here's the only thing I found other then a few (very few) reference to the collection:

A brief bio and a qoute:

Captain W.B. Whall b. 1837, d. 1925?, Master Mariner, who was intended for the Church, went up to Oxford and studied music under Sir John Stainer, but then went to sea in 1861. For the first few years he was shipmate of old men-of-wars men from "before the peace" (1815). He stated "Since 1872, I have not heard a Shanty or Song worth the name. Steam spoilt them." The first edition of his "Sea Songs and Shanties" was 1910 by Brown, Son and Ferguson, Glasgow, 1910. "As to the spelling of shanty, the earliest collection known to us, published about 1875, calls these ditties "Shanty Songs", meaning we suppose, songs from the shanties. Many of the early ones were certainly nigger; for example, "Way! Sing Sally", "Jamboree", "Let de bulgine run"; and though as a rule white men did not sing "nigger", still there were hundreds of coloured men in our ships, both naval and mercantile, and many of these songs came from the shanties, as the Negro huts on the Southern plantations were called. In any case why go to the French when we have the good old English word "chant?" There are many good French sea songs of this class, but they are not called "chanteys".