According to Legman, Colcord expurgated (deleted material)against her wishes and at her publisher's request.

I see no evidence that she bowdlerized (altered) what she actually printed.

I do know that at some point she received a few texts from a retired American merchant sailor that included two or three impossible-to-expurgate songs, which she did not print in any form.

She forwarded them to Robert W. Gordon, and they are among his papers. I made photocopies years ago, but I can't guarantee I know where they are.

My feeling is that if Colcord, in 1924, was ready to publish any bawdy shanties at all without alteration, they could not have been very bawdy by today's standards. ("Abram Brown" and "A-Rovin'" in relatively brief forms may have been typical.) It would nonetheless have taken a good deal of nerve to print them in full, and might even have been in violation of the U.S. postal laws of the day. (Recall Hugill's publisher-induced inhibitions forty-five years later.)

The amount of bawdy material Colcord might have learned on her father's ship in the 1890s must have been pretty small, considering the circumstances. Conjecturally the bulk of it might have come by way of her brother, Lincoln Colcord, who may have been more likely to have been within earshot when a bawdy shanty was being sung.