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)

The words were written by Alexander Hay (born 1826), a Newcastle cabinet-maker who went to sea as a ship’s carpenter. W. Clark Russell printed five verses in the preface to his dictionary Sailors’ Language (1883), which we reprint as Sailors' Language. 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 a song which the sailors sang on every possible occasion when the captain was on deck.

He called the verses “a fair sample of the sort of ‘growling’ Jack puts into his songs.” The Board of Trade was the government department that regulated British merchant ships, so a crew shouting its name at the captain was threatening to report him. According to Allan’s Illustrated Edition of Tyneside Songs and Readings (1891), Russell got one detail wrong: Hay “was brutally used, but the irons were only threatened.” Hay later recited the song at a public meeting in Limehouse chaired by Samuel Plimsoll, the campaigner for safer merchant ships.