"The author, Captain Robert Chamblet Adams, indicated that he had first heard the song around 1850."

Please tell me where you're getting this from.

"Alfred Mason Williams' 1895 Studies in Folk-song and Popular Poetry called it a "good specimen of a bowline chant"."

What value is there to you copy and pasting this from Wikipedia? Who is Alfred Mason Williams to be saying anything about this that we should value when he's clearly cribbing from another text and that he doesn't even understand—as indicated by calling it a "bowline chant" and not being able to see that it can't possibly be a "good specimen" of that?