"15 Men on the Dead Man's Chest" - The REAL (?) Story
According a 1918 book I fatefully received, the true origin of the fun scrap of a pirate song is deliciously dark (and makes way more sense)
Like most living Americans, my exposure to the “15 Men” pirate song was through some combination of reading Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Stevenson, the instigator of all this, only teases the chorus in his book without any indiction on whether it’s a bone fide sailor’s song or quatrain he made up:
“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!”
Disney’s take on the song departs from Stevenson with a key word change. As per the Mr. Gibbs character’s solo drunken singing in the Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest movie, the first line is changed to “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest”.
What gives? Is it a “the” or an “a”? How do fifteen men physically fit upon a dead man’s torso? Or maybe chest is a treasure chest? And is there a complete version of this song, or am I doomed to repeat the same four lines over and over when feeling piratey? A spirited old book a good friend gifted me may offer surprising insight.
Songs of Men (1918) gives us a clue - and warms my lion heart!
I’ve been very fortunate in life to have pals who “get” me. Such is my college friend Jeremy who sent me a small, tattered book a few years back as a gift. Songs of Men is an anthology of songs selected and arranged by Robert Frothingham and published in 1918 by the Houghton Mifflin Company/The Riverside Press Cambridge.
I’d describe the book to you myself, but the epic published forward by Frothingham does the job the best. Here it is:
“Most Kind and Gentle Reader,
If you are looking for old favorites or for something to please the pale aesthetic brow you won’t find them here. There’s nothing about this collection suggestive of the drawing-room, nothing that by the widest stretch of the imagination could be identified with ‘his mistress’ eyebrow.’
Colloquially speaking, this is a bunch of verse intended to appeal to red-blooded men and women. Strong, virile stuff, it sings the Great Outdoors from the Arctic Circle to the Tropics, from the Occident to the Orient. It runs the gamut of man’s emotions in-so-far as they can be stimulated by wanderlust, camp and trail, pioneering, seafaring, piracy, sport, battle afloat and ashore, gold-seeking, vagabonds, animals, the Great War, the joy of accomplishment and the bitterness of failure. Our own glorious West is here with its ever-present glamour of mountain peaks, mining camps, cowboys, desert and illimitable plains.
With such an idea in mind as the title indicates, it was inevitable that the old favorites be overlooked and that ‘many a gem of purest ray serene’ should be rescue from obscurity. Yes, and some of them were written by women—not the feminist types which the Great War has swept into the discard, but your real ‘man’s woman’ who has a fashion of looking life straight in the eye—and are all the more Songs of Men on that account.
Within will be found the first authoritative publication in book form of that famous piratical ditty, ‘Derelict’ or ‘Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest,’ elaborated many years ago by my old friend Young Ewing Allison, of Louisville, Kentucky, from Stevenson’s renowned quatrain in ‘Treasure Island,’ also ‘The Little Red God,’ an anonymous bit of verse written especially for this anthology by one of our best-known poets.
On your way, little book.
R.F.
New York
October, 1918”
A personal aside, this introduction is one of the warmest and most memorable I've read. I know nothing of this Frothingham fellow, but he strikes me as the kind of character who’d go on a bull moose hunt with Teddy Roosevelt and cry “bully!” with every snort of finely sourced gin.
As far as the claim Mr. Frothingham makes here with regards to our song in question, it is significant. Poet Young Ewing Allison is credited with fleshing out Stevenson’s verse after Treasure Island publication and smash success. You can find Allison’s version with a casual internet or library search and it is widely considered the complete song. According to the predominate sources, the song’s first published appearance was under the name Derelict in the Louisville Courier-Journal, where Allison worked as editor, in 1891. If Songs of Men really was the first book to publish Derelict, that makes it a notable work of history. Bully, Mr. Frothingham!
Another aside, I wonder what “feminist types which the Great War has swept into discard” refers to? I guess there may have been a branch of feminism that fell out of favor post WWI? It sounds like this branch was opposed to a more Western frontier vision of the empowered woman, the rugged whiskey-shooting woman of action whom the book celebrates. I chuckle, as it seems like we’re doomed to run on the same hamster wheel of gender-based American Culture War bickering in perpetuity with slightly different details. But I digress.
Here is Allison’s song-poem Derelict as it appears in Songs of Men. For listeners, I hope you enjoy the voice of Indiana-based Adam Steele who has graciously agreed to be my guest bard for this article. Adam Steele is a performer, songwriter, and producer with five albums and nearly 30 singles released. His most recent album Time Machine features music in a wide variety of genres. You can find his music on all streaming platforms, including Spotify here.
Young Ewing Allison’s Derelict:
For readers, the following are the complete lyrics. The em dashes indicate an insertion of the “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”:
“Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—
Drink and the devil had done of the rest—
The mate was fixed by the bo’s’n’s pike,
The bo’s’n brained with a marlinspike,
And Cookey’s throat was marked belike
It had been gripped
by fingers ten;
And there they lay,
All good, dead men,
Like break-o’-day in a boozing ken—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of a whole ship’s list—
Dead and be-dammed and the rest gone whist!—
The skipper lay with his nob in gore
Where the scullion’s axe his cheek had shore—
And the scullion he was stabbed times four.
And there they lay,
And the soggy skies
Dripped all day long
In up-staring eyes—
At murk sunset and at foul sunrise—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of ‘em stiff and stark—
Ten of the crew had the murder mark—
‘T was a cutlass swipe, or an ounce of lead,
Or a yawning hole in a battered head,—
And the scuppers glut with a rotting red.
And there they lay—
Aye, damn my eyes!—
All lookouts clapped
On paradise—
All souls bound just contrariwise—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of ‘em good and true—
Every man-jack could ha’ sailed with Old Pew—
There was chest on chest full of Spanish gold,
With a ton of plate in the middle hold,
And the cabins, riot of loot untold,
And they lay there
That had took the plum,
With sightless glare
And their lips struck dumb,
While we shared all by the rule of thumb—
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
More was seen through the stern light screen—
Charting ondoubt where a woman had been—
A flimsy shift on a bunker cot,
With a thing dirk slot through the bosom-spot,
And the lace stiff-dry in a purplish blot…
Or was she wench,
Or some shuddering maid
That dared the knife
And that took the blade?
By God! She was stuff for a plucky jade;
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest—
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
We wrapped ‘em all in a mains’l tight,
With twice ten turns of a hawser’s bight,
And we heaved ‘em over and out of sight—
With a ya-heave-ho!
And a fare-you-well!
And a sullen plunge
In the sullen swell,
Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell!
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
The meaning
Firstly, one must acknowledge the great lyrics. The basic recap of the story would go something like this—the narrator has come upon fifteen dead sailors on the Dead Man’s Chest (we’ll get to what that is later). The bulk of the song describes, with almost palpable delight, the grisly details of the dead crew who have all been plainly murdered. For example, the “‘T was a cutlass swipe, or an ounce of lead” line. The narrator is playing forensic detective, noting, with glee, all the horrible fates of the fifteen.
I love the stanza, “More was seen through the stern light screen”. The narrator finds a “flimsy shift” (dress) with a dirk (knife) cut in the chest a la “bosom spot” with dried blood. The narrator muses on what kind of women she must’ve been, an unfortunate maiden or ship’s prostitute, before declaring, “By God! She was stuff for a plucky jade”, essentially, “Whoever she was, she was a real badass!”
Ultimately, the narrator and his companions joyfully chuck the bodies into the ocean and celebrate by drinking rum. The macabre lyrics clash with the boisterous tune and celebratory rum drinking. What’s the deal? Is the narrator just a real deal psychopath who likes to party? Is this song based off a true story of some kind, or strictly the boundless imaginations of Stevenson and Allison? Cue internet research montage.
Many trails down this rabbit hole I've found lead to a book title Buried Caesars: Essays in Literary Appreciation by Vincent Starrett, published 1968 by the Books for Libraries Press, Inc. of Freeport, New York. The entire book is available online for free on the Internet Archive. The essay relevant to us is on page 189 and the author devotes a whole chapter to behind-the-scenes drama surrounding the song that even involves The New York Times.
I’ll not recount the entire essay here, but essentially Starrett claims the song’s roots are entirely Stevenson’s. Additionally, Allison was not the only one who was inspired by Stevenson’s original scrap of a song. Starett shares a 1902 version called The Pirate Song with music by Henry F. Gilbert and “words adapted from Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Additional stanzas by Alice C. Hyde.” This version appears to be where the switch was made from “the Dead Man’s Chest” to “a dead man’s chest.”
This version of events is what roughly passes as the mainstream narrative from what I can tell. Stevenson and later Allison’s works are entirely original and inspired multiple popular musical adaptations and spinoffs. There are no real world pirate roots to the song. I’d be prepared to accept that story myself save for one standalone introduction to Derelict in my spirited wee tattered copy of Songs of Men.
Frothingham weighs in - the real story?
My dear Frothingham in Songs of Men makes good with his promise in the foreword. Derelict by Young Ewing Allison is published in its entirety on page 150. But Frothingham goes a step further with a personal introduction to the work:
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