Susanne posted a message in another thread, and I'd hate to see it get lost. Here's the pertinent part:

Thread #8767   Message #56834
Posted By:
02-Feb-99 - 09:01 AM
Thread Name: 'Orribble Murder!!
Subject: Add: CLAUDY^^ and CRUEL SHIP'S CAPTAIN^^


The Cruel Ship's Captain

A boy to me was bound apprentice
Because his parents they were poor
So I took him from St. James's Workhouse
All for to sail on the Greenland shore



One day this poor boy he did annoy me
Nothing to him then did I say
But I rushed him to my frozen yard-arm
And I kept him there till the very next day



When his eyes and his teeth did hang towards me
With his hands and his feet bowed down likewise
And with a bloody iron bar I killed him
Because I wouldn't hear his cries

[1967:] Early in the nineteenth century, a whale skipper was charged in King's Lynn with the murder of an apprentice. A broadside ballad, in the form of a wordy gallows confession and good night, appeared, and in course of circulating round the East Anglian countryside it got pared down to the bone. The poet George Crabbe was interested in the case, and took it as a model for his verse-narrative of 'Peter Grimes', which subsequently formed the base of Britten's opera. The opera is in three acts. The same ground is covered in three verses by a song as bleak and keen as a harpoon head. (Notes A. L. Lloyd, 'Leviathan!')

Susanne has similar information on her Website here (click).