More Bab Ballads

“I was barely sixty then,” insists Poll Pineapple, recalling when her eyes were the toast of the Royal Fleet—and how she disguised herself as a sailor to follow the lieutenant she loved.

In W. S. Gilbert’s comic ballads, Portsmouth Bay is home to bumboat women, gunboats and officers with a taste for peppermint drops. Poll wins Lieutenant Belaye’s heart, then faces a voyage after him aboard the Hot Cross Bun—a tiny ship with one gun and a crew so remarkably well-mannered that even their oaths are mild. Gilbert’s nimble rhymes turn romance, respectability and the perils of life at sea into delicious absurdity; elsewhere, ogres debate the merits of eating good children, and a humble page yearns for a noblewoman. Can Poll keep her disguise—and her hopes—afloat among the navy’s gentlest sailors?

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