Well now; there's a song we don't hear much from these days! As a matter of fact, it's one that I have worked on for quite some time since pulling it out of "Southern Harmony" online and MIDI transcriptions. Recognizing it's potential right away, I arranged it for whistle / flute, and considered it for a fife piece. It seems that I found a few of the other versions you mention, but little if any relationship or similarity between the scores. I finally found a few of the lyrics similar to V. II above, and they fit (sort of) metricly with the music I had; I use that as the "Verse" and your "V. III" as the "Chorus"; I suspect that there were many more verses than either one of us have here, probably lost to posterity. So much do I like "Old Ship" that I recorded it on my first CD with the "Gilead" low "G" Irish flute. If I ever figure out how to "rip" an Mp3 off of an audio track, I could send it to you.

Send me an E-mail address (hopefully on a server that can handle some hefty attachments) - PM will do - and I'll see if I've got some graphics of the score/s I used for you.