On the evening of January 6, 1839, the worst storm in 300 years swept the coast of Ireland and Great Britain. Losses totaled upwards of 300 deaths, with nearly fifty wrecked ships. Known as the Night of the Big Wind, this North Atlantic nightmare was also part inspiration for a nautical ballad by America’s most famous poet of the day, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Better known for such works as “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his narrative poem “The Wreck of the Hesperus” likely borrowed from two events. The first was The Night of the Big Wind, which also caused a deadly blizzard in the northeastern United States. The second was a real maritime disaster involving a schooner called Favorite. During the U.S. blizzard, she wrecked off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, drowning all aboard. One woman reportedly floated to shore still tied to the ship’s mast.
Norman’s Woe
The wreck of Favorite occurred off a rocky reef on the Gloucester coast known as Norman’s Woe. That reef is a real nautical hazard, but the vessel name Hesperus was actually borrowed from another ship lost near Boston. Despite its creative license, “The Wreck of the Hesperus” remains one of Longfellow’s most enduring poems.
First published in 1842 in Ballads and Other Poems, this cautionary tale of seafaring hubris was so popular that it received additional printings in illustrated book form, most notably the 1889 version published by E.P. Dutton & Company. Below is the original verse with a few of the illustrations from that edition.
You can also listen to the audio version below.
“The Wreck of the Hesperus,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Read by Jason Mills. Recording courtesy of LibriVox (public domain).
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The Wreck of the Hesperus
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Illustrations by H. Winthrop Pierce, Edmund H. Garrett, J.D. Woodward, W.F. Halsall, W.L. Taylor, A. Buhler, H.P. Barnes, A.J. Lewis. Drawn and engraved under the supervision of George T. Andrew.
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughtèr,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.
Then up and spake an old Sailòr,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
“I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
“Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!”
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable’s length.
“Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow.”
He wrapped her warm in his seaman’s coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
“O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
Oh say, what may it be?”
“‘T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!” —
And he steered for the open sea.
“O father! I hear the sound of guns,
Oh say, what may it be?”
“Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!”
“O father! I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?”
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That savèd she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow’rds the reef of Norman’s Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe!
