought a "twenty-hour gun duel with fifteen enemy ships, which left the Revenge smashed and sinking and Grenville dying from multiple wounds.")
Grenville's was the first of two failures at Roanoke: "In April [1585]. [Sir Walter] Raleigh [who had been granted a royal patent for the area he labeled 'Virginia'] sent a seven-vessel fleet commanded by his cousin, Sir Richard Grenville, to establish an English colony in this new region. Grenville explored the Indian towns of Pamlico Sound before deciding to build an English settlement under Ralph Lane on Roanoke Island. Lane's men built a fort and dwellings on the island, where the remained for almost 11 months," exploring and seeking exploitable raw materials. They returned to England in 1586.
"In 1587 John White, an artist in the Grenville expedition of 1585-86, led approximately 150 men, women, and boys to establish a colony in Virginia under a charter from Raleigh. Reluctantly, White ordered the settlers to establish themselves in the town abandoned by Lane." On August 13, 1587, White's granddaughter Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the future United States, was born. White then sailed back to England to try to raise more support. "His departure marked the last known contact between the English and the famous 'lost colony.' When White returned three years later, he found no colonists and only the remains of the structures they had built" (PowellEncyclopedia, p. 983).
Ironically, Lane had left Roanoke (with Sir Francis Drake) just before Grenville returned to the island with supplies: "Apparently it was only a few days after Lane and Drake left when Sir Richard Grenville arrived with the long-expected supplies. If Lane had remained but this brief time longer, his colony might well might well have been England's first permanent American colony" (PowellHistory, p. 16). He left fifteen men behind -- enough to maintain the property but not to expand or improve it -- even though he had more men that he could have left. The fifteen were never seen again (PowellHistory, p. 17). This whole mess had arisen because Grenville had occupied his time in 1585 chasing Spanish ships -- and, in the process, wrecked the ship carrying most of the supplies for the colony (Herman, p. 152).
That wasn't Grenville's only attempt at founding a colony. In 1574, he had suggested founding a colony in Terra Australis, even though this southern continent hadn't been discovered; it was just an hypothesis! (Herman, p. 73). - RBW
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