The Bay of Biscay O

The Bay of Biscay is a stage song of 1805, with words by the Irish actor and playwright Andrew Cherry and music by John Davy, and for most of the 19th century it was one of the best-known sea songs in English. Its four verses follow a ship through a night of thunder and lightning in the Bay of Biscay, the stormy stretch of the Atlantic between Brittany and northern Spain. She springs a leak and the crew cling to the rigging all night. By morning she is breaking up, and then “a sail in sight appears.”

Cherry (1762–1812, of Limerick) and Davy (1763–1824, of Devon) wrote it for Spanish Dollars; or, The Priest of the Parish, a short musical piece staged at Covent Garden in 1805 for the benefit of the tenor Charles Incledon, who was famous for his sea songs.

The song spread quickly. The Bodleian Library alone holds more than fifteen broadside editions, the earliest datable one printed in Liverpool in the early 1820s, and in America the text appeared in 38 songsters between 1807 and 1820. At least one sheet-music edition advertised it as sung by John Braham, the other great English tenor of the day. The tune was well enough known to carry new words: an Irish parody, Paddy’s Wake, begins “Loud howl’d each Irish mourner,” and a later broadside about the wreck of the ship Reform borrowed Cherry’s first line whole. Fiddlers played it too: it is in Joshua Roose’s Manchester tune manuscript of 1850, and Francis O’Neill printed it in The Music of Ireland (1903).

Sailors sang it as a forebitter, not a shanty. Richard Henry Dana, in San Diego in April 1836, went aboard the newly arrived ship California and found two English man-of-war’s men in her crew, and he recorded in Two Years Before the Mast that “I was glad to find that ‘All in the Downs,’ ‘Poor Tom Bowline,’ ‘The Bay of Biscay,’ ‘List, ye Landsmen!’ and all those classical songs of the sea, still held their places.” Herman Melville’s White-Jacket (1850) gives the song to the sheet-anchor men, the oldest seamen of a frigate’s forecastle: “These are the fellows that sing you ‘The Bay of Biscay Oh!’ and ‘Here a sheer hulk lies poor Tom Bowling!’ ‘Cease, rude Boreas, blustering railer!’” (see Rude Boreas).

The song turns up twice in Dickens. In The Pickwick Papers the medical student Jack Hopkins sings “The King, God bless him” to “a novel air, compounded of the ‘Bay of Biscay,’ and ‘A Frog he would,’” and in Dombey and Son the oracular Captain Bunsby, hearing a letter from a friend presumed lost at sea, suddenly bellows “In the Bays of Biscay, O!”, which so affects Captain Cuttle “as an appropriate tribute to departed worth” that he shakes his hand and wipes his eyes.

The text here is from Sea Songs and Ballads. The melody is Davy’s tune as printed in Hamilton’s Universal Tune-Book (Glasgow, 1844). Jerry Bryant sings it on Roast Beef of Old England. Two other sea songs share the title: a Laws ballad (K3) about a ship separated from her consort in a storm, and the ghost ballad The Bay of Biscay.