49. Lord Franklin

Traditional, arranged & adapted by Robbie O’Connell ©Helvic Music 1998, Helvic Music

“Lord Franklin,” also known as “Lady Franklin’s Lament” or “The Sailor’s Dream,” has been around for 175 years. When I was a student in UCD in the early 1970s, I heard a wonderful singer and guitarist called Johnny Norris sing it to the accompaniment of an open tuned guitar, a rarity in Ireland in those days. I had heard A.L. Lloyd’s version before that but it didn’t connect with me like Norris’s version did. Later on, I heard the mesmerizing version by Mícheál Ó Domhnaill and Kevin Burke on their brilliant album, Promenade.

The song had been a favorite of mine for years so, in the late 1990s, when Liam and Dónal Clancy and I were recording an album of sea songs, The Wild & Wasteful Ocean, it was an obvious choice for inclusion. I first came across this melody, in the 1960s, in an alternate version of the 1798 Irish ballad “The Croppy Boy.” A different version of “The Croppy Boy—“Good men and true in this house who dwell”—used an old Irish air, “Cáilín ó Chois tSiúre Mé,”¹ first published as a broadside in Elizabethan times and thought to be the source of Pistol’s remark about, “Caleno custure me” in Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The tune I sing here was also used for several other songs, including the well known barrack room ballad “McCafferty” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from the 1963 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

I could never find out who wrote the lyrics of “Lord Franklin” but it first appeared as a broadsheet ballad around 1850 following several years of public interest in the mysterious disappearance of the famous Franklin expedition in the Arctic. Sir John Franklin set out in 1845 with two ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to search for the Northwest Passage , a theoretical summertime sea lane that linked the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The economic impact of such a discovery would have been enormous. Stan Rogers also wrote one of his best known songs, “The Northwest Passage,” about a similar quest. When Franklin, or any of his crew, failed to return to England, his wife convinced the British Admiralty to send out several rescue missions but they all returned without success. The song is written from the point of view of a sailor dreaming about Lady Franklin’s distress at her husband’s loss

I remember being riveted to a documentary on PBS back in the 1990s unveiling the recent discoveries about what had happened. The two ships were trapped in the Arctic winter ice. They might have survived if their canned provisions had not been contaminated. Inferior quality cans used to provision the ships caused serious lead poisoning which led to mental deterioration and poor decisions. Some of the crew set out over the ice to seek help from the Inuit but even though they made some contact, their mission failed. Bodies retrieved from the ice a century and a half later showed clear evidence of fatal lead poisoning. Amazingly, the well-preserved wreck of HMS Erebus was discovered in 2014, and HMS Terror was found in 2016. I think the song was probably instrumental maintaining public awareness of the whole affair over the years and prevented it from being lost in the mists of history.

Lyrics:

LORD FRANKLIN

Traditional, arranged & adapted by Robbie O’Connell ©Helvic Music 1998²

It was homeward bound one night on the deep
Lying in my hammock I fell asleep
I dreamed a dream, and I thought it true
Concerning Franklin and his gallant crew

With a hundred seamen he sailed away
For the frozen ocean in the month of May
To seek that passage around the pole
Where we poor sailors sometimes must go

Through cruel hardships they mainly strove
Their ship on mountains of ice was drove
Where the Eskimo with his skin canoe
Was the only one that ever came through

In Baffin Bay where the whale fish blow
The fate of Franklin no man may know
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Or Lord Franklin with his sailors they dwell

And now my burden it gives me pain
For long-lost Franklin I’d cross the main
Ten thousand pounds would I freely give
To say on earth that Franklin do live.

1. “I am a girl from the banks of the Suir”. The Suir (Abhainn na Siúire) is one of the big rivers in Munster and rises in North Tipperary, flows through Carrick-on-Suir and empties into the Celtic Sea between Dunmore East in Waterford and Hook Head in Wexford. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Suir

2. PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Robbie O’Connell: Vocal and guitar
Liam Clancy: Concertina
Donal Clancy: Whistle
James Blennerhassett: Bass
Engineered & Mixed: Bruno Staehelin
Produced: Liam Clancy, Robbie O’Connell & Donal Clancy
Mastered: Laurent Baraton & Bruno Staehelin