Welsh Journals

Buccaneers. By E. Roland Williams. Spanish waters, Spanish waters, you are ringing in my ears, Like a slow sweet puce of music from the grey forgotten years." I HAVE written before about some of the Welshmen whose destinies were joined with the romance and adventure of the early buccaneering voyages. There has survived at least one Welsh ballad which enables us to see another small group of these adventur rs in their habit as they lived." In many ways the ballad is unique in Welsh literature. For, with the exception of the Odes of Tomas Pns, tnat literature is strangely silent about a move- ment which was no inconsiderable factor in the complex of Welsh social life and activities under the Tudor Queen. This reticence of the bards is difficult to explain and even to comprehend quite. Shakespeare is redolent of adventure and sea- faring at every turn how natural and typical of the times, for instance, is Romeo's outburst about Juliet Yet wert thou as far, As that vast shore washed by the furthest sea, I would adventure for such nierehandise." Like so much else in Shakespeare and in the writings of his chief contemporaries, it is the subconscious expression of something which was a part of the very air this generation breathed. Yet, although two of the leading figures in Welsh literature during the latter part of the sixteenth century, Tomas Prys and William Middleton, were themselves gentlemen adven- turers of considerable note, and although Middle- ton's pioneer translation of the Psalms into Welsh cynghanedd verse was actually composed while the author was cruising off the West Indies, the literature of the period at large bears but the slightest impress of what was going on in the background and outside Wales. This, too, al- though there were not a few living in Wales who followed the fortunes of the seafarers with an interest as lively as that of Master Richard Hakluyt himself such a one must have been William Earle, Constable of Cardigan, who, in 1580, wrote to Edward Cornwall stating his intention to pay the latter a visit in order to talk with him about Drake's circuityon of the world." This ballad, then, The Ballad of Lieutenant Peilyn," has attached to it a rare literary and historical interest, being the story of a pack of Welshmen* who went in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and at her command to the West India to be avenged upon and to despoil the Spaniards." "bagad o GynlTu," — John MASEFIELD. It is a full voiced expression, in colloquial Welsh, of something of the romance and stir of the times. It was composed during the earlier part of Somers and Preston's voyage to the Indies in 1595 (the date in the manuscript in the White Book of Mechell is wrongly given as 1570), and it is just such a recital as that which won the heart of Desdemona. For, like Othello, the Welsh balladist too had a tale to tell,- of lantres vast and deserts idle, Of stirring episodes by flood and field, Of hairbreadth 'scapes in the imminent deadly breach." Even the cannibals that do each other eat find a place of honour in it And the story is told in the breezy swaggering largissimo style so beloved by a generation which, in England at least, had caught the taste for such a style of narration from Marlow's Tamburlaine." More important still, from the point of view of the historian, step by step with the ballad there is available a confirmation of the same events in an account of the same voyage written bv an Englishman, Robert Davie-an account which found its way into the hands of Hakluyt, by whom it was published in the Principal' Naviga- tions. The ballad opens with the bard pacing the shore of the West India," overcome with long- ing for his native land. On looking up, he espies a pelican perched on a tree above his head, and bathed in the blood that flowed from its own breast. Here was just the messenger to take the bard's greeting to Britain-" over seven thousand miles of sea and stream, on a bare course by dead reckoning, due east So the obliging pelican is bidden go to the Queen at the Court, and relate to her and to famed Sir Roger Williams, that knight beyond compare," the adventures that had befallen himself and his compatriots during the voyage. Her Majesty was to be told that all the Welshmen belonging to the expedition were well, although a third part of the English have died, been killed, or have turned faint." He then proceeds to give parti- culars of his fellow-countrymen Captain Billings, that fierce Hector, is our chieftain on land mid the perils of every fray, you'll find him foremost. Captain Roberts is the second to venture boldly like Jason or like great-headed Theseus beating down the foe Hugh Middleton in every place spares no pains to do his utmost and the two lieutenants in every fray, Salisbury and Peilvn Robert Billings 'and Sergeant Hughes -they'll make no truce with the black-faced foe. Will Thomas, William Jones, and Hugh — that's the lot of us Welshmen. Tell the Queen." continues the balladist, warming to his narration, that we have not as yet come to a single place -country, town, or trim island, but that we have been victorious in every chase, wherever her Grace's enemies were. First of all off the coast