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
Alan Stevenson Alan Stevenson Alan Stevenson (1807, Edinburgh – 1865, Portobello, Edinburgh) was a Scottish lighthouse engineer who was Engineer to the Board of Northern Lighthouses. Among his notable works is the Skerryvore Lighthouse. A member of the famous Stevenson family of engineers, eldest son of Robert Stevenson, and brother of David and Thomas Stevenson, between 1843 and 1853 he built thirteen lighthouses in and around Scotland. The writer Robert Louis Stevenson was the son of Thomas and thus the nephew of Alan Stevenson. He was born in Edinburgh on 28 April 1807 the son of Robert Stevenson and his wife, Jean