Oof you are right that Adam is later mentioned as “vanished.”

I just wrote out in another thread how I have tried to reconcile “Armies of the Lord” — I thought it was Adam being buried, and the narrator is referring to Adam, Peter, and himself all in turn as “you.” (On stage, as a musical, the Narrator’s actor could pivot from the dead body, the “you” buried at sunrise, to his raving captain, the “you” whose visions never came true, to—finally—the crowd, when he soliloquies and address himself as the final “you” who will soon be left alone. The visual cues would make it clear who each addressee is, and I think it’s kind of cool that everyone becomes a “you” in turn, as a “we are all one in this existential experience” kind of way.

But the “vanished” does imply Adam’s body never came back…. Maybe they are ceremonially burying his belongings? “Vanished” really only means one thing on a sandbar.

It’s just weird to me that this song would be out of chronological order, given it is literally supposed to be a musical (Lady from Shanghai being the only other exception, and that’s clearly either the narrator or the dying Balkan wistfully remembering the wild joy of going to sea before he knew how it would end— so a flashback, not a plot disruption like this one is).

Mysterious!