Sometimes internet gives us the chance to find material that can by used in class when teaching a little part of English history. Here are the lyrics:
Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward, the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye!
Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar,
Thunderclouds rend the air
Baffled our foes stand on the shore,
Follow they will not dare.
Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward, the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye!
Though the waves leap, soft shall ye sleep,
Ocean’s a royal bed
Rocked in the deep, Flora will keep
Watch by your weary head.
Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward, the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye!
Many’s the lad fought on that day
Well the Claymore could wield
When the night came, silently lay
Dead in Culloden’s field.
Speed bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing,
Onward, the sailors cry
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye!
Burned are their homes, exile and death
Scatter the loyal men
Yet e`r the sword cool in the sheath
Charlie will come again!
The origin of this song is to be found on Wikipedia: “The Skye Boat Song” is a Scottish folk song, which can also be played as a waltz, recalling the escape of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) from Uist to the Isle of Skye after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. “Come O’er the Stream Charlie” is a Scottish song whose theme is the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Written well after the events it commemorates, it is not a genuine Jacobite song, as is the case with many others now considered in the “classic canon of Jacobite songs,” most of which were songs “composed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but were passed off as contemporary products of the Jacobite risings.