Frank Vickery version

I've sailed among the Yankees, the Spaniards and Chinese. I've lain down with the yellow girls beneath the tall palm trees. I've crossed the Line and Gulf Stream, and around by Table Bay, And around Cape Horn and home again - oh, that's the sailor's way! Oh, Bobby'll go to his darling, and Johnny'll go to his dear, And Mike will go to his wife and fam'ly, and Andrew for pipe and beer; But I'll go to the dance hall to hear the music play, For around Cape Horn and home again, oh, that is the sailor's way!

Source: Frank Vickery, in Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman

New Zealand version

I've traded with the Maoris, Brazilians and Chinese, I've courted half-caste beauties beneath the kauri trees; I've travelled along with a laugh and a song In the land where they grow "mate"; Around the Horn and home again, For that is the sailor's way.
ChorusI've crossed the Line, the Gulf Stream, I've been in Table; Around the Horn and home again, For that is the sailor's way!

Source: James Cowan, "The Bush Poet," Canterbury Times, September 24, 1913, as quoted by Michael Brown (2015)

Doerflinger (Songs of the Sailor and Lumberman) took down this song from Frank Vickery, of the Avon Queen, who used the same tune in Go to Sea No More. “Mr. Vickery said there were many more stanzas.” A few lines are quoted in Bill Adams’s Ships and Women, 1936.

The song began as a poem. William Allingham’s “Homeward Bound,” published in the Dalziel brothers’ anthology A Round of Days (1866), has the same verses (“We’ve traded with the Yankees, / Brazilians, and Chinese; / We’ve laughed with dusky beauties / In shade of high palm trees”) and the refrain “Round the world and home again, / That’s the sailor’s way!” How it reached the forecastle is unknown, but sailors kept its shape and roughened its words.

The earliest known printing of it as a sung song comes from New Zealand. James Cowan quoted a local version in “The Chantey” (Canterbury Times, 1912) and again in “The Bush Poet” (1913), noting that ex-sailors still sang it in the gum-digging and kauri camps north of Auckland. Allingham’s Yankees and palm trees have become Maoris and kauri trees, and the land “where they grow ‘mate’” is South America, home of yerba mate. Michael Brown traces Cowan’s texts in “‘The Chantey’ and ‘The Bush Poet’: James Cowan and Vernacular Song in New Zealand” (Journal of New Zealand Studies, 2015). Rona Bailey and Herbert Roth printed Cowan’s text, quietly altered to “the land where they call you mate,” in Shanties by the Way (1967), and Neil Colquhoun’s reworking with a new tune became the New Zealand folk-revival favourite Across the Line.

Table Bay is the harbor of Cape Town, South Africa. The Line is the Equator, and a ceremony was often held for a sailor’s first crossing.