Pirates of the Caribbean Secrets Revealed
Question: I have two questions about
Pirates of the Caribbean. First, Captain Sparrow and Miss Swann sing a song when they're stranded on the island, something about "yo-ho" and rum - what is it? And second, where did the term Davy Jones' locker come from? I know it refers to the bottom of the sea, but why?
FlickChick: The sea shanty Swann and Sparrow warble has a venerable history. The first lines are:
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest/
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!/
Drink and the devil had done for the rest/
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
They were penned by 19th-century writer
Robert Louis Stevenson for his 1882 adventure novel
Treasure Island, a motherload of popular pirate lore and imagery. Apparently Stevenson was inspired by a about legendary buccaneer Edward Teach (c.1680-1718), better known as Blackbeard, who is said to have marooned a ship full of mutinous sailors on a tiny island popularly referred to as "Dead Man's Chest" and returned to find that most of them had slaughtered each other. A writer named E.(wing) Young Allison expanded on Stevenson's evocative beginning in 1891, spinning it into a lengthy and gruesome poem called "The Derelict" (as in the derelict ship). It includes such grisly images as:
The mate was fixed by the bosun's pike/
The bosun brained with a marlinspike
and
The skipper lay with his nob in gore/
Where the scullion's axe his cheek had shore/
And the scullion he was stabbed times four.
Nasty. The poem was set to music in 1901 by composer Henry Waller and renamed "A Piratical Ballad" for a stage production of
Treasure Island.
As to Davy Jones' locker, the short answer is: No one has the faintest idea. The concensus is that the earliest reference to Davy Jones is in
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) by Tobias Smollett (coincidentally, like Stevenson, a Scot), which asserts that Jones is a sailors' bogeyman. Smollet describes Jones as having "saucer eyes... three rows of teeth... horns and tail" and breathing blue smoke. He presides over all the malevolent spirits of the deep and is often glimpsed before shipwrecks, crippling storms and other nautical nightmares. Jones keeps his treasures - everything that sinks beneath the waves - at the very bottom of the sea, so somehow the ocean floor came to be called his locker. Why not his chest or his storage room? Beats me and, apparently, everyone else as well.
But we do know that the phrase goes back at least two centuries, since the first clear reference comes from Tobias Smollett, who wrote in
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751 that: "This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes, ship-wrecks, and other disasters to which sea-faring life is exposed, warning the devoted wretch of death and woe." So his locker is the bottom of the sea, the ocean's depths.
