Paul Jones's victory

This broadside text sounds remarkably like other graphic sea battle songs of the War of 1812 period. From the many variant texts that appeared in England and America in the early nineteenth century there must have been a new song about John Paul Jones’s victory over HMS Serapis in 1779 circulating among street singers. The language and irregularities in the metric flow suggest that this ballad was written in the popular idiom. The versions on this broadside and White’s other broadside of the same title are the earliest in print and may be close to the original text.

They are nearly identical in layout, illustrations, and paper to Captain Hull’s Victory, and thus were probably printed after August 1812 by Joseph White. Even though the broadside looks almost the same, this version of the text is from quite a different source, with significant changes in words and word order, even with omitted and added verses. A somewhat improved variant of the same text appears in An Interesting Life, Travels, Voyages . . . John Paul Jones (1809; 34-35). Coverly’s later version on the sheet added to the Thomas collection is identical to White’s thirteen-verse version with the grammatical error “if we can’t do no better boys” corrected.

No period tune with this title can be found. This is odd, given the wide popularity of the text. In the 1812-14 period, a dozen or more songs were published either “to the tune of Paul Jones’s Victory” or most likely set to the tune, which suggests a recently popular fad.