Hugill wasn't a pedant, but he didn't like it when shanty singing was badly misrepresented by people who hadn't a clue.

He seemed to have been perfectly at home with anything that sounded   authentic "to my way of thinking," as he frankly put it. He was also fond of saying, "Different ships, different long splices."

In other words, "different strokes for different folks." Any variation was acceptable to him, I believe, as long as it resembled the verbal, melodic, and presentational style, and the cultural substance, of what he knew (or had every reason to believe) was real. His books show how strongly he wished to preserve the real in the face of the artificial and distorted.

To give a partly fanciful example, he may have included "blood-red" roses, whatever its actual origin, because it sounded perfectly plausible and was not clearly in conflict with shanty idiom. But something modern, like "long-stemmed roses," would have just sounded wrong, and I believe he'd have shaken his head in disbelief.

Of course, that's merely my impression of his views, which are, fortunately, mostly set out in his books.

I can only imagine what he'd think about current "pyrate music."