I'm exhuming this rather antique thread having spent a lot of time trying to put together my own collation of this ballad. I've been through all the examples in Bronson, the various versions - some of them rather suspicious in terms of text - that Baring-Gould included in his notebooks (thanks to Martin Graebe on that one), and a couple of others from the Gardiner MSS that Bob Askew has sent me.

A couple of questions arise:
1. In the Penguin version, allegedly that collected by Sharp from Mrs. Overd, there is the verse:

See how my love do tumble,
See how my love do taver,
See how my love do try to swim,
That makes my heart quaver.

However, Bronson's account of the same version (Overd / CJS) has:

Look how my love's swimming along
See how my love swager
I'm afraid she'll swim to dry land
Which makes my heart quaver

For those who set great store by detailed motivational analyses of song texts, this would suggest that young Johnny is scared stupid that she will escape alive to tell the tale. More to the point, though: is the Penguin version simply one of Lloyd's revisions? I don't have the source material to check up on it.

2. As far as I can make out, the only reference I've found in a version from tradition (outside of Child) to some kind of ill-fortune having been visited on the voyage is the stanza "The sails were outspread, but of miles made not any" in the "Undutiful Daughter" version collected by Baring-Gould from John Masters - which bears evidence of at least some editorial intervention. So has anyone come across anything similar in a collected version that I haven't discovered yet? I'm intrigued by the text submitted above by Dave Bryant, which contains some very unusual and suspiciously judgemental lines.