“‘We wrapped ’em all in a mains’l tight
With twice ten turns of the hawser’s bight!
“These two lines are part of a poem written by Young Allison as a continuance of the Billy Bones song in Treasure Island.
“A mainsail is made of 0, 1 or 2 canvas, which will stand alone; 28 sheet-iron would do as well.
“A hawser, with us, is anything in the shape of a rope which is above six inches circumference. You will note that the bight is used—two parts, or loop. Instead of using the largest rope on board a ship, the smallest—skysail bunt-line—would have been more to the point.
“A sailor would get back at me by saying ‘Perhaps she didn’t carry skysails.’
“I would reply, ‘Suppose the mainsail was as soft as silk and the hawser as pliable, would you, as a sailor, throw them away on dead men?’
“A mistaken idea exists that Stevenson wrote the Billy Bones song and only used one verse in “Treasure Island.” He ‘quotes’ the only verse there is. We of the sea locate the scene of the verse at Dead Chest Island, half way between the S. W. & S. E. points of Porto Rico, four and one-half miles off shore, which was used as a buccaneer rendezvous, and later as the haven of wreckers and smugglers. It was first named by the Spanish ‘Casa de Muertos’—the Coffin.
“While I knew that Stevenson wrote, I did not know him as a writer. I knew him as the grandson and son of men who dared to do, and who achieved in the doing. I also knew him as a man interested in everything pertaining to the sea.
“In fancy, I can see him gazing off to leeward, and hear him drone—as of yore—