This beautiful, narrative poem was first published in 1849 in a volume titled "Poems", just a few years after James Thomas Fields became a partner in a Boston publishing firm. Several of Fields' works reference the sea which may have been due to the fact that his father was a sea captain, although he died when Fields was quite young. After James Thomas Fields' death in 1881 at the age of 63, two of Fields' contemporaries, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, wrote poems in his memory.