John Masefield had the King Louis bit, for the first time in print as far as I can tell, in his _Sailor's Garland_. Masefield's chanty texts were rather fanciful; though we can't say that he did or did not pen that verse, he did create or tweak many verses according to his ideas about the chanty genre.

The verse then appears in Whall's 1910/1913 collection. In the start of the collection, Whall acknowledges having read Masefield. I have clear evidence that Whall, though a former sea captain, did also borrow lyrics from *books* he read — though I can't say one way or the other if that was the case here.

Then we have Terry's _The Shanty Book_ (1921) in which he praises Whall's work, and surely he read Masefield. Perhaps the combination of reading both of those gave him the feeling he could say that the King Louis verse never seemed to have been omitted. Of course, others will argue that Terry's mom's dad was a sailor and uncles, too, and he grew up in Newcastles, etc., so he was sitting there hearing chanties all day and he really did hear "Haul Away Joe" sung a lot… and the verse was "never omitted." I don't buy it.

On the other hand, Terry contributes the verse about mouldy lips, which would seem a more likely candidate IMO as something he heard IRL.

Both the "King Louis" and "lips" verses are completely plausible as "traditional" verses. But the fact that we see them more than one place - given the places we do actually see them - should not give the impression that they were standard or even necessarily common.

These three print sources are all by editors who were not rigorous in their presentations - who synthesized rather than documented. If, in the original documented sources like journals and travelogues we had these verses (I am not finding them), then we could call them more standard. But they're not there, and so they have the particular ring of the mediated / xerox'd stream of chanty practice.

The Clancy's, GUEST,Ryan, went on to create their Revival rendition from Terry's book (or from someone else who did the same), and so they propagated a cookie-cutter form.

In this light, Leadbelly's lines are in no way unusual or lacking anything.