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 club), particularly with Charles Baxter, who would become Stevenson's financial agent, and with a professor, Fleeming Jenkin, whose house staged amateur drama in which Stevenson took part, and whose biography he would later write. Perhaps most important at this point in his life was a cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as "Bob"), a lively and light-hearted young man who, instead of the family profession, had chosen to study art. Each year during vacations, Stevenson travelled to inspect the family's engineering works—to Anstruther and Wick in 1868, with his father on his official tour of Orkney and Shetland islands lighthouses