expression from him. He just writes things and tucks them away in odd
corners and it has devolved upon me to collect them and keep them. So it is
that, while not a literary executor--because Allison, thank God, is
scandalously healthy and I am making no professions--it falls to my
satisfied lot to be a literary collector in a certain sense--if he who
gathers and preserves and gloats over the brain products of others may thus
be described. That is why, treasured among my earthly possessions--scant
enough, the good Lord knows, but full of joy and satisfaction to me--are
extensive lead-pencil manuscript memoranda in Allison's writing showing the
painstaking stages by which "Fifteen Dead Men," characterized by James
Whitcomb Riley as that "masterly and exquisite ballad of delicious
horrificness," reached its perfection. Under whatever name it may be sung,
be it "The Ballad of Dead Men," or "On Board the Derelict" or "Derelict,"
it is a poem big enough to fix the Jewel of Fame firmly over the author's
brow.
Away back in the Allison strain somewhere must have been a bold buccaneer,
for who else but the descendant of a roystering, fighting, blood-letting
pirate could have seen the "scuppers glut with a rotting red?" Through all
the visible mildness of his deep and complex nature there surely runs a
blood-thirsty current, in proof of which I submit this single paragraph
from certain confessions[3] of his:
With character seared, abandoned and dissolute in habit, through
and by the hearing and seeing and reading of history, there was but
one desperate step left. So I entered upon the career of a pirate
in my ninth year. The Spanish Main, as no doubt you remember, was
at that time upon an open common just across the street from our
house, and it was a hundred feet long, half as wide and would
average two feet in depth. I have often since thanked Heaven that
they filled up that pathless ocean in order to build an iron
foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why
during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast
thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long
rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the
plank--even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured
them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that
iron foundry. Under the lee of the Northernmost promontory, near a
rock marked with peculiar crosses made by the point of the stiletto
which I constantly carried in my red silk sash, I buried tons of
plate, and doubloons, pieces of eight, pistoles, Louis d'ors, and
galleons by the chest. At that time galleons somehow meant to me
money pieces in use, though since then the name has been given to a
species of boat. The rich brocades, Damascus and Indian stuffs,
laces, mantles, shawls and finery were piled in riotous profusion
in our cave where--let the whole truth be told if it must--I lived
with a bold, black-eyed and coquettish Spanish girl, who loved me
with ungovernable jealousy that occasionally led to bitter and
terrible scenes of rage and despair. At last when I brought home a
white and red English girl, whose life I spared because she had
begged me on her knees by the memory of my sainted mother to spare
her for her old father, who was waiting her coming, Joquita passed
all bounds. I killed her--with a single knife thrust, I remember.
She was buried right on the spot where the Tilden and Hendricks
flag pole afterwards stood in the campaign of 1876. It was with
bitter melancholy that I fancied the red stripes on the flag had
their color from the blood of the poor, foolish, jealous girl below.
[3] The Delicious Vice. Pages 23-24. First Series, 1907.
So it is, naturally enough, that to Allison, "Treasure Island" is the _ne
plus ultra_ and composite of all pirate stories, and this marvel of delight
he called to Waller's attention while they were incubating "The
Ogallallas." No sooner had Waller read it than the quatrain of Old Billy
Bones took possession of him and converted itself into music. The two of
them, as so many other thousands had done, bewailed the parsimony of
Stevenson in the use and development of the grisly suggestion and Waller
declared that if Allison would complete the verse he would set it to music.
That same night Allison composed three ragged but promising verses, at
white heat, while walking the floor in a cloud of tobacco smoke of his own
making. Next morning he gave them to Waller, who by night had the score and
words married and a day later the finished product went forward to Wm. A.
Pond & Co., and was published under the title of "A Piratical Ballad"[4].
Note that these initial verses are described as "ragged" and in this I am
also quoting Allison himself who in our various chats on his reminiscence
of "Treasure Island" has often given them this characterization. Be that as
it may these three verses were the foundation for the perfect six that were
to emerge after several years more of intermittent but patient development
and labor.
[4] A Piratical Ballad. Song for Bass or Deep Baritone. Words by
Young E. Allison; Music by Henry Waller; New York. Published by
William A. Pond & Co. Copyright 1891. [See pages 65-68.]
A PIRATICAL BALLAD.
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!
The mate was fixed by the bo's'n's pike,
The bo's'n brained with a marlinspike,
And cookey's throat was marked belike
It had been gripped
By fingers ten.
And there they lay,
All good dead men--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men all stark and cold--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Their eyes popp'd wide and glazed and bold--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
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.
And there they lay,
And the soggy skies
Rained all day long
On the staring eyes--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of the Vixen's list--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
All gone down from the devil's own fist--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
We wrapped 'em all in a mainsail's fold,
We sewed at the foot a bit of gold,
And we heaved 'em into the billows cold.
The bit was put
As snug's could be,
Where't ne'er will bother
You nor me--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
This is the requiem of the Fifteen Dead Men that Eugene Cowles would sing
so effectively in his booming bass after rehearsals of "The Ogallallas." It
must have been great!
Allison felt that he had done little justice to an idea full of great
possibilities and made a number of revisions during the polishing process
until it was raised to five verses. I have the original manuscript[5] of
the first revision of "A Piratical Ballad" unearthed from a cubby-hole in
an old desk of his to which I fell heir, the only change being in the title
to "A Ballad of Dead Men," the elimination of one of the concluding lines
"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" from the refrain of each verse, (it had been
added originally to fit the musical cadence), and the strengthening of the
final verse by the substitution of--
With willing hearts
And a Yo-heave-ho
Over the side
To the sharks below.
[5] Reproduced in facsimile.
Many will no doubt recall "The Philosophy of Composition"[6] by Edgar Allen
Poe, and those who by some mischance have missed it, can spend a delightful
hour in the perusal of what, beyond the least doubt, is the most skillful
analysis of poetic composition ever written, even though it fails to carry
conviction that "The Raven" was ever produced by the formula described. Poe
declared that--
... most writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood
that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic
intuition; and would positively shudder at letting the public take
a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities
of thought, at the true purposes seized only at the last moment, at
the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity
of full view, at the fully matured fancies discarded as
unmanageable, at the cautious selections and rejections, at the
painful erasions and interpolations--in a word at the wheels and
pinions, the tackle for scene shifting, the step ladders and demon
traps, the cock's feather, the red paint and the black patches,
which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred constitute the
properties of the literary _histrio_.
[6] Stone & Kimball Edition. Vol. 6; page 31.
And so he proceeds to detail how he composed "The Raven." First he decided
on a length of about one hundred lines that could be read at one sitting;
on beauty as its province; on sadness as its tone; on a variation of the
application of the refrain--it remaining for the most part unvaried--to
obtain what he termed "artistic piquancy;" proceeding only at that stage to
the composition of the last verse as the first step. All this of course has
little to do with "Derelict" and yet I cannot but see a sort of analogy of
effect by processes wholly divergent, particularly as Allison once told me
that the central idea of the last verse for consigning the bodies to the
deep was ever in his mind and that this verse was first projected, although
its development was the most difficult and its perfection did not come
until later. So much for that! In the five verses he had arrived
approximately at a consummation of the sea burial, the introduction very
properly repeating the quatrain of Billy Bones before concluding:
We wrapped 'em all in a mains'l tight,
With twice ten turns of a hawser's bight,
And we heaved 'em over and out of sight--
With a yo-heave-ho!
And a fare-you-well!
And a sullen plunge
In the sullen swell--
Ten fathom-lengths of the road to hell--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
While this composition is fine and tight as a drum in poetic meter and
conception, the real perfection was not arrived at until he made it "Ten
fathoms _deep on_ the road to hell." In the five-verse revision a part of
the last verse as it appeared in "A Piratical Ballad" went into the second,
a part of the second verse was shifted to the third and a fourth was added
to give an implied reason for the riot of death in an inferred quarrel over
the "chest on chest full of Spanish gold, with a ton of plate in the middle
hold." Strangely enough all these shifts and additions do not appear to
have altered the sentiment in the least and at times I am amazed, in
reading over old versions, that I do not appreciably miss certain lines and
ideas that seem vital to the finished product.
Shortly after the five verses had been privately printed for his friends on
a single slip, Allison conceived the rather daring idea of injecting the
trace of a woman on board the Derelict which up to this time he had very
closely developed in the Stevensonian spirit. While there was no woman in
"Treasure Island," he proved to himself by analysis that his new thought
would do no violence to Stevenson's idea, because Billy Bones' song was a
reminiscence of _his own past_ and not of Treasure Island. Hence the trace
of a woman, skillfully injected, might be permissible. Here, too, his
analysis gave him the melancholy tone--of which Poe speaks as so highly
desirable--greatly accentuated by doubt of whether she was "wench" or
"maid," and a further possible incentive for the extermination of the whole
ship's list. This verse[7] has undergone little change since the woman
trace was first injected:
More we saw, through the stern-light screen--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Chartings ondoubt where a woman had been--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
A flimsy shift on a bunker cot,
With a dagger-slot in the bosom spot
And the lace stiff-dry in a purplish blot.
Now whether wench
Or a shuddering maid,
She dared the knife
And she took the blade.
By God! She was stuff for a plucky jade--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
[7] Reproduced in facsimile.
There were certain niceties of word adjustment to follow as for instance
the substitution of "a thin dirk-slot" for "a dagger-slot," the word "thin"
carrying a keen mental impression of a snaky, hissing sound-sensation as
the idea unfolded of the dirk slipping through the flimsy fabric of the
shift, cast on the bunker cot to remain the silent evidence of the tragedy.
The very acme of touches came in the punctuation[8] of the concluding
lines--pauses that emphasize with so much ingenuity the very question that
lends the speculatively mournful cadence to the whole:
Or was she wench ...
Or some shuddering maid...?
That dared the knife
And that took the blade!
And as a cap-sheaf came the thought of differentiating the
whole verse[8] by an Italicized setting! That is almost the last
word of the conception of poet-printer.
[8] Reproduced in facsimile.
The dogged persistency that Allison applied to the completion of this
masterpiece has always won my deepest admiration. And the admiration of
many others too, for this poem, first publicly printed in the Louisville
_Courier-Journal_, has been reprinted in one form or another, in almost
every newspaper in the country and has an honored place in many scrap
books. What great and painstaking effort was encompassed in its composition
only one can know even partly who has been privileged to "peep behind the
scenes" at the "properties of the literary _histrio_"--the manuscript notes
and memoranda, a few of which accompany this volume in facsimile.
IF THERE _is_ CONTROVERSY!
If any one in this wide, old world, after reading the wealth of evidence in
this little volume, still thinks Young E. Allison did not write "Derelict,"
let him come to me like a man and say so and I'll give him a good swift
stab in the eye, with my eye, and say: "You don't want to be convinced."
This includes the editor of _The New York Times Book Review_. When he made
an egregious blunder by stating that "Derelict" was an unskilled sailor's
jingle, a wave of protest reached him. He then printed Walt Mason's letter
describing the poem as a work of art and altered his editorial
characterization of it to "famous old chanty." In the same breath he wrote
that it was not likely that Mr. Allison was the author--but why not likely?
It is plain that somebody must have written it. Nobody else's name had ever
been associated with it. The _Times_ man had nobody to suggest as the
author. Why, then, maintain that Mr. Allison was not the author? His sole
reason is that the "Bowdlerized" and bastard version which he printed had
been _copied from a manuscript written into an old book printed in 1843_!
What does the ink say about dates? What do the pen marks say? Great gods
and little fishes! If ever I shall desire to antiquitize a modernity I'll
copy it into an old book and send a transcript to that delightful Babe of
the Woods of _The New York Times Book Review_.
When _Rubric_, a Chicago magazine venture of attractiveness, but doomed in
advance to failure, published Allison's poem under the title "On Board the
Derelict," I detached three sets of the eight illustrated and illuminated
pages on which it was printed, had the sheets inlaid in hand-made paper and
neatly bound. This was accomplished with the sage advice of my old
playmate, Frank M. Morris, the bookman of Chicago. One of these volumes was
made for Mr. Allison, (so that he would surely have at least one copy of
his own poem), a second was for my bookish friend, James F. Joseph, then of
Chicago and now of Indianapolis, and a third was for my own library. The
mere fact that Allison was five years autographing my particular copy has
no bearing whatever in this discussion, but leads me to say that I felt
amply repaid in the end by this very handsome inscription on the fly-leaf:
This Volume,
No. 1
of the limited private edition of "On Board the Derelict," is
for the private delight of my dear friend,
Champion Ingraham Hitchcock,
the publisher and designer thereof--appreciative guide,
counselor and encourager of other excursions into "the higher
altitudes,"--with all love and long memory
Christmas, 1906. YOUNG E. ALLISON.
Well, because "Derelict" was a delight and Allison my friend, I gave away
_Rubrics_ by the score and, among others, saw that a copy went to Wallace
Rice, literatus--and Chicago book reviewer--to whom I owe an everlasting
debt of gratitude for precious moments saved by good advice on modern stuff
not to read. In presenting "Derelict," the _Rubric_ publishers left an
impression that the poem had but then been completed[9] for its pages. I
knew better; Wallace had read it before, in whole or in part and raised a
question. It so worked upon me that later I decided to submit it to Allison
himself. Sometimes we do things, and know not why, that have a very
distinct later and wholly unexpected bearing upon situations, and when the
opportunity for this volume arose, the memory that I had saved Allison's
penciled reply came over me. A patient search had its reward. Here is the
letter[10] written with the same old lead pencil on the same old spongy
copy paper:
Louisville Feb. 22, 1902.
Dear Hitch:
My supposition is that the _Rubric_ folks misunderstood or have
been misunderstood. The Dead Man's Song was first written about 10
years ago--3 verses--and Henry Waller set it to music & it was
published in New York. The version for the song did not exhaust it
in my mind and so I took it up every now & then for 4 or 5 years
and finally completed it. A very lovely little girl who was
visiting my wife helped me to decide whether I should write in one
verse "a flimsy shift" or "a filmy shift" or other versions, and
her opinion on "flimsy" decided me. She is the only person that
ever had anything to do with it--_as far as I know_! What hypnotic
influences were at work or what astral minds may have intervened, I
know not. But I have always thought I did it all. It was not much
to do, except for a certain 17th Century verbiage and grisly humor.
I am glad you still believe I wouldn't steal anybody else's brains
any more than I would his money. Waller wrote splendid singing
music to it which Eugene Cowles used to bellow beautifully.
With best love, as always,
Y. E. A.
[9] See letter to "The New York Times Book Review".
[10] Reproduced in facsimile.
That this narrative may be complete, the articles and comment that appeared
in _The New York Times Book Review_ are reproduced, together with a letter
to the editor written by the author of this volume, which, neither
acknowledged nor published by him, obtained wide circulation through _The
Scoop_,[11] a magazine issued every Saturday by The Press Club of Chicago.
It was quite characteristic of Allison to decline the very urgent requests
of many friends to jump into the arena and make a claim for that which is
his own creation and in coming to a negative decision, his reasons are
probably best expressed in a letter to Henry A. Sampson, who himself writes
poetry:
Yours of the 5th containing wormwood from the _N. Y. Times_ (and
being the 11th copy received from loving friends) is here.
Jealous! Jealous! Just the acute development on your part of the
ordinary professional jealousy. Merely because I have at last found
my place amongst those solitary and dazzling poets, Homer and
Shakespeare, who, also, it has been proved, did not write their own
stuff, but found it all in folk lore and copied it down.
Well, damn me, I can't help my own genius and do not care for its
products because I can always make more, and I compose these things
for my own satisfaction.
I, with Shakespeare and Homer, perceive the bitter inefficacy of
fighting the scientific critics. Walt Mason saw the versification
was artful instead of "bungling and crude," but the _Times_ critic
knows a copy out of a "chanty book" when he sees it.
I envy your being unpublished. You do not have to bleed with me and
Homer and Bill. I feel the desiccating effects of my own dishonor.
I grow distrustful. I wonder if _you_ wrote _your_ poems. You
refused to publish. Were you, astute and keen reader of auguries,
afraid of being found out? Who writes all these magnificent things
that me and Homer and Bill couldn't and didn't write?
No, I don't owe it to my friends to settle this. I'd a sight rather
plead guilty and accept indeterminate sentence than to waste time
on my friends. I've got 'em or I haven't. And I want to convince
enemies by a profound and dignified sneak.
From one who has had dirt done him.
MANTELLINI
Louisville, Oct. 6, 1914.
[11] Issue of October 10, 1914.
SOME CLIPPINGS; _and_ A LETTER
The controversial comments on Allison's "Fifteen Men on the Dead Man's
Chest," heretofore mentioned, appeared in _The New York Times Book Review_
of September 20, 1914, and October 4, 1914, while the inquiry that
precipitated the discussion was published July 26. The printed matter,
_verbatim et literatim_, and the matter not printed, are subjoined:
_July 26, 1914._
APPEALS TO READERS
EDWARD ALDEN.--Can some reader tell me if the verse or chorus of a
pirate's song, which Robert Louis Stevenson recites several times
in whole or in part in "Treasure Island," was original or quoted;
and, if there are other verses, where they may be found? The lines
as Stevenson gives them are:
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest,
Yo-ho-ha and a bottle of rum;
Drink and the devil had done for the rest,
Yo-ho-ha and a bottle of rum.
* * * * *
_September 20, 1914._
ANSWERS FROM READERS
W. L.--The verse about which Edward Alden inquired in your issue of
July 26. and which is quoted in Stevenson's "Treasure Island," is
the opening stanza of an old song or chantey of West Indian piracy,
which is believed to have originated from the wreck of an English
buccaneer on a cay in the Caribbean Sea known as "The Dead Man's
Chest." The cay was so named from its fancied resemblance to the
old sailors' sea chest which held his scanty belongings. The song
or chantey was familiar to deep-sea sailors many years ago. The
song is copied from a very old scrapbook, in which the author's
name was not given. The verses[12] are as follows:
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!
The mate was fixed by the bo'sun's pike
An the bo'sun brained with a marlin spike.
And the cookie's throat was marked belike
It had been clutched by fingers ten,
And there they lay, all good dead men,
Like break o' day in a boozin' ken--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of a whole ship's list,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Dead and bedamned and their souls gone whist,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
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;
And there they lay, and the soggy skies
Dripped ceaselessly in upstaring eyes,
By murk sunset and by foul sunrise--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of 'em stiff and stark,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Ten of the crew bore the murder mark,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
'Twas a cutlass swipe or an ounce of lead,
Or a gaping hole in a battered head,
And the scuppers' glut of a rotting red;
And there they lay, ay, damn my eyes,
Their lookouts clapped on Paradise,
Their souls gone just the contrawise--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Fifteen men of 'em good and true,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Every man Jack could a' sailed with Old Pew,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
There was chest on chest of Spanish gold
And a ton of plate in the middle hold,
And the cabin's riot of loot untold--
And there they lay that had took the plum,
With sightless eyes and with lips struck dumb,
And we shared all by rule o' thumb--
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
More was seen through the stern light's screen,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Chartings undoubt where a woman had been,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
A flimsy shift on a bunker cot
With a dirk slit sheer through the bosom spot
And the lace stiff dry in a purplish rot--
Or was she wench or shuddering maid,
She dared the knife and she took the blade--
Faith, there was stuff for a plucky Jade!
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!