Emmie:

On shanties: Outside of the sponger era and a few mail packets, the Bahamas has never really had much of a local maritime so, one imagines they sang what the mainlanders sang at the time.

fyi: You might enjoy this recently started thread on Caribbean shantymen and womens:
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=162686

On John B & Prouty: I've replied in the main "John B" thread just to keeps things sorted here.