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P UFFIN C LASSIC S

In I got bodily into the apple barrel, and found there was scarce an apple left; but, sitting down there in the dark, what with the sound of the waters and the rocking movement of the ship, I had either fallen asleep, or was on the point of doing so, when a heavy man sat down with rather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leaned his shoulders against it, and I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak. It was Silver’s voice, and, before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity; for from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

INTRODUCED BY EOIN COLFER

P UFFIN C LASSIC S

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First published 1883

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introduction by

EOIN COLFER

What is every boy’s dream?

To be plunged bodily into high adventure. To be plucked from everyday life and dropped into a seat-ofthe-pants existence, with danger at every turn. And, of course, there must be pirates. Bloodthirsty, murderous sea dogs. Filthy as bilge water and treacherous with gold fever.

For me, this is the essence of Treasure Island. Jim Hawkins could be any boy on the planet. He is no musclebound superhero. He is an ordinary lad who finds himself in an extraordinary situation. In the reader’s mind, he is Jim Hawkins. At least, he could be. It’s just possible. I know that for eight hours in 1977 I was Jim Hawkins.

I remember approaching the book with great reluctance – after all, it is a classic, and teachers were always pushing classics at us. And if you read a classic without objection that would be just the same as admitting that teachers could occasionally be right. Surely that couldn’t be true, could it?

Somehow Treasure Island penetrated my defences, and I began to read. Within pages, and quite against my will, I was completely immersed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s world of danger and intrigue. I clearly remember being so worried about Jim Hawkins’s immediate future that I actually left a sweaty handprint on my school desk. Of course, when the teacher asked me if I liked Treasure Island, I shrugged and said: ‘’Sokay, I s’pose.’ Even then, you could tell I was going to be a writer.

So now Jim is not alone on the Hispaniola, we are along for the ride with him, and we stay there by his side, inside his head, until the last page. We hide inside the apple barrel together, overhearing the pirates’ plan. We fall under Long John Silver’s spell and ﬁnally we triumph on TreasureIsland. It is a breathless journey and the closest thing to a real pirate adventure we can experience without an eye patch and a time machine. Treasure Island makes us believe that adventure is not only possible, but probable. Every old man we see could be the one to hand up a treasure map and spark oﬀ a whirlwind adventure.

Reading Treasure Island again as a writer, Stevenson’s characters make me grind my teeth jealously, which is not an attractive sight. Just think: Jim Hawkins, Billy Bones, Ben Gunn and, of course, Long John Silver are all in the same book! Most writers would get a trilogy from such a wealth of characters. Who hasn’t heard of Long John Silver? As a teacher, I only had to mention the name in vi

passing and half the boys in my class would whack the fellow beside them, cackling ‘Arr, Jim lad.’

But my personal favourite character is Pew, the blind beggar. Was there ever a moment in popular fiction more sublimely terrifying than when the beggar taps his way down the dark road, ever closer to the spot where Jim Hawkins is hiding? Don’t try too hard to visualize that, you’ll have nightmares.

In Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson set the tone for a million pale imitations. The old phrase ‘Oft imitated, never bettered’ is very apt in this case. How many wannabe Treasure Islands have we read? How many diluted facsimiles have we seen on the movie screen? Of course there will never be another Treasure Island. It is a unique work of genius, and to date I have met at least a dozen respected writers who claim it as their favourite adventure story. Counting me, that’s thirteen.

To S. L. O.,

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

IV: THE STOCKADE

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 shoulders 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 cove 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, 4

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 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 fourpenny 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 over-riding 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 suchlike 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 8

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 ﬁ lthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate 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 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.

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 outside 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 14

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 gabbling; 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 Dr 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; and Jim here will 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,’ 18

‘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 head-foremost 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 a while; he should lie for a week where he is – that is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke would settle him.’