Rounding the Horn

DESCRIPTION: Sailor describes hard trip around Cape Horn (in the frigate "Amphitrite"), and the pleasures (mostly female) of shore-leave in Chile. The singer says that Spanish girls are superior to (English) women, who have no enthusiasm and steal your clothes
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1879 (Journal of the Andrew Hicks)
KEYWORDS: travel sea ship shore drink sailor whore clothes theft
FOUND IN: Britain(England(North))
REFERENCES (7 citations):
VaughanWilliams/Lloyd-PenguinBookOfEnglishFolkSongs, p. 90, "Rounding the Horn" (1 text, 1 tune)
Henry/Huntingdon/Herrmann-SamHenrysSongsOfThePeople H539, pp. 97-98, "The Girls of Valparaiso" (1 text, 1 tune)
Huntington-TheGam-MoreSongsWhalemenSang, pp. 163-164, "The Chile Girls" (1 text, 1 tune)
Colcord-SongsOfAmericanSailormen, pp. 177-178, "The Girls Around Cape Horn" (1 text, 1 tune)
Palmer-OxfordBookOfSeaSongs 127, "Rounding the Horn" (1 text, 1 tune)
Kinsey-SongsOfTheSea, pp. 131-132, "The Gals Around Cape Horn" (1 text, 1 tune)
DT, RNDHORN* RNDHORN2
Roud #4706
RECORDINGS:
Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, "Round Cape Horn" (on ENMacCollSeeger02)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Loss of the Amphitrite" [Laws K4] (subject)
cf "The Painful Plough" (tune)
cf. "Come All You Worthy Christian Men" (tune)
cf. "Van Dieman's Land (I)" [Laws L18] (tune)
NOTES [185 words]: The brig Amphitrite was built in 1820 and engaged in South American trade. A frigate of the same name was lost in 1833 while carrying female convicts to Australia (see "The Loss of the Amphitrite"). - PJS
Roud seems to occasionally file versions of this "The Loss of the Amphitrite" [Laws K4] and vice versa. They only common element I can see is the ship name. But this seems to be primarily Roud 4076.
The "Blue Peter" often mentioned in the second line was a signal flag. Grant Uden and Richard Cooper, A Dictionary of British Ships and Seamen, 1980 (I use the 1981 St. Martin's Press edition), p. 54, says the Blue Peter was "a blue flag with a white square in the centre (flag P in the International Code), hoisted as a signal that the ship is ready to sail."
The fact that the song actually calls the ship the Amphitrite is a bit curious and hints at broadside origin. Uden and Cooper, p. 321, note that British sailors, knowing nothing of classical mythology, had a tendency to convert classical ship names into something they knew, so "Amphitrite" became "Am and Tripe" ("Ham and Tripe"?). - RBW
Last updated in version 6.5
File: VWL090

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