Treasure Island

About this book

Treasure Island is Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of a boy who finds a map, sails to an island in search of buried treasure, and discovers that most of the crew are pirates. It was written for a boys’ magazine in 1881 and published as a book in 1883, and it was Stevenson’s first real success. Nearly everything the popular imagination associates with pirates (the treasure map marked with an X, the one-legged seaman with a parrot, the black spot) comes from this book or was fixed by it.

It has lasted because Stevenson took a form meant for children and gave it real craft. The plot is tight, the chapters are short and end on turns of suspense, and the villain is one of the most memorable in English fiction: a man who is charming, intelligent, and genuinely fond of the boy he is prepared to kill.

The story

Jim Hawkins helps his parents run the Admiral Benbow inn on the English coast. An old sailor takes a room there, drinks heavily, and lives in fear of a visitor with one leg. When the sailor dies after a visit from a blind beggar, Jim and his mother open his sea chest and find a packet of papers, among them a map of an island with the location of a buried fortune.

The local squire and doctor fit out a ship, the Hispaniola, and take Jim along as cabin boy. The squire hires the crew on the recommendation of a one-legged cook named Long John Silver, who turns out to have sailed with the pirate whose treasure they are after. Hiding in an apple barrel, Jim overhears enough to know that a mutiny is planned. The rest of the book takes place on the island, where the honest party and the pirates fight for the ship, the stockade, and the map.

Themes and historical context

Stevenson began the book in the summer of 1881, in Scotland, after drawing a map of an imaginary island to amuse his stepson. He wrote it quickly, a chapter a day at first, and read each installment aloud to his family. It was serialized in Young Folks, where it did not attract much notice, and became popular only after the book edition appeared.

The novel’s lasting interest comes from Long John Silver. Stevenson gave the pirate the energy and good humor that the respectable characters lack, and he lets Silver change sides as often as it suits him without ever quite becoming a monster. Jim’s relationship with him, part fear and part affection, is the moral center of the story and the reason it is more than a boys’ adventure.

The historical setting is the mid-eighteenth century, in the years after the great age of piracy, and the pirates’ references to Captain Flint and to real figures like Edward England place it in that world. Stevenson drew on earlier sea fiction and on accounts of pirates published in the eighteenth century, and he acknowledged borrowing details from several predecessors.

Who should read it

At around 67,000 words, in thirty-four chapters grouped into six parts, this is a short novel that moves fast. The sea vocabulary and the pirates’ talk are the only obstacles, and context carries most of it. It suits readers from about ten upward and loses nothing when read by adults. It is the natural first Stevenson, with Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as next steps.

Edition notes

This Project Gutenberg edition is taken from an edition illustrated by Louis Rhead, an English-born American artist who illustrated a number of adventure classics in the early twentieth century. His illustrations are included in the HTML and EPUB versions. The text is complete.