This shanty seems to have originated with the Liverpool packet-trade, shortly after the end of the War of 1812. Along with Black Ball Line and Blow the Man Down, it is among the most famous of the Western Ocean packet shanties.
Various other couplets make dating the shanty more difficult. In referring to the Yankee ship, one couplet evidently references Civil War days:
What do you think she's got for cargo
Old shot and shell, she breaks the embargo.
Although the named captains and mates mentioned surely
followed the shantyman's preference, the Captain Hayes mentioned here
was lost aboard the Rainbow in 1848. Stan Hugill provides a list of alternatives: Pompey Squash, the big buck negro; Bully Hayes, the Down East Bucko; Big Black Jack, the Boston Slugger; Cockeyed Bill, the West End Barber; Santander James, the Rocket from Hell; Negro Dick from New Brunswick; and a Bow-legged Bastard from the Bowery.
Similarly the bill of fare was subject to much variety: "belaying-pin soup and monkey's liver", "mosquito's heart and sandfly's liver," "dandy funk and centipede's whiskers", "nanny goat's horns and a donkey's rudder", "black-eyed peas and a donkey's crupper," or "hot water soup, but slightly thinner."
Variants for the cargo include: "five hundred bottles of German lager", and "four hundred chimps from Santiago".
In some versions, references to slaving ("black sheep that have run the Embargo") point to post-1820s slave trading, when opportunistic captains sought to re-exploit the field after many slavers and pirates of the West Indies and Guinea coast were cleared out by joint national efforts.