by Robert Louis Stevenson

TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,

Storm and adventure, heat and cold,

If schooners, islands, and maroons,

And buccaneers, and buried gold,

And all the old romance, retold

Exactly in the ancient way,

Can please, as me they pleased of old,

The wiser youngsters of today:

--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 I

And all my pirates share the grave

Where these and their creations lie!

To S. 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.

TREASURE ISLAND

PART ONE--The Old Buccaneer

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

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 looking 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 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 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 did 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 four-penny 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

overriding 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 such like 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

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.