Davy Jones’ Locker is the most familiar expression in the English maritime vocabulary for death at sea, used for centuries by sailors across the English-speaking world to describe the destination of ships that sank and men who drowned. It appears in literature from at least the 18th century, in Tobias Smollett’s 1751 novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, but the expression was clearly already established in maritime usage before Smollett used it, and its origin is one of the more contested etymological questions in the history of the English language.
The Davy Jones theories divide into two main branches. The Welsh saint theory traces the name to Saint David, the patron saint of Wales, whose name was contracted to Davy in the same way that the patron saint of sailors, Saint Nicholas, was contracted to Old Nick as an alternative name for the devil: the saint whose protection was specifically maritime being reinterpreted, in the specific dark humour of the sailor’s relationship with the sea, as the supernatural figure who welcomed the drowned rather than the figure who protected the living. The Jones is common enough in Welsh naming to complete the Welsh saint hypothesis, making Davy Jones the Welsh sailor’s patron saint reimagined as the deity of the drowned.
The Alternative Theories
The alternative theories are more colourful and less linguistically coherent. The corrupt shipowner theory proposes a specific historical David Jones who operated a pub in London in the 17th century and who was known for the practice of shanghaiing unwilling recruits into service by drugging them and storing them in the pub’s cellar, called the locker, until a ship was ready to take them. The locker in this theory is a specific physical space in a specific building, and Davy Jones is a specific historical villain whose name became the generic term for the fate of the press-ganged sailor.
The Jonah theory connects the name to the biblical Jonah, who was thrown overboard in a storm and swallowed by a large fish, and proposes that Jones is the corruption of Jonah through the specific linguistic processes that maritime communities, which were not primarily literate, applied to names they received aurally rather than in writing. In this theory, Davy Jones is God’s Jonah, the divine agent of the storm and the drowning, and the locker is the belly of the whale that received the overboard sailor.
The Locker
Whatever the origin of the name, the locker is the specific and consistent element of the expression that the linguistic theories agree on: the ocean floor as a chest, a container, a place that receives rather than merely destroys. The maritime tradition’s insistence on the locker as a specific location rather than simply the absence of the drowned man is the expression of a specific theological and psychological need: the need to believe that the sailor who did not return went somewhere rather than simply ceased. The locker gives the drowned a destination, which is a form of dignity that the alternative, the simple negation of the drowning, does not provide.
Sailors named the depth below the hull. They gave the drowned a house. They called the sea floor a locker, which is the word for a place where valued things are stored and kept. The specific humanity of this naming is the humanity of a community that had lost too many people to the sea to be able to regard the sea as simply dangerous: it had to be regarded as a place, a destination, a receiver of the people it claimed. Davy Jones’ Locker is the name the maritime community gave to its grief, expressed in the specific vocabulary of the storage that the sea provides for what it takes.
