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 Louis Stevenson M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said that Stevenson "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins". Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland on 13 November 1850 to Thomas Stevenson (1818–87), a leading lighthouse engineer, and his wife Margaret Isabella (born Balfour, 1829–97). He was christened Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson. At about age 18, he changed the spelling of "Lewis" to "Louis", and he dropped "Balfour" in 1873. Lighthouse design was the family's profession; Thomas's father (Robert's grandfather) was famous civil engineer Robert Stevenson, and Thomas's