Treasure Island

Jim Hawkins, helping his mother run a small coastal inn, finds a treasure map among the belongings of a dying sailor, Billy Bones, and carries it to Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey, who outfit a ship, the Hispaniola, to sail after the buried fortune it promises. They hire on a crew that includes the ship's cook, Long John Silver, a genial, one legged man Jim comes to like almost despite himself, unaware until partway through the voyage that Silver has planted most of his own men aboard and is quietly organizing a mutiny under Captain Smollett's nose. Jim overhears the plot from inside an apple barrel just in time to warn the honest men, and once the ship reaches the island the two sides fight it out through ambush, siege, and shifting loyalty, Silver switching sides more than once as the balance of danger tips back and forth. Jim, acting largely on his own initiative throughout, cuts the ship loose from the mutineers and, once aboard alone with the wounded Israel Hands, helps him beach the schooner, only to have Hands turn on him with a dagger; Jim shoots him dead first. The buried gold itself turns out to have already been found and reburied by Ben Gunn, a marooned former pirate living alone on the island, and once the treasure is finally loaded aboard, the expedition sails for home; Silver slips away with a portion of the money at their first port of call and is never seen again.

Stevenson wrote the whole story to entertain his young stepson during a rained out holiday in the Scottish highlands, and the book's brisk, incident driven pace shows it, one clean set piece following another with almost none of the digression common to adventure fiction of the period. Jim narrates his own growing competence and nerve across the voyage, and the novel reads today as much as an account of a boy proving himself equal to real danger as a treasure hunt.

Stevenson borrowed the name Dead Man's Chest, the refrain of the pirates' sea song, from Charles Kingsley's travel book At Last, which mentions Dead Chest Island in the Virgin Islands.