Treasure Island
1883 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
1883 novel by Robert Louis Stevenson From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Treasure Island (originally titled The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys[1]) is an adventure and historical novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It was published in 1883, and tells a story of "buccaneers and buried gold" set in the 1700s. It is considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action.
 First edition | |
| Author | Robert Louis Stevenson |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys by Captain George North |
| Language | English |
| Subjects | Pirates, coming-of-age |
| Genre | Adventure novel, Historical novel, Young adult literature |
| Publisher | Cassell and Company |
Publication date | 14 November 1883 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Pages | 292 (first edition) |
| OCLC | 610014604 |
| Text | Treasure Island at Wikisource |
The novel was originally serialised from 1881 to 1882 in the children's magazine Young Folks under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883 by Cassell & Co. It has since become one of the most-often dramatised and adapted novels.
Since its publication Treasure Island has significantly influenced depictions of pirates in popular culture, including elements such as deserted tropical islands, treasure maps marked with an "X", and one-legged seamen with parrots perched on their shoulders.[2]
In the mid-18th century, an old sailor who identifies himself as "The Captain" starts to lodge at the rural Admiral Benbow Inn in Bristol. He tells the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, to keep a lookout for "a one-legged seafaring man". Black Dog, a pirate with missing fingers, recognises the captain as his former shipmate Billy Bones, and confronts him. They get into a cutlass fight; Black Dog flees, and Bones suffers a stroke. That night, Jim's father dies. Days later, Pew, a blind beggar, visits the inn, delivering a summons to Bones called "the black spot". Shortly thereafter, Bones suffers another stroke and dies. Pew and his accomplices attack the inn but are attacked and routed by mounted excise officers, and Pew is trampled to death by one of their horses. Jim and his mother escape with a packet from The Captain's sea chest, which is found to contain a map of the island on which the infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure. Jim shows the map to the local physician Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney, and they decide to make an expedition to the island, with Jim serving as a cabin boy.
They set sail from Bristol on a schooner chartered by Trelawney, the Hispaniola, under Captain Alexander Smollett. Jim forms a strong bond with the ship's one-legged cook, Long John Silver. The crew suffers a tragedy when first mate Mr. Arrow, a drunkard, is washed overboard during a storm. While hidden in an apple barrel, Jim overhears a conversation among the Hispaniola's crew which reveals that many of them are pirates who had served on Captain Flint's ship, the Walrus, with Silver leading them. They plan to mutiny after the salvage of the treasure, and to murder the captain and the few remaining loyal crew. Jim secretly informs Captain Smollett, Trelawney, and Livesey.
Arriving at the island and going ashore, Jim flees into the jungle after witnessing Silver murder a sailor for objections. He meets a marooned pirate named Ben Gunn, who is also a former member of Flint's crew. The mutineers arm themselves and take the ship, while Jim and Smollett's loyal band take refuge in an abandoned stockade on the island. After a brief truce, the mutineers attack the stockade, with casualties on both sides of the battle. Jim makes his way to the Hispaniola and cuts the ship from its anchor, drifting it along the ebb tide. He boards the ship and encounters the pirate Israel Hands, who had been injured in a drunken dispute with one of his companions. Hands helps Jim beach the schooner in the northern bay, then attempts to kill Jim with a dagger, but Jim shoots him dead with two pistols.
Jim goes ashore and returns to the stockade, where he is horrified to find only Silver and the pirates. Silver tells Jim that when everyone found the ship was gone, Captain Smollett's party had agreed to a truce whereby the pirates take the map and allow the besieged party to leave. In the morning, Livesey arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates, and tells Silver to look out for trouble once he's found the site of the treasure. After a dispute over leadership, Silver and the others set out with the map, taking Jim along as a hostage. They find a skeleton with its arms oriented toward the treasure, unnerving the party. Ben Gunn shouts Captain Flint's last words from the forest, making the superstitious pirates believe that Flint's ghost is haunting the island. They eventually find a treasure cache, but it is empty. The pirates prepare to kill Silver and Jim, but they are driven off by the doctor's party, including Gunn. Livesey explains that Gunn had already found the bulk of the treasure and taken it to his cave, long ago. The expedition members load this portion of the treasure onto the Hispaniola and depart the island, with Silver as their only prisoner. At their first port, in Spanish America, Silver steals a bag of money and escapes. The remaining crew sail back to Bristol and divide up the treasure. Some treasure was never found, but Jim refuses to return to the "accursed" island to look for it.
Treasure Island was written by Stevenson after returning from his first trip to America where he was married. Still a relatively unknown author, inspiration came in summer of 1881 in Braemar, Scotland when bad weather kept the family inside.[3] To amuse his 12-year old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, he used the idea of a secret map as the basis of a story about hidden treasure.
He had clearly started work by 25 August, writing to a friend, "If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast, that it's all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship... It's quite silly and horrid fun – and what I want is the best book about Buccaneers that can be had."[4]
Stevenson originally gave the book the title The Sea Cook. One month after conceiving of the book, chapters began to appear in the pages of the Young Folks magazine.[5] After completing several chapters rapidly, Stevenson was interrupted by illness.[6] He left Scotland and continued working on the first draft near London, where he and his father discussed points of the tale, and his father suggested elements that he included. The novel eventually ran in seventeen weekly instalments from 1 October 1881 to 28 January 1882. The book was later republished as the novel Treasure Island and proved to be Stevenson's first financial and critical success.
The growth of the desert island genre can be traced back to 1719 when Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published. A century later, novels such as S. H. Burney's The Shipwreck (1816), and Sir Walter Scott's The Pirate (1822) continued to expand upon Defoe's classic. Other authors in the mid-19th century continued this trend, with works including James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot (1823). During the same period, Edgar Allan Poe wrote "MS Found in a Bottle" (1833) and "The Gold-Bug" (1843). All of these works influenced Stevenson's end product.[7]
Stevenson also consciously borrowed material from previous authors. In a letter from July 1884 to Sidney Colvin, he wrote that, "Treasure Island came out of Kingsley's At Last, where I got the Dead Man's Chest — and that was the seed — and out of the great Captain Johnson's History of the Notorious Pirates." Stevenson also admits that he took the idea of Captain Flint's pointing skeleton from Poe's The Gold-Bug and he constructed Billy Bones's history from the "Money-Diggers" section ("Golden Dreams" in particular[8]) of Tales of a Traveller by Washington Irving, one of his favourite writers.[9]
Among other minor characters whose names are not revealed are the four pirates who were killed in an attack on the stockade along with Job Anderson; the pirate killed by the honest men minus Jim Hawkins the day before the attack on the stockade; the pirate killed by Ben Gunn the night before the attack; the pirate shot by Squire Trelawney when aiming at Israel Hands, who later died of his injuries; and the pirate marooned on the island along with Tom Morgan and Dick Johnson.
The historian Luis Junco suggests that Treasure Island is a combination of the story of the murder of Captain George Glas aboard the Earl of Sandwich in 1765 and the taking of the ship Walrus off the island of La Graciosa near Tenerife. The pirates of La Graciosa buried their treasure there, and were subsequently all killed in a bloody battle with the Royal Navy; the treasure was never recovered.
In his book Pirates of the Carraigin, David Kelly deals with the piracy and murder of Captain Glas and others by the Ship's cook and his gang aboard a ship travelling from Tenerife to London. The perpetrators of this crime also buried the considerable treasure they had stolen but most of it was later recovered. They were all executed in Dublin in 1766. In his research, Kelly showed that Stevenson was a neighbour of the named victim in Edinburgh, and so was aware from an early age of these events, which had been a scandal at the time. Stevenson and his family were members of a church congregation set up by the victim's father. Although he never visited Ireland, Stevenson based at least two other books, Kidnapped and Catriona on real crimes that were perpetrated in Dublin; these crimes were all reported in detail in The Gentleman's Magazine, published in Dublin and Edinburgh.[11]
Other allusions to real piracy include:
Various claims have been made that one island or another inspired Treasure Island:
In August 2022 Mick Whitley, then the member of Parliament for Birkenhead, supported the findings of a local historian named John Lamb that Stevenson had set his classic novel Treasure Island in the towns of Birkenhead and Wallasey on the Wirral Peninsula lying opposite Liverpool. This followed a previous announcement by Alan Evans of Wirral Borough Council that the French science fiction writer Jules Verne had also set his 1874 novel The Mysterious Island in Birkenhead. Their letters of support for Mr Lamb's claims were posted on the Jules Verne and the Heroes of Birkenhead website in August 2022.[29][30][31]
Stevenson's Treasure Island has spawned an enormous amount of literature based upon the original novel:
Several sequels have also been produced in film and television, including:
 | This section needs additional citations for verification. (July 2023) |
 | This section contains a list of miscellaneous information. (July 2023) |
In worldbuilding, there are:
There have been over 50 film and TV adaptations of Treasure Island.
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Film adaptations include:[45]
There have been over 24 major stage adaptations made, though the number of minor adaptations remains countless.[52] The story is also a popular plot and setting for a traditional pantomime wherein Mrs. Hawkins, Jim's mother is the dame.
Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean franchise references Treasure Island many times. In the 2006 revamp of the original attraction, the island port was officially named Isla Tesoro, with the Spanish translation of Treasure Island is La isla del tesoro. In making Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Treasure Island was one of many inspirations behind making the film, noted by the filmmakers like producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who regarded the 1950 Walt Disney Studio feature.[75] It was also noted that history has a strange way of turning full circle as 53 years later, it took the very same studio's first Pirates of the Caribbean movie to reinvent and reinvigorate a moribund genre which delighted millions.[76] One thing screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio took from their experience on Treasure Planet, was the simple premise of, "Is Long John Silver a delightful Falstaffian character or a contemptible villain?" That idea was something they carried into Captain Jack Sparrow.[77] Hector Barbossa's pet monkey, named "Jack" after Jack Sparrow, is a reference to Long John Silver's pet parrot Captain Flint. Both animals are named after their owner's former captain.[78] Dead Man's Chest features the most references, beginning with Joshamee Gibbs singing Dead Man's Chest, a song from the novel, which served as the original opening of until it changed into the second scene of the film.[79][80] Jack Sparrow is given the Black Spot by Bootstrap Bill Turner as a marker that the Kraken can track. Governor Weatherby Swann witnesses Mercer kill the captain, who was intended to be called "Captain Hawkins", as revealed by screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio on the film's DVD commentary. Hawkins' backstory was intended to relate to that of Jim Hawkins' father in Treasure Island, explaining the circumstances of his father's disappearance at sea and why he never returned to the Admiral Benbow Inn.[81] The merchant ship the Edinburgh Trader was played by the Bounty, a ship replica which played the Hispaniola in the 1990 movie adaptation of the novel. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides has Hector Barbossa begin wearing a wooden peg leg where a real one used to be, revealed to have been lost in an off-screen encounter with Blackbeard. Barbossa is feared as an omen of death and referred to as "the one legged man" by Blackbeard and his daughter Angelica, which is a parallel to Billy Bones having feared John Silver and ominously referred to him by the same moniker. Regarding this change in Barbossa, actor Geoffrey Rush noted Robert Newton playing Long John Silver in Treasure Island[82][83] Terry Rossio references Treasure Island and Treasure Planet in the annotations for his screenplay draft for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, which features a character named Captain (later Admiral) John Benbow as a reference to the Admiral Benbow Inn.[84] One of Chris Schweizer's early ideas for the Pirates of the Caribbean comic book series was to have Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann's 12-or-13-year-old son be involved in Jack Sparrow's search for Anamaria who had disappeared while searching for a mystical treasure, with the boy eventually growing up and becoming Billy Bones, a character from Treasure Island.[citation needed] A phantom pirate named Black Dog Briar appears in the video game expansion.
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