Pedantry alert. Non-pedants stay out!:

Doerflinger published a third text and tune in the Southern Literary Messenger (Oct., 1939), pp. 696-97. It's clearly from Maitland, but - as was usual at the time - not even the singer's name is mentioned.

Doerflinger says, "The following stanzas were all sung by the same shantyman, but on two different occasions" (i.e., in differing but overlapping versions). Collected in 1938, it appears to be a combination of most of the two versions Doerflinger later printed in his book.

Alan Lomax recorded one more version from Maitland in 1940, published in Duncan Emrich's "Folklore on the American Land" (1972). After the first two stanzas about the keel and Jonathan Laird, it becomes noticeably different:

And away down the Mersey she sailed one day....
And across to the Westward she ploughed her way....

'Twas at the island of Fayal....
Where she got her guns and crew on board....

Then away across the watery world....
To sink, to burn, and to destroy....

All the Federal comers that came her way....
'Twas in the harbor of Cherbourg one day....

There the little Kearsarge she did lay....
When Semmes and Winslow made the shore....

Winslow challenged Semmes out to sea....
He couldn't refuse, there was too many around....

Three miles outside of Cherbourg....
There the Kearsarge sunk her down below....

Maitland said he'd learned the shanty when he was about fifteen, in 1870-71, nearly seventy years before he was recorded. I suggest that in all these cases he was struggling to remember the words, but much of the time could only summon up their substance.

The specificity of the historical detail - possibly unique in a chantey - may help to explain Maitland's plural versions as well as the inability of Colcord's father to remember more than the lines about the keel, Birkenhead, Laird, and the Mersey.

Hugill's version (learned in 1925) has most of Maitland's substance, but (except for a misprinted line) everything rhymes!

Maitland appears to be the only source for the obscure detail that Alabama had originally been called Hull No. 292 (in fact, "290"). A headline in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (Nov. 8, 1862) reads,

Doings of "No. 290" or the "Alabama."

The article never explains the name, implying that it was well known at the time. Several other papers mention "No. 290" in the fall of 1862.

As has been mentioned, a further version, Nye's, which he sang in 1954 on a Folkways LP, is largely rewritten from Doerflinger.

A search of various newspaper databases turns up no early mention of the chantey.