E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898.
Davy Jones’s Locker.
He’s gone to Davy Jones’s locker, i.e. he is dead. Jones is a corruption of Jonah, the prophet, who was thrown into the sea. Locker, in seaman’s phrase, means any receptacle for private stores; and duffy is a ghost or spirit among the West Indian negroes. So the whole phrase is, “He is gone to the place of safe keeping, where duffy Jonah was sent to.”
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“This same Davy Jones, according to the mythology of sailors, is the flend that presides over all the evil spirits of the deep, and is seen in various shapes … . warning the devoted wretch of death and woe.”—Smollett: Peregrine Pickle, xiii.
