Famous Single Poems
“‘Suddenly,’ says Jim, ‘he—the captain—began to pipe up his eternal song,
“Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—
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!”
“‘At first I had supposed “the dead man’s chest” to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man.’”
There has been much speculation and discussion as to where Stevenson got this chantey, but, in the light of the evidence, there can be only one answer to that question. He got it out of his head.
In his letter to Henley he says explicitly that it was “only known to the crew of the late Captain Flint,” which is surely plain enough, and Lloyd Osbourne testifies to the same effect.
“I am quite sure,” he writes, “that the ‘Fifteen Men’ was wholly original to R. L. S.; and the most confirming fact of all to my mind is that he always considered the Dead Man’s Chest not as a literal chest, but as a small rock that had thus been fancifully named by the buccaneers. Though I remember his often speaking of this, it is strange that no explanation
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