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The Bonny Ship the “Diamond”

[ Roud 2172 ; Ballad Index FSWB094 ; trad.]

The Bonny Ship the “Diamond” is a song about the West Greenland right whale fishing in the 1820s. Ewan MacColl sang it in 1957 on his and A.L. Lloyd's Riverside album Thar She Blows! (reissued in the 1960s on the Washington label as Whaling Ballads). Lloyd recorded it again in 1967 for his album Leviathan! Ballads and Songs of the Whaling Trade, where he was accompanied by Alf Edwards, English concertina; Dave Swarbrick, fiddle; Martin Carthy, mandolin; and Trevor Lucas and Martyn Wyndham-Read singing chorus. This track was included in the Topic Sampler No. 6, Folk Songs: A Collection of Ballads & Broadsides and on the French compilation Chants de Marins IV: Ballads, Complaintes et Shanties des Matelots Anglais.

A.L. Lloyd commented in the Leviathan! sleeve notes:

Sad events lie behind this most spirited of whaling songs. By the 1820s the relativity milder northern waters were fished clean, and whalemen were having to search in more distant corners of the Arctic, notably round the mighty and bitter Melville Bay in Northwest Greenland. In 1830, a fleet of fifty British whaleships reached the grounds in early June, a month before they expected. But the same winds that had helped them also crowded the Bay with ice floes and locked most of the fleet in, including the Diamond, the Resolution, the Rattler (not Battler) of Leigh (not Montrose), and the Eliza Swan. Twenty fine ships were crushed to splinters and many bold whalermen froze or drowned. The Eliza Swan was among those that got free and brought the sad news home. Our song must have been made only a season or two before that tragedy for the Diamond's maiden voyage was only in 1825. One wonders if the man who made the song was up in Melville Bay, the year of the disaster, and whether he was lost with his ship.

The Watersons sang The Bonny Ship the “Diamond” in 1965 in their BBC TV documentary, Travelling for a Living:

Lyrics

The Diamond is a ship, my lads, for the Davis Strait she's bound,
And the quay it is all garnished with bonny lasses 'round.
Captain Thompson gives the order to sail the ocean wide,
Where the sun it never sets, my lads, no darkness dims the sky.

Chorus (after each verse):

And it's cheer up my lads, let your hearts never fail,
For the bonny ship, the Diamond, goes a-fishing for the whale.

Along the quays of Peterhead, the lasses stand around,
Their shawls all pulled about them and the salt tears running down.
Now don't you weep, my bonny lass, though you be left behind,
For the rose will bloom on Greenland's ice before we change our mind.

Here's health to the Resolution, likewise the Eliza Swan,
Here's a health to the Battler of Montroseand the Diamond, ship of fame.
We wear the trousers of the white, the jackets of the blue,
When we return to Peterhead, we'll have sweethearts anoo

Oh, it'll be bright both day and night when the whaling lads come home,
In a ship that's full of oil, my boys, and money to our name.
We'll make the cradles all to rock and the blankets for to tear,
And every lass in Peterhead sing, “Hushabye, my dear.”

Acknowledgements

The lyrics were copied from the Leviathan! sleeve notes.