Let's go back in time a little, thanks to my disarrayed "filing system."

A song called "Come, Brave Boys, to the Carping Trade," appeared on a broadside around 1699. The Bodleian copy
http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/25000/24945.gif
is undated, but includes a song from George Farquhar's comedy "Love and a Bottle" (1698), sung by the actress Margaret Mills.

I've been unable to determine the precise meaning of the phrase "carping trade"; Oxford is silent.

The song must have been rather popular, for a textually unrelated song directed to be sung to the same tune appeared in William Hyland's drama "The Ship-Wreck" (1746).

The verbose "Come, Boys, to the Carping Trade" contains sixty-four lines of the sort of nautical mixed metaphors and double entendre we've become used to. The woman in the case, called both a "Frigate" and a "Pinnace," even gets a ship's name: "The Bonaventure" ("good fortune"). This "warlike Ship of Fame...from the Coast of Venus came," the names "Venus" and "Venice" being virtual homophones in the 17th century. She is "Well-mounted in her Upper-tier,/ The Quarter-deck and Gun-room clear." The speaker boards her with a "Blunderbus/ And two small Hand-Granado's."

The song ends with the sea-going speaker lamenting the loss of his "store of powder":

"My Ammunition is spent and gone,
My little, little Gun, not half a foot long,
And my two small Balls will make but one,
That I no more can board her."

But we're still a long way from "Cruising Round Yarmouth."