Both for seamen, and lubbers ashore?
And if to Old Davy I should go, dear Poll!
You never will hear of me more.
What then? all’s a hazard!... &c.
Perhaps he ‘may laughing come back,’ and he supports this doctrine of chances by means of the doctrine of election, in the figure of the cherub up aloft with his protective power over Jack; and which cherub, in the last verse, is commissioned, at the end of all things, to ‘look out a good berth’ for the same theological sailor.
To be sure, such loose theology was to be expected in sailors who had such chaplains to teach them, as Dibdin delineates in another of his songs, ‘There’s nothing like grog’:—
T’other day, as the chaplain was preaching,
Behind him I curiously slunk;
And while he our duty was teaching,