(1850) White Jacket
Though Melville purchased a copy of Child’s English and Scottish Ballads in 1859, he likely read the ballad earlier or heard it sung during his years at sea, because he references a musical version of ‘Spens’ in his novel White Jacket (1850). Agnes Cannon writes: ‘The evidence would seem to indicate that Melville learned most of the songs referred to in his novels during his years at sea either from hearing them sung by his fellow sailors or from the little books known as songsters which were so popular during the nineteenth century’. In White Jacket a sailor named Jack Chase sings many ‘salt sea ballads and ditties’, including ‘Spens’. Melville inserts two lines of the ballad into the text of the novel: ‘Sir Patrick Spens was the best sailor/That ever sailed the sea’.
Selected Criticism:
Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Melville’s Reading, Revised and enlarged edition. (University of South Carolina Press: 1988) [1948]. p. 108.
Agnes Dicken Cannon ‘Melville’s Use of Sea Ballads and Songs’, Western Folklore, Vol. 23, No. 1, Western States Folklore Society.(Jan., 1964), pp. 1-16. JSTOR
Links: InternetArchive; GoogleBooks; Online-Literature; OpenLibrary
1860-1885 “The Admiral of the White”
Henning Cohen writes: ‘What Melville seems to be attempting [in “The Admiral of the White”] was a sea ballad in the tradition of “Sir Patrick Spens”’. William Stein writes that the ending was a ‘muffled allusion to the ballad of “Sir Patrick Spens”’.
[Excerpt]
Like a baron bold from his mountain-hold,
At night looks the Admiral forth:
Heavy the clouds, and thick and dun,
They slant from the sullen North.
[…]
Pale, pale, but proud, “neath the billows loud,
The Admiral sleeps to night;
Pale, pale, but proud, in his sea-weed shroud,—
The Admiral of the White:
And by their gun the dutiful ones,
Who had fought, bravely fought the good fight.
Melville does not state that the admiral and sailors die because of the direct command of a foolish ruler ashore, but the men are bringing a prize home when they are caught in a storm. They wreck on the rocks because the store of seized metal arms brought on board flipped their compass. These mariners are involved in a war that was started and encouraged by superiors ashore.
Sources: GoogleBooks
1888 ‘The Haglets’
Melville draws on ‘Spens’ more thoroughly in ‘The Haglets’ (1888), a narrative poem about a fleet of captured Spanish ships that runs aground in rough weather on their return home with a prize. Melville’s protagonist is the Admiral of the Royal Navy, in charge of leading the fleet. (In a few versions of ‘Spens’ the skipper’s name is replaced with the actual Scottish admiral Sir Andrew Wood.) Melville begins ‘The Haglets’ by focusing on his admiral below the water, long after the shipwreck: ‘decayed and coral-mossed,/ a form recumbent, swords at feet.’ Melville repeats ‘swords are at feet’ in the next stanza. Later in the poem he describes the moon, on the wane, which foretells the death of all hands. After narrating the details of the tragedy, Melville ends the poem by returning to the image of the Admiral dead on the ocean floor:
[Excerpt]
Imbedded deep with shells
And drifted treasure deep,
Forever he sinks deeper in
Unfathomable sleep—
His cannon round him thrown,
His sailors at his feet,
The wizard sea enchanting them
Where never haglets beat.
Haglets appear throughout the poem, as birds indifferent to the death of these men and also as a pun for small hags, i.e. the three Fates themselves. Robert Madison argues convincingly that haglets are shearwaters (Puffinus sp.) a pelagic long-winged seabird. One possible interpretation, though unlikely, is that Melville wanted to connect these birds with storm petrels (Thalassidroma pelagica), smaller grey birds, which are common offshore in rough weather. In parts of Scotland in the nineteenth century, this bird was known as a ‘spencie’ or ‘spensie’. In supernatural belief and folklore, seabirds often represent the souls of dead sailors, so it is possible that this nickname for the storm petrel has a connection to ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, though no evidence has yet been found to support this.
Selected Criticism:
Robert D. Madison, ‘Mellville’s Haglets’, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 5.2 (Oct. 2003) pp. 79-83. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118900427/PDFSTART
William Bysshe Stein, ‘The Old Man and the Triple Goddess: Melville’s “The Haglets”‘, ELH, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1958, Johns Hopkins University Press), pp. 43-59. JSTOR
Sources: GoogleBooks
(1924 posthumous) ‘Billy in the Darbies,’ from Billy Budd, Sailor
In this novella one of the sailors writes ‘Billy in the Darbies’, a broadside ballad that serves as an epilogue to the story. The sailor recounts how when out at sea the officers executed his shipmate Billy. The moon shines in through the porthole as the skilled, handsome Billy imagines himself ‘fathoms down, fathoms down’. The final words of the ballad are:
‘I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist’.
Melville’s dedication to Billy Budd is to Jack Chase, an actual friend to Melville and the same fictional sailor in White Jacket who sings ‘Spens’. Scholars believe Melville began the writing of Billy Budd after his creation of ‘Billy in the Darbies’, written apparently in the same year as ‘The Haglets’.
Still another possible connection to ‘Spens’ in Billy Budd is in regards to when Melville digresses to give historic background about mutinies in the Royal Navy. He writes of the Nore Mutiny and again puts forth the image of the skilled sailor who suffers because of his devotion to royalty:
‘The event converted into irony for a time those spirited strains of Dibdin—as a song-writer no mean auxiliary to the English government at that European conjuncture—strains celebrating, among other things, the patriotic devotion of the British tar: “And as for my life, ’tis the King’s!”’.
Links to text:GoogleBooks (poem); Virginia.edu (novella)
