I would direct your attention to the first paragraph of the following link to the Naval Historical Center.
http://www.history.navy.mil/trivia/triv04-3.htm
Somewhat surprisingly, official military histories are notoriously bad at getting the facts right. Sites like this make a lot of errors and tend to propagate myths that have sprung up over the years.
This site is good case in point. Sailor does not come from an Old English word saylor. Rather, it doesn’t appear until the 15th century. The verb does come from the Old English, but it’s siglan. I suspect the naval historian who wrote the text for this web site confused the letter yogh (g) for a y and a verb for a noun.
Also, I would dispute the degree to which the training of colonial militias by the British influence the Continental Army. Relatively few officers or men of the Continental Army had any real military experience. Washington got the job because he was just about the only colonial who had significant military experience. It was the mercenary drillmasters brought in from Europe and the French who whipped the Continental Army into shape.
Benedict Arnold, arguably the greatest colonial field commander of the war, had no military experience at all. Ditto for George Rogers Clark and Anthony Wayne. Nathaniel Greene had a year of self-taught militia experience before the Revolution. Henry Knox was the only American commander, other than Washington, who had significant militia experience prior to the war. Of all the colonial generals, the one with the most experience was Horatio Gates, who had retired from the British Army as a major. But he was also probably the worst of the American generals. Arnold essentially mutinied at Saratoga and won the decisive battle by disobeying Gates’s orders. Gates also lost the battle of Camden, his only other significant action.
The navy would be a bit different. As a highly technical (for the era) profession, most sailors and officers in the Continental Navy and the early US Navy and Coast Guard would have been experienced sailors in various merchant fleets and in the Royal Navy. You can make a stronger case for Royal Navy tradition influencing the US Navy than you can for the army.
But all this is pretty irrelevant to the original question. There is absolutely no reason to suspect that blue bark is anything close to 230 years old.
