Rolling Home
Sailors' version
ChorusRolling home, rolling home Rolling home across the sea Rolling home to old New England Rolling home dear land to theeFare you well, you Spanish maidens It is time to say adieu Happy times we've spent together Happy times we've spent with you 'Round Cape Horn one frosty morning And our sails were full of snow Clear your sheets and sway your halyards Swing her out and let her go Up aloft amid the rigging Blows a wild and rushing gale Like a monsoon in the springtime Filling out each well known sail And the waves we leave behind us Seem to murmur as they flow There's a hearty welcome waiting In the land to which you go Many thousand miles behind us Many thousand miles before Ocean lifts her winds to bring us To that well remembered shore
Additional verses
Charles Mackay's poem (1858)
Rolling home, rolling home, rolling home, dear land, to thee! Rolling home to merry England, rolling home across the sea!Twice a thousand miles behind us, and a thousand miles before, Ancient Ocean heaves to bear us to the well-remember'd shore; New-born breezes swell to waft us to our childhood's balmy skies, To the glow of friendly faces, to the light of loving eyes. Every motion of the vessel, every dip of mast or spar, Is a dance and a rejoicing, and a promise from afar; And we love the light above us, as it tips the waves around, All the more because, ere coming, it has beam'd on English ground. And 'tis nearer, ever nearer, to the rising of the morn, And 'tis eastward, ever eastward, to the land where we were born. And we'll sing in joyous chorus through the watches of the night: We shall see the shores of England at the dawning of the light. Rolling home to little England, though so little, yet so great, With her face of sunny beauty, and her heart as strong as fate, With her men of honest nature, with her women good and fair, With her courage and her virtue that can do as well as bear.
Rolling home, rolling home, rolling home, dear land, to thee! Rolling home to merry England, rolling home across the sea!
Source: The Collected Songs of Charles Mackay (1859)
Rolling Home was, in Stan Hugill‘s words, “the most famous homeward-bound song of them all.” Hugill insisted it was a capstan shanty, though Whall, Sampson, Terry and others printed it as a forebitter, and it was sung in English, American and German ships. The chorus names whatever home the ship was bound for: England, New England, even “old Chicago” on the Great Lakes. Every version Hugill heard had the crew leaving Australia. He remembered all hands manning the anchor capstan while he sang a verse in English and they answered with the chorus, then a German shantyman sang a verse and they answered in Low German. German sailors had their own version, Magelhan.
Much of the text goes back to the Scottish writer Charles Mackay, whose poem Rolling Home is headed “On board the Europa, homeward bound, May 26th, 1858.” Mackay had sailed from Boston a week earlier on the Cunard steamer, at the end of a lecture tour of the United States and Canada, and he printed the poem the next year in The Collected Songs of Charles Mackay. Several of the sailors’ verses are his lines reworked: his “Strong as spring-time in the blossoms filling out each blooming sail” became “Like a monsoon in the springtime, filling out each well known sail.” Whether he also wrote the chorus is less clear. Nobody has found the song in print before 1858, but Hugill and the folklorist MacEdward Leach both raised the possibility that it was the other way round, and that Mackay had heard sailors singing it at the capstan and borrowed their refrain.
John Masefield wrote in 1906 that he had heard it “in various parts of the world” and that it had given him “more pleasure than any song I have ever heard.” He said it was “sometimes sung as a chanty, especially aboard homeward-bound ships,” and quoted a verse bidding farewell to “Australian Maidens.” In 1939 Sidney Robertson Cowell recorded the old sea captain Leighton Robinson and three shipmates singing it in Belvedere, California.