Three Ships... Poem by David Lewis Paget

Sebastian Cabot returned from Spain,
To delight in England's shores,
He needed a route to old Cathay
To trade his wool for furs,
The Straits were held by the Spanish Dons
The Cape by the Portuguese,
Between them, strangling English trade,
He championed English needs.

So he formed the Merchant Adventurers,
To seek out a north-east route,
Each man hand-picked for his diligence
And conformity, to suit;
They had to be 'knit in unitie,
Obedience in everie degree',
So that no dissent would afflict them when
At mercy of tides and sea.

He chose three sturdy sailing ships
To seek the fabled course,
That would take them over the top of the world
Where man hadn't been before,
The Bona Confidentia
Was a ship of ninety tons,
Carrying victuals to serve the crews
For a voyage of fifteen months.

The Edward Bonaventura carried
The pilot of the fleet,
The seadog, Richard Chancellor,
A seaman, most complete.
But then, the Bona Speranza carried
The leader of the three,
A soldier with no ocean skills,
Sir Hugh - Hugh Willoughby.

They sailed at last by Greenwich there,
By Good King Hen-ery,
He bid them well, and weather fair
As they headed toward the sea,
But the winds blew up, and the seas were rough
And they sheltered for forty days,
Along the English coastline that
Was hidden in mist and haze.

They sailed past Scandinavia
Toward the Lapland coast,
So close that they could hail each other
To save one being lost,
But by the Lofotan Islands there
The wind it howled, forlorn,
And Willoughby failed to trim his sails,
So ran before the storm.

The other two fell far behind
Lost to each other's sight,
The seas hurled furious waves to
Batter the ships all through the night,
But when the storm had spent its force
And the sun rose, grey at the dawn,
Willoughby found the victuals ship
But Chancellor had gone.

The two remaining ships stayed close,
They crossed the Barents Sea,
They reached Novaya Zemlya then
Turned back, in misery,
The ice was just beginning to form
On yard and deck, and sail,
They headed back to find Murmansk
But ice lay on the rail.

By the cold Arzina River mouth
The ships were locked in the ice,
With never a human soul to see
In a million miles of white,
The seamen hung on the frosted rail
And searched while their eyes could see,
Then went below as the cold and snow
Closed in on their purgatory.

Willoughby sat at his cabin desk
And wrote in his diary,
'The land lay not as the globe was made,
I should never have put to sea.
The world up here is like frozen glass
And it streams from the yards and sails,
'Til the ship turns white, and disappears,
Into the landscape pales.

For months they fed on the victuals there,
Burnt sea-coal to warm their bones,
The sailors fell in a stupor, lay
In their bunks, or thought of home,
But the ice, it cracked, and the ship, it creaked
As the pressure built up outside,
And many a man was crazed, and ran
In search of the countryside.

And so they died there, one by one,
From fear, from cold, alas;
While Willoughby sat at his desk so still,
His diary frozen like glass,
It lay on the table, its final remark
Was to puzzle men, three years on,
With the ships of frozen statues found
Where they'd dropped and died, to a man.

The entry stood out stark and bare
With his frozen pen at his side,
As if he'd been trying to tell the world
How the last of his seamen died,
'There were strange beastes, to us unknowen,
And wonderful to be seen,
Prowled round the ship in the midnite gloome,
Dear God - I have locked me in! '

2 November 2008