I can't shed any light in the specific question, but BBC Radio 4 (Word of Mouth) recently ran an item about pirates, which included a piece about nautical language. The suggestion was that sailors were effectively a nation apart, with their own patois and pronunciation, which superseded native accents and vocabularies. Since a ship's company often hailed from diverse nations and ports, and spent far more time together than with people from their native regions, this was perhaps inevitable. Maybe there was also some deliberate re-invention, as there usually is with 'tribal' slang, to 'claim' words for the maritime community. These new variants would have been spread and shared as people moved from ship to ship, and mingled in ports around the world. Bear in mind also that sailors heard many languages spoken on their travels, and specially the 'correct' local pronunciations of place names, which were often at odds with both the English and the literal pronunciations as suggested by the various spellings on maps.

Tom