"Off to Sea Once More" is a forebitter about the hardships of a sailor' life. He loses his money to whores and boarding-house masters and has to return to sea, in this case to the 1850s Bering sea bowhead whale fishing. Stan Hugill said this song in “known to every seaman”. During the latter days of sail, many lodging house keepers encouraged seamen to fall in debt to them, then signed them aboard a hardcase ship in return for the “advance note” loaned by the company to the sailor ostensibly to buy gear for the voyage. Paddy West of Great Howard Street, Liverpool, was well-known for this, likewise John da Costa of the same seaport. (There is a song about Paddy West. in this collection.) Whaling boats, like many of the transatlantic packet ships, had reputations of being “blood-boats”, with bad food and pay, worse conditions and hard masters who maintained authority with the hard end of a belaying pin. As a result, most of them were crewed by men in debt to (if not shanghaied by) boarding-house masters. This forebitter, with its advice to give up the sea — advice inevitably thwarted by pimps, whores, drunkenness, and boarding-house masters — was sometimes used as a pump or capstan chantey. Many versions of the song had a chorus and may have been used as shanties, however, Hugill asserts that this version was a forebitter, “since it had no all-hands-in chorus”. The lack of a chorus lets the poignant story stand out more clearly and effectively. It is listed in the Roud Index of Folksongs as #644. It was printed in Stan Hugill's Shanties from the Seven Seas. It was recorded by A.L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl, Louis Killen and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman on their Shady Grove album which is where I learned it.