The Turkish Navy Quadrilles

 Mavi Boncuk | 

THE TURKISH NAVY QUADRILLES[1] . Sheet music cover (with music arranged by Stephen Clover)[2], showing the Turkish Fleet just outside a Turkish city after a drawing by Augustus Butler (1817-1863).[3]

Published by Clover, S.

Printer: Stannard and Dixon[*], London ca 1860, 1860

[*] Thomas William Stannard and Francis Dixon

[1] The quadrille is a dance that was fashionable in late 18th- and 19th-century Europe and its colonies. The quadrille consists of a chain of four to six contredanses, courtly versions of English country dances that had been taken up at the court of Louis XIV and spread across Europe.

[2] Stephen Glover (1812/13–1870), was a composer and teacher.

Glover was brother to Charles William Glover. He was born in London in 1812 or 1813, and became a popular composer of songs, ballads, and duets. The Monks of Old (1842), What are the Wild Waves Saying (1850), Excelsior, and Songs from the Holy Scriptures illustrate the range and taste of the fourteen or fifteen hundred compositions Glover presented to the public from 1847 until his death, on 7 December 1870, at the age of 57.

[3] Also known for numerous views, military scenes, music covers and title-pages, etc., as well as the illustrations to Victor Hugo, “The hunchback or bell-ringer of Notre Dame” 1840.

The "Arethusa" of the title is a frigate of the Royal Navy, named HMS Arethusa, which was originally built in 1757 as a French privateer under the name Pélerine, renamed Aréthuse in early 1758 when purchased for the French Navy, from whom she was captured in 1759. According to Greek mythology, the nymph Arethusa, for whom the ship was named, was transformed by Artemis into a fountain. The song chronicles an engagement in the English Channel on 17 June 1778 between the Arethusa and the French frigate, Belle Poule.

It opens

Come all ye jolly sailors bold
Whose hearts are cast in honour's mould
While English glory I unfold
Hurrah for the Arethusa
She is a frigate tight and brave
As ever stemmed the dashing wave
Her men are staunch to their favorite launch
And when the foe shall meet our fire
Sooner than strike we'll all expire
On board of the Arethusa
'Twas with the spring fleet she went out
The English Channel to cruise about
When four French sail in show so stout
Bore down on the Arethusa

When Sir Henry Wood wrote his Fantasia on British Sea Songs in 1905 a version of this song became the third movement.

"The Girl I left Behind", also known as "The Girl I Left Behind Me", is an English folk song dating back to Elizabethan era. It is said to have been played when soldiers left for war or a naval vessel set sail. According to other sources the song originated in 1758 when English Admirals Hawke and Rodney were observing the French fleet. The first printed text of the song appeared in Dublin in 1791. A popular tune with several variations, "The Girl I Left Behind Me", may have been imported into America around 1650 as 'Brighton Camp', of which a copy dating from around 1796 resides in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Over The Water To Charlie is an old Scottish song written around the 18th century and sung to the tune by the same name.

This popular Jacobite song has been subjected to various alterations by different hands, so that few copies read alike. Inevitably Robert Burns got involved but he didn't write this song per se, as the song predated

Glover, Stephen, "What are the Wild Waves Saying?" (1859). Historic Sheet Music Collection. Paper 25.