Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/335

 A. Hyatt Verrill contends that it is the mapmakers who are mistaken, all of them blindly following an error made by an early one, and says that during his residence in the West Indies he never heard the island called anything but “Dead Man’s Chest,” or “Duchess Island.”

Whatever its name, legend has it that in the old days the pirates of those seas were in the habit of repairing thither to careen and scrape their ships, to stretch their legs, and to indulge in the boisterous pastimes peculiar to their profession. But this also rests on a very slender foundation. F. A. Fenger, who made a voyage through Sir Francis Drake Channel in a canoe in 1916, is one of the few men who have actually seen the island. He says in his account of the voyage in “Alone in the Caribbean” that he intended to land on it, but the surf was too high, and he had to give it up. He took a photograph of it, however, which shows that it is more of a rock than an island—about the poorest possible place to use as a harbor.

Of course the only thing that matters is not what the island really is, but what Stevenson transmuted it into. Doubtless most readers of his immortal tale have imagined, as Jim Hawkins did, a sailor’s sea-chest with fifteen men heaped across it (although Stevenson was careful to use capitals as an indication of what it really meant):