From Captain Sternvall's Swedish shanty collection Sång under Segel, the last two lines of each verse are repeated in chorus. From Stan Hugill's Songs of the Sea:
The wind-pump mentioned in this song was to be seen in all of the small sailing barks of Norway at the end of the last century. The "Baltic barks" were built of wood and, to use a sailor expression "leaked like a basket". Sailors, on joining such a ship, would lift a hatch and smell the odors coming up from the hold. If the hold stank to high heaven, the sailor would be satisfied; if it smelled sweet, he knew that the ship was leaking and he would head ashore. The windmill pump saved many hours of the heart-breaking work known in ships having only manual pumps.