The usual chorus and no more appears in American novelist Sinclair Lewis's "Arrowsmith" (1925). Two American printings of the song (or much of it) occurred almost simultaneously in the fall of 1929.

One, in Frank Shay's "Drawn from the Wood," is virtually identical in words and tune to the version in "The Week-End Book." Shay (1888-1954)
had been a lumberjack, sailor, and overseas doughboy, but he gives the song "As sung by Ruth Dyer." It was evidently new to him, since he hadn't included it in either of his two earlier collections of songs for "Pious Friends and Drunken Companions." or in his sea-song anthology "Wooden Ships and Iron Men."

More significant is the version in "The Songs My Mother Never Taught Me," an expurgated and bowdlerized collection of soldier and sailor songs by John Jacob Niles, Doug Moore, and W. W. "Wally" Wallgren. Niles, not yet famous, was a veteran of the Air Service, Moore of the Navy, and Wallgren of the Marine Corps.

Niles, of course, liked to tinker with words and music besides passing off some of his original compositions as ancient folk creations. Neither of these objections seem to apply very seriously to "The Fire Ship." Not only do the editors assure us that the song "is hereby recorded from the singing of Tom Davin--Literary Racketeer and Irishman Extraordinaire"; the tune given is, startlingly, a worn-down version of that usually associated with "The Lowlands of Holland." If Niles had "improved" the tune, he would have done a better job.

Compare the final stanza with that of the "Black and Rolling Eye" broadside.

                FIRESHIP
                
As I set out one evening upon a midnight clear,
I ran across a fire ship and after her did steer
I hoisted up my siginal which she did quickly know            
And as I ran my buntin' up she immediately hove to

        She had a dark and rolling eye
        And her hair hung down in ringolets                                
        A fine girl, a decent girl and one of the rakish kind.

(Falsetto) "Oh, sir, you must excuse me for being out so late,
For if my parents knew of it, Oh, sad would be my fate.
My father is a minister; a good and righteous man,
My mother is a Methodist, so I do the best I can."

                         Chorus

I took her to a tavern and treated her to wine,
Ah! then I did not know that she was of the rakish kind.
I handled her and dandled her, 'til I found to my surprise,
She was nothing but a fireship rigged up in a disguise.

                         Chorus

So all ye jolly sailormen that sail the wintry sea,
And all ye merry prentice boys, a warnin' take from me.
Beware of floatin' fireships; they'll be the ruin of you,
For 'twas there I had me main yard sprung
                         and me jewel block stove through.

                          Chorus



(Some may recall the opening lines of Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus" [1842]: "It was the schooner Hesperus,/That sailed the wintry sea.")