Treasure Island

TREASURE ISLAND

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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Dedication

To S.L.O., an American gentleman whose classic taste shaped this narrative, the author dedicates this book in return for many delightful hours, with his warmest wishes and affection.

To the Hesitating Reader

If sailor tales and sea shanties—storms, adventure, heat and cold, ships called schooners, islands, outcasts, pirates, and buried treasure, all the old-fashioned romance retold exactly as it was long ago—can please today's sharper young readers the way such stories once pleased me, then let them dive in.

But if young readers no longer crave those old adventures, no longer care for the daring tales of the past, then so be it. Either way, may I and all my pirates rest in the same grave as those old stories and their creators.

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Contents

Part One: The Old Buccaneer (a buccaneer is a pirate)
I. The Old Sea-Dog at the Admiral Benbow
II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears
III. The Black Spot
IV. The Sea-Chest
V. The Last of the Blind Man
VI. The Captain's Papers

Part Two: The Sea Cook
VII. I Go to Bristol
VIII. At the Sign of the Spy-Glass
IX. Powder and Arms
X. The Voyage
XI. What I Heard in the Apple-Barrel
XII. Council of War

Part Three: My Shore Adventure
XIII. How I Began My Shore Adventure
XIV. The First Blow
XV. The Man of the Island

Part Four: The Stockade (a stockade is a fenced-in fort)
XVI. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: How the Ship Was Abandoned
XVII. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: The Jolly-Boat's Last Trip
XVIII. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: End of the First Day's Fighting
XIX. Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins: The Garrison in the Stockade
XX. Silver's Embassy
XXI. The Attack

Part Five: My Sea Adventure
XXII. How I Began My Sea Adventure
XXIII. The Ebb-Tide Runs
XXIV. The Cruise of the Coracle
XXV. I Strike the Jolly Roger
XXVI. Israel Hands
XXVII. "Pieces of Eight"

Part Six: Captain Silver
XXVIII. In the Enemy's Camp
XXIX. The Black Spot Again
XXX. On Parole
XXXI. The Treasure-Hunt—Flint's Pointer
XXXII. The Treasure-Hunt—The Voice Among the Trees
XXXIII. The Fall of a Chieftain
XXXIV. And Last

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PART ONE: The Old Buccaneer

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

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the other gentlemen involved have asked me to write down everything that happened regarding Treasure Island, start to finish. I'm to leave out nothing except the island's exact location—and that only because treasure still remains buried there. So in this year of our Lord 17—, I pick up my pen and go back to the days when my father ran the Admiral Benbow Inn, and an old, weather-beaten sailor with a scar across his cheek first came to lodge under our roof.

I remember him as clearly as if it happened yesterday. He came trudging up to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind on a hand-cart—a tall, powerful, heavyset man with skin browned by years at sea. His greasy braided ponytail hung over the shoulder of his dirty blue coat. His hands were rough and scarred, the nails broken and black, and across one cheek ran a sabre cut, pale and ugly against his skin. I remember him scanning the cove, whistling to himself, and then breaking into that old sea-song he would sing so often afterward:

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

He sang it in a high, cracked, unsteady voice, as though it had been worn down by years of shouting orders at sea. Then he banged on the door with a stick shaped like a handspike (a lever sailors use for hauling ropes), and when my father came out, he demanded a glass of rum in a rough voice. When it arrived, he drank it slowly, like someone who knew good rum from bad, all the while studying the cliffs and our inn's sign.

"This is a handy cove," he said finally, "and a decently placed tavern. Much business, friend?"

My father told him no, very little—more's the pity.

"Well, then," the man said, "this is the place for me. You there," he called to the man with the cart, "bring my chest up and help me with it. I'll be staying a while," he went on. "I'm a simple man—rum, bacon, and eggs is all I need, plus that hilltop up there to watch for ships. What should you call me? Call me Captain. Oh, I see what you're after—here." He tossed down three or four gold coins on the doorstep. "Tell me when I've used that up," he said, looking as commanding as any ship's captain.

Despite his shabby clothes and rough speech, he didn't seem like an ordinary sailor who took orders from others. He carried himself more like an officer—someone used to being obeyed, or to striking those who disobeyed. The man with the cart told us that the mail coach had dropped him off the morning before at the Royal George Inn. He'd asked what other inns lined the coast, and hearing ours described as quiet and out of the way, he'd chosen it over the rest. That was all we ever learned about our new guest.

He kept mostly to himself. All day he wandered the cove or the cliffs, telescope in hand; each evening he sat by the fire in the parlor, drinking strong rum and water. He rarely answered when spoken to—he'd just glance up sharply and snort through his nose like a foghorn. We and our regular customers quickly learned to leave him alone. Every day, returning from his walk, he'd ask whether any sailors had passed by on the road. At first we assumed he simply missed the company of fellow seamen, but eventually we realized he was actually trying to avoid them. Whenever a sailor did stop at the Admiral Benbow—as some did, traveling the coast road toward Bristol—the captain would peek at him through the curtained doorway before entering the parlor himself, and he always fell silent as a mouse whenever such a person was present.

I, at least, was in on his secret, since I shared in his fears. One day he'd pulled me aside and promised me a silver fourpenny coin on the first of every month if I would "keep a sharp lookout for a seafaring man with one leg" and tell him the instant such a man appeared. Often, when payday came and I asked for my coin, he'd only snort and glare at me, but before the week ended he always thought better of it, brought me my fourpence, and repeated his orders to watch for "the seafaring man with one leg."

I can hardly describe how that one-legged figure haunted my dreams. On stormy nights, with the wind rattling the house and waves crashing along the cove and cliffs, I would picture him in a thousand terrifying shapes. Sometimes his leg was cut off at the knee, sometimes at the hip; sometimes he seemed like some monstrous creature who'd never had more than one leg, growing straight from the middle of his body. Watching him leap and chase me over hedges and ditches in these nightmares was the worst part of all. I paid a steep price for that monthly fourpence, in the form of these terrible imaginings.

Yet despite my fear of the one-legged sailor, I was actually less afraid of the captain himself than everyone else who knew him. Some nights he drank more rum and water than he could handle, and then he'd sit and sing his wild old sea-songs, paying no attention to anyone—but other times he'd demand drinks for the whole room and force the frightened customers to listen to his stories or join in his singing. I often heard the whole house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," as the neighbors sang along for dear life, terrified, each one singing louder than the last to avoid standing out. During these fits, he was the most overbearing man imaginable—he'd slap the table for silence, fly into a rage at any question, or just as often at no question at all, assuming from the silence that no one was paying attention to his story. He wouldn't let anyone leave until he'd drunk himself into a stupor and stumbled off to bed.

His stories frightened people most of all. Awful tales they were—about hangings, walking the plank, storms at sea, and the wild, lawless activity of the Spanish Main (the Caribbean coast where pirates once roamed). By his own account, he must have spent his life among some of the most wicked men who ever sailed, and the crude language he used to tell these stories shocked our simple country neighbors almost as much as the crimes themselves. My father constantly worried the inn would suffer, since surely people would stop coming to be bullied and frightened into their beds—but I actually think his presence helped business. People were scared at the time, but looking back, they rather enjoyed it. It added excitement to our quiet country life, and some of the younger men even claimed to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt," saying men like him were what made England feared at sea.

In one sense, though, he threatened to ruin us, since he stayed on week after week, then month after month, until his money ran out entirely—yet my father never worked up the courage to demand more payment. Whenever he brought it up, the captain would snort so loudly it was practically a roar, and stare my poor father down until he left the room. I saw my father wringing his hands after such encounters, and I'm certain the constant worry and fear he lived under hastened his early death.

The whole time he stayed with us, the captain never changed his clothes, except to buy some stockings from a traveling peddler. When one corner of his hat drooped down, he simply left it that way, though it annoyed him greatly whenever the wind blew. I remember his coat, which he patched himself up in his room, until eventually it was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a single letter, and he spoke to no one except the neighbors—and even then, mostly only when drunk on rum. None of us had ever seen his great sea-chest opened.

He was crossed only once, and that was near the end, when my poor father lay dying, worn down by illness. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to check on him...