The Happy ship carpenter

This seventeenth-century text is by Laurence Price (1628-80?) (Dugaw, letter). It appears virtually as Coverly printed it on a mid-eighteenth-century ballad sheet in the Madden Collection titled “The Bristol Bridegroom; or, The Ship-Carpenter’s Love to the Merchant’s Daughter.” It was also printed later on slip sheets and broadsides. Coverly had two columns of this song set up, and found that the whole ballad would not fit the sheet. Rather than cut lines, he simply dropped the type size for the third column.

“The Happy Ship Carpenter” is a “female warrior” ballad (Dugaw, “Female Warrior,” and Warrior Women 1989). Carleton Sprague Smith reproduced The Happy Ship-Carpenter (1775), citing an early British copy of this text in the Pepys Collection (The Young Seaman’s Misfortune 4:224) that names its tune as “The Spinning Wheel” (Lambert 1:325). While the first line is the same, the remaining lines are quite different. It is not the same song and thus not an appropriate tune match.

In an Indiana University ballad listserv, Steve Gardham traced the paring down of this ballad over three centuries of publication (Dungbeetle 22-23; Roud). The text appeared in one songster in 1794 (R. Keller, Early American Songsters).