Famous Single Poems
ing the rhyme I don’t think you do it justice. You describe it as a rough, unstudied sailor’s jingle, whereas it is a work of art. Some of the lines are tremendous, and the whole poem has a haunting quality that never yet distinguished a mere jingle.”
But the Times was not convinced. It followed Mr. Mason’s letter with the following condescending editorial note:
We have received several other letters in which the authorship of the lines is credited to Mr. Allison, who is a resident of Louisville, Ky., and the editor of the Insurance Field. It is not likely, however, that he wrote the famous old chantey. Our correspondent, “W. L.,” says that he copied the verses from a manuscript written into a book… published in 1843. This book belonged to his grandfather, who died in 1874.
Thereupon Mr. Champion I. Hitchcock, a close friend of Mr. Allison and his associate on the Insurance Field, took up the cudgels and wrote the Times a letter setting forth the history of the inception and development of the poem from the first three-stanza version published as a song in 1891, to the final six-stanza version published in the Rubric in 1901; and pointing out that, no matter how old a scrapbook might be, additions to it could be made at any time, and that this poem had certainly been
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