Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

When Jim and I were in Mexico last December, visiting his mother after his stepdad had died, Jim’s mother invited us to look through a cabinet of books they had and take anything we wanted. I selected a few, including Treasure Island. I had never read it. It’s a lovely Scribner’s edition from 1937 with nine full color plate illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. Jim’s mother thought that it had been Jim’s when he was a boy, but Jim doesn’t remember it. Stevenson originally published Treasure Island serially in 1881 and 1882 in a children’s magazine called Young Folks and then published it as a book the following year. Treasure Island was his first success, followed by A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885); Kidnapped (1886); and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). He wrote numerous other short stories, poetry, and non-fiction works.

I won’t summarize the story in detail, but here’s the gist.

Our narrator is Jim Hawkins telling a story that happened when he was a boy. He writes, on the first page, “I take up my pen in the year of grace 17–.” As a boy, (the age is unspecified but he must be at least thirteen) Jim lives with his parents at an Inn they operate called “Admiral Benbow” on the coast of England. They are visited by a lodger who turns out to be a pirate, Billy Bones. Bones has a map showing where the pirate Flint buried his treasure. First one man and then another try to get the map, but they fail, and Billy ends up dead, and the Inn ransacked. Jim recovers the map and shares it with two men in town, Dr. Livesey, and Squire Trelawney. The men put together a voyage to retrieve the treasure. The squire hires a boat called, “The Hispaniola”, and engages a Captain Smollett. The squire hires a peg-legged cook, too, who brings on additional crew.

The ship sails with Jim as the cabin boy. Hiding in an apple barrel Jim overhears the cook and the men talking mutiny. The cook is Long John Silver, the very man that Billy Bones had warned about back at the Admiral Benbow! After coming to the island, with Jim’s forewarning, Dr. Livesey, the Squire, Captain Smollet, and a few of the honest men escape the mutineers and take refuge in a stockade built on the island. The pirates take the ship and the beach. Jim meanwhile explores the island and finds a man named Ben Gunn, a member of Flint’s crew that Flint marooned on the island. (While Jim is exploring the island there are three chapter narrated by Dr. Livesey that tell what happened during the mutiny on the boat and how they found the stockade.) Jim joins the crew in the stockade.

There’s a battle at the stockade. Several men of both sides are killed, but the pirates get the worst of it. In the aftermath, Jim takes off. He finds a one-person, handmade boat that Ben Gunn had made and uses that to sail out to the Hispaniola and cut its anchor, setting the boat adrift, with two drunken, fighting pirates on board. Then he boards the boat and finds one of the pirates dead and the other, Israel Hands, injured. With Israel Hand’s help, Jim is able to sail the boat into a hidden cove on the opposite side of the island. There, Israel Hands tries to kill Jim with a knife, but Jim shoots him and dumps his body overboard.

Then Jim hikes back to the stockade and sneaks in, but in the dark doesn’t realize that the stockade has now been taken over by Silver and the pirates. They’ve also got the map. Silver and Jim make a pact to help each other. They next day they follow the map to the treasure, only to find it already dug up. Just as the frustrated pirates are about to turn on Jim and Silver, Dr. Livesey, Squire Trelawney, and Ben Gunn show up. They kill a couple of pirates and drive the rest away. It turns out Ben Gunn had long ago transferred the treasure to a secret cave. The injured Captain Smollet is also at the cave.

Over the next few days the men transfer the treasure to the hidden boat and sail off, taking Silver and Ben Gunn with them. They make a first stop in the Caribbean to hire additional crew. Silver steals away, taking a bag of gold. Jim writes, “I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him.”

The final paragraphs are a little bit of “where are they now.” Jim is happy to have heard no more of Long John Silver and still has bad dreams that make him sit up straight in bed when he thinks he hears Silver’s parrot screaming, “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

It’s a rip-roaring good story. Not too long, but substantial. Very fast-moving with lots of reversals and cliff-hangers at the ends of chapters. Super fun and exciting. I really enjoyed it. Lots of rum-drinking. Pleasantly gruesome: more than half of the characters end up dead by the end. The book doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel test. There’s only one woman in the entire novel: Jim’s un-named mother, who disappears after the first few chapters. All the cliches of pirates and pirate stories are here: “Yo ho ho”; the peg-leg and the parrot on the shoulder, the map, “X marks the spot”, the chest, the jolly roger. The trail to the treasure is marked by a skeleton laid out on the ground pointing the way. Very cool. Most of these tropes Stevenson borrowed from other sources but codified here. The story has been adapted a truly impressive number of times: dozens of films, dozens of television shows, dozens of stage productions. Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater did a radio production. Jule Styne wrote a musical version called, “Pieces of Eight.”

Stevenson was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Traveling in France in 1877 he met an unhappily married American woman named Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne. They fell in love. She moved back to America, settling in San Francisco. Determined to be with her, Stevenson set sail for New York City in August 1879, and then took the train to California. Always in poor health since childhood, the trip wore him out and he stopped first in Monterey. In December, he made it to San Francisco but still in bad shape. Fanny, now divorced, nursed him back to health. In May of 1880, they married. They honeymooned in Napa Valley. They lived for several years back in England, where Stevenson became close with Henry James. The two men had met earlier in London, admired each other’s work and begun a correspondence. (James’ The Portrait of a Lady is from the same year as Treasure Island‘s first serialization.) Now they ended up living near each other and visited often. Later, Stevenson and Fanny explored the south seas and decided to settle in Samoa. He died, in Samoa, 1894, of a stroke, age 44.