Hi Richie,

I like the idea of the ghost ripping the murderer in three and then turning round to the rest of the crew, as if expecting a round of applause, and wishing them a safe voyage.

Anyway, regarding the versions, to be more exact, it's just stanzas 22 and 23 that are new in Deming (or at least they don't appear in any earlier version that we have looked at in the course of this discussion). Stanzas 15 and 16 are also in Buchan's version and in several Scottish chapbooks of around 1800 (or perhaps earlier if I understand Steve's comment on Morren right). So they were already in circulation in print several decades before the Deming broadside. (Admittedly, Deming 16.4 changes the meaning compared with those earlier texts, where the line refers to the premature death of the victim rather than the damnation of the murderer, but the wording is still similar, and it's easy to see how the Deming line could have evolved out of the other.)

Even if those Scottish chapbooks take us back a couple of decades before 1780, that would still allow plenty of time for the ballad to have circulated and evolved in oral tradition alongside printed texts like the Roxburghe broadside. So I still don't see the need for there to have been an older version of the ballad before 1726.

As for the isolation of Nova Scotia, they still had access to broadside ballads, as W. Roy Mackenzie mentions several times - in fact in one case he suggests that the ballad he is talking about was printed in Nova Scotia (Quest p. 205). The „Gaspard" version he took down from the singing of Mrs. Margaret Curry is the Deming version practically word for word, just with a few stanzas omitted and a handful of very minor changes in wording, no more than you might expect if the singer had learnt it from a broadside or a book and then carried on singing it over a period of time without checking it against the printed text.