The Antelope Puts to Sea
During the American Revolutionary War, the British Crown issued letters of marque to private ship owners, authorizing them to attack and capture enemy merchant vessels. These “privateers” were essentially legalized pirates — if successful, they kept a share of the captured cargo as prize. Halifax, founded in 1749 and named after George Dunk, Earl of Halifax, was ideally positioned for such ventures. The harbour the Mi’kmaq called K’jipuktuk (“Great Harbour”) served as a major British naval base, and many Nova Scotian fishermen saw privateering as a path to quick fortune.
Stan Rogers‘s Barrett's Privateers (1976) captures this world through the tale of the fictional Captain Elcid Barrett, who recruits “twenty brave men, all fishermen” to crew the Antelope — a vessel so decrepit it “scarce could stand.” The song opens in 1778: “a letter of marque came from the king,” and “on the king’s birthday we put to sea.” June 4 was the official birthday of King George III, making it a fitting date for loyal subjects to embark on Crown-sanctioned plunder.
The voyage ends in disaster. After a failed attack on an American privateer, the surviving crew limps back to Nova Scotia, broken and maimed. The narrator spends his remaining years as “a broken man on a Halifax pier, the last of Barrett’s Privateers.” The song became Rogers’s most famous work and an unofficial anthem of Atlantic Canada.