According to an apocryphal story, the pirate Blackbeard marooned his crew on Dead Chest Island as punishment, leaving them with nothing but a cutlass and a bottle of rum each.

Because the earliest known references to this story are from the 20th century, it is almost certainly fakelore derived from Robert Louis Stevenson's song "Dead Man's Chest", which first appeared in his novel Treasure Island in 1883.

Stevenson found the name "Dead Man's Chest" among a list of island names in a book by Charles Kingsley and said "Treasure Island came out of Kingsley's At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871); where I got the 'Dead Man's Chest' - that was the seed".

The Dutchman's Cap, Broken Jerusalem, The Dead Man's Chest, Rum Island, and so forth, mark a time and a race more prosaic, but still more terrible, though not one whit more wicked and brutal, than the Spanish conquistadores.

In 1994, a journalist, Quentin van Marle, spent 31 days alone on the island as a voluntary castaway, beating the supposed record of Blackbeard's pirates and in commemoration of the centenary of Robert Louis Stevenson's death.