John T. McCutcheon, cartoonist and kindly philosopher, and his wife Evelyn Shaw McCutcheon, mother and poet, learned to sing this song on their Treasure Island in the West Indies. They tell of it, "Time and usage have given this song almost the dignity of a national anthem around Nassau. The weathered ribs of the historic craft lie imbedded in the sand at Governor's Harbor, whence an expedition, especially sent up for the purpose in 1926, extracted a knee of horseflesh and a ring-bolt. These relics are now preserved and built into the Watch Tower, designed by Mr. Howard Shaw and built on our southern coast a couple of points east by north of the star Canopus."
(Italics are mine.) (Italicized: The Island Song Book: Foreword by John and Evelyn McCutcheon, Privately Printed at The Chicago Tribune Tower, Jan. 15, 1927)
(All: American Songbag, Sandburg, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927)
Here, now the other two thirds of The John B. Sails trilogy, "Canopus" and "The Watch Tower," as told to Carl Sandburg by the Clan McCutcheon c.1927.