I'm only a sailor man — tradesman would I were, For I've ever rued the day I became a tar; Rued the rambling notion, ever the decoy Unto such an awful life. Board of Trade, ahoy! I snubb'd skipper for bad grub, rotten flour to eat, Hard tack full of weevils; how demon chandlers cheat! Salt junk like mahogany, scurvying man and boy. Says he, 'Where's your remedy?' Board of Trade, ahoy! Can ye wonder mutiny, lubber-like, will work, In our mercantile marine, cramm'd with measly pork? Is it wonderful that men lose their native joy, With provisions maggoty? Board of Trade, ahoy! Oh had we a crew to stand by when we're ashore, Show this horrid stuff that pigs even would abhor! Sue the swindling dealer who'd our health destroy. What say ye, oh sailor friends? Board of Trade, ahoy! Dutchmen here before the mast, and behind it too! Dutchmen mate and carpenter, Dutchmen most the crew! Foreigners to man our ships, horrible employ! What's old England coming to? Board of Trade, ahoy!

Source: William Clark Russell's *Sailors' Language: A Collection of Sea-terms and Their Definitions* (1883)

These verses are printed in William Clark Russell’s Sailors’ Language: A Collection of Sea-terms and Their Definitions (1883). Russell explains:

A ship’s carpenter once told me that he was clapped in irons and lay manacled for six weeks in a voyage to China for writing the words of [this] song which the sailors sang on every possible occasion when the captain was on deck.

These are “a fair sample of the sort of ‘growling’ Jack puts into his songs”. The shouts of Board of Trade are meant “to annoy the skipper” as any skipper at that time feared a complaint to that venerable body.