A boy to me was bound apprenticed Because his parents they were poor. So I took him from St. James' workhouse All for to sail on the Greenland shore. One day this poor boy he did annoy me, Nothing to him then did I say, But I rushed him to my frozen yardarm And I kept him there 'til the very next day. When his eyes and his teeth did hang toward me, With his hands and his feet bowed down likewise, And with a tarry gasket there I killed him Because I wouldn't hear his cries. Now all you sea captains that go out a-navyin', Take a warning example by me, And don't misuse your young apprentice boys, Or else it's hanged you'll surely be.

Source: Transcribed from A. L. Lloyd's recording on *Thar She Blows* (Riverside RLP 12-635, with Ewan MacColl), from an early 19th-century King's Lynn broadsheet ballad

From A. L. Lloyd’s liner notes to Leviathan! Ballads and Songs of the Whaling Trade:

Early in the 19th century a whale skipper was charged in King’s Lynn with the murder of an apprentice. A broadside ballad, in the form of a wordy gallows confession and good night, appeared, and in course of circulating round the East Anglian countryside it got pared down to the bone. The poet George Crabbe was interested in the case, and took it as a model for his verse-narrating of Peter Grimes which subsequently formed the base of Britten’s opera. The opera is in three acts. The same ground is covered in three verses by a song as bleak and keen as a harpoon head.