TREASURE ISLAND

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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PART ONE — The Old Buccaneer (a buccaneer is a pirate)

Chapter 1: The Old Sea-Dog at the Admiral Benbow

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the other gentlemen asked me to write down everything that happened about Treasure Island—from beginning to end. I'm only leaving out the island's exact location, because there is still treasure buried there that no one has dug up yet.

So I pick up my pen and go back to the time when my father ran the Admiral Benbow inn. That was when an old brown-skinned sailor with a scar on his face first came to stay under our roof.

I remember him just like it was yesterday. He came walking slowly to the inn door, with his sea-chest (a large box for storing his belongings) following behind him on a small cart. He was tall, strong, and heavy, with skin browned by the sun. His greasy braided hair fell over the shoulder of his dirty blue coat. His hands were rough and scarred, with broken black fingernails. Across one cheek ran a dirty, pale scar from a sword cut.

I remember him looking around the cove (a small bay by the sea) and whistling to himself. Then he started singing an old sailor's song that he sang many times after that:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

He sang it in a high, shaky voice. Then he knocked on the door with a stick he carried, and when my father came out, he roughly asked for a glass of rum. He drank it slowly, like someone who really knew his drinks, all while looking around at the cliffs and up at our inn's sign.

"This is a handy cove," he said finally. "And a nice spot for a tavern. Do you get much company, friend?"

My father told him no, very little company—and that was a shame.

"Well then," the man said, "this is the place for me. Hey, you," he called to the man pushing the cart, "bring my chest up here and help me carry it. I'll stay here a while," he went on. "I'm a simple man. Rum, bacon, and eggs is all I need, plus that hill up there to watch for ships. You can call me Captain. Oh, I see what you're thinking about payment—here." He threw down three or four gold coins on the doorstep. "You can tell me when I've used that up," he said, looking as tough as a ship's commander.

Even though his clothes were poor and his speech was rough, he didn't seem like an ordinary sailor. He seemed more like an officer used to giving orders. The man with the cart told us that a stagecoach had dropped him off the morning before at another inn. He had asked about inns along the coast, and after hearing ours was quiet and out of the way, he picked ours instead. That's all we ever learned about our new guest.

He was usually a very quiet man. All day he wandered around the cove or the cliffs with a brass telescope. In the evenings, he sat by the fire in the parlor and drank strong rum mixed with water. Most of the time he wouldn't answer if you spoke to him—he'd just look up sharply and snort through his nose like a foghorn. We and our other guests quickly learned to leave him alone.

Every day when he came back from his walk, he asked if any sailors had passed by on the road. At first we thought he just wanted company from other sailors. But later we realized he was actually trying to avoid them. Whenever a sailor did stop at the Admiral Benbow (which happened sometimes, since sailors used the coast road to reach Bristol), the captain would peek at him through the curtained doorway before coming into the parlor. And he was always dead silent whenever a sailor was around.

For me, there was no mystery at all, because I was part of his secret worries. One day he took me aside and promised me a silver four-penny coin every month if I would keep watch for "a sailor with one leg" and tell him the moment I saw such a man. Often, when the first of the month came and I asked for my coin, he would just snort at me and stare hard. But before the week ended, he always changed his mind, gave me my four-penny piece, and reminded me again to watch for "the sailor with one leg."

I can hardly explain how that one-legged man haunted my dreams. On stormy nights, when the wind rattled the house and waves crashed along the cliffs, I imagined him in a thousand terrifying shapes. Sometimes his leg was cut off at the knee, sometimes at the hip. Other times he was some strange creature who only ever had one leg, right in the middle of his body. Watching him jump and chase me over fences and ditches was the worst nightmare I could imagine. I paid a high price for that monthly four-penny coin, in the form of these terrible dreams.

But even though I feared the idea of the one-legged sailor, I was actually less scared of the captain himself than most other people were. Some nights he drank more rum and water than he could handle. On those nights, he would sit and sing his wild old sea-songs, paying no attention to anyone. Other times, he would demand drinks for everyone and force the frightened customers to listen to his stories or join in his singing. Often I heard the whole house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," with all the neighbors singing along loudly—not because they wanted to, but because they were scared not to.

During these wild moods, he was impossible to control. He would slam his hand on the table for silence. He would get furious if someone asked a question—or if no one did, because then he'd think they weren't paying attention to his story. He wouldn't let anyone leave the inn until he had drunk himself tired and stumbled off to bed.

His stories were the scariest part of all. They were terrible tales about hangings, walking the plank, storms at sea, and wild, lawless places. According to him, he had lived among some of the most wicked men who ever sailed the seas. The rough language he used to tell these stories shocked our quiet country neighbors almost as much as the terrible events themselves.

My father kept saying that the inn would be ruined, because people would stop coming to be scared and bullied and sent trembling to bed. But I actually think having the captain there helped business. People were frightened at the time, but looking back, they sort of enjoyed it—it added excitement to their quiet country lives. Some of the younger men even pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt," saying men like him made England powerful at sea.

In one way, though, he really was ruining us. He stayed week after week, then month after month, until all his gold coins were long spent. Still, my father never worked up the courage to ask him for more money. Whenever my father brought it up, the captain would snort through his nose so loudly it sounded like a roar, and stare my father right out of the room. I saw my father wringing his hands in distress after these moments, and I'm sure the constant worry and fear made his early, sad death come even sooner.

The whole time he lived with us, the captain never changed his clothes, except to buy some new stockings from a traveling salesman. When one corner of his hat fell down, he just let it hang like that from then on, even though it flapped annoyingly in the wind. I remember his coat, which he patched himself in his room upstairs—by the end, it was practically all patches. He never wrote or received any letters, and he never talked to anyone except the neighbors, and even then, usually only when he'd been drinking rum. Nobody ever saw inside his big sea-chest.

He was only challenged once, and that happened near the end, when my poor father was very sick and close to death. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to check on him.