Folklore
A Ballad of the French Fleet
OCTOBER, 1746. Me, Thoieas Pbisce {loquitur). A FLEET with fla^ arrayed Sailed from the port of Brest, And the Admiral's ship displayed The signal, '■ Steer southwest." For this Admiral d'Anville Had sworn by cross and crown To ravage with fire and steel Our helpless Boston…
- Also recorded as
- A Ballad of the Frexch Fleet
These are archival variants — spellings, translations, and former official names. Names people say that no authority granted are filed as claims, not here.
Work
- Type
- folk narrative
- Creator
- Samuel Adams Drake
- Created, as stated
- 1884
The tale
OCTOBER, 1746. Me, Thoieas Pbisce {loquitur). A FLEET with fla^ arrayed Sailed from the port of Brest, And the Admiral's ship displayed The signal, '■ Steer southwest." For this Admiral d'Anville Had sworn by cross and crown To ravage with fire and steel Our helpless Boston town. There were rumors in the street. In the houses there was fear Of the coming of the fleet. And the danger hovering near; 76 NEW-ENGLAND LEGENDS. And while from mouth to mouth Spread the tidings of dismay, I stood in the Old South, Saying humbly, " Let us pray ! *' O Lord ! we would not advise ; But if in thy providence A tempest should arise To drive the French fleet hence, And scatter it far and wide, Or sink it in the sea. We should be satisfied, And thine the glory be." This was the prayer 1 made, For my soul was all on flame ; And even as I prayed, The answering tempest came, — It came with a mightj'- power. Shaking the windows and walls, And tolling the bell in the tower As it tolls at funerals. The fleet it overtook, And the broad sails in the van Like the tents of Cushan shook, Or the curtains of Midian. Down on the reeling decks Crashed the o'erwhelming seas ; Ah ! never were there wrecks So…
- Narrative type
- ballad
- The printing this telling comes from
- Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884) (1884)
- First attestation in print
- Not held. The archive holds the printing above and no evidence of an earlier one, and it does not treat a collection's date as a first printing.
Tellings
A tale told several ways is one record and several tellings. Each is given whole, with its teller named — or recorded as unattributed where the collector left them unnamed, which is itself a fact about the collection.
As printed in Samuel Adams Drake (1884)
Told by unattributed — the collector names no informant · collected by Samuel Adams Drake · 1884
OCTOBER, 1746. Me, Thoieas Pbisce {loquitur). A FLEET with fla^ arrayed Sailed from the port of Brest, And the Admiral's ship displayed The signal, '■ Steer southwest." For this Admiral d'Anville Had sworn by cross and crown To ravage with fire and steel Our helpless Boston town. There were rumors in the street. In the houses there was fear Of the coming of the fleet. And the danger hovering near; 76 NEW-ENGLAND LEGENDS. And while from mouth to mouth Spread the tidings of dismay, I stood in the Old South, Saying humbly, " Let us pray ! *' O Lord ! we would not advise ; But if in thy providence A tempest should arise To drive the French fleet hence, And scatter it far and wide, Or sink it in the sea. We should be satisfied, And thine the glory be." This was the prayer 1 made, For my soul was all on flame ; And even as I prayed, The answering tempest came, — It came with a mightj'- power. Shaking the windows and walls, And tolling the bell in the tower As it tolls at funerals. The fleet it overtook, And the broad sails in the van Like the tents of Cushan shook, Or the curtains of Midian. Down on the reeling decks Crashed the o'erwhelming seas ; Ah ! never were there wrecks So pitiful as these ! Tike a potter's A-essel broke The great ships of the litie ; They were carried away as a smoke. Or sank like lead in the brine. O Lord ! before thy path They vanished, and ceased to be. When thou didst walk in wrath With thine horses through the sea !
Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
Questions this record answers
Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.
In which printing does the archive hold A Ballad of the French Fleet?
Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884) The printing is dated 1884. This is the printing this archive's own telling was lifted from, and the archive can hand over the volume. It is not a claim that the tale was first printed there.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
How many tellings of A Ballad of the French Fleet does the archive hold?
One telling: As printed in Samuel Adams Drake (1884) (unattributed — the collector names no informant). A tale told several ways is one record and several tellings, each given whole with its teller named — or recorded as unattributed where the collector left them unnamed, which is itself a fact about the collection.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
Who collected A Ballad of the French Fleet?
Samuel Adams Drake. The archive records the collector separately from the teller, because who wrote a tale down and who told it are different facts and collapsing them destroys both.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
What does the archive hold for A Ballad of the French Fleet, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of A Ballad of the French Fleet from Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Public domain — published before 1929 (public domain). 7 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to Samuel Adams Drake.
Attested by: Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Public domain — published before 1929.
Related records
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:a-ballad-of-the-french-fleet
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/work/a-ballad-of-the-french-fleet
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/work/a-ballad-of-the-french-fleet.json
- Version
- 2 · last changed 3 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884) — source of record
- License
- Public domain — published before 1929 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- A BALLAD OF THE FRENCH FLEET
- Attribution
- Samuel Adams Drake
- Rights as stated
- Published 1884 and in the public domain in the United States.
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the full text of the collection from its public-domain holding institution | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | segment | split the volume into chapters at its own printed headings; the first occurrence of a heading opens the chapter and later occurrences are the running header, which is discarded | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | corroborate | matched each heading against the book's own table of contents and took the index's spelling as the title; a heading the index does not carry was refused as a caption, a byline, or scanner noise | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | filter | retained the chapters that name a Boston-area place, by the tale's own words | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 5 | normalize | collapsed the scan's line breaks; not one word of the telling was altered, added, or removed | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 6 | withdraw-unattested-setting | The setting recorded on this tale — "Boston and eastern Massachusetts" — is the same string carried by every folklore record in this archive. It is the scope of the collections these tales were drawn from, applied at accession, and not a setting read out of this tale by anyone. It was being served as the source's own wording, which it is not, and on a dozen records the tale printed beside it refuted it. The field is cleared rather than reworded: the archive does not hold a per-tale setting and will not imply one. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 7 | withdraw-unattested-collection-place | The collection place recorded on every telling of this tale — "Boston and eastern Massachusetts" — is the same string carried by every telling in this archive. These tales were compiled from print, not collected from informants in a place, and the field asserted a collection event that did not happen. It is cleared: the teller field already records, correctly, that the collector named no informant, and an absence stated is worth more than a constant that hides it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |