Sea shanty until that decade. A well-known early example, though not strictly speaking a reference to a shanty, is the song "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest", which was invented by Robert Louis Stevenson for his novel "Treasure Island" (1883). Quotes of "Blow the Man Down" were particularly plentiful. Rudyard Kipling romanticized the idea of the sailor's sea song within the poetic genre with his works "The First Chantey" and "The Last Chantey" (1893). While shanties were historically understood as work songs, the word "shanty" has often been used in popular culture since the mid-20th century as a catch-all term that
Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (1847–1900) was a Scottish art critic, a cousin of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson and the brother of Katharine de Mattos. He was the only son of the Scottish engineer, Alan Stevenson, and of Margaret Jones, his wife. He was born at Edinburgh on 28 March 1847, and educated at Windermere and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he took no honours, but graduated B.A. in 1871 and M.A. in 1882. He excelled as a gymnast and light-weight athlete ; his favourite outdoor exercise was canoeing. His tastes in life were Bohemian,