John Masefield was the poet laureate of England when I was a kid.  One the first books we read at Boston Grammar School was a boy's novel called 'Jim Davies'  - and this was novel was a homage to the great Treasure Island , written by Robert Louis Stevenson.

 

Stevenson's classic has obsessed many great writers - as well as Masefield I would respectfully point you in the direction of RF Delderfield's The Adventures of Beb Gunn.

 

Anyway Charlie Ipcar had the idea of setting this Masefield poem, called The Ballad of John Siver to music.  He thought of it as slow reflective  piece - an old bucaneer reminiscing.

 

I disagreed.  I saw Stevenson's wonderful creation as a not really a figure from histrory but as a confection, something to delight us - far removed from the brutes who murdered at will on the Spanish Main.

 

The Long John Silver of my imagination has some humour and decency at his heart, and really who wouldn't want to be in his gang?

 

A Ballad of John Silver

(John Masefield with ammendments and a tune and chorus from Alan Whittle)

We were schooner-rigged and rakish, with a long and lissome hull,
And we flew the pretty colours of the cross-bones and the skull;
Yes our Jolly Roger flapping,  gamely at the fore,
We sailed the Spanish Waters,  in the jolly days of yore.
We'd a long brass gun amidships, like a well-conducted ship,
We each had,  a brace of pistols and a cutlass at our hip;
Oh we were such naughty pirates,   you will certainly deplore
We chased   goody goody merchant-men and laid their ships aboard.
Oh cut and let rip!

Was the way on Flints old ship

Cos dead men  tell no tales

Oh Me and Billy Bones

We sent ‘em down to Davy Jones

Weren’t we the jolliest gang o’ cutthroats under sail

Then the dead men fouled the scuppers and the wounded filled the chains,
And the paint-work all was spatter-dashed with other people's brains,
She was boarded, she was looted, she was scuttled till she sank,
And the pale survivors left us by walking of the plank.
Then while standing by the taffrail,  lounging on the poop)
We could hear the drowning folk lament the absent chicken-coop;
Then, having washed the blood away, we'd little else to do
Than to dance a jolly hornpipe, like pirates tend to do
Chorus
O! the fiddle on the fo'c's'le, and the slapping naked soles,
And the genial "Down the middle, Jake, and curtsey when she rolls!"
With the silver seas around us and the pale moon overhead,
And the look-out not  real looking, but his pipe-bowl glowing red.
Ah! the pig-tailed, quidding pirates and the rotten tricks we played,
They’ve all  been put a stop-to, by that nasty Board of Trade;
The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest,
A little south of sunset, in the Islands of the Blest.

So every  setting of the sun

I fills me glass right up with rum

We as survived – our beards are old and grey

But we remember plain as print

Our dear Old Captain Flint, and his very genial orders of the day

(music and chorus and amendments to John Masefield’s lyric by Alan Whittle ©December 2007)