Patrick O'Neal

A longer version of this text from the 1790s was printed by J. Pitts (Madden Collection 3:60 #63; Garland). It is titled “Patrick O’Neal; or, The Irishman’s Description of a Man of War” and has twelve verses. From the differences between this broadside version of eight verses (omitting verses 1, 4, 7, and 10) and the Pitts version printed in the Baltimore Musical Miscellany, it is clear that the text was not fixed—several versions with fairly significant changes of phrase were circulating.

The text is an Irish version of the “Yankee Doodle” conceit of the country rustic who is pressed into the crew of a ship of the Royal Navy and does not recognize the naval equipment he sees. Appearing in twenty-two songsters between 1797 and 1820 and printed in a number of them with the first verse beginning “O Ye Sons of Hibernia,” the song survived in oral tradition (Roud; R. Keller, Early American Songsters).