This song appears in Roy Palmer's The Valiant Sailor (Cambridge University Press, 1973). Palmer annotated Roy Harris's track on the accompanying album, The Valiant Sailor: Songs & Ballads of Nelson's Navy, with the following liner notes:
A "ninety-eight" was, of course, a ship of 98 guns. This pithy autobiography has everything: press-gang, storm, battle, bloodshed, followed by retirement to Greenwich Hospital. It is a true-blue song, though its happy ending was by no means always true to life. The text is from a London broadside printed by Ryle; the tune is from Kidson's A Garland of English Folk Songs (1928).
The song tells the story of a young man pressed into the Navy. He survives Trafalgar and ends his days in the home for retired Seamen at Greenwich.