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A Wool Fleet Chorus


Fare you well, you Sydney girls, time for us to go!
The Peter's at the fore truck, and five thousand bales below,
We've a dozen shellbacks forrard, and a skipper hard as nails,
And we're bound for old England and the January sales!

Soon we'll leave the Snares behind, blusterous and strong
Up'll come the Westerlies and hustle her along:
Running like a driven deer through the thundering gales,
Racing under royals for the January Sales!

Old Cape Stiff 'll drop astern, like a blinking dream,
Sleet and snow and crashing seas, fog and ice'll seem,
Snoring through the Tropics with a Trade that never fails,
Nor'ard on a bowline for the January sales!

Then the girls'll get her towrope, and she'll smell the land again,
And she'll reel the knots off steady as a blessed railway train,
Till seventy days from Sydney Heads the Lizard light she hails —
First to the Channel for the January sales!

Notes

From THE RETURN OF THE CUTTY SARK, edited by Cicely Fox Smith, published by Methuen & Co., London, UK, © 1924, p. 24. This poem was also published in FULL SAIL by Houghton Mifflin Co., © 1926, in basically the same form as given here.

"The Snares" is a reference to a group of islands off the southern tip of New Zealand's South Island.

"Cape Stiff" is sailor's slang for Cape Horn.

Barrie Temple (UK) has adapted this poem for singing, as recorded by Salt of the Earth on TOMORROW'S TIDE, © 1998.

The header graphic is from a photograph by Charles Pickering. According to David R. Godine: "In this panoramic view, clippers are moored near the wool warehouses that lined the quay. The wool clipper in the centre of this photograph is the Duke of Sutherland , built in 1865; it was on this ship that the novelist Joseph Conrad served as an ordinary seaman in 1878-79."

Charley Noble and Jim Saville

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