> Terry (hypothetically) would *have* to find some explainable meaning for "hogeye" and just as many of us have (including me at first), he suspected veiled sexuality.

It seems not to have been Terry himself but his shantying friend Morley Roberts who disclosed to him (along with "the benefit of his ripe nautical experience") the meaning of "hogeye." It "veiled the coarse intimacy of the term which it represented." As Terry writes,

"As a boy [i.e., before 1885] my curiosity was piqued by reticence, evasions, or declarations of ignorance, whenever I asked the meaning of the term."

And concerning making shanties dirtier than they generally were:

"The 'longshore' mariner of to-day...not only wants to explain to me, as a landsman, the exact meaning of terms...which the old type of sailor, with his natural delicacy, avoided discussing, but he tries, where possible, to work them into his shanty, a thing the sailor of old time never did."

To sum up: "hog's-eye" and "hogeye" had a both clean and dirty meanings. The various Mudcat minds that have discussed the matter over many years are essentially unanimous in their belief as to what the dirty meaning was.

I'm inclined to agree with Gibb's suspicion that at the moment of its creation, "The Hogeye Man" (or just a line about the "hogeye man") simply referred to a barge sailor. (If that meaning had not been both natural and probable, I can't imagine the strait-laced Whall publishing the shanty in any form.)

Dirty interpretations presumably didn't take hold for some singers till at least ten minutes later. If a sexual "hog's-eye" actually predated the shanty, that would only make reinterpretation inevitable.