Dimensions 360 x 250 mm. Single leaf broadside, edges uncut. Printed in four columns. With three woodcut vignettes. Old central vertical fold. A trifle creased and marked.

A rare survival of a broadside ballad in which the captain of a ship bound for India discovers on board the young servant girl whom he had pledged to wed but then abandoned. He finds that she is carrying his child and, though at first angered by her 'betrayal', agrees to marry. However, 'fortune to them proves unkind' and a storm descends upon them, sweeping the maiden into the sea. When the captain finds her body 'floating on the main' two days later, he casts himself overboard to 'share the same fate'.

The publishing house of John Pitts (1765-1844) was responsible for a prodigious output of cheap, popular printing in the first half of the nineteenth-century.

COPAC records copies at just two locations (BL and Hull); OCLC adds two further (Adelaide and Toronto).