I Saw Three Ships: A Song History
"I Saw Three Ships" is an English Christmas carol, number 700 in the Roud Folk Song Index.[1][2] The reference works consulted here all date its first appearance in print to 1666, in John Forbes's Cantus, a song collection printed in Aberdeen; the Ballad Index identifies it as a "sunny bank" form of the carol, and the Toronto Representative Poetry Online edition and the New Oxford Book of Carols (as reported on the Hymns and Carols of Christmas site) both point to the same book's second edition.[1][3][4] Ritson the antiquary later quoted Christmas lines tied to that Aberdeen collection in which a single ship arrives with Saint Michael at the helm, and in 1868 William Henry Husk suggested that this might be where the carol's ships came from.[1][4] By the early nineteenth century the song was circulating on cheap printed sheets: the Bodleian Library holds a copy of "The Sunny Bank" issued by T. Bloomer of Birmingham between 1821 and 1827.[1] William Sandys printed the now-familiar text in his Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern (London, 1833), and Hymnary.org cites that book as the source of the text in The Cyber Hymnal; Sandys himself noted a closely similar broadside.[3][5][4]
Jan van de Cappelle, A State Yacht and Other Craft in Calm Water, oil on wood, ca. 1660. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its ships; it has no connection to the carol.
The carol lived on in oral tradition in many shapes. Husk found it, in varying forms, among most of the printed carol sheets of his day, including a "Sunny Bank" form said to come from Warwickshire or Staffordshire and a Kentish one sung under a sycamore tree, and Cecil Sharp's English Folk-Carols (1911) printed versions associated with Wootton-under-Edge and Shipston-on-Stour.[4] The Ballad Index records it from England, Wales and Ireland and, across the Atlantic, from the Appalachians and elsewhere in the United States; it also appeared in The Oxford Book of Carols (1928).[1][4] Peter Kennedy recorded the Cornish miner Jan Thomas of Camborne singing a family version in 1956, and the singer Jean Ritchie, who printed it in her Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, recorded it in 1959 for Carols of All Seasons, remembering her sister Patty singing it while doing chores and guessing that Patty had picked it up at the Pine Mountain Settlement School.[2][1]
The obvious puzzle is geographical: Bethlehem is an inland town, far from any water a ship could navigate.[1] Several explanations have been offered, none of them proven. Ian Bradley, in The Penguin Book of Carols, suggests the three ships were carrying the Magi or their relics, and the booklet notes to a Peter Kennedy anthology, quoted on Mainly Norfolk, read a version Sabine Baring-Gould took down from a Humber boatman, in which the ships carry three crowns from Bethlehem toward the Rhine, as a reference to the skulls of the Magi given to Cologne Cathedral.[1][2] David C. Fowler, in The Bible in Middle English Literature (1984), thought it likely instead that the song first told of Mary Magdalene's legendary sea voyage to Marseille, while the Ballad Index's editor guesses that three may simply be a lucky or Trinitarian number, and that English singers, for whom the sea was never far off, assumed Bethlehem had one too.[1]
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