Lighter,

When I say minstrel-ish, to be clear (and maybe my term is poor, or misused), I am broadly evoking stage caricature and comic popular song with a penchant for playing on ethnic/national stereotypes—rather than only songs that reference African American ethnicity.

Stuff like THIS, published 1854 , in which I could see "Paddy Lay Back" fitting. Or THIS , where "Paddy on the Railway" is indicated as being set to "King of the Cannibal Islands."

I'm recalling one of the discussions circa 1915 when Richard Runciman Terry presented on shanties to colleagues and one remarked that he remembered "Paddy on the Railway" being a "Christy's Minstrels" item.

My basic, not expert, understanding from some of the scholarship on blackface minstrelsy is that even in the early period, minstrels did plenty of send-ups of Italian (opera) music, i.e. not only "Ethiopian delineation." A few decades later, I observe collections to include a wider range with "sauerkraut"/German caricatures, "Paddy"/Irish caricatures, and even some Chinese pidgin... the minstrel model developing into vaudeville.

I'd welcome a better characterization. I'm simply making a distinction between sailor song that strikes me as material derived more from popular theater performance as opposed to those items (including much of the "core" chanty repertoire) that sound more "folky" (disseminated among peers in off-stage contexts).

Robert,

Sure! It's a familiar source in these discussions, but flies under the radar a bit due to the uncommon title. A few subsequent publications, which I can only imagine are derivative of the _Once a Week_ piece, parse "Valparaiso" and "Round the Horn" as two separate items.

***
If the 1868 source does indeed refer to our song, it may be notable that we don't (yet) have more documentation until decades later. In the narrow context of "chanties" and their performance context, it's a hard song to sing. Dick Maitland's performance for Doerflinger shows how hard it might have been to keep in one's repertoire (due to its long narrative and more sophisticated rhyme-scheme) unless the singer really made it a point to practice it and keep it fresh.