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