The Brooklyn Eagle (Oct. 14, 1896), p. 11, reprinted a peculiar story from the Chicago Times-Herald of unknown but presumably recent date. In it, the anonymous reporter claims that while strolling along the waterfront of the Chicago River he'd heard a group of "old time sailors...businly engaged on one of the big boats tugging at a hawser when one of them began to sing...[a]nd the others joined lustily in the refrain":

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.

For they drank and drank and got so drunk,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!
Each from the dead man bit a chunk,
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.

The bottle burst and the men accurst,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!
Sucked his blood to quench their thirst,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.

They sucked his blood and crunched his bones,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!
When suddenly up came Davy Jones!
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.

"My men," says he, "you must come with me,"
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!
And he grinned with a horrible kind of glee;
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!

Davy Jones had a big black key,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!
It was for his locker beneath the sea,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum!

He winked and blinked like an owl in a tree,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum;
And he sank them all to the bottom of the sea,
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum.

Now, all take warning from this 'ere song,
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum;
Never drink whisky so devilish strong.
Yo-ho-ho! and a bottle of rum.

The writer assumed that this performance proved that Stevenson's " Treasure Island" (1882) had drawn its famous lines about the "Dead Man's Chest" from an actual shanty. Of course, it proves nothing of the sort, particularly since Stevenson, while working on the novel, had written to a friend that the song was "known only to the crew of the late Capt. Flint."

When the reporter asked the men where they'd learned the song, one answered "defiantly": "We never larnt it nowhere, yer honor, we allers knowed it."

In "Buried Caesars" (1923), a collection of his essays, Vincent Starrett concluded that the whole story was a hoax because Stevenson himself had written the four lines of the song that appear in "Treasure Island."

But it was a long time between 1882 and 1896. Stevenson didn't get his song on the Chicago riverfront, but it's certainly possible that the alleged sailors did pick up some unknown versifier's later effort and put it to use as a shanty. It's at least equally possible that they didn't.

Whatever the truth of it, somebody should have been collecting shanties on the Great Lakes long before Ivan Walton.