Gibb Sahib wrote:

Robert,

Maybe this source was the rationale for the c.1898-1900 date you mentioned earlier?

Carlton Dawe, _The Voyage of the "Pulo Way"_, 1899. Page 83.

I wish I knew. I would have had the date at second-hand, with Doerflinger being my best guess for the source because that's the book that caused me to put the song in the Ballad Index -- but there is no way to reconstruct after twenty-odd years; Doerflinger was among the very first books I indexed. (The "foundation documents" of the Ballad Index, so to speak, were Child, Laws, Randolph, Eddy, and Doerflinger, plus Lomax's Folk Songs of North America, because those were the high-quality collections I had at the time. Maybe one or two others that I don't recall off the top of my head. But those were the early books.)

The other side is, that's a quality citation, so I'm going to put it into the Ballad Index either way. :-) Thank you again.