Structo issue 13

so was the day of the privateer. Sources suggest that Ward came back to England, but not to Kent, to work on the Plymouth sheries. He was pressed into the Royal Navy at the beginning of the 17th century, only to steal a boat with a number of other sailors and break away. He was chosen as captain of this band, apparently through a democratic process, a piratical meritocracy perhaps. The boat crew went on to steal a French ship, sailing to the Mediterranean to acquire an even larger vessel equipped with thirty-two guns, wonderfully rechristened in English as The Gift. In a story that becomes stranger than any ction, a chain of events left Ward stranded in Tunis, having had his request of a royal pardon from James I refused. He ended up a Barbary corsair under the protection of Tunis, and converted to Islam; hence that other name, Yusuf Reis. In 1612 a Renaissance play about his conversion, A Christian Turn’d Turk, was written by the English dramatist Robert Daborne. It ends with our Kentish pirate anti-hero recanting his conversion to Islam and committing suicide (I guess Daborne had to please his Christian punters). Historic sources differ, however, suggesting Ward died in Tunis from the plague, a wealthy man from his piracy, at the ripe age of 70.

‘Captain Ward and the Rainbow’ is number 287 of the Child Ballads, an immense collection of English and Scottish folk songs, as well as American variants, compiled by Francis James Child and published in the second half of the nineteenth century as a 2,500-page work entitled The English and Scottish Ballads. In the ballad, the king sends his ship the Rainbow after Ward, only for the ship to be defeated and taunts sent back to the King proclaiming Ward king of the sea. It’s a great story.

I fantasised about a young Ward working the sheries at Faversham Creek, guiding boats along the Swale. Being here, the thought was irresistible. The true truth didn’t bother me; the story, the folk myth that threaded through the ages, that was much more important. I’d come back to Kent to nd signs of life old and new, evidence of culture and cultures not entirely suburban, of the retail park and the out-of-town Tesco.

The natural coincidences I felt had led me to Ward – connecting to my preoccupations with underground radical music, marginal cultures, and hidden tributaries of history – gave me a real buzz of discovery. I realised I could disassemble the world I knew and try and put it back together in a shape I felt more tting.

I loved how I’d discovered this story by accident through my taste in music, had found this ballad being performed in a mutated form to punks and hippies in a dodgy venue on the Tottenham High Road.

That night at the gig we discussed a few other things; in John Barleycorn 