Hand-coloured.; Text in English below image.

A typically rousing loyalist print centring on the virtues and heroism of the British tar. Many similar prints were produced at this time, soon after the recommencement of hostilities with France and in the face of another invasion scare. This image is an adaptation of a long-standing iconography of the sailor ashore, free from the confines and disciplinary routine of the ship and ready to revel. Here, however, his energies are directed not to debauchery, as was the stereotypical image of the lower-deck sailor, but to defending British shores against the French. Thus on his hatband he sports the motto ‘Nelson for ever’, which also points to the supposed popularity of Nelson among the lower deck, and the verse caption resembles the numerous popular songs and ballads by Charles Dibdin and others on similar themes that were being performed nightly at the London theatres.

This image of the tar is a far cry from the mutinous figure that had shaken the nation only five years earlier in the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore, and he himself probably owes something to the theatrical incarnation of the tar at this time: his given name in the verse, ‘Ben Block’, is typical of the figures that populated so many comedies and afterpieces of the period.