Dead Man's Chest

"Dead Man's Chest" (also known as Fifteen Men On The Dead Man's Chest or Derelict) is a fictionalsea song, originally from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island (1883). It was expanded in a poem, titled Derelict by Young E. Allison, published in the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1891. It has since been used in many later works of art in various forms.

Stevenson found the name "Dead Man's Chest" among a list of Virgin Island names in a book by Charles Kingsley, possibly in reference to the Dead Chest Island off Peter Island in the British Virgin Islands. As Stevenson once said, "Treasure Island came out of Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871); where I got the 'Dead Man's Chest'—that was the seed." That is, Stevenson saw the three words "Dead Man's Chest" in Kingsley's book among a list of names, germinating in Stevenson's mind it was the "seed", which then grew into the novel.

In Treasure Island Stevenson only wrote the chorus, leaving the remainder of the song unwritten, and to the reader's imagination:

...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
...Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

Another lyric in the novel, near its end:

What put to sea with seventy-five."

Stevenson does not make clear if this lyric is part of Dead Man's Chest or another fictional song entirely. Regardless, the words of the lyric help advance the storyline.

Other variations of the poem were printed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that claimed to be folklore, but in reality were nothing more than new extensions from Stevenson's original. One appeared in the Chicago Times-Herald named "Stevenson's Sailor Song" by an anonymous author, who claimed to hear it being sung on the "wharfs of Chicago" by a group of "old time sailors", who when asked where they learned it, replied 'We never learned it nowhere, we allers knowed it.' The story was meant as a hoax but some took it seriously. Another appeared in print as "Billy Bones's Fancy", supposedly pieced together from various "fragments", suggesting an antiquated origin, but in fact it was an adaptation of the Times-Herald piece. As Stevenson's stepson Osbourne once said, "'Fifteen-Men' was wholly original with Stevenson," and as Stevenson himself said, the book At Last by Kingsley was "the seed" of his invention.

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