LYR ADD now posted.

It makes quite interesting reading, I think. It looks earlier than Warlike Seamen - by which I mean that if one of them had to be a garbled version of the other, the direction of garbling would definitely be Dolphin to WS rather than vice versa. That said, the Dolphin looks pretty garbled in parts - some of the nautical terminology looks very hazy! The other striking thing about the Dolphin, which points to fairly long immersion in oral tradition, is the heavy use of stock phrases - "tall lofty ship", "brave and fearless too", "our jovial crew", "let every man stand true to his guns" etc.

My original question, incidentally, was about the fourth verse, which seems to have dropped out of the song by the time it turned into Warlike Seamen -

O our captain stood on the quarterdeck
He was brave and fearless too.
"It's three to one against us," he cried
All to our jovial crew
And if it hadn't been for my younger brother
O this battle would never have been tried,
But let every man stand true to his guns
And we'll give to them a broadside.

I was just wondering, what's the narrator's younger brother got to do with anything? All very odd!