Treasure Island

Treasure Island
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Published: 1883
Categorie(s): Fiction, Action & Adventure
Source: Wikisource
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About Stevenson:
Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3,
1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading rep-
resentative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man
who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a
man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly
admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Heming-
way, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. Most modernist writers
dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write
within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics
have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place
in the canon. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Stevenson:
• Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
• Kidnapped (1886)
• The Black Arrow (1884)
• Essays in the Art of Writing (1905)
• The New Arabian Nights (1882)
• A Christmas Sermon (1900)
• The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
• The Silverado Squatters (1883)
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Part 1
The Old Buccaneer
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Chapter 1
The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow
S quire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen hav-
ing asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure
Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bear-
ings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lif-
ted, 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 sea-
man with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remem-
ber 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 look-
ing 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
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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 morn-
ing 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 resid-
ence. 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