They seek assistance from their neighbours who are too frightened to do any more than send for the revenue officers. Jim finds a packet of documents and takes it. He and his mother hide and watch the pirates ransack the inn. At last, the pirates are chased away by revenue officers on horseback, who accidentally trample Pew to death. Jim asks the officers to take him to Dr Livesey, who is visiting Squire Trelawney.
Thrilled by the possibility of adventure and buried gold, the Squire commissions a ship, the Hispaniola. Jim bids farewell to his mother and arrives in Bristol, where the ship is docked. The Squire has meanwhile hired a cook for the voyage, Long John Silver, who has chosen most of the rest of the crew. Silver is a charming but morally ambiguous character who switches allegiance whenever it suits him.
Jim carries a message to Silver, only to find that Black Dog is also in the same tavern! Just before the journey begins, the upright and serious Captain Smollett warns the Squire and Livesey that he does not trust the crew. They all know it is a treasure-seeking voyage, although this is meant to be a secret.
During most of the voyage, his fears seem unfounded and the crew seems to be happy and efficient. Jim sneaks ashore and hears in the distance one of the honest men being slain at the hands of the pirates. He also sees Silver murder a man who he was unable to convince to join his mutiny.
Terrified that he will be next, Jim runs into the woods. Gunn reveals that Flint had buried the treasure on the island with the help of six men, whom he had then killed. Gunn had returned to the island with a group of others three years before. Jekyll and Mr. Tell us what you like and we'll recommend books you'll love. Sign up and get a free ebook! Treasure Island Part of Enriched Classics.
By Robert Louis Stevenson. About The Book. About The Author. Robert Louis Stevenson. Product Details. Resources and Downloads. Curriculum Guide pdf. Mercantile vessels were easy pickings for these pirates — partly because the crewmen on such ships were so badly treated and poorly paid that they often volunteered to join their captors. And, although many merchants and government officials, especially in the American colonies, turned a blind eye to piracy and often actually supported it, it was not always easy for the pirates to find ready markets for goods.
Coins, precious metals, and other nonperishable items in particular were likely to be stored in safe places, awaiting the pirates' opportunity to dispose of them profitably — and what safer place than buried on one of the many small islands around the Caribbean Sea, with nothing to reveal the cache but a cryptic map secreted in an old man's sea chest? Certainly, believing in the existence of such a map and its discovery by someone willing and able to go in search of the riches, as in Treasure Island , does not require much stretch of the imagination.
The other circumstances of the novel, in particular the characters of the pirates, are equally believable; Stevenson's "sea dogs" bear the mark of authenticity.
During the so-called Golden Age of Piracy in the Atlantic, it was not unusual for the men sailing under pirate flags to be in their teens or sometimes even younger one such, of whom a record was kept, was "Thomas Simpson, about ten". Most, before they were forty, were retired, blind, crippled, or dead.
The pirate's life at sea was in most cases easier — and surely a lot more fun, for those of a certain turn of mind — than that of navy crewmen or merchant sailors, but it was still hard and dangerous, requiring a young man's energy and fitness. The older pirates of Treasure Island , including Billy Bones, Pew, Tom Morgan, Long John Silver, and perhaps several others, in their fifties at most, had had their day in the late teens and early twenties of the century Silver says he sailed with Edward England, who died shortly after , and had either spent their shares of the loot taken from ships and towns or, no doubt infrequently in real life, had saved what they could.
The chance to recover a large treasure, like the one Billy Bones' map leads to, would have been a dream come true for such men. Pirate crews unlike the crews of naval or merchant ships, who served under the strict rule of a captain and officers they had not chosen were generally democratic, electing their captains and reserving the right to depose them.
Thus, Stevenson's pirates, freely choosing the redoubtable Silver as their leader, are off on a last grand adventure with a captain whom they trust, or so they must believe. Jim Hawkins himself would not have been an unusual boy in the English or colonial New England eighteenth century, although he may seem to the twenty-first-century reader remarkably free from the normal responsibilities of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old.
An innkeeper's son, he would have expected to inherit his father's trade and would have been educated early in the skills to pursue it. Those that required schooling — reading, writing, and arithmetic — he would have acquired by age ten or so; the others would be learned on the job, and especially with his father ill and the inn not particularly successful he would have been needed there to do as much work as he could.
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