Treasure Island

Collins Classics

History of Collins

In 1819, Millworker William Collins from Glasgow, Scotland, set up a company for printing and publishing pamphlets, sermons, hymn books and prayer books. That company was Collins and was to mark the birth of HarperCollins Publishers as we know it today. The long tradition of Collins dictionary publishing can be traced back to the first dictionary William published in 1824, Greek and English Lexicon. Indeed, from 1840 onwards, he began to produce illustrated dictionaries and even obtained a licence to print and publish the Bible.

Soon after, William published the first Collins novel, Ready Reckoner, however it was the time of the Long Depression, where harvests were poor, prices were high, potato crops had failed and violence was erupting in Europe. As a result, many factories across the country were forced to close down and William chose to retire in 1846, partly due to the hardships he was facing.

Aged 30, William’s son, William II took over the business. A keen humanitarian with a warm heart and a generous spirit, William II was truly ‘Victorian’ in his outlook. He introduced new, up-to-date steam presses and published affordable editions of Shakespeare’s works and Pilgrim’s Progress, making them available to the masses for the first time. A new demand for educational books meant that success came with the publication of travel books, scientific books, encyclopaedias and dictionaries. This demand to be educated led to the later publication of atlases and Collins also held the monopoly on scripture writing at the time.

In the 1860s Collins began to expand and diversify and the idea of ‘books for the millions’ was developed. Affordable editions of classical literature were published and in 1903 Collins introduced 10 titles in their Collins Handy Illustrated Pocket Novels. These proved so popular that a few years later this had increased to an output of 50 volumes, selling nearly half a million in their year of publication. In the same year, The Everyman’s Library was also instituted, with the idea of publishing an affordable library of the most important classical works, biographies, religious and philosophical treatments, plays, poems, travel and adventure. This series eclipsed all competition at the time and the introduction of paperback books in the 1950s helped to open that market and marked a high point in the industry.

HarperCollins is and has always been a champion of the classics and the current Collins Classics series follows in this tradition – publishing classical literature that is affordable and available to all. Beautifully packaged, highly collectible and intended to be reread and enjoyed at every opportunity.

Life & Times
About the Author

Robert Louis Stevenson could be described as a career novelist. That is to say, he fashioned himself as a story teller and wrote as much as he humanly could for his rather short life, which ended aged 44. He wrote a dozen novels and a number of collections of short stories. Stevenson is best known for two books that fall into entirely different genres: Treasure Island (1883) and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The former was his first novel and the one that put him on the literary map at the age of 33. Stevenson was beset by ill health, so writing became an escape while convalescing. In this instance he took himself away to the high seas to a world filled with lawless pirates, intent on finding buried treasure.

His Works

The clichéd image of the fictional 19th-century pirate was born with Treasure Island. Stevenson put together a collection of pirate characteristics in Long John Silver and his crewmen, which have become standards used in many other pirate stories since. However, Stevenson’s pirates were not charismatic and engaging rogues or anti-heroes. They were seagoing outlaws and villains, driven by selfishness and greed, and readily willing to kill.

Parallels have been drawn between Long John Silver and Robin Hood, but the former has no loyalty in his band of men and is not motivated by a desire to help anyone. On the contrary, he only uses the other pirates for his own ends and turns his back when he no longer needs their protection.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is entirely different. Treasure Island is essentially a boy’s adventure story, while this novel investigates the disturbing psychology behind split personality disorder, or schizophrenia. In Victorian times, there was an inevitable religious overtone to the interpretation of psychological conditions, so Stevenson saw the dual personality of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as a conflict between the good and evil sides of the personality. The implication being that we all suffer a similar conflict, but this case was heightened and amplified by Dr Jekyll imbibing a drug potion. In fact, there is such a pronounced change in personality that Dr Jekyll alters in appearance and posture when he metamorphoses into Mr Hyde.

It seems likely that the drug potion used by Dr Jekyll is representative of opium, which was taken in opium dens in London in the late Victorian era. At first the potion enables him to switch from one persona, or alter ego to the other at will. However, the dosage is increased until he can no longer control the situation and Mr Hyde becomes all consuming. In effect, the subconscious animal mind overpowers the conscious human mind, because his primal needs and desires are allowed to develop and grow.

This is evidently also an expression of the feelings of suppression that Stevenson felt in Victorian society. There was such a pressing requirement to behave in a certain way, which denied acknowledgement of the baser instincts, that Dr Jekyll was the personification of this frustration in Stevenson and other Victorian men. Dr Jekyll is compelled to transform into Mr Hyde so that he can do things that polite society would have normally found scandalous.

In the end, the inner turmoil is too much for Dr Jekyll. He feels more human as Mr Hyde, yet society views him as being more human as Dr Jekyll. Aware that his desire to remain as Mr Hyde forever will conflict with the values of society, he ends things so that others do not have to witness his indulgence.

The book evidently struck a chord with Victorian society, judging by its success and by its lasting impact. We now use the term ‘a Jekyll and Hyde character’ to describe someone with unpredictable behaviour or violent mood swings. In addition, the concept of character transformation has been borrowed many times over in fiction.

A Contribution to Literature

Like many Victorian novelists, Robert Louis Stevenson was highly regarded by his contemporaries and writers of other generations. It is easy now to forget that English literature had to start somewhere and that those who ‘invented’ the novel had no precedent.

For Stevenson the novel was only a century or so old and there was still plenty of room to try new approaches to the narrative form. To be successful was to be pioneering, which meant that one had to be innovative and visionary in outlook, as well as being able to weave together a compelling story.

By and large Victorian novelists tended to be loyal to their chosen genre. Once they found their niche they stuck to the same formula, so it was quite unusual for a writer to attempt to write in more than one genre, but Stevenson managed with consummate ease. Had he lived beyond his 44 years then he may have continued his ascent as an original thinker and become one of, if not the, greatest writer of all time. As it was, he managed to make his permanent mark on the register of classic novelists and claim his place in the story of English literature.

Stevenson ended his life on the island of Upolu, Samoa, in the South Pacific Ocean. He had sailed extensively among the Pacific Islands and made Upolu his own ‘treasure island’ in 1890. He bought an estate on the island with the proceeds of his book sales and lived there happily for four years until he was struck down by a seizure. It was probably a stroke (cerebral haemorrhage) caused by an embolism.

His health had been compromised in 1879 when Stevenson took a long journey by sea and rail from Europe to California. He chose to travel second class, which was ‘roughing it’ in those days. By the time he arrived at his destination he was at deaths door. It seems that he never fully recovered from these self-imposed hardships. Stevenson was, surprisingly, viewed as something of a failure by his family. He had been expected to become a successful engineer, but rejected convention and expectation in pursuit of his writing. Although he was successful as a writer in his own lifetime his naturally Bohemian and unorthodox behaviour made him feel marginalized by Victorian society. This could explain why he felt more at home in far flung places, where he was free from the parameters of Victorian etiquette and expectation. Before he started to travel, he found his escape in visiting places of ill repute and iniquity where the underclass would not judge him and where he met more interesting people on the fringes of society.

To

S. L. O.,

An American gentleman, in accordance with whose classic taste the following narrative has been designed, it is now, in return for numerous delightful hours, and with the kindest wishes, dedicated by his affectionate friend,

THE AUTHOR

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

History of Collins

Life & Times

Dedication

PART ONE The Old Buccaneer

CHAPTER 1 The Old Sea Dog at the ‘Admiral Benbow’

CHAPTER 2 Black Dog Appears and Disappears

CHAPTER 3 The Black Spot

CHAPTER 4 The Sea-Chest

CHAPTER 5 The Last of the Blind Man

CHAPTER 6 The Captain’s Papers

PART TWO The Sea Cook

CHAPTER 7 I Go to Bristol

CHAPTER 8 At the Sign of the ‘Spy-Glass’

CHAPTER 9 Powder and Arms

CHAPTER 10 The Voyage

CHAPTER 11 What I Heard in the Apple Barrel

CHAPTER 12 Council of War

PART THREE My Shore Adventure

CHAPTER 13 How I Began my Shore Adventure

CHAPTER 14 The First Blow

CHAPTER 15 The Man of the Island

PART FOUR The Stockade

CHAPTER 16 Narrative Continued by the Doctor: How the Ship was Abandoned

CHAPTER 17 Narrative Continued by the Doctor: The Jolly-Boat’s Last Trip

CHAPTER 18 Narrative Continued by the Doctor: End of the First Day’s Fighting

CHAPTER 19 Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins: The Garrison in the Stockade

CHAPTER 20 Silver’s Embassy

CHAPTER 21 The Attack

PART FIVE My Sea Adventure

CHAPTER 22 How I Began my Sea Adventure

CHAPTER 23 The Ebb-tide Runs

CHAPTER 24 The Cruise of the Coracle

CHAPTER 25 I Strike the Jolly Roger

CHAPTER 26 Israel Hands

CHAPTER 27 ‘Pieces of Eight’

PART SIX Captain Silver

CHAPTER 28 In the Enemy’s Camp

CHAPTER 29 The Black Spot Again

CHAPTER 30 On Parole

CHAPTER 31 The Treasure Hunt – Flint’s Pointer

CHAPTER 32 The Treasure Hunt – The Voice Among the Trees

CHAPTER 33 The Fall of a Chieftain

CHAPTER 34 And Last

CLASSIC LITERATURE: WORDS AND PHRASES

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE The Old Buccaneer

CHAPTER 1 The Old Sea Dog at the ‘Admiral Benbow’

Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:

‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!’

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

‘This is a handy cove,’ says he, at length; ‘and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?’

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

‘Well, then,’ said he, ‘this is the berth for me. Here you, matey,’ he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; ‘bring up alongside and help up my chest. I’ll stay here a bit,’ he continued. ‘I’m a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you’re at – there’; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. ‘You can tell me when I’ve worked through that,’ says he, looking as fierce as a commander.

And, indeed, bad as his clothes were, and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast; but seemed like a mate or skipper, accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the ‘Royal George’; that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.

He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove, or upon the cliffs, with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the parlour next the fire, and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to; only look up sudden and fierce, and blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day, when he came back from his stroll, he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this question; but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman put up at the ‘Admiral Benbow’ (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol), he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter; for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one day, and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my ‘weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg’, and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough, when the first of the month came round, and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me, and stare me down; but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my fourpenny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for ‘the seafaring man with one leg’.

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round, and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with ‘Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum’, all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other, to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most over-riding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea; and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life; and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a ‘true sea-dog’, and a ‘real old salt’, and such-like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us; for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly, that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.

He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old ‘Benbow’. I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he – the captain, that is – began to pipe up his eternal song:

‘Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!’

At first I had supposed ‘the dead man’s chest’ to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody but Dr Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean – silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr Livesey’s; he went on as before, speaking clear and kind, and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath: ‘Silence, there, between decks!’

‘Were you addressing me, sir?’ says the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, ‘I have only one thing to say to you, sir,’ replies the doctor, ‘that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!’

The old fellow’s fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a sailor’s clasp-knife, and, balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him, as before, over his shoulder, and in the same tone of voice; rather high, so that all the room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady:

‘If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at next assizes.’

Then followed a battle of looks between them; but the captain soon knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog.

‘And now, sir,’ continued the doctor, ‘since I now know there’s such a fellow in my district, you may count I’ll have an eye upon you day and night. I’m not a doctor only; I’m a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like tonight’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice.’

Soon after Dr Livesey’s horse came to the door, and he rode away; but the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.