On a hill in Bristol there’s a slender tower. I was taken there on a day out when I was a kid. I remember climbing what seemed like hundreds of steps to the top and there the distances to strange and exotic sounding places across the oceans of the world were engraved in a bronze plate.

The tower was built to commemorate John Cabot, actually he was Italian so his name was really Giovanni Caboto and in 1497 he hauled up anchor and - all ‘Ship-shape and Bristol fashion’, he set sail in his small wooden ship The Mathew; down the river Avon to the Bristol channel and out across the Atlantic Ocean.

“to seeke out, discover and finde whatsoever isles countries, regions or provinces might lie beyond.

and he found an island, which, as he put it
“before this time have been unknown to all Christians” and he decided to call the island New Found Land, because he found it and, to him at least, it was new.

And along with the island of Newfoundland land he discovered the biggest supply of cod in the known universe.

So in just one epic voyage our Giovanni, the original Cap’n Birdseye, became the Codfather of such incredible cod products as Wizard Spray deodorizer, Templeton’s RAZ-MAH, Dodd’s Dyspepsia tablets, Scoot Foot Cream, Brick’s Tasteless tonic and Castoria which, for 86 years was the most trusted name in household laxatives.

In 1997 to mark the 450th anniversary of his voyage, they built a replica of the Matthew and in May they set off down the river under the suspension bridge left at Avonmouth and out across the Atlantic to Newfoundland.

Coincidentally, 1997 saw another reminder of Bristol’s seafaring history when,
further down the Bristol channel, at the bottom of the cliffs at Rapparee Cove, near Ilfracombe, Devon, February storms washed free the bones, some still in iron manacles, of African slaves who were buried in a massed grave after the ship The London that was carrying them to Bristol was dashed onto the rocks in a storm some 200 years before.

Bristol built its wealth on the back of what was called the Triangle trade. The Triangle Trade ships sailed from Bristol to West Africa where they traded their cargoes for slaves. Next came the infamous middle passage, the second side of the triangle, to the islands of the Caribbean and the coast of north America where the slaves were sold to the plantation owners for the money which bought cargoes of sugar, tobacco and cotton, grown using slave labour, which were then carried back to .....Bristol.

And Bristol also produced its share of pirates, perhaps the most famous was Edward Teach better known to you, me hearties as Blackbeard, the scourge of the Carribbean. Life as a pirate wasn’t really any more dangerous than serving in the navy in those days, but the pay was better.

This song is a stark and brutal confession of slave trading and piracy, concluding with a warning from the condemned cell. Given to me by Tim Laycock.