Nimrod's Song, The

DESCRIPTION: "Come all ye friends of Newfoundland Who have a mind to roam O'er the wild and stormy ocean...." The crew sails from Newfoundland to the ice. They have great trouble and sorrow. The crew are listed. The singer hopes Captain Barbour will find a better ship
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1925 (Murphy, Songs Sung by Old Time Sealers of Many Years Ago, according to Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff)
KEYWORDS: hunting ship hardtimes moniker
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Ryan/Small-HaulinRopeAndGaff, pp. 74-75, "The Nimrod's Song" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: James Murphy, editor, _Songs Sung by Old-TIme Sealers of Many Years Ago_, James Murphy Publishing, 1925 (PDF available from Memorial University of Newfoundland web site), p. 1, "The Nimrod's Song" (1 text)
Roud #V44825
NOTES [1643 words]: Not related to "The Wreck of the Nimrod," which obviously is about a shipwreck; this is a song about a whaling ship that later became a sealer and then, later still, an Antarctic explorer. Nimrod was a good name for such a ship; Nimrod was "a mighty hunter before the Lord" (Genesis 10:9).
Despite the aspersions cast in this song, the Nimrod was by no means a failure as a sealer; Chafe, p. 36, reports that her 1871 trip, bringing in 28,087 seals, resulted in a record payout to the men. (The total seals she brought in were not many more than other ships that year, and her total was eclipsed by 1873 anyway -- Chafe, pp. 49-50, has the statistics -- but because she had a small crew, the payout per man was very high.) The real problem is, what had been a good ship in the 1870s was not necessarily a good ship in the 1900s.... And the notes in Murphy say that the song refers to her last trip to the ice, in 1907. Which fits with the record in Chafe, p. 88; Baxter Barbour commanded the Nimrod 1905-1907, without ever taking more than 8099 seals; in 1907, he took a disastrous 2508 "sculps" -- the fifth-lowest total in the ship's long history, based on Chafe, p. 102, and the lowest she ever collected apart from a spell of extremely bad luck in 1883-1887 under, I suspect, two bad captains (the second one was never given another command, and the first one had only a slightly longer career).
According to Paine, p. 359, the Nimrod was built in Dundee in 1865. She was built under the personal supervision of the well-known sealer Captain Edward White (Ryan/Drake, p. 70, which also has a picture of him); he also commanded her until 1870, when he transferred to the Neptune. The Nimrod was purchased by the sealing company Job Brothers -- one of Newfoundland's leading sealing firms -- in 1867 (Busch, p. 66; O'Neill, p. 963), making her one of the first dozen or so steamers to be involved in sealing; the very first time a sealer used steam had been just five years earlier. After forty years of that, although she had been re-engined in 1889 (Riffenburgh, p. 122), she was old enough that Job Brothers sold her.
Her last sealing skipper Baxter Barbour was a well-known name. The Barbours were something of a dynasty of Newfoundland sealer captains -- George Barbour was the captain mentioned in many "Greenland Disaster" songs, e.g., and Alpheus Barber is mentioned in "The Sealer's Song (II)." Baxter Barbour was not one of the more famous ones, but in "Captains and Ships" he is said to command the Labrador, and earlier to have commanded the Louise -- plus he was captain of the Diana in 1913-1914 (for the Diana see "Arrival of 'Aurora,' 'Diana,' 'Virginia Lake,' and 'Vanguard,' Loaded") and of the Kite in 1908 (Feltham, p. 83; for the Kite, see "The Kite Abandoned in White Bay") -- meaning that the song's wish that he get a better ship came true.
An online reference mentions a merchant Master, Baxter Barbour, who was lost with the vanished S. S. Dunelm (sailing from Sydney, Cape Breton to Manchester, England) on October 17, 1915 at the age of 38. (Feltham, p. 56, agrees that Barbour was lost on the Dunelm but lists her as the ship's captain.) A man who was 38 in late 1915 would have been 29 or 30 at the time of the Nimrod's last sealing trip -- and members of the great sealing families often were given charge of sealers while in their twenties, before they were fully qualified to be captains and navigators (see, for example, the case of Westbury Kean on p. 18 of Brown or in "The Newfoundland Disaster (I)"). Such a "captain," since he could not navigate, would have to serve as a Master on a sea voyage.
Baxter Barbour was also said to have been a scamp (Feltham, p. 56); there was even a rumor that, after his loss at sea on the Dunelm, he turned up as a translator on the German submarine that sank the Erik (Feltham, pp. 56-57. Feltham gives evidence that the man who told this story was unreliable; I'm not sure I trust Feltham's opinion, but if Barbour had turned up alive, surely there would be some record of it!).
The Nimrod was Baxter Barbour's first command; he commanded her in 1905-1907. None of those years was particularly good (Barbour, in fact, never took more than 8099 seals in a season, and in 1911, he lost the Harlaw), but 1907 was particularly bad -- as mentioned above, just 2508 seals (Chafe, p. 88). And she hadn't taken as many as many as ten thousand seals in any year since 1901. Perhaps little wonder that the owners were happy to get rid of her. So I think we can safely accept the date of 1907 as the date of this song, since that was her last and worst year under Barbour.
What happened to the Nimrod after her 1907 failure made her famous. Ernest Shackleton, who had gotten into a conflict with his ex-superior Robert Scott, wanted to go back to the Antarctic, and he needed a ship FAST (Riffenburgh, p. 117). He had a different vessel in mind -- but his fundraising hadn't been very successful; he couldn't afford her.
Unable to find an affordable vessel in Europe, he bought the Nimrod, sight unseen, for 5000 pounds -- less than half the price of the Bjorn, the vessel he had wanted (Riffenburgh, p. 122). Presumably he had heard of how well Newfoundland sealing vessels handled in the ice, and thought that the old clunker would live up to the reports. "We are led to believe that the explorer's heart sank when he first set his eyes on the little sealer in the Thames. Her decks were stinking and still covered with the remains of seal blood and blubber from the recent hunt. Her masts were rotten and her sails were in such poor condition that they were useless" (O'Neill, p. 963).
"The Nimrod was only half the size of the Norwegian ship and had a maximum speed of barely six knots under steam. Shackleton did not think much of her at first, recalling in Heart of the Antarctic, 'I must confess I was disappointed when I first examined the little ship, to which I was about to commit the hopes and aspirations of many years. She was very dilapidated and smelled strongly of seal-oil... my first impression hardly did justice to the plucky old ship.' Later, he described her as 'one of the finest I have known,' and confided in a letter that the Nimrod was a far stronger ship constructionally than his famous Endurance of 1914" (Watson, p. 175). (Which is probably true; she may have had a lousy engine, but they made those old whalers *tough*).
"On 15 June Nimrod arrived in the Thames, and Shackleton was horrified. The new ship (which formally belonged to sponsor William Beardmore, not Shackleton) appeared even smaller than her measurements had made her sound, she was extremely dilapidated, her masts were rotten, and from top to bottom she was filthy and stank of the seal oil [actually fat that was processed into oil on shore] that had for decades filled her holds" (Riffenburgh, p. 123). That, frankly, sounds typical of a Newfoundland sealing steamer; they never got decent maintenance, and they all stank because of the seal blubber and flesh. Shackleton probably should have known better, but he was stuck, and so his crews went to work. She wasn't just repaired; she was rebuilt -- converted from a schooner to a barquentine, plus she got new engines.
Some reports say they never did get the stink out of her, which I would believe, although I suspect that the real problem came as they entered equatorial regions; a third of a century later, the sealer Eagle was almost uninhabitable when the tropical heat caused the blubber to come out of her woodwork (Squires, p. 30 and elsewhere). Nimrod's departure for the Antarctic was delayed a few days so that she could take part in the 1906 Cowles Regatta, where King Edward VII, Queen Alexandra, and other royals could visit her and give the company a flag that might perhaps go to the South Pole -- and the royal company found the ship pungent and hard to get around (Larson, pp. 120-121).
I find myself wondering if, after all that work was done, Shackleton had actually saved money by using her. Certainly she was too small; he filled her till she was much too full, and still couldn't carry all that he needed. But he was committed by then.
So Shackleton took her south, on an expedition that set a new "Farthest South" record but did not reach the South Pole. She returned to England in 1909 (after doing some exploring that updated the charts of the southern seas; Riffenburgh, pp. 284-285; that may well have been more scientifically useful than Shackleton's polar trip). Shackleton sold her a year later to finance future expeditions (Paine, p. 359), including the ill-fated Endurance expedition of 1914. In 1911, she went on a Siberia expedition, then served in Britain as a coastal collier in World War I. On January 30, 1919, she was wrecked near Caister/Yarmouth; there were only two survivors (Tarver, p. 15; according to Riffenburgh, this was out of thirteen in the crew; Winsor, p. 57, calls the spot she went aground the "Barber Sand").
It's perhaps a little ironic that one of the commanders of the Nimrod when she was a sealer was Robert A. Bartlett (her skipper in 1903-1904; Chafe, p. 87), memorialized in "Captain Bob Bartlett." Bartlett became famous for his exploits in the arctic, but he was not part of the Nimrod's trips to the southern ice.
Riffenburgh's is the only book I could find that is explicitly about the Nimrod expedition. But it won't be much use to students of this song; it's much more about Shackleton than his ship. He does reproduce Shackleton's sketch plan of the ship on p. 124; this is of course as she was after her rebuilding.
There is a (very poor) photo of the Nimrod on p. 57 of Winsor and a better one on p. 943 of O'Neill, showing her in St. John's harbour. P. 71 has a photo of Baxter Barbour. - RBW
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