I have to back off some on my last post, about The Handsome Cabin Boy. I think it was correct as far as it went, about the captain's wife. But I didn't follow the verse far enough.

Picking up that verse:

And now and again she slipped him a kiss
And she would have liked to toy
But 'twas the captain found out the secret of
The handsome cabin boy.

Just how did the captain find out the secret? If he thought initially that he was hiring a handsome boy, how did the discovery of the real sex come about? One can certainly infer that he saw his cabin boy as a sex object, and in exploring the possibilities discovered the real state of facts, and took advantage of them just as he had intended with "the handsome cabin boy".

So, Tradsinger, I agree with you (sort of), but for other reasons.

Dave Oesterreich