[3]And elsewhere in The Four Years Voyages: But now they had no Goods at all, he believed, having disposed of them all, either by giving them to other Prizes, &c. or heaving the rest into David Jones's Locker (i.e. the Sea).

[3]An early description of Davy Jones occurs in Tobias Smollett's The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, published in 1751:[4] This same Davy Jones, according to sailors, is the fiend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is often seen in various shapes, perching among the rigging on the eve of hurricanes:, ship-wrecks, and other disasters to which sea-faring life is exposed, warning the devoted wretch of death and woe.

Locker, in seaman’s phrase, means any receptacle for private stores; and duffy is a ghost or spirit among the West Indian negroes.

[14] In the 1930 cartoon "The Haunted Ship", from the Aesop's Fables series, Davy Jones is depicted as a living skeleton wearing a pirate's bicorne hat.

Theodore Sturgeon's 1938 short story "Mailed Through a Porthole", about a doomed freighter, takes the form of a letter addressed to "Mr. David Jones, Esq., Forty Fathoms."

Jones is portrayed as a captain assigned to ferry those drowned at sea to the afterlife before he corrupted his purpose out of anger at his betrayal by his lover, the sea-goddess Calypso.

[19] French singer Nolwenn Leroy recorded a song titled "Davy Jones" for her 2012 album Ô Filles de l'Eau.