There has to be some reason why whoever first made this song picked the name Flying Cloud. That must surely have been some time after the real Flying Cloud began (legitimate) operations, most likely during her active career or possibly fairly soon after her end. I'm imagining a conversation in a pub, with someone saying "The Flying Cloud is/was a marvellous fast ship. What a ship she would be been for a pirate captain a hundred years ago!". And then the other party in the conversation taking that thought and running with it, grafting in memes about pirates, young men being led astray, etc.

If the song's wide dissemination was then partly through print, what has happened to all the copies of the broadside? Were the likes of Baring-Gould and Kidson mainly interested in earlier broadsides and not bothering to collect recent ones? Who collected broadsides printed in the USA in the second half of the 1800s?