"What care we for that sound" may be a rhetorical question from one of the shanty singers, implying that the sound of the stuns'ls breaking away is not in the proper pitch. As a matter of fact at this point the entire ship's rigging should be retuned! It boggles my mind how they managed to get any serious singing done aboard ship.

Stan Rogers freely admited that when it came to nautical terminology he was very much at sea. In "Barret's Privateer" there's that curious line where "the main truck took off both me legs; it's hard to imagine how a little knob on the top of the mast could do that but what the hell, haul away, me bully boys!

Cheerily,
Charley Noble