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Oh, you may bless your happy lots, all ye who dwell on shore,
For it's little you know of the hardships that we poor seamen bore;
Yes, it's little you know of the hardships that we were forced to stand,
For fourteen days and fifteen nights on the Banks of Newfoundland.
Our ship she sailed through frost and snow from the day we left Quebec,
And if we had not walked about we'd have frozen to the deck;
But we being true-born sailor men as ever ship had manned,
Our captain he doubled our grog each day on the Banks of Newfoundland.
Well, there never was a ship, me boys, that sailed the western waves,
But the billowy seas came a-rolling in and bent them into staves;
Our ship being built of unseasoned wood, it could but little stand,
The hurricane, it met us there on the Banks of Newfoundland.
Well, we fasted for thirteen days and nights, our provisions giving out,
On the morning of the fourteenth day, we cast our lines about;
Well, the lot, it fell on the Captain's son, and thinking relief at hand,
We spared him for another night on the Banks of Newfoundland.
On the morning of the fifteenth day no vessel did appear,
We gave to him another hour to offer up a prayer;
Well, Providence to us proved kind; kept blood from every hand,
For an English vessel hove in sight on the Banks of Newfoundland.
We hoisted aloft our signal; they bore down on us straightaway,
When they saw our pitiful condition, they began to weep and pray;
Five hundred souls we had on board when first we left the land,
There's now alive but seventy-five on the Banks of Newfoundland.
They took us off that ship, me boys; we was more like ghosts than men,
They fed us and they clothed us and brought us back again;
They fed us and they clothed us, and brought us straight to land,
While the billowy waves roll o'er the graves on the Banks of Newfoundland.
This variant was collected by Barry Taylor and published on-line with Taylor's original MIDI file in The Great Canadian Tunebook.
A variant was collected in 1957 from O.J. Abbott of Ontario by Edith Fowke and published in The Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs (1973).
A variant was also arranged and recorded by Margaret Christl and Ian Robb (Barley Grain For Me, trk#12, 1998, Folk-Legacy Records, Sharon, CT).
The YouTube video above features an acapella variant by Travis Hatcher of Labrador and Nova Scotia.
