I Saw Three Ships

Bethlehem sits in the Judean hills at roughly 2,500 feet above sea level. The nearest water is the Dead Sea, about 20 miles away, and it is a salt lake with no outlet. No ship has ever sailed into Bethlehem, and no ship ever could. That flat contradiction between the words and the map is the most interesting thing about this carol, and people have been trying to explain it for a very long time.

The song itself is one of the easiest in the Christmas repertoire. It is a question-and-answer ballad built on one bouncing tune, with two lines of every verse repeating the same phrase about Christmas Day in the morning. Children pick it up on the second verse.

Origins

The earliest known printed version appears in Cantus, Songs and Fancies, a collection issued by the Aberdeen printer John Forbes, in its second edition of 1666. The carol is catalogued as number 700 in the Roud Folk Song Index, the standard reference number for tracing a folk song across its variants.

The version most people sing today comes from Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, published in 1833 by the English lawyer and antiquarian William Sandys. Sandys collected carols that were still being sung in country districts and printed nine verses, with the text linked to oral tradition in the north of England, Derbyshire in particular. Because it circulated by singing rather than printing for most of its life, there is no single authoritative wording and no reliable composition date beyond the seventeenth century.

Close relatives survive under other names. "As I Sat on a Sunny Bank" uses the same structure and the same three ships, and American versions sometimes go by "Sailing In". The verses about bells ringing and souls singing, which many hymnals still print, belong to the longer Sandys text rather than to the four-verse arrangement common in schools.

Meaning & Interpretation

The carol works by interrogation. One verse asks a question, the next answers it, and the answer produces another question. That call-and-response shape is much older than the printed text and shows up across English folk song, which is part of why the words drift so freely between versions.

The cargo is where the drift is widest. Sandys has the Virgin Mary and Christ aboard. Other variants put the Holy Family in the ships, and others still carry the three Wise Men, which lines up neatly with the number three. Some versions do not sail to Bethlehem at all and land the ships instead in a generic holy place. The song has no fixed story, only a fixed rhythm.

How can ships sail into Bethlehem?

They cannot, and the carol has never explained itself. Several theories are offered, none of them proven. One holds that the three ships recall the twelfth-century transfer of relics said to be the bones of the Magi, moved from Milan to Cologne Cathedral in 1164 under Archbishop Rainald of Dassel, with the journey remembered in English tradition as a voyage. A second reads the ships as camels, long nicknamed ships of the desert, carrying the Wise Men across dry country. A third suggests a heraldic source, the arms attributed to King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia, which carried three silver galleys on blue. The simplest reading is that the ships are devotional imagery rather than geography, a medieval singer's picture of holy travellers arriving in state, with no interest at all in whether the harbour exists.

What was in the three ships?

It depends on which version you sing. The 1833 Sandys text says the Virgin Mary and Christ. Other traditional variants carry the Holy Family, and several put the three Wise Men aboard, which explains the number of vessels. Modern hymnals usually follow Sandys.

How old is I Saw Three Ships?

The earliest surviving printing is from 1666, in the second edition of John Forbes's Cantus, so the carol is at least that old and probably older, since it was already circulating as a folk song. The familiar modern wording dates from William Sandys's 1833 collection.

Is the carol about the Three Wise Men?

Some versions clearly are, naming the Wise Men as the passengers, and the Cologne relics theory and the camel theory both assume a Magi connection. Others name Mary and Christ instead. Both readings are traditional, and the carol carries no title or refrain that settles the matter.