Had an old copy of this still pretty and touching, but much disordered, ballad been saved, we should perhaps have had a story like this. Bonnie Annie, having stolen her father's gold and her mother's fee, and fled with her paramour (like the maid in No 4), the ship in which she is sailing encounters a storm and cannot get on. Annie is seized with the pangs of travail, and deplores the absence of women (B 6, 7, A 9, 10; compare No 15, 21-26). The sailors say there is somebody on board who is marked for death, or flying from a just doom. They cast lots, and the lot falls on Annie, — a result which strikes us as having more semblance of the "corrupted currents of this world" than of a pure judgment of God. Annie, conscious only of her own guilt, asks to be thrown overboard. Her paramour offers great sums to the crew to save her, but their efforts prove useless, and Annie again begs, or they now insist, that she shall be cast into the sea with her babe. This done, the ship is able to sail on; Annie floats to shore and is buried there.
The captain of the ship is the guilty man in A, in B a rich squire. A may exhibit the original plot, but it is just as likely that the captain was substituted for a passenger, under the influence of another ballad, in which there is no Annie, but a ship-master stained with many crimes, whom the lot points out as endangering or obstructing the vessel. See 'Brown Robyn's Confession,' further on.
If the narrative in Jonah, i, is the ultimate source of this and similar stories, it must be owned that the tradition has maintained its principal traits in this ballad remarkably well. Jonah flies from the presence of the Lord in a ship; the ship is overtaken by a tempest;[foot-note] the sailors cast lots to know who is the guilty cause, and the lot falls on Jonah; he bids the sailors take him up and cast him into the sea; nevertheless the men row hard to bring the ship to land, but cannot succeed; they throw Jonah into the water, and the storm ceases.[foot-note]
Translated in Grundtvig's Engelske og skotske Folkeviser, p. 199, No 31.
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