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Looking at its structure, though, “The Flowers of Bermuda” isn’t built like a traditional shipwreck ballad. Most Newfoundland shipwreck songs begin with a formulaic “come-all-ye” opening:

Good people all both great and small I hope you will attend
To those few simple verses that I have lately penned
They are concerning dangers that us poor seamen stand
While sailing by those stormy shores on the banks of Newfoundland
— “The Petty Harbour Bait Skiff” (Newfoundland shipwreck song)

Others give a brief summary:

You feeling hearted Christians I pray you will draw near
It’s of a dreadful shipwreck l mean to let you hear
For the loss of the “Atlantic” upon the ocean wave
Where fully seven hundred souls met a deep and a watery grave
— “Loss of the Atlantic” (Newfoundland shipwreck song)

Rogers, on the other hand, gets straight to the guts of the story, beginning to establish the song’s central character while vividly revealing his fate:

He was the Captain of the Nightingale
Twenty-one days from Clyde in coal
He could smell the flowers of Bermuda in the gale
When he died on the North Rock shoal

One tiny poetic detail from this chorus helps make the song feel vivid, poignant, and real: that a man could be close enough to safety to smell flowers on the breeze, yet still drown in the North Atlantic.

Is it accurate – would this really be possible? I’ve been on sailing vessels near tropical islands, and I’ve never been aware of smelling the flowers, but I hadn’t just crossed the ocean. Other literary works I’ve read describe similar experiences. Sailors nearing Guadalcanal in World War II were aware of the smell of vegetation before they sighted land, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s narrator in “Christmas at Sea” describes sailing close to a village near the deadly cliffs that threaten to sink his ship, remarking: “I vow we sniffed the victuals as the vessel went about.” More importantly, it’s exactly the kind of “psychological shorthand” Howell was talking about; accurate or not, it feels real.

The Atlantic sank off the coast of Nova Scotia, and a ballad about her was collected in Newfoundland and the Maritimes. Stan Rogers would certainly have been familiar with the song.

You might think that giving away the captain’s death at the beginning of the song is a mistake from a narrative standpoint; after all, it’s what we would now call a “spoiler.” But Rogers handles that problem by ending the song with a stunning verse whose impact far surpasses the mere fact of the captain’s death. The verse begins with joy and beauty, making us forget the cruel revelation we know is coming, until it’s brought back to us at the halfway point:

Oh, there be flowers in Bermuda.
Beauty lies on every hand,
And there be laughter, ease and drink for every man,
But there is no joy for me;

Then, finishing the verse, Rogers reveals the chilling tableau that, we now know, has haunted his narrator since the song began:

For when we reached the wretched Nightingale
What an awful sight was plain –
The Captain, drowned, was tangled in the mizzen chains,
Smiling bravely beneath the sea.

As you may have gathered, I think “The Flowers of Bermuda” is one of the gems of Stan Rogers’s oeuvre. The world does not necessarily agree; it’s rarely included in lists of his greatest works (although it did make it onto the compilation CD The Very Best of Stan Rogers). It is, however, a song that Stan’s son Nathan Rogers cared about enough to reimagine as an unaccompanied ballad, as documented in this YouTube video:

So, is “The Flowers of Bermuda” one of Stan’s best? I’ll leave that to individual listeners to decide. I will grant that it has some pretty stiff competition, what with “Northwest Passage,” “The Mary Ellen Carter,” “The Jeannie C.,” “White Squall,” “MacDonnell on the Heights,” and even the much-beloved (and much-maligned) “Barrett’s Privateers.” Like all of those songs, it combines the epic struggle of people carving a living out of the earth and sea with attention to the smallest details of life, both painful and sweet: the smell of flowers, the groan of a sinking ship, and the brave smile of a man who died saving his crew.

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