Dead Man's Chest - Background

Background

Stevenson found the name "Dead Man's Chest" among a list of island names in a book by Charles Kingsley, in reference to the Dead Chest 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:

Another lyric in the novel, near its end, is also included in the Allison poem: "But one man of her crew alive, 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.

The song has been widely used in the arts for over a century. In 1901 music was added to the lyrics of "Derelict" for a Broadway rendition of Treasure Island. In 1967, writers for the Walt Disney film company found inspiration in "Derelict" for the sea-song "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)", which was played in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" theme ride at Disneyland. Astrid Lindgren expanded Stevenson's couplet differently in the script for the 1969 Pippi Longstocking TV series; the two resulting verses were sung to a West Indian sea shanty. In the 1978 film Revenge of the Pink Panther, Chief Inspector Clouseau, disguised as a "salty Swedish seadog," sings a mangled version of the song. Alan Moore made a play on the song in the 1986 graphic novel Watchmen, the chapter is called "One man on fifteen dead men's chests." In 1993, the contemporary "pirate" vocal group, The Jolly Rogers, recorded Mark Stahl's arrangement of Young E. Allison's lyrics, re-released in 1997 on their CD titled "Pirate Gold". A rendition was recorded by the steampunk band Abney Park as "The Derelict".

In German, the song is sometimes known as "17 Mann auf des toten Manns Kiste", so it mentions 2 more men. Likewise, in the Hungarian translation of Treasure Island, the phrase is "seven (men) on a dead man's chest"; apparently these numbers provided the closest effect to the original regarding rhyme and syllables in English.

When the second Pirates of the Caribbean film came out, Master Gibbs sang the original version from Treasure Island; a fourth wall joke as the film was call Dead Man's Chest.