Other black-letter copies are Pepys, IV, 202, No 195; Roxburghe, III, 56; Euing, No 108; British Museum, 112. f. 44 (19). This copy is printed in Halliwell's Early Naval Ballads, p. 59, Bell's Early Ballads, p. 167, Ebsworth's Roxburghe Ballads, VI, 426.
There are Aldermary Churchyard copies, as Roxburghe Ballads, III, 652, 861; Scottish stall-copies, as Greenock, W. Scott, Stirling, M. Randall; English, by Pitts, Seven Dials, one of which is printed in Logan's Pedlar's Pack, p. 1.
A copy in Buchan's Manuscripts, II, 245, is nearly the old broadside; another, II, 417, is the stall-copy. Kinloch, Manuscripts, V, 109, II, 265, has the stall-copy from oral transmission (with Weir for Ward). Rev. S. Baring-Gould has recently taken down this ballad (much changed by tradition) in the west of England.
Captain Ward, a famous rover, wishes to make his peae with the king, and offers thirty ton of gold as "ransom" for himself and his men. The king will not trust a man who has proved false to France and to Spain, and sends the Rainbow, with five hundred men, against Ward. The Rainbow has easy work with Dutch, Spaniards, and French, but her fifty brass pieces have no effect on Ward; though the Rainbow is brass without, he is steel within, 82 (suggested by 'Sir Andrew Barton,' A 271, B 251, 'He is brass within and steel without).' The Rainbow retires, and reports to the king that Ward is too strong to be taken. The king laments that he has lost three captains, any one of whom would have brought Ward in: George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, †1605, Charles Blount, Lord Mount joy, †1606 (both of whom had a part in the defeat of the Armada), and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, †1601.
The Rainbow was the name of one of Drake's four ships in his expedition against Cadiz in 1587. The Rainbow is mentioned very often from 1589; as in The Manuscripts of the Earl Cowper, vol. i, Hist. Manuscripts Commission, XIIth Report, Appendix, Part I; Index in Part III of the same, p. 296.
John Ward, an Englishman of Kent, is said to have commenced 'rover' about 1604, by inducing the crew of a king's ship in which he had some place to turn pirates under his command. His race, though eventful, was, naturally enough, not long. He seems not to be heard of after 1609, in which year Ward and his colleague, Dansekar, are spoken of as the "two late famous pirates." See Mr. Ebsworth's preface to the ballad, VI, 423 ff., founded on Andrew Barker's book about Ward and Dansekar, published in the year last named.
Two other ballad-histories, 'The Seamen's Song of Captain Ward' and 'The Seamen's Song of Dansekar' (i.e. Dansekar and Ward), entered in the Stationers' Registers July 3, 1609, are given by Mr. Ebsworth, VI, 784, 423.
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