Dead Man's Chest Dead Man's Chest "Dead Man's Chest" (also known as "Fifteen Men On The Dead Man's Chest" or "Derelict") is a fictional sea song, originally from Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island" (1883). It was expanded in a poem, titled "Derelict" by Young E. Allison, published in the "Louisville Courier-Journal" in 1891. It has since been used in many later works of art in various forms. Stevenson found the name "Dead Man's Chest" among a list of Virgin Island names in a book by Charles Kingsley, possibly in reference to the Dead Chest Island off Peter Island in the British Virgin
Robert Louis Stevenson Mariki, Apaiang, and Abemama in the Gilbert Islands. They spent several months on Abemama with tyrant-chief Tem Binoka, whom Stevenson described in "In the South Seas". Stevenson left Sydney on the "Janet Nicoll" in April 1890 for his third and final voyage among the South Seas islands. He intended to produce another book of travel writing to follow his earlier book "In the South Seas", but it was his wife who eventually published her journal of their third voyage. (Fanny misnames the ship in her account "The Cruise of the Janet Nichol".) A fellow passenger was Jack Buckland, whose stories