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
Under the Dome (novel) the same title and then a second time in 1982 as "The Cannibals". As King stated on his official site, these two unfinished works "were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of "The Cannibals" is that it, like "Needful Things", was a kind of social comedy. The new "Under the Dome" is played dead straight." From the material originally written, only the first chapter is included in the new novel. According to Stephen J. Spignesi's