# Famous Single Poems/Derelict

DERELICT
A REMINISCENCE OF R. L. S.’S “TREASURE ISLAND” AND CAP’N BILLY BONES, HIS 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!” The mate was fixed by the bos’n’s pike, The bos’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— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Dead and bedamned and the rest gone whist!— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! The skipper lay with his nob in gore Where the scullion’s ax his cheek had shore— Arid 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— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Ten of the crew had the Murder mark— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! ’Twas a cutlass swipe, or an ounce of lead, Or a yawing 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— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Every man jack could ha’ sailed with Old Pew— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! There was chest on chest full of Spanish gold, With a ton of plate in the middle hold, And the cabins riot of stuff untold.
And they lay there, That had took the plum, With sightless glare And their eyes struck dumb, While we shared all by the rule of thumb— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
More was seen through the sternlight screen— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Chartings ondoubt where a woman had been!— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! A flimsy shift on a bunker cot, With a thin 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— 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! 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 yo-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!
Young E. Allison.
DERELICT
“I am now on another lay for the moment, purely owing to Lloyd, this one,” wrote R. L. S. to Henley in August, 1881; “now, see here, ‘The Sea-Cook, or Treasure Island: A Story for Boys.’
“If this doesn’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn it is about Buccaneers… and a map, and a treasure, and a mutiny, and a derelict ship, and a sea-cook with one leg, and a sea-song with the chorus, ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum’ (at the last Ho you heave at the capstan bars), which is a real buccaneer’s song, only known to the crew of the late Captain Flint.”
And three years later, when the book was fetching not only the kids but their elders too, and R. L. S. was getting his first real taste of success, he wrote to Sidney Colvin, “Treasure Island came out of Kingsley’s ‘At Last,’ where I got the Dead Man’s Chest—and that was the seed.”
“At Last” is an uninspired account of a trip to the West Indies and the only reference to the Dead Man’s Chest is in the first chapter. “We ​were crawling slowly along,” Kingsley writes, “looking out for Virgin Garda; the first of those numberless isles which Columbus, so goes the tale, discovered on St. Ursula’s day, and named them after the saint and her eleven thousand mythical virgins. Unfortunately, English buccaneers have since given to most of them less poetic names. The Dutchman’s Cap, Broken Jerusalem, The Dead Man’s Chest, Rum Island, and so forth, mark a time and race more prosaic.”
The English names will doubtless seem to aiany readers much more picturesque than the colorless virgins’; but however that may be, Kingsley’s narrative identifies Dead Man’s Chest as one of the Virgin Islands. Curiously enough, it may be doubted if it ever was really called “Dead Man’s Chest.” Present-day maps give its name as “Dead Chest Island,” and that is the name it has been known by, on the maps at least, for a century and a half. It is so given on Neptune Occidental, A Complete Pilot of the West Indies, published by Thomas Jeffreys at London in 1782. Kingsley possibly made a mistake in the name, as he did in one of the others—for “Broken Jerusalem” should be “Fallen Jerusalem”—a most fortunate mistake, surely, since without it there would have been no “Fifteen men,” and perhaps even no Treasure Island!
​A. Hyatt Verrill contends that it is the mapmakers who are mistaken, all of them blindly following an error made by an early one, and says that during his residence in the West Indies he never heard the island called anything but “Dead Man’s Chest,” or “Duchess Island.”
Whatever its name, legend has it that in the old days the pirates of those seas were in the habit of repairing thither to careen and scrape their ships, to stretch their legs, and to indulge in the boisterous pastimes peculiar to their profession. But this also rests on a very slender foundation. F. A. Fenger, who made a voyage through Sir Francis Drake Channel in a canoe in 1916, is one of the few men who have actually seen the island. He says in his account of the voyage in “Alone in the Caribbean” that he intended to land on it, but the surf was too high, and he had to give it up. He took a photograph of it, however, which shows that it is more of a rock than an island—about the poorest possible place to use as a harbor.
Of course the only thing that matters is not what the island really is, but what Stevenson transmuted it into. Doubtless most readers of his immortal tale have imagined, as Jim Hawkins did, a sailor’s sea-chest with fifteen men heaped across it (although Stevenson was careful to use capitals as an indication of what it really meant):
​“‘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 ​of the kind appears in Treasure Island.” Probably Stevenson thought such an explanation unnecessary in view of his having capitalized the words. In discussing the story he may have mentioned the fact that the Dead Man’s Chest was one of the Virgins, and this has simply slipped from Mr. Osbourne’s memory—he was only thirteen years old when Treasure Island was written. It was “purely owing to Lloyd,” by the way, who had complained that R. L. S. never wrote anything exciting, that Treasure Island was begun; it was his enthusiasm for it which helped carry it to a triumphant finish; and to him, very fittingly, the book is dedicated.
The Manchester Guardian, in a solemn article, recently asserted that on the Chilean coast there is a little church obviously constructed of timber taken from a ship, and that round the edge of its bell, which was presumably once a ship’s bell, run the words, “Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest.” The priest in charge of the church assured an inquirer, whom the Guardian does not name, that the building dated from early in the eighteenth century. “Considering that it is not to be found in the printed page,” adds the Guardian gravely, “it is an interesting sidelight on the strange nooks and corners from which Stevenson collected the material for his books,” the inference being that at some period of his career Stevenson visited ​this church, climbed up into the steeple and perused the legend on the bell!
It is a fact, however, that, outside of Treasure Island, the chantey has never been found anywhere in print, and it has always been one of the tragedies of literature that the Captain never got any further than the first four lines. The beginning is so admirable! Though, of course, as a chantey four lines are enough; many chanteys consist of no more than that. For a chantey is made to be sung as a gang of sailors heave on a rope, or do some other work in concert, one voice carrying the lines and all of them coming in on the chorus. It is like a marching-song: the simpler and more repetitious it is the better.
Mr. E. B. Osborn, the literary editor of the London Morning Post and the author of a collection of charming essays, Literature and Life, has the audacity to assert that even these four lines would not have been tolerated aboard the Hispaniola, for Flint’s cutthroats would have preferred such jocund stuff as “Haul Away, Joe,” or “Hog’s-Eye Man,” and adds that “it is highly improbable that there ever was an authentic chantey of the Dead Man’s Chest. If there had been, it would have been found in one of the standard collections, such as Captain W. B. Whall’s or that published by Dr. R. R. ​Terry, whose qualifications for collecting and editing a book of chanteys are exceptional.”
It may be taken for granted, then, that when Treasure Island was published, this chantey consisted of four lines only, and that they had originated with R. L. S. One can imagine him smacking his lips over them, like Sentimental Tommy! And consider the cunning of the man—and his self-restraint—in writing only four!
But these lines were to waken an echoing chord in an American brain, and the result was to be—not a chantey, to be sure!—but one of the most truly piratical, bloodthirsty songs ever written.
In the city of Louisville, Kentucky, there lives a quiet and retiring man by the name of Young Ewing Allison. He is slightly built, not in any way piratical in appearance, somewhat deaf, with an eye full of humor, and a reputation for kindly satire. At the time Treasure Island appeared, he was twenty-eight years old, and was city editor of the Louisville Courier–Journal. He had started his wage-earning career as a printer’s devil at the age of thirteen, and had been scented with printer’s ink ever since. History does not record when he first read Stevenson’s romance, but in 1891, three years after he had left daily newspaper ​work to start an insurance paper, he fell in with Henry Waller at Louisville, and one result was his first elaboration of Stevenson’s quatrain.
Waller was the adopted son of Mary Francis Scott-Siddons, the famous English actress. He had been an infant prodigy as a pianist, but his father had overdriven him and he was on the verge of complete breakdown, when Mrs. Siddons intervened and bought his freedom. She sent him to study with Liszt, and he remained there three years, but, like most infant prodigies, his development was soon arrested, and he never became a great pianist. But he had acquired a thorough knowledge of music, which he put to use as a teacher and composer. He drifted to America and settled at Louisville, where Mr. Allison, who was also a music enthusiast, met him. The two became fast friends, and the idea of an American opera germinated between them. They went to work, Allison writing the lyrics and libretto and Waller the music—and, wonder of wonders, they did produce an opera, which they named “The Ogallallas,” which was accepted by the Bostonians, and which was actually produced at the Columbia Theater, Chicago, February 16, 1893. It had a regular dime novel plot—heroic scout, beautiful maiden, bloodthirsty redskins—and it was a failure. Americans weren’t interested in scouts and redskins, at least on the stage. They preferred ​picturesque Spanish bandits or tragic Italian clowns.
But meanwhile their friendship had had another result. It was one evening in 1891, that Mr. Allison happened to mention Treasure Island, and the famous and haunting quatrain of old Billy Bones. They bewailed the parsimony of Stevenson in revealing so little of a song which had such tremendous possibilities; and finally Waller remarked that if Allison would write two or three stanzas around the theme, he would set them to music, and maybe they could make some money out of it. The suggestion appealed to Allison, and he composed three ragged but promising stanzas, which Waller set to music next day. They called it “A Piratical Ballad,” and sent it to William A. Pond & Co. It was accepted and published—but while it was a good song, it never made anybody’s fortune.
But Mr. Allison had found what was to become his avocation for many years—to devise fitting and adequate expression for an entrancing theme:
Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
He himself has applied the adjective “ragged” to the three stanzas which he wrote for Waller’s song; they were far from satisfying ​him, and he went to work to improve them. He pondered, he polished, he expanded. Stray phrases, as they came into his head, were jotted down on scraps of paper and stuck away in odd corners of his desk. That theme was always at the back of his mind, and his brain was incessantly at work upon it. It was the “labor of the file” so dear to Gautier—changing a phrase here, a word there; rejoicing over the discovery of the word “yawing” to describe a gaping hole in a battered head; tasting the joy of the true artist in winning closer and closer to perfection.
At last he had five stanzas which suited him fairly well, and he sent them to the Century Magazine. The editor accepted them in a flush of enthusiasm when he first read them; but when, some time later, he got them out of his manuscript safe and looked them over, he perceived that they were rather strong meat for his clientele, and he wrote to Mr. Allison suggesting that they be toned down a little, especially in the closing lines. This Mr. Allison refused to do, and the poem came back to him. So it was printed in the Louisville Courier–Journal, and started on its travels through the press. As is almost always the case, some exchange editor soon clipped off the author’s name, and from that time on it was usually credited to that prolific writer, “Anon.”
But the theme was still stirring around in ​Mr. Allison’s mind, and he began to wonder if it would be permissible to introduce the trace of a woman on board the Derelict. Up to this point he had tried to develop his theme strictly in accordance with the Stevensonian spirit—and there was no woman in Treasure Island. But after all Billy Bones’s song had nothing to do with the Hispaniola—it was a reminiscence of his own past, in which doubtless more than one woman had played a part! So why not? And Mr. Allison went to work in his usual careful fashion on what was to become one of the most striking stanzas of the poem. He even consulted a girl as to whether it should be a “flimsy shift” or a “filmy shift”—a perilous thing to do, but by good luck the girl preferred flimsy. And he decided that this stanza should be set in italics to show that it was, in a way, an interpolation.
In 1901, the editors of the Rubric, a magazine published in Chicago, having happened upon the poem somewhere, and also having learned by some strange chance that Mr. Allison was its author, wrote him asking his permission to use it. He not only consented, but sent them the revised version with the new stanza about the woman, and the poem was published very happily illustrated in two colors and occupying eight pages of the magazine. It was called “On Board the Derelict,” and the issue of the ​magazine containing it is a prized possession of a few fortunate collectors.
This publication gave a new impetus to the poem, which by this time was coming to be recognized by the discriminating as something of a classic. But very few people outside of Louisville had ever heard of Young E. Allison, the name meant nothing to the exchange editor, and before long it was again dropped and old “Anon.” was brought back into service. It had such an air of verisimilitude that most people assumed that it was a real pirate song, dating from the days of the Spanish Main. It was this assumption which caused one of the editors of the New York Times to get tangled up in a controversy which served to lighten the sky a little during the first dark days of the European war.
On July 26, 1914, the Times published a letter from Mr. Edward Alden asking if there was any more to Billy Bones His Song than the four lines given in Treasure Island.
On the September 20 following, an answer signed “W. L.” was published, to the effect that the verse “is the opening stanza of an old song or chantey of West Indian piracy, which is believed to have originated from the wreck of an English buccaneer on a cay in the Caribbean Sea known as ‘The Dead Man’s Chest.’ The cay was so named from its fancied resemblance ​to the old sailor’s sea-chest which held his scanty belongings. The song or chantey was familiar to deep-sea sailors many years ago. The song is copied from a very old scrap-book in which the author’s name was not given.” And a garbled version of Mr. Allison’s poem followed in its six-stanza form.
On the same day, the Times, never suspecting that this story was woven of the fabric of which dreams are made, published an editorial calling attention to the chantey and adding that “while it can hardly be recommended as a delectable piece of literature, in any sense, it is interesting as a bit of rough, unstudied sailor’s jingle, the very authorship of which is long since forgotten.”
On October 4, this bubble was pricked by Walt Mason, who wrote to the Times stating that “the fine old sea poem, ‘Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest,’ recently quoted in your columns, was written by Young E. Allison. I have raked through various biographical dictionaries trying to discover who Young E. Allison was, but without result.” (Mr. Mason was also evidently under the impression that it was an old poem, and that its author had long since passed to his reward.)
“The man who wrote such a poem,” Mr. Mason continued, “should not be unknelled, unhonored, and unsung. In your editorial ​touching the rhyme I don’t think you do it justice. You describe it as a rough, unstudied sailor’s jingle, whereas it is a work of art. Some of the lines are tremendous, and the whole poem has a haunting quality that never yet distinguished a mere jingle.”
But the Times was not convinced. It followed Mr. Mason’s letter with the following condescending editorial note:
We have received several other letters in which the authorship of the lines is credited to Mr. Allison, who is a resident of Louisville, Ky., and the editor of the Insurance Field. It is not likely, however, that he wrote the famous old chantey. Our correspondent, “W. L.,” says that he copied the verses from a manuscript written into a book… published in 1843. This book belonged to his grandfather, who died in 1874.
Thereupon Mr. Champion I. Hitchcock, a close friend of Mr. Allison and his associate on the Insurance Field, took up the cudgels and wrote the Times a letter setting forth the history of the inception and development of the poem from the first three-stanza version published as a song in 1891, to the final six-stanza version published in the Rubric in 1901; and pointing out that, no matter how old a scrapbook might be, additions to it could be made at any time, and that this poem had certainly been ​written into this one subsequent to 1901, which was the first time that the six-stanza version had ever been published anywhere.
But the Times, apparently, had had enough of the controversy, for it refused to publish Mr. Hitchcock’s letter. Whereupon that gentleman, his fighting blood thoroughly aroused, wrote a monograph on the subject, complete and convincing, and published it himself. This book, it may be added, is not only one of the rarest in existence, but is one of the finest expressions of friendship to be found anywhere, and is a credit alike to its author and to the man whose qualities and achievements it celebrates.
Now of course Walt Mason was entirely right. “Derelict” is not a rough, unstudied jingle; it is a piece of polished artistry. No sailor could have composed it unless he was also a scholar and a poet. But it is art that conceals art. “Taking Stevenson’s quatrain as a starting-point, Allison succeeded in writing a wholly modern versification in words and meter so skilfully used as to create not only a vivid atmosphere of piracy and antiquity, but of unskilfulness and coarseness.”
Also it is not a chantey. It could not possibly have been used, as chanteys were used in the days of sailing-ships, to get a gang of men to heaving or pulling together. True chanteys consist of one line only, used as a chorus, the ​rest depending on the imagination of the man who sang the solo part, and usually this imagination was of the most limited description. The pull was always on the accent of the chorus, as, for example:
Rendso was no sailor— Rendso, boys, Rendso; He shipped on board a whaler— Rendso, boys, Rendso.
And finally the nautical references in the poem leave much to be desired. As a sailorman pointed out in the Scoop of Chicago, it would be about as easy to wrap a man in sheet-iron as in a piece of the mainsail, which is of canvas heavy and stiff enough to stand alone; and as for tying him up “with twice ten turns of a hawser’s bight”—well, a hawser is the largest rope on board a ship, and to make a bight or loop in it would require a Samson or a Hercules.
“We of the sea,” continued this old salt, “locate the scene of the verse at Dead Chest Island, half-way between the S. W. and S. E. points of Porto Rico, four and a half miles off-shore, which was used as a pirate rendezvous and later as the haven of wreckers and smugglers. It was first named by the Spanish ‘Casa de Minos’—the coffin.”
Mr. Allison acknowledged cheerfully that ​the points about the mainsail and hawser were beyond reproach. “My own education as an able seaman,” he explained, “was gained from years of youthful study of dime-novel sea yarns by Ned Buntline, Sylvanus Cobb, jr., Billy Bowline, and other masters of the sea in libraries. I feel stronger in my piracy than in my seamanship. If there is a single verse, or, mayhap, one line of ‘Derelict’ that will hold, without leaking, anything of a specific gravity heavier than moonshine, it would surprise me. But it seems to, when it is adopted as a ‘real chantey’—and that’s the test, that it ‘seems.’”
Which is absolutely true—seeming is all that is necessary.
It is an amusing coincidence that R. L. S. made practically the same answer when some aspersions were cast upon the seamanship of his story.
“Of course,” he wrote in a letter to W. E. Henley, “my seamanship is jimmy. But I have known and sailed with seamen too, and lived and eaten with them; and I made my put-up shot in no great ignorance, but as a put-up thing has to be made, i. e., to be coherent and picturesque, and damn the expense. Are they fairly lively on the wires? Then, favor me with your tongues. Are they wooden, and dim, and no sport? Then it is I that am silent, otherwise not.”
​For the benefit of future biographers, the following facts are here set down about Young E. Allison: born at Henderson, Ky., December 23, 1853; printer’s devil at 13; “local editor” at 15; city reporter on a daily at 17; city editor Louisville Courier–Journal; managing editor Louisville Commercial; founded The Insurance Herald, 1888; sold it and established The Insurance Field, 1899; editor-in-chief Louisville Daily Herald, 1902; chose Champion I. Hitchcock to carry on The Insurance Field, 1903; resumed editorial management of The Insurance Field in association with Mr. Hitchcock, 1905. Is the author of two tales, “The Longworth Mystery,” and “The Passing of Major Kilgore,” and of various poems, the best known of which after “Derelict” is “The Ballad of Whisky Straight.” But it is a long way after!
“I do not pretend to be a poet,” says Mr. Allison in a recent letter. “Since boyhood, indeed, I have not had the habit of reading much poetry. I have written a lot of verse, but mere ‘mood satisfiers,’ not put out as literature. Among this lot were lyrics for four operas, the librettos of which I prepared for music composed by Henry Waller. One of them, ‘The Ogallallas,’ was produced by the Bostonians thirty years ago. Another, a tragic grand opera called ‘Father Francesco,’ was brought out at ​the Royal Opera at Berlin in 1895. The others did not come up for breath.
“‘Derelict’ was first smudged in in 1891, when Mr. Waller and I were friends and not collaborators. He had not read Treasure Island, whereupon I loaned him the book. The refrain of Long John Silver struck him—as it has countless others—as containing endless lure. He said it called for music and if I would make a song around it he would set it. Next morning I gave him three hazy but singable verses and before night it was set musically and the manuscript was sent off to Pond & Co., and met immediate acceptance and publication. It was fine, grisly music, but I recognized that the words were inadequate and so began the work of polishing and constructing. It took about six years to get it to suit me. I was after an atmosphere of the perfect silence of dead life filled with horror by the refrain. There came other verses which did not ‘belong,’ and all that, and they never got in.”
But there is still one other which he has in mind—a stanza celebrating Captain Flint’s green parrot with its “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” It is awaited with the most pleasurable anticipations!
There have been various extensions of Stevenson’s quatrain by other hands, and some of them have been set to music, but none of them ​succeeds in achieving the atmosphere of horror which Mr. Allison maintains so successfully. James Whitcomb Riley, who knew a good poem when he saw it, not long before his death sent to Mr. Allison the following stanza, which expresses perfectly the feelings of that gentleman’s admirers:
Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Young E. Allison done all the rest— Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! He’s sung this song for you and me, Jest as it wuz—or ort to be— Clean through time and eternity, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!