It seems that only one example of the song was ever recorded from tradition, with all modern forms deriving from that. It was published in Doerflinger's Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman (1951); he got it from an American, Dick Maitland, who, while bosun on the General Knox around 1885, had learned it one night from a Liverpool man. The song rapidly became popular with revival singers. Roy Palmer (Boxing the Compass, 2001) gives Burgess' captaincy of the Davy Crockett as 1863 to 1874, and reasons that the song dates from that period or a little after.