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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
Treasure Island (Including the History Behind the Book) offers a captivating exploration into the thrilling worlds of high-seas adventure and pirate lore, showcasing a diverse range of literary styles from the swashbuckling tales of Robert Louis Stevenson, Daniel Defoe, and Captain Charles Johnson. This anthology captures the romance and danger of maritime expeditions through richly woven narratives and vivid characters that have come to define the genre. A standout piece within this collection, while non-attributed, delivers a vivid exploration of treasure hunts and mutinies, illustrating the timeless allure of piracy and the boundless seas. The anthology's contributors, Stevenson, Defoe, and Johnson, are luminaries of their respective eras, having each independently shaped the thematic and stylistic contours of adventure literature. With roots steeped in historical and cultural fascinations with piracy and exploration, these authors illuminate the complexities of human nature through their portrayals of ambition, survival, and morality. The eclectic voices of these writers span Enlightenment thought to 19th-century romanticism, offering an enriching cross-temporal dialogue that deepens the reader's engagement with the narratives. Readers are invited to immerse themselves in this extraordinary collection, which serves as a literary voyage through history and imagination. The anthology not only educates and entertains but provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the multiplicity of perspectives, sailing through eras of rich storytelling. Delving into its pages offers an unparalleled experience in understanding the perennial fascination with exploration, adventure, and the human spirit's tenacity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Treasure Island (Including the History Behind the Book)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Treasure lures the bold, but the true journey charts a young conscience through storms of greed, loyalty, and fear. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island stands as a landmark of adventure fiction, distilling the allure and peril of the sea into a taut, character-driven narrative. Set against an eighteenth-century maritime backdrop and presented through a youthful but observant narrator, it balances swift action with a careful moral gaze. More than a tale of buried gold, it is a study of choice under pressure, of leadership and betrayal, and of how courage is tested when danger wears a charming face.
First appearing in serial form in the British boys’ magazine Young Folks in 1881–82 under the pseudonym Captain George North, and then published as a book by Cassell & Company in 1883, Treasure Island emerged in the late Victorian era, when popular periodicals carried episodic adventures to a wide readership. Its setting spans the English coast and an unnamed tropical island, situating readers within the eighteenth-century world of merchant ships, taverns, and privateering lore. As an adventure novel and coming-of-age story, it fused nautical detail with suspense, immediately appealing to both younger readers and adults drawn to its crisp pacing and moral complexity.
The premise is at once simple and inexhaustible: a boy finds a map that promises buried wealth, and a voyage is outfitted to seize it before rival claimants prevail. Told in the first person by Jim Hawkins, the narrative voice is lucid, brisk, and reflective without slowing the action. The ship Hispaniola, a crew with secrets, and the haunting possibility of mutiny infuse the journey with mounting tension. Stevenson’s style favors vivid scenes, clear stakes, and an atmosphere thick with salt air and whispers of treachery, offering an experience that is cinematic in movement yet attentive to the subtleties of motive and consequence.
The book’s origin story is itself part of its charm. Stevenson conceived the tale after sketching a fanciful island map for his stepson, and the map’s suggestive coves and capes prompted characters, conflicts, and a plot to match. The serial publication in Young Folks, under a nautical pen name, honed the chapters into cliffhangers that reward continuous reading. When issued in one volume in 1883, the narrative gained the unity and momentum that have helped it endure. The Victorian publishing context—affordable magazines and family reading—shaped a novel that is vigorous, accessible, and yet crafted with literary care.
Treasure Island also belongs to a longer tradition of sea narratives that includes Daniel Defoe’s maritime fictions and the pseudo-historical biographies published under the name Captain Charles Johnson in A General History of the Pyrates (1724). Defoe’s plainspoken realism, navigational detail, and interest in resourcefulness at sea provided a model for keeping extraordinary events grounded. Johnson’s compendium of pirate lives, mingling fact and legend, furnished a lexicon of manners, punishments, and codes that colored the era’s imagination. Stevenson absorbed these antecedents and refined them into a psychologically nimble, tightly plotted story that privileges character and choice over mere catalogues of daring feats.
From this synthesis came many features now synonymous with pirate lore: the persuasive, one-legged sailor with unsuspected ambitions; a parrot’s squawk punctuating tense debates; a treasure map marked with an X; and the ominous ritual of the black spot. These elements, while entertaining, are never mere ornament. They focus the novel’s enduring themes: the moral ambiguity of charisma, the corrosive pull of greed, the allure and danger of leadership, and the fragile bonds of trust aboard a cramped ship in hostile waters. The book’s clarity of design—voyage, island, reckoning—supports a steady exploration of how ideals fare under duress.
For contemporary readers, Treasure Island remains compelling not only as a brisk adventure but as a meditation on growing up in a world where motives collide and appearances mislead. It invites questions about loyalty, prudence, and courage without prescribing simple answers, and it does so in prose that moves with the inevitability of tide and trade wind. Its historical roots in Defoe’s realism and Johnson’s pirate lore enrich the experience without requiring prior knowledge. What begins with the promise of buried treasure becomes an examination of value itself—what is worth risking, what must be guarded, and how a clear-eyed youth learns to steer by his own stars.
Synopsis (Selection)
Treasure Island is an 1883 adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, first serialized in 1881–82 in the boys’ magazine Young Folks under the byline Captain George North. The story grew from a map Stevenson sketched for his stepson, then expanded into a tale shaped by earlier pirate lore. Daniel Defoe’s interest in maritime realism and survival narratives, and the widely read General History of the Pyrates attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, furnished vocabulary, incident, and atmosphere. Stevenson adapted these materials to a Victorian juvenile readership without sacrificing tension or clarity. What follows summarizes the novel’s plot in narrative order and notes the historical currents behind its creation.
The narrative opens at the Admiral Benbow inn, where young Jim Hawkins helps his parents manage their seaside house. A weathered seaman who calls himself Billy Bones lodges there, guarding a sea chest and dreading the arrival of a one‑legged man. Visits from rough sailors, including Black Dog and a blind messenger named Pew, build pressure around the chest and its secret. After a violent disturbance, Jim recovers documents that push the story outward. He seeks counsel from Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney, respectable local figures whose decisiveness moves events from the quiet coast toward a transoceanic expedition.
Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney identify the papers as a chart to a long‑buried hoard and resolve to outfit a ship. In Bristol they secure the Hispaniola, engage the cautious Captain Smollett, and hire a crew. Trelawney, frank and enthusiastic, is introduced to Long John Silver, a popular tavern keeper with a missing leg and a talent for recruiting sailors. Silver’s canny leadership and genial manner earn trust, and Jim carries a letter that cements their acquaintance. Provisions are loaded, roles assigned, and the boy joins as cabin hand. The tone shifts from coastal suspense to the disciplined routines of a sea voyage.
At sea, Smollett’s unease about the crew hardens into suspicion. The officers enforce order while undercurrents of camaraderie and secrecy ripple below deck. By chance, Jim hides in an apple barrel and overhears a conversation that reframes the voyage, revealing divided loyalties and a concealed agenda. He quietly reports what he has learned to the small circle of trusted leaders. Plans are made to keep discipline, limit access to arms, and bide time until landfall. The ship presses on, weathering minor squalls, with the island’s wooded hills finally rising on the horizon to concentrate everyone’s hopes and fears.
The landing divides the company. Shore parties go out, tempers flare, and Jim slips away into the island’s thickets. There he meets Ben Gunn, a former crewman marooned years before, who hints at knowledge that could alter everyone’s expectations. Elsewhere, forces consolidate around a defensible stockade, and the narrative alternates between Jim’s solitary encounters and Dr. Livesey’s measured account of logistics, duty, and medical care. Early clashes establish the terrain: the anchorage, the palisade, the hill called the Spy‑glass, and treacherous swamps. The expedition’s original plan gives way to improvised tactics as each side seeks position and supplies.
The struggle intensifies through sieges, sorties, and stealth. Jim undertakes a hazardous nighttime venture involving small craft and the anchored ship, a gamble that shifts momentum at sea. Among the opposing sailors, leadership wavers, ceremonies of judgment appear, and memories of the fearsome Captain Flint—whose buried plunder set events in motion—continue to discipline or unnerve the men. Dr. Livesey treats the wounded impartially, underscoring the novel’s attention to practical ethics amid conflict. Geography functions tactically: dense woods conceal movements, tidal flats strand boats, and narrow channels decide approaches. The contest for ship and fort sets up the search that follows.
With resources strained, negotiations open. Under an uneasy truce, a treasure chart changes hands, and both parties calculate advantage. A march begins across the island by way of named landmarks, where songs, carved signs, and relics of earlier voyages invest the route with menace. Dissension among the mutineers threatens their focus, while Jim and his allies weigh risk against duty. Hints suggest the prize may not lie where expected, and the search becomes a test of nerve and judgment. Tension peaks as the company nears the objective, the ground itself seeming to remember earlier violence and warn of disappointments.
A rapid sequence of reversals resolves the immediate contest, and surviving participants settle accounts as far as circumstances allow. Arrangements for departure are made, discipline is reasserted, and the boy narrator closes his story with thoughts on courage, temptation, and the stubborn pull of seafaring life. The novel’s message balances the exhilaration of discovery with caution about greed’s distortions and the ambiguity of charm in a leader. It is an adventure tale that doubles as a measured coming‑of‑age, where loyalty, prudence, and resourcefulness carry as much weight as force.
The book’s afterlife has been extensive. Treasure Island consolidated modern pirate iconography: the one‑legged sea cook, the parrot’s cry of pieces of eight, the coded map marked with an X, and the ritual of informal justice among rogues. Stevenson’s clear, economical style and tight plotting drew on Defoe‑like realism while absorbing anecdotal color long associated with Johnson’s compendium. First appearing as magazine serial and then as a volume with evocative illustrations, it reached broad audiences and inspired stage versions, films, comics, and games. Though Stevenson alone authored the novel, its roots in earlier seafaring lore helped secure its lasting cultural presence.
Historical Context
Treasure Island is set in the mid eighteenth century, beginning at the Admiral Benbow inn on the coast of England’s West Country, moving through the booming port of Bristol, and sailing to a nameless island in the Caribbean, off the Spanish Main. The period sits after the classic Golden Age of Piracy but within living memory of it, amid the Atlantic world of sugar, rum, and imperial rivalry. Bristol’s merchants outfit the Hispaniola, and the crew is recruited in waterfront taverns typical of British maritime culture. The novel’s hints about recent wars and colonial frontiers align the action with the 1740s–1750s, when British commercial expansion pressed against Spanish power in the Caribbean.
The Golden Age of Piracy, broadly c. 1650–1730, is the single most important historical matrix for Treasure Island. Its late Caribbean phase (c. 1715–1722) followed the wreck of the 1715 Spanish treasure fleet off Florida and the demobilization of thousands of sailors after the War of the Spanish Succession. Nassau in the Bahamas became a pirate port, where figures like Edward Teach, known as Blackbeard, and Bartholomew Roberts preyed on trade routes linking Havana, Jamaica, and the North American seaboard. Pirate governance, reported in Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724–1728), featured articles of agreement, elected quartermasters, shares of plunder, and compensation for injuries. The skull-and-crossbones flags and the practice of marooning had real precedents. Roberts alone reportedly captured hundreds of ships before being killed off Cape Lopez in 1722; Blackbeard blockaded Charleston in May 1718 and died at Ocracoke in November that year. Stevenson drew directly on this dossier of names, customs, and episodes. Israel Hands, a historical associate of Blackbeard who was shot in the knee during a display of terror, reappears as a character; Long John Silver synthesizes the charismatic quartermaster figure described by Johnson. The legendary Captain Flint resembles composite late-era pirates, his death of rum at Savannah nodding to the Georgia colony founded in 1733 and situating Flint’s exploits earlier than Jim Hawkins’s voyage. While Johnson’s authorship remains debated, his book supplied the lexicon of the Jolly Roger, articles, and pirate councils that Stevenson dramatized through inventions such as the black spot. Thus the novel’s plot of buried plunder, mutiny, and makeshift shipboard politics mirrors the lived Atlantic of 1715–1722, recollected a generation later by characters navigating the fading but potent afterglow of that age.
Privateering during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714) seeded many conditions that Treasure Island echoes. European crowns issued letters of marque to seize enemy shipping; when peace arrived with the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), thousands of skilled seafarers found themselves unemployed. Some, like Henry Jennings, slid from sanctioned raiding into piracy by attacking Spanish salvage camps after the 1715 fleet wreck. Admiral John Benbow, commemorated by the inn that opens the novel, fought the French in the West Indies in 1702, becoming a popular naval hero. Stevenson’s Bristol patrons and veteran seamen inhabit the social world created by wartime privateering and its distinctly unstable peace.
The suppression of piracy between 1717 and 1726 forms a historical backdrop to Flint’s vanished crew. King George I proclaimed a royal pardon on 5 September 1717 for pirates who surrendered; Woodes Rogers arrived as royal governor at Nassau in July 1718 to enforce order. Blackbeard was killed in November 1718, and mass trials in London, Charleston, and the Caribbean culminated in hangings through 1723, including associates of Bartholomew Roberts after his death in 1722. Treasure Island imagines remnants of that world scattered to ports like Bristol and Savannah, with Flint’s cache buried before the crackdown and his surviving shipmates—now tavern-keepers, beggars, or hands-for-hire—reconvening to seize it.
The Atlantic plantation economy and Bristol’s role in it give the novel’s English scenes their material reality. In the eighteenth century, Bristol became a major slaving and sugar port; between 1698 and 1807, its merchants dispatched over 2,100 slave voyages that forcibly embarked more than 500,000 Africans, exchanging British manufactures for human cargo and Caribbean sugar and rum. The Society of Merchant Venturers coordinated local interests; dockside taverns served as labor markets where captains recruited crews. Treasure Island’s Bristol investors, barrels of rum, and the recruitment of sailors through Long John Silver’s Spy-glass echo these rhythms of trade and the moral ambiguities of wealth derived from the wider Atlantic system.
Spanish imperial logistics and treasure flows structure the geography of the story. Since the sixteenth century, the flotas and galleons of the Carrera de Indias carried silver from New Spain and Peru to Havana and thence to Spain, a convoy system formalized by the 1560s. The catastrophic 1715 fleet wreck off Florida produced prolonged salvage operations that attracted privateers and pirates. Legends of buried treasure—often linked to Captain Kidd, executed in 1701—were amplified in Johnson’s General History. Stevenson harnessed those myths in his cryptic map and the Hispaniola’s course toward the Spanish Main. The ship’s very name, recalling the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, signals the region’s Spanish colonial frame.
The history behind the book connects Stevenson to earlier maritime narratives and to Victorian print culture. He conceived the map and plot in 1881 at Braemar, Scotland, and serialized the tale as The Sea-Cook in Young Folks (1881–1882) under the pseudonym Captain George North, publishing it as Treasure Island in 1883 with Cassell. Stevenson drew on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Captain Singleton (1720) for island survival, mutiny, and buccaneering material, and on Captain Charles Johnson’s General History for names, practices, and episodes. In late nineteenth-century Britain, rising literacy after the 1870 Education Act and imperial maritime power created an eager audience for disciplined yet morally fraught adventure set in the Atlantic past.
Treasure Island offers a political and social critique by exposing the costs of imperial commerce and the precarious status of maritime labor. The Bristol gentry’s money, the tavern recruitment of seamen, and the lure of Spanish bullion evoke a system that prizes extraction over justice. Pirate articles promise rough egalitarianism and compensation for injury, implicitly rebuking class hierarchies aboard lawful ships, yet the pirates’ violent greed indicts that alternative as well. The disabled Long John Silver and scarred sailors register the bodily toll of wars and work. By staging mutiny, makeshift governance, and the corrupting pursuit of treasure, the novel interrogates the moral foundations of Britain’s eighteenth-century Atlantic order.
Treasure Island (Including the History Behind the Book)
Treasure Island
To
LLOYD OSBOURNE
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
Part I. The Old Buccaneer
Chapter I. 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 shoulder 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 cover 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 did 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 four-penny 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 overriding 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 pyrate 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 the 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.
Chapter II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears
It was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you will see, of his affairs. It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor father was little likely to see the spring. He sank daily, and my mother and I had all the inn upon our hands, and were kept busy enough without paying much regard to our unpleasant guest.
It was one January morning, very early — a pinching, frosty morning — the cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to seaward. The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey. Well, mother was upstairs with father and I was laying the breakfast-table against the captain’s return when the parlour door opened and a man stepped in on whom I had never set my eyes before. He was a pale, tallowy creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand, and though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a fighter. I had always my eye open for seafaring men, with one leg or two, and I remember this one puzzled me. He was not sailorly, and yet he had a smack of the sea about him too.
I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table and motioned me to draw near. I paused where I was, with my napkin in my hand.
“Come here, sonny,” says he. “Come nearer here.”
I took a step nearer.
“Is this here table for my mate Bill?” he asked with a kind of leer.
I told him I did not know his mate Bill, and this was for a person who stayed in our house whom we called the captain.
“Well,” said he, “my mate Bill would be called the captain, as like as not. He has a cut on one cheek and a mighty pleasant way with him, particularly in drink, has my mate Bill. We’ll put it, for argument like, that your captain has a cut on one cheek — and we’ll put it, if you like, that that cheek’s the right one. Ah, well! I told you. Now, is my mate Bill in this here house?”
I told him he was out walking.
“Which way, sonny? Which way is he gone?”
And when I had pointed out the rock and told him how the captain was likely to return, and how soon, and answered a few other questions, “Ah,” said he, “this’ll be as good as drink to my mate Bill.”
The expression of his face as he said these words was not at all pleasant, and I had my own reasons for thinking that the stranger was mistaken, even supposing he meant what he said. But it was no affair of mine, I thought; and besides, it was difficult to know what to do. The stranger kept hanging about just inside the inn door, peering round the corner like a cat waiting for a mouse. Once I stepped out myself into the road, but he immediately called me back, and as I did not obey quick enough for his fancy, a most horrible change came over his tallowy face, and he ordered me in with an oath that made me jump. As soon as I was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy and he had taken quite a fancy to me. “I have a son of my own,” said he, “as like you as two blocks, and he’s all the pride of my ’art. But the great thing for boys is discipline, sonny — discipline. Now, if you had sailed along of Bill, you wouldn’t have stood there to be spoke to twice — not you. That was never Bill’s way, nor the way of sich as sailed with him. And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spy-glass under his arm, bless his old ’art, to be sure. You and me’ll just go back into the parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we’ll give Bill a little surprise — bless his ’art, I say again.”
So saying, the stranger backed along with me into the parlour and put me behind him in the corner so that we were both hidden by the open door. I was very uneasy and alarmed, as you may fancy, and it rather added to my fears to observe that the stranger was certainly frightened himself. He cleared the hilt of his cutlass and loosened the blade in the sheath; and all the time we were waiting there he kept swallowing as if he felt what we used to call a lump in the throat.
At last in strode the captain, slammed the door behind him, without looking to the right or left, and marched straight across the room to where his breakfast awaited him.
“Bill,” said the stranger in a voice that I thought he had tried to make bold and big.
The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn so old and sick.
“Come, Bill, you know me; you know an old shipmate, Bill, surely,” said the stranger.
The captain made a sort of gasp.
“Black Dog!” said he.
“And who else?” returned the other, getting more at his ease. “Black Dog as ever was, come for to see his old shipmate Billy, at the Admiral Benbow inn. Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since I lost them two talons,” holding up his mutilated hand.
“Now, look here,” said the captain; “you’ve run me down; here I am; well, then, speak up; what is it?”
“That’s you, Bill,” returned Black Dog, “you’re in the right of it, Billy. I’ll have a glass of rum from this dear child here, as I’ve took such a liking to; and we’ll sit down, if you please, and talk square, like old shipmates.”
When I returned with the rum, they were already seated on either side of the captain’s breakfast-table — Black Dog next to the door and sitting sideways so as to have one eye on his old shipmate and one, as I thought, on his retreat.
He bade me go and leave the door wide open. “None of your keyholes for me, sonny,” he said; and I left them together and retired into the bar.
“For a long time, though I certainly did my best to listen, I could hear nothing but a low gattling; but at last the voices began to grow higher, and I could pick up a word or two, mostly oaths, from the captain.
“No, no, no, no; and an end of it!” he cried once. And again, “If it comes to swinging, swing all, say I.”
Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and other noises — the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder. Just at the door the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard of Admiral Benbow. You may see the notch on the lower side of the frame to this day.
That blow was the last of the battle. Once out upon the road, Black Dog, in spite of his wound, showed a wonderful clean pair of heels and disappeared over the edge of the hill in half a minute. The captain, for his part, stood staring at the signboard like a bewildered man. Then he passed his hand over his eyes several times and at last turned back into the house.
“Jim,” says he, “rum”; and as he spoke, he reeled a little, and caught himself with one hand against the wall.
“Are you hurt?” cried I.
“Rum,” he repeated. “I must get away from here. Rum! Rum!”
I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor. At the same instant my mother, alarmed by the cries and fighting, came running downstairs to help me. Between us we raised his head. He was breathing very loud and hard, but his eyes were closed and his face a horrible colour.
“Dear, deary me,” cried my mother, “what a disgrace upon the house! And your poor father sick!”
In the meantime, we had no idea what to do to help the captain, nor any other thought but that he had got his death-hurt in the scuffle with the stranger. I got the rum, to be sure, and tried to put it down his throat, but his teeth were tightly shut and his jaws as strong as iron. It was a happy relief for us when the door opened and Doctor Livesey came in, on his visit to my father.
“Oh, doctor,” we cried, “what shall we do? Where is he wounded?”
“Wounded? A fiddle-stick’s end!” said the doctor. “No more wounded than you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him. Now, Mrs. Hawkins, just you run upstairs to your husband and tell him, if possible, nothing about it. For my part, I must do my best to save this fellow’s trebly worthless life; Jim, you get me a basin.”
When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the captain’s sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm. It was tattooed in several places. “Here’s luck,” “A fair wind,” and “Billy Bones his fancy,” were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from it — done, as I thought, with great spirit.
“Prophetic,” said the doctor, touching this picture with his finger. “And now, Master Billy Bones, if that be your name, we’ll have a look at the colour of your blood. Jim,” he said, “are you afraid of blood?”
“No, sir,” said I.
“Well, then,” said he, “you hold the basin”; and with that he took his lancet and opened a vein.
A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes and looked mistily about him. First he recognized the doctor with an unmistakable frown; then his glance fell upon me, and he looked relieved. But suddenly his colour changed, and he tried to raise himself, crying, “Where’s Black Dog?”
“There is no Black Dog here,” said the doctor, “except what you have on your own back. You have been drinking rum; you have had a stroke, precisely as I told you; and I have just, very much against my own will, dragged you headforemost out of the grave. Now, Mr. Bones —”
“That’s not my name,” he interrupted.
“Much I care,” returned the doctor. “It’s the name of a buccaneer of my acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won’t kill you, but if you take one you’ll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you don’t break off short, you’ll die — do you understand that?— die, and go to your own place, like the man in the Bible. Come, now, make an effort. I’ll help you to your bed for once.”
Between us, with much trouble, we managed to hoist him upstairs, and laid him on his bed, where his head fell back on the pillow as if he were almost fainting.
“Now, mind you,” said the doctor, “I clear my conscience — the name of rum for you is death.”
And with that he went off to see my father, taking me with him by the arm.
“This is nothing,” he said as soon as he had closed the door. “I have drawn blood enough to keep him quiet awhile; he should lie for a week where he is — that is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke would settle him.”
Chapter III. The Black Spot
About noon I stopped at the captain’s door with some cooling drinks and medicines. He was lying very much as we had left him, only a little higher, and he seemed both weak and excited.
“Jim,” he said, “you’re the only one here that’s worth anything, and you know I’ve been always good to you. Never a month but I’ve given you a silver fourpenny for yourself. And now you see, mate, I’m pretty low, and deserted by all; and Jim, you’ll bring me one noggin of rum, now, won’t you, matey?”
“The doctor —” I began.
But he broke in cursing the doctor, in a feeble voice but heartily. “Doctors is all swabs,” he said; “and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what to the doctor know of lands like that?— and I lived on rum, I tell you. It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if I’m not to have my rum now I’m a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood’ll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab”; and he ran on again for a while with curses. “Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges,” he continued in the pleading tone. “I can’t keep ’em still, not I. I haven’t had a drop this blessed day. That doctor’s a fool, I tell you. If I don’t have a drain o’ rum, Jim, I’ll have the horrors; I seen some on ’em already. I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I’m a man that has lived rough, and I’ll raise Cain. Your doctor hisself said one glass wouldn’t hurt me. I’ll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim.”
He was growing more and more excited, and this alarmed me for my father, who was very low that day and needed quiet; besides, I was reassured by the doctor’s words, now quoted to me, and rather offended by the offer of a bribe.
“I want none of your money,” said I, “but what you owe my father. I’ll get you one glass, and no more.”
When I brought it to him, he seized it greedily and drank it out.
“Aye, aye,” said he, “that’s some better, sure enough. And now, matey, did that doctor say how long I was to lie here in this old berth?”
“A week at least,” said I.
“Thunder!” he cried. “A week! I can’t do that; they’d have the black spot on me by then. The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn’t keep what they got, and want to nail what is another’s. Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know? But I’m a saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine, nor lost it neither; and I’ll trick ’em again. I’m not afraid on ’em. I’ll shake out another reef, matey, and daddle ’em again.”
As he was thus speaking, he had risen from bed with great difficulty, holding to my shoulder with a grip that almost made me cry out, and moving his legs like so much dead weight. His words, spirited as they were in meaning, contrasted sadly with the weakness of the voice in which they were uttered. He paused when he had got into a sitting position on the edge.
“That doctor’s done me,” he murmured. “My ears is singing. Lay me back.”
Before I could do much to help him he had fallen back again to his former place, where he lay for a while silent.
“Jim,” he said at length, “you saw that seafaring man today?”
“Black Dog?” I asked.
“Ah! Black Dog,” says he. “HE’S a bad un; but there’s worse that put him on. Now, if I can’t get away nohow, and they tip me the black spot, mind you, it’s my old sea-chest they’re after; you get on a horse — you can, can’t you? Well, then, you get on a horse, and go to — well, yes, I will!— to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all hands — magistrates and sich — and he’ll lay ’em aboard at the Admiral Benbow — all old Flint’s crew, man and boy, all on ’em that’s left. I was first mate, I was, old Flint’s first mate, and I’m the on’y one as knows the place. He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay a-dying, like as if I was to now, you see. But you won’t peach unless they get the black spot on me, or unless you see that Black Dog again or a seafaring man with one leg, Jim — him above all.”
“But what is the black spot, captain?” I asked.
“That’s a summons, mate. I’ll tell you if they get that. But you keep your weather-eye open, Jim, and I’ll share with you equals, upon my honour.”
He wandered a little longer, his voice growing weaker; but soon after I had given him his medicine, which he took like a child, with the remark, “If ever a seaman wanted drugs, it’s me,” he fell at last into a heavy, swoon-like sleep, in which I left him. What I should have done had all gone well I do not know. Probably I should have told the whole story to the doctor, for I was in mortal fear lest the captain should repent of his confessions and make an end of me. But as things fell out, my poor father died quite suddenly that evening, which put all other matters on one side. Our natural distress, the visits of the neighbours, the arranging of the funeral, and all the work of the inn to be carried on in the meanwhile kept me so busy that I had scarcely time to think of the captain, far less to be afraid of him.
He got downstairs next morning, to be sure, and had his meals as usual, though he ate little and had more, I am afraid, than his usual supply of rum, for he helped himself out of the bar, scowling and blowing through his nose, and no one dared to cross him. On the night before the funeral he was as drunk as ever; and it was shocking, in that house of mourning, to hear him singing away at his ugly old sea-song; but weak as he was, we were all in the fear of death for him, and the doctor was suddenly taken up with a case many miles away and was never near the house after my father’s death. I have said the captain was weak, and indeed he seemed rather to grow weaker than regain his strength. He clambered up and down stairs, and went from the parlour to the bar and back again, and sometimes put his nose out of doors to smell the sea, holding on to the walls as he went for support and breathing hard and fast like a man on a steep mountain. He never particularly addressed me, and it is my belief he had as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper was more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness, more violent than ever. He had an alarming way now when he was drunk of drawing his cutlass and laying it bare before him on the table. But with all that, he minded people less and seemed shut up in his own thoughts and rather wandering. Once, for instance, to our extreme wonder, he piped up to a different air, a king of country love-song that he must have learned in his youth before he had begun to follow the sea.
So things passed until, the day after the funeral, and about three o’clock of a bitter, foggy, frosty afternoon, I was standing at the door for a moment, full of sad thoughts about my father, when I saw someone drawing slowly near along the road. He was plainly blind, for he tapped before him with a stick and wore a great green shade over his eyes and nose; and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore a huge old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him appear positively deformed. I never saw in my life a more dreadful-looking figure. He stopped a little from the inn, and raising his voice in an odd sing-song, addressed the air in front of him, “Will any kind friend inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight of his eyes in the gracious defence of his native country, England — and God bless King George!— where or in what part of this country he may now be?”
“You are at the Admiral Benbow, Black Hill Cove, my good man,” said I.
“I hear a voice,” said he, “a young voice. Will you give me your hand, my kind young friend, and lead me in?”
I held out my hand, and the horrible, soft-spoken, eyeless creature gripped it in a moment like a vise. I was so much startled that I struggled to withdraw, but the blind man pulled me close up to him with a single action of his arm.
“Now, boy,” he said, “take me in to the captain.”
“Sir,” said I, “upon my word I dare not.”
“Oh,” he sneered, “that’s it! Take me in straight or I’ll break your arm.”
And he gave it, as he spoke, a wrench that made me cry out.
“Sir,” said I, “it is for yourself I mean. The captain is not what he used to be. He sits with a drawn cutlass. Another gentleman —”
“Come, now, march,” interrupted he; and I never heard a voice so cruel, and cold, and ugly as that blind man’s. It cowed me more than the pain, and I began to obey him at once, walking straight in at the door and towards the parlour, where our sick old buccaneer was sitting, dazed with rum. The blind man clung close to me, holding me in one iron fist and leaning almost more of his weight on me than I could carry. “Lead me straight up to him, and when I’m in view, cry out, ‘Here’s a friend for you, Bill.’ If you don’t, I’ll do this,” and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door, cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice.
The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the rum went out of him and left him staring sober. The expression of his face was not so much of terror as of mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do not believe he had enough force left in his body.
“Now, Bill, sit where you are,” said the beggar. “If I can’t see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your left hand. Boy, take his left hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right.”
We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captain’s, which closed upon it instantly.
“And now that’s done,” said the blind man; and at the words he suddenly left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road, where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick go tap-tap-tapping into the distance.
It was some time before either I or the captain seemed to gather our senses, but at length, and about at the same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply into the palm.
“Ten o’clock!” he cried. “Six hours. We’ll do them yet,” and he sprang to his feet.
Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face foremost to the floor.
I ran to him at once, calling to my mother. But haste was all in vain. The captain had been struck dead by thundering apoplexy. It is a curious thing to understand, for I had certainly never liked the man, though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears. It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of the first was still fresh in my heart.
