Shanty

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum …

I always imagined fifteen guys stomping up and down on some poor guy’s chest. Maybe I’m the only one—I never really checked with anyone else. Well, today I came across this translation at a Russian blog: пятнадцать человек на сундук мертвеца, which back-translates nicely to “fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,” but here the chest is a wooden thing you put stuff in, not the place where you breathe in and out (while you’re alive, anyway).

That certainly makes more sense. Still a tight fit, but more reasonable than fifteen pirates standing cheek-to-jowl on any person, prone or upright, living or dead. So, is that the correct interpretation?

Google to the rescue once again. Using the entire phrase as input, I found this:

Dead Man’s Chest is a tiny island that forms part of the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea. Pirate legends of the Caribbean claim that the notorious pirate Edward Teach (Blackbeard) marooned 15 of his pirate crew on “Dead Man’s Chest” as a punishment for their mutiny and desertion.

Can I trust this source? Let’s Google “virgin islands” + “dead man’s chest” … voilà: a nice Wikipedia article about Dead Chest Island. Apparently the name got shortened in the intervening years. At any rate, if you look at the photo of the island, you might imagine the thoracic cavity of a dead man floating in the water—if you have a particularly morbid turn of mind. So it would seem I was right all along. It’s just that the chest was metaphorical, and a whole lot bigger.

But wait! There’s an island south of Puerto Rico called Isla de Caja de Muertos—Caja de Muertos for short, which can be rendered in English as “Coffin of Dead Men” or “Dead Men’s Chest.” A wooden thing again! And really—why do I think I see an anatomical chest in the Virgin Islands and not a treasure chest (or chest of drawers, for that matter)? Round and round we go—maybe the Russian translator got it right.

I really thought the blogger had cleared up a problem I never even knew I had. Но, увы …