it, shockingly mutilated, claiming to have found it written on the fly-leaf of a book dated 1843. The Times spoke sapiently about this "rough, unstudied sailor's jingle." Immediately the fight was on. Walt Mason vigorously rebuked the newspaper for its characterization, and furnished the name of the poem's author—Young E. Allison. The venerable Times dissented, thinking it "unlikely that Mr. Allison wrote the famous old chanty," and finally Champ Hitchcock wrote a monograph to prove it, and published it himself, achieving at once a triumph of truth and of bookmaking. The Times gracefully recanted, and again all was well.
Thus did one of the world's most famous fugitive poems receive, at length, the full publicity it deserved. Since that time, a host of admirers have paid this masterpiece the tribute of unqualified admiration, and not long before his death James Whitcomb Riley added a stanza, in jest, which is practically unknown. It ran:
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
Young E. Allison done all the rest,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
He's sung this song for you and me,
Jest as it wuz—or ort to be—
Clean through time and eternity,
Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
