The ballad of Old Mad Jack

Via Wikipedia

You've probably never heard of John Percival.  You almost certainly know what he did to save this Republic's history.  And therein lies our story.

When I was a wee lad of no more than 20 summers, 2cents and I used to haunt the drunken cellar of Barstan's restaurant in Orono, Maine.  I've come to learn that reader and frequent commenter Libertman was likely a frequent (and possibly drunken - like us) denizen as well.  You see, Barstan's was the first place that I heard the late, great folk trio Schooner Fare.

Imagine the best Irish pub music you've heard.  Now mix it with sea chantys and three part a capella harmony.  Now imagine that you're around twenty years old and that the beer flows freely.  That is what Schooner Fare meant to me.

Chicken Mom (you do read her each day, don't you?) brought these memories to the fore with a post quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes about Old Ironsides:

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar; —
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.

Oliver Wendell Holmes should have picked up a tin whistle and played along with Schooner Fare in the Ballad of Mad Jack Percival. Jack Percival was an American boy growing up in Barnstable, Mass (the Kennedy Compound is there, for those who keep score in modern political to-and-fro).  But that was long before Mad Jack sailed off as a cabin boy.

With just nine months of school he departed the land.
He moved up from cabin boy hand over hand.
Impressed by the English to service the King
as he jumped overboard they could all hear him sing:

He was impressed and sent to serve on H.M.S. Victory, Lord Nelson's own flagship (albeit a few years after Nelson gasped in his last dying breath, "Kiss me, Hardy."  Perhaps this was all for the best for young Jack).  He jumped ship to escape back to America.

Come a Sailor, come a Soldier, come a Captain, a King,
if you dare me to do it, I'll do anything.
I'll take up the fight, I'll even the odds;
I'll do what is right, or I'm not from Cape Cod.
I'm Jack the Cantankerous, just from Cape Cod.

The War of 1812 was hard on America, with the British fleet blockading major ports like New York City.  Percival was part of a nautical response:

In 1813 Jack started to work
on a plan to reopen the port of New York.
When the British blockade had everyone down,
so Mad Jack decided to turn it around.
He borrowed a fisherman's Smack so I'm told,
put goats on the deck and armed men in the hold.
When a Tender of Red Coats they're pulling beside
his men came out shooting as proudly he cried

It was the fishing Smack "Yankee" that he commandeered, capturing the HMS Eagle.  He followed that up by capturing HMS Epevier and HMS Nautilus, not to mention 19 British merchantmen.

Come a Sailor, come a Soldier, come a Captain, a King,
if you dare me to do it, I'll do anything.
I'll take up the fight, I'll even the odds;
I'll do what is right, or I'm not from Cape Cod.
I'm Jack the Cantankerous, just from Cape Cod.

That might be enough for most men.  But in 1841 he saved Old Ironsides - perhaps with a bit of help from Mr. Holmes - from the scrap heap, restoring her to fine sailing trim and then Captaining her around the globe.

Did you hear how Mad Jack saved Old Ironsides, too
from the scrap heap of flagships too old to renew?
At sixty five years he inspected each shroud
and promised the Navy he'd make her stand proud.
He collected the finest ship riggers around
from Boston, New Bedford, and old Portsmouth town.
He rigged her and jigged her and made her stand tall
and then he sailed her around the World once and for all.

Mad Jack began his naval career on the decks of a ship that I have trod upon myself, Lord Nelson's HMS Victory.  He ended his naval career on the decks of a ship that I have also trod upon, the USS Constitution, Old Ironsides herself.  That's some career.  Along the way Nathanial Hawthorne wrote about him, as did Herman Melville and James Michener.

And Schooner Fare (embedding disabled at the request of a publisher who doesn't remotely understand the power of New Media).

Each year the Navy takes Old Ironsides into Boston Harbor, to turn her around.  You see, she weathers differently on each side depending on which is most exposed to the gale.  This care preserves Johnny Percival's hard work.

I encourage everyone to click through to the song.  It sings the story of a young man thrust into a man's seafaring world.  The song of a man who found himself fighting for his country, and then for a ship too important to scrap.  It's the song of young men growing up respecting that tradition.  A song that Chicken Mom brings to the attention of a waiting Republic.

Come a Sailor, come a Soldier, come a Captain, a King,
if you dare me to do it, I'll do anything.
I'll take up the fight, I'll even the odds;
I'll do what is right, or I'm not from Cape Cod.
I'm Jack the Cantankerous, I'm Jack the Cantankerous,I'm Jack the Cantankerous,just from Cape Cod.