Around the Wild Cape Horn - Ralph McTell

Around the Wild Cape Horn - Ralph McTell
I was born a lan-boun farm boy
And in New Enland raise
The ripplin' of the wheat fiels
Well they were my oean waves
Each cry and call eah rise and fall
Of the rows aross the corn
We're seaulls swoopin' across the bow
Of a ship I dreamed
I sail around cape Horn
My deck was the dusty farm yard
My mast was the telegraph pole
The wind blown choir in the telephone wire
Was the chord heard in my soul
And it seemed to have been singing
Since the day that I was born
Gonna take a trip on a sailing ship
All the way around the wild Cape Horn
Well I found that ship in Hamburg
Her name was The Peking
Our skipper's name was Captain Jürs
And I'd never met a man like him
He pulled two men out from the sea
By the hair in a raging storm
And he kept that grateful sailing ship
All the way around the wild Cape Horn
Well the cargo weighed five thousand tons
The ship three thousand more
An acre of sail was up aloft
Some seventeen storeys tall
And we had a pig and a scruffy dog
And a turkey fed on corn
And willing hands drive around
All the way around the wild Cape Horn
Well it's four hours on and it's four hours off
You sleep in your wet clothes
The only dry thing on this ship
Is the cargo down below
Eleven thousand miles we sailed
Nigh on one hundred dawns
Thirty-two sails on a heaving ship
Pulling us around the wild Cape Horn
For seventeen days we were becalmed
And then Friday the thirteenth
Sixty eight great ships were lost
In the storm of the century
But we were blue into the Atlantic
On a sun-lit sparkling morn
The turkey got sick so we ate him quick
On the way around the wild Cape Horn
We lost two boys Now on that voyage
They got thrown overboard
Silence from us down below
No one could put in words
Two empty bunks to mark the space
In our young lives to mourn
Towns between all life and death
On the way around the wild Cape Horn
Well she had us sort of hypnotised
No time to catch our breath
If you want to love you alive
Well you have to flirt with death
Sail close to the hardest wind
And treat all risks with scorn
A farm boy and un-yoked team
Ploughed their way around the wild Cape Horn
Mountain waves like avalanches
Crashed upon the decks
The screaming winds snapped ropes and spars
And tried to have us wrecked
But she rose and fell through the foam and the swell
Her sails were ripped and torn
Eight thousand tons tossed like a cork
It made it around the wild Cape Horn
And she had us sort of hypnotised
No time to catch our breath
If you want to love alive
You have to flirt with death
And sail close to the hardest wind
And treat all risks with scorn
A farm boy and un-yoked team
Ploughed their way around the wild Cape Horn
Well a farmer boy and un-yoked team
Ploughed their way around the wild Cape Horn