There has been a lot of good work done on previous Mudcat threads in the area of "Black" shanties. Aside from threads dealing with specific shanties, I want to mention two particularly helpful and important discussions:

thread.cfm?threadid=97356

thread.cfm?threadid=119776&messages=60&page=1    [There are five pages, listed at the top, to this thread on "Rare Caribbean Shanties".]

These threads are background for any discussion here and I won't try to duplicate them. My primary concern has to do with whether a shanty may have been current in the time period leading up to 1853, and whether it might have been present in the San Francisco Bay area, or in Sydney, or Melbourne, or Newcastle on the Australian end of these voyages by the "Julia Ann". Or even in Tahiti or Honolulu or up in the Puget Sound area of Washington state, since the "Julia Ann" picked up, or could have picked up crew members at any of these stops along the way.