Sometime in the early 1840s the Rev. John Broadwood (1798 - 1864) of Lyne in Surrey (near Chertsey) asked an organist, Mr George Dusart of Worthing, to write arrangements for 16 songs he had learned by ear from country folk during his childhood in Sussex. On their anonymous publication in 1843 as "Old English Songs" they became the first collection of English traditional folk songs to appear in print. Among them was "The Privateer".
   A feature of "Old English Songs" was John Broadwood's insistence that the tunes were to be accurately reproduced, as were their words, with just a few minor changes "to render the sense intelligible". According to the music critic Frank Howes, who wrote a preface to the centenary edition of "Old English Songs", Dusart once protested against a flattened seventh in one of the tunes. Broadwood responded "by violent blasts on the flute and replied, 'Musically it may be wrong, but I will have it exactly as my singers sang it'". Broadwood evidently loved the songs; his stated aim in publishing them was "to rescue them from oblivion and to afford a specimen of genuine Old English Melody".
   Howes found that the tunes defied conventional music analysis. "The Privateer" was especially tricky to define, "so queer ... an instance of the Near Eastern scale, in fact, occurring in English folk-song".
   The song dates quite specifically to a time when Britain was at war with both France and Spain, which places it either during the War of the First Coalition of 1796 to 1802, or the Peninsular War of 1804 to 1808.
   The first line of Broadwood's song is rather obscure, but for a boat to be "on the drift" presumably means that it is untied and someone is holding on to the mooring ring to keep it close to the quay. The young man joining the privateer, which is already under way (Broadwood had "under weigh", as in "weighing anchor"), is about to step into the boat taking him aboard.