Davy Jones’ Origins Submerged Forever

For at least 250 years, Davy Jones has been known as the Spirit of the Sea, or the Sailors’ Devil, and Davy Jones’ locker is the bottom of the sea, where drowned sailors spend their eternity. The earliest literary citation listed in the Oxford English Dictionary for Davy Jones is from Tobias Smollett’s “Peregrine Pickle” (1751): “This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep.” Later, in the “Naval Chronicles” of 1803, “The seamen . . . would have met a watery grave; or, to use a seaman’s phrase, gone to Davy Jones’s locker.”

As a boy, I loved books about “wooden ships and iron men,” and I had a pretty clear picture in my mind of what Davy Jones’ locker was like. It contained a lot of old sea chests with great brass locks and heavy leather handles at each end. They looked remarkably like those treasure chests in the book illustrations by the great Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. The bones of dead sailors lay in the chests, which were open to the briny deep and its denizens.

Half of my genes came over from Wales, and I used to wonder why a typically Welsh name like Davy Jones would be given to a sea devil. My maternal grandfather was a Welsh Congregational minister who came here to live among the Welsh miners in the coal-mining district of Pennsylvania. He was also a poet; so I thought anyone named Davy Jones should be a coal miner or a poet, or maybe a singer. My mother told me everyone in Wales was a great singer. At the time, she’d never been to Wales, but I had no reason to doubt her.

The “why Davy Jones?” puzzle remained unsolved in my mind for many years; then, just last week, I was looking up something in my old Webster’s Second when “Davy Jones” caught my eye, and I read, “. . . sea devil. . . . It is a corruption of Duppy Jonah or Duffy Jonah .” To word-fanciers, a line like that is like the aromas of an Italian kitchen to a hungry man. It sets our juices flowing.

Duppy or Duffy evidently comes originally from Africa--from a word, dupe , of the Bube people, “A very primitive Bantu-speaking Negro people of the island of Fernando Po, West Africa.” A duppy is “a spirit or ghost . . . usually malevolent.” Jonah is, presumably, the old biblical prophet who was tossed overboard and for three days and three nights made his home in a whale’s belly. Jonah survived his sojourn in the whale, but we can understand his subsequent malevolence, I think. Duppy-or-Duffy Jonah is supposed to have moved westward across the Atlantic from the Bube of Fernando Po to the West Indies, where sailors picked it up and transformed Duffy Jonah to Davy Jones.

To someone in my line of work, a discovery like this comes as both a thrill and an embarrassment. Here I am, a writer on words and language, a man some of whose time has been spent since the late 1930s pondering the riddle of why the “sea devil” is called Davy Jones. And now, well into my 60s, I learn for the first time that Davy Jones may not be Davy Jones at all, but some ghost called Duppy, or Duffy, Jonah. How is it that in all those years, I hadn’t discovered Old Devil Duppy? I’ve always been one to “look it up.” Is it possible that in all my years, I never searched for the source of Davy Jones? I couldn’t believe it.

It turns out that I needn’t be too embarrassed. I’m sure I’d gone to several dictionaries before my recent serendipitous dip into Webster’s Second. I’m reassured by my search through about a dozen reference works in the past few days. Few of them mention Duffy or Duppy. Most say things like “sailors’ term” and, for etymology, nothing more than a question mark. Even the larger Webster’s Third, which you’d think would include the information I found in Webster’s Second, says nothing at all about Davy’s derivation. It is this omission of Duffy Jonah from the Third, after it had been in the Second, that leads me to believe that the Duppy-Duffy-Fernando Po theory is probably folk etymology, though, admittedly, scholarly folk etymology.

I like both the ingenuity and the romance of the Duffy Jonah-to-Davy Jones theory and was delighted to discover it, mostly because I love that sort of theorizing in etymological detective work. I also rejoice at African origins, ever since I learned that our most ubiquitous linguistic export, OK, is almost certainly African. But, appealing as Duffy Jonah may appear, I suspect that, as the original Davy Jones, he is no more than clever conjecture. It’s certainly fun to think about, but I’m afraid my Davy Jones puzzle will probably remain unresolved.