The only thing I have is the following quotation which I took to fit the song quite well, though I'm ready to be corrected:

[1999:] Both the navy and the merchant shipowners learnt through bitter experience to expect a certain percentage of their ships to sink every year they sailed. With the mortality rate so high and conditions so bad, the sailors themselves could only cultivate a brutal fatalism about their work. They lived in a twilit world, with their own jargon and codes. Most did not expect to live beyond the age of forty. They regarded the government with suspicion, the law with indifference, and their landlubber compatriots with derision. They were accustomed to shipwreck and injury, they accepted that the sea was unsafe, and they remained suspicious of men who promised salvation. (Bella Bathurst, The Lighthouse Stevensons 11)

(Great book, by the way!)