Guest - See Charlie Baum's posts above of 14 July 2020. The song was written by John Roberts and Frederick McQueen a few days after the tragedy. Roberts had been a crewman on the Pytoria (which seems to be the schooner's correct name) only a week before. The format of their song was as a usual Bahamian rhyming ballad, a term coined by the researcher Peter Siegel. Blind Blake later re-worked it as a calypso for performing at the Royal Victoria Hotel in Nassau, where he was bandleader. He recorded the song in 1934.

The musicologist Samuel Barclay Charters visited the Bahamas in 1958 and luckily was able to make a recording of the original arrangement sung by John Roberts, H. Brown, and Charles Wallace. As Charlie Baum says, you can hear this track on "Vol. 2, Music of the Bahamas" by Folkways Records. It's well worth getting hold of.