Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
While this composition is fine and tight as a drum in poetic meter and conception, the real perfection was not arrived at until he made it “Ten fathoms deep on the road to hell.” In the five-verse revision a part of the last verse as it appeared in “A Piratical Ballad” went into the second, a part of the second verse was shifted to the third and a fourth was added to give an implied reason for the riot of death in an inferred quarrel over the “chest on chest full of Spanish gold, with a ton of plate in the middle hold.” Strangely enough all these shifts and additions do not appear to have altered the sentiment in the least and at times I am amazed, in reading over old versions, that I do not appreciably miss certain lines and ideas that seem vital to the finished product.
Shortly after the five verses had been privately printed for his friends on a single slip, Allison conceived the rather daring idea of injecting the trace of a woman on board the Derelict which up to this time he had very closely developed in the Stevensonian spirit. While there was no woman in “Treasure Island,” he proved to himself by analysis that his new thought would do no violence to Stevenson’s idea, because Billy Bones’ song was a reminiscence of his own past and not of Treasure Island. Hence the trace of a woman, skillfully injected, might be permissible. Here, too, his analysis gave him the melancholy tone—of which Poe speaks as so highly desirable—greatly accentuated by doubt of whether she was “wench” or “maid,” and a further possible incentive for the extermination of the whole ship’s list. This verse† † Reproduced in [facsimile]. has undergone little change since the woman trace was first injected:
More we saw, through the stern-light 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 dagger-slot in the bosom spot
And the lace stiff-dry in a purplish blot.