The fine old sea poem, “Fifteen Men on the Dead Man’s Chest,” recently quoted in your columns, was written by Younge E. Allison. I have raked through various biographical dictionaries trying to discover who Younge E. Allison was, but without results. The man who wrote such a poem 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. I never weary of repeating some of its sonorous lines.
WALT MASON.
Emporia, Kan., Sept. 24.
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 of that city. Mr. Allison was at one time a correspondent of THE NEW YORK TIMES and also has written several books of fiction, including “The Passing of Major Galbraith.” It is not likely, however, that he wrote the famous old chanty. One of our correspondents writes that Mr. Allison “reconstructed” the song some years ago on the first four lines which are quoted in Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.”
Our correspondent, “W. L.,” who furnished the copy of the song as published recently in THE BOOK REVIEW says, however, that he copied the verses from a manuscript written into a book which bears this title: “Tales of the Ocean and Essays for the Forecastle, Containing Matters and Incidents Humorous, Pathetic, Romantic, and Sentimental, by Hawser Martingale, Boston, Printed and Published by S. W. Dickinson, 52 Washington St., 1843.” This book belonged to his grandfather, who died in 1874, and the song was familiar to “W. L.” in his youth as early as 1870.
In a letter to W. E. Henley, dated at Braemar, Aug. 25, 1881, written when Stevenson had begun the writing of “Treasure Island,” he writes:
I am now on another lay for the moment, purely owing to Lloyd this one; but I believe there’s more coin in it than in any amount of crawlers. Now see here “The Sea Cook or Treasure Island: A Story for Boys.” [This was the first title selected for the book.]
If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast, that it’s all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship and a current and a fine old Squire Trelawney, (the real Tre. purged of literature and sin to suit the infant mind,) and a doctor and another doctor and a sea cook with one leg and and a sea song with a chorus, “Yo-ho-ho and a Bottle of Rum,” (at the third “ho” you heave at the capstan bars,) which is a real buccaneer’s song, only known to the crew of the late Capt. Flint, who died of rum at Key West much regretted?
The first publication of “Treasure Island” was in 1883, and in a letter to Sidney Colvin in July, 1884, Stevenson writes: “‘Treasure Island’ came out of Kingsley’s ‘At Last,’ where I got ‘The Dead Man’s Chest.’”
††††