Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

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.

“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!”

Back we will go, the way we came, and small thanks to you big, hulking, chicken-hearted men.

“Trelawney,” said the doctor, “I’ll go with you; and I’ll go bail for it, so will Jim, and be a credit to the undertaking. There’s only one man I’m afraid of.” “And who’s that?” cried the squire. “Name the dog, sir!” “You,” replied the doctor; “for you cannot hold your tongue.

Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.

Long John Silver, he is called, and has lost a leg; but that I regarded as a recommendation, since he lost it in his country’s service, under the immortal Hawke. He has no pension, Livesey. Imagine the abominable age we live in!

“I am in the most magnificent health and spirits, eating like a bull, sleeping like a tree, yet I shall not enjoy a moment till I hear my old tarpaulins tramping round the capstan.

“I forgot to tell you that Silver is a man of substance; I know of my own knowledge that he has a banker’s account, which has never been overdrawn. He leaves his wife to manage the inn; and as she is a woman of colour, a pair of old bachelors like you and I may be excused for guessing that it is the wife, quite as much as the health, that sends him back to roving.

In the same letter, he hires Silver because he doesn't have a pension.

Now, to tell you the truth, from the very first mention of Long John in Squire Trelawney’s letter, I had taken a fear in my mind that he might prove to be the very one-legged sailor whom I had watched for so long at the old “Benbow.”

And you don’t like Mr. Arrow?” “I don’t, sir. I believe he’s a good seaman; but he’s too free with the crew to be a good officer. A mate should keep himself to himself—shouldn’t drink with the men before the mast!”

“I’ll tell you what I’ve heard myself,” continued Captain Smollett: “that you have a map of an island; that there’s crosses on the map to show where treasure is, and that the island lies—” And then he named the latitude and longitude exactly. “I never told that,” cried the squire, “to a soul!” “The hands know it, sir,” returned the captain.

“You wish us to keep this matter dark and to make a garrison of the stern part of the ship, manned with my friend’s own people, and provided with all the arms and powder on board. In other words, you fear a mutiny.”

But I am responsible for the ship’s safety and the life of every man Jack aboard of her.

In the meantime, we could never make out where he got the drink. That was the ship’s mystery. Watch him as we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he were drunk, and if he were sober, deny solemnly that he ever tasted anything but water.

“There,” John would add, “you can’t touch pitch and not be mucked, lad.

“Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it’s hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.

“‘Dead men don’t bite,’

I give my vote—death. When I’m in Parlyment and riding in my coach, I don’t want none of these sea-lawyers in the cabin a-coming home, unlooked for, like the devil at prayers.

I could tell the direction of the speakers pretty exactly, not only by the sound of their voices but by the behaviour of the few birds that still hung in alarm above the heads of the intruders.

“For thirty years,” he said, “I’ve sailed the seas, and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views—amen, so be it.

There’s never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a’terwards, Tom Morgan, you may lay to that.”

It was long ere I could close an eye, and heaven knows I had matter enough for thought in the man whom I had slain that afternoon, in my own most perilous position, and above all, in the remarkable game that I saw Silver now engaged upon—keeping the mutineers together with one hand and grasping with the other after every means, possible and impossible, to make his peace and save his miserable life.

The explosion of disapproval, which nothing but Silver’s black looks had restrained, broke out immediately the doctor had left the house. Silver was roundly accused of playing double—of trying to make a separate peace for himself, of sacrificing the interests of his accomplices and victims; and, in one word, of the identical, exact thing that he was doing.