Treasure Island | Page 4

. . . . . . . . . . . 195 33. THE FALL OF A
CHIEFTAIN . . . . . . . . 201 34. AND LAST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207

TREASURE ISLAND

PART ONE
The Old Buccaneer

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 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