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Sound familiar? Given the story’s similarities to that of the Nightingale, and given its location on the North Rock, it seems most likely that Stan really saw a map of Bermuda shipwrecks, found the history of the Curlew, and transformed it into a song, changing the story and the name of the ship to suit his purpose. The plot changes he made, especially the captain’s death, were most likely for dramatic effect; after all, a shipwreck where two bags of mail are the only casualties is a little anticlimactic. (That is, unless the crew later goes through great hardship to raise the ship, as in his other classic “The Mary Ellen Carter.”) Making the captain the only man who stays behind, and the only man who drowns, increases his heroism and again improves the tale.

Why did he change the ship’s name? It could be quite simply that the song required three syllables. It’s also true that the nightingale is a more graceful and beloved bird than the homely curlew. Finally, there was a ship called Nightingale, which sank in the Atlantic in 1893—famous enough for Rogers to have heard of her, but not close enough to Bermuda to be on a map of the island.

In her 42 years at sea, the Nightingale was a tea clipper, a slave ship, a general merchant vessel, an Arctic explorer, and (yes) a collier, supplying coal to Union Army and Navy installations in the Civil War. The Nightingale was also notable for having a beautiful carved figurehead of Jenny Lind, the opera singer, who was known as “The Swedish Nightingale.” I suspect Stan had read about this famous ship, and borrowed her name to give his story a greater sense of familiarity.

(Stan could not have known this, but the Nightingale’s story wasn’t over.  About fifteen years after his song came out, the Nightingale’s figurehead, which had been removed from the ship in Norway in 1885, turned up in a barn in Sweden. This is an amazing coincidence, since it was a statue of a Swedish woman, but carved in New England for an American ship.)

“Clipper Ship Nightingale Getting Under Weigh Off the Battery, New York.”
Published by N. Currier in 1854.

“Good People All Both Great and Small”:
Traditional Ballads and “The Flowers of Bermuda”

Starting with the story of the Curlew and adding details from the Nightingale, Stan Rogers set about fashioning a song. In writing “The Flowers of Bermuda,” he drew on a rich Canadian tradition of maritime disaster ballads. Local shipwreck ballads were very common in the Atlantic Provinces; for example, you can hear field recordings and read the texts of about three dozen Newfoundland shipwreck ballads collected by MacEdward Leach at this link. (The site has no search function, but each link on this landing page should take you to a song mentioning a shipwreck.)

Although Rogers himself was born and raised in Ontario, his parents were from Atlantic Canada, and traditional songs from Nova Scotia and Newfoundland appear on many of his recordings. Rogers was no doubt familiar with versions of these ballads, and many more, dealing with the hundreds of vessels wrecked off the coasts of Newfoundland and the Maritimes.

But “The Flowers of Bermuda” isn’t a traditional shipwreck ballad, because Rogers didn’t write it that way. To find out why, I listened to Rogers’s close friend, the poet Bill Howell, who was a big influence on his songwriting. In an interview released on the DVD One Warm Line, Howell explained how Rogers used traditional songs in his songwriting. Although the old folksongs as collected by Leach and Helen Creighton (whose books Rogers pored through) were wonderful, Howell said, they were too long and repetitive, which made them sound “arcane” to modern listeners. So according to Howell, Rogers approached traditional songs, as well as period literary works and historical writing, as sources of language, structure, and story, asking one overarching question of the material:

“How can you [satisfy] the requirement of the modern songwriter, which is to find the psychological shorthand that a modern contemporary lyric will give you, but still get the kind of language that will register or reflect the language community of the time? Like the archaisms of the language, for example.”

Mizzen-chains of the U.S.S. Constellation. The captain of the Nightingale must have gotten his foot stuck in this apparatus as the ship rolled. Photo is ©. More Web Leads and used according to the terms of Stock Photo Showcase.

“The Flowers of Bermuda” achieves this balance brilliantly. It successfully reflects the language of its characters, but doesn’t slavishly copy older songs.

Let’s look first at a few examples of the language. The phrase “carry all o’ we” is ungrammatical in modern Standard English, but wouldn’t have been foreign to a nineteenth-century British sea captain; it even survives as a feature of Caribbean creoles today. So too with the phrase “for drowning,” meaning “destined to drown.” Even the inconsistency of conjugation we find in “the boats be smashed/ […] they are stove in through and through” rang true enough to Melville in the 1850s that he had Queequeg say, “ye are going in her, be ye?” Bits of occupational jargon like “hard on her beam-ends” and “tangled in the mizzen-chains” complete the feeling that the song could have been written by a nineteenth-century sailor.

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