Davy Jones's Locker

Sailors’ idiom for the bottom of the sea as the grave of drowned mariners and foundered ships. The phrase is in print by 1726 in Daniel Defoe’s “The Four Years Voyages of Capt. George Roberts,” and Tobias Smollett uses it in “The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle” (1751), where Davy Jones is described as a fiend presiding over the evil spirits of the deep. The origin of the name is unsettled; folk etymologies tie “Davy” to a patron saint of seamen and “Jones” to the biblical Jonah, but neither is documented. “Going to Davy Jones’s Locker” means death by drowning.