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Stevenson Robert Louis

Treasure Island

TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,Storm and adventure, heat and cold,If schooners, islands, and maroonsAnd Buccaneers and buried Gold,And all the old romance, retoldExactly in the ancient way,Can please, as me they pleased of old,The wiser youngsters of to-day:– So be it, and fall on! If not,If studious youth no longer crave,His ancient appetites forgot,Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,Or Cooper of the wood and wave:So be it, also! And may IAnd all my pirates share the graveWhere these and their creations lie! To LLOYD OSBOURNE 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

PART I

THE OLD BUCCANEER

CHAPTER I

AT THE "ADMIRAL BENBOW"

Squire Trelawney, Doctor 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 saber 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 pig-tail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber 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," said he, looking as fierce as a commander.