Here Lyes the Body of
James Barnerd Who Departed
This Life the 4 of March 1768
In the 48 Year of his Age
The Boisterous Winds and Neptuns
Waves have Tost me too and Fro
By Gods decree you Plainly See
I am Harbour’d here Below.
In searching for the origins of this nautical verse in Sleepy Hollow, NY, I found multiple instances of a similar though in several ways quite different epitaph in cemeteries from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Providence, Rhode Island; from New London, Connecticut to Boston, Massachusetts; and from Annapolis Maryland to Castletown Mount in Ireland, all between the 1780s and the 18teens. Here it is as carved Captain John Barlow’s stone in Stratford, Connecticut’s Old Congregational Burying Ground:
In Memory of
Capt. JOHN BARLOW
who died May the 4th
1786, in the 37th Year
of his Age
Tho’ Borea’s Blasts and Neptune’s Waves
Have tossed me to and fro
In spite of Death by God’s Decree
I harbor here below.
Where I do now at anchor ride
With many of our Fleet
Yet once again I must make Sail
Our adm’ral Christ to meet.
Its original provenance apparently goes back to the late 1600s, in England. Two different anthologies of English epitaphs in my collection — the anonymous G.D.’s Epitaphs, Ancient and Modern, Serious and Comical, in Prose and in Verse (ca. 1738) and Webb’s New Select Select Collection of Epitaphs (1775) — each record these very lines as the epitaph for one John Dunch of Stepney, who died in 1696. A Google search turns up another instance, in Lancashire in 1692, on the grave of one William, son of James Norris of Liverpool, “reputed to be a sailor washed up in the River Wyre.” I will keep looking for references to the verse in hopes of someday finding its earliest, and original, occurrence.
Note the telling differences between the Norris/Dunch/Barlow version, and James Barnerd’s. Barnerd’s ends with the speaker unambiguously interred. At rest, perhaps, but nonetheless dead and buried, without any reference to Resurrection. The older version completes the verse with a joyful message of meeting Christ. As we often see with hymns, I think there is a good chance that contemporary readers would have known the second verse and so understood the larger, triumphant, context.
More significantly, the first line of the original is straight out of Classical mythology with Boreas (God of the North Wind) and Neptune (Roman God of the Sea). It might be a reference to the storm that a wrathful Neptune unleashed on Aeneas and his men in Book I of The Aeneid. In the Barnerd epitaph, someone has edited the first line to take out the reference to Boreas and replace it with a decidedly Christian allusion to the boisterous winds the Apostles had to endure during Storm on the Sea of Galilee. as recorded in Mathew 14:
28. Peter answered him and said, Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.
29. And he said, Come. And when Peter was come down out of the ship, he walked on the water, to go to Jesus.
30. But when he saw the wind boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink, he cried, saying, Lord, save me.
31. And immediately Jesus stretched forth his hand, and caught him, and said unto him, O thou of little faith, wherefore didst thou doubt?
I love to see such little pieces of evidence of a local hand at work, adapting a traditional text to suit a current need. This, and the pleasure of tracing texts through the centuries, make this project endlessly rewarding for me.
