When US Navy Commander Roger Johnson happened upon a 1919 Parliamentary transcript dealing with the near sinking of a British man-of-war called the King James, he at first gave it only passing thought—until he came across the words to a sailors’ ballad entitled “Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest,” and a description of events that matched in every detail the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Dead Man’s Chest is a classic pirate yarn that begins with Long John Silver’s escape from the merchantman Hispaniola and culminates with the American Revolution more than a decade later. It describes the unholy alliance between this softhearted cutthroat, his nephew David Noble, and Captain John Paul Jones, as they work together to retrieve a king’s ransom of Spanish gold and jewels from Dead Man’s chest—the remainder of the treasure described in Stevenson’s novel and the inspiration for the sailor’s ballad of the same name.