Treasure Island

Summary

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

A scarred old sailor sings this song at a lonely English inn, and a boy’s life changes forever. The sailor dies clutching a mysterious paper. The paper is a map. The map leads to buried treasure. And the treasure belongs to the most feared pirate who ever sailed: Captain Flint.

This is Treasure Island.

The Old Sea-Dog

Robert Louis Stevenson published this adventure in 1883, and it invented the pirate story as we know it. Before Treasure Island, there were no treasure maps with an X marking the spot. No one-legged sea cooks with parrots on their shoulders. No “pieces of eight” or black spots or “shiver my timbers.” Stevenson created the entire mythology from his imagination, and every pirate story since has been living in his shadow.

The narrator is Jim Hawkins, a young boy whose father runs the Admiral Benbow inn on the English coast. One day, a brown old seaman with a sabre cut across his cheek arrives and takes a room. He calls himself “Captain” and pays in gold. He drinks rum from morning to night. He terrorizes the other guests with stories of hanging and walking the plank.

And he watches the road. Always watching.

“Keep your weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg,” he tells Jim, pressing a silver coin into his hand. “Let me know the moment he appears.”

Jim doesn’t know what to make of this. He dreams of a one-legged man with a thousand diabolical expressions, chasing him over hedge and ditch. But he has no idea what’s coming.

The Black Spot

The Captain’s past catches up to him. First comes a man called Black Dog, missing two fingers, who fights the Captain with cutlasses and flees. Then comes a blind beggar named Pew, the most terrifying figure Jim has ever seen—hunched, tapping with a stick, his voice cold and cruel.

Pew forces Jim to lead him to the Captain. He presses something into the old man’s palm.

“Ten o’clock!” the Captain cries. “Six hours!”

Then he falls dead on the floor. Apoplexy. His heart has given out from the shock.

Jim and his mother search the Captain’s sea-chest before whoever gave him that summons can return. Among his effects they find a packet wrapped in oilcloth. They flee into the night just as Pew and his gang arrive, turning the inn upside down looking for what Jim has already taken.

The packet contains two things: an account book recording twenty years of piracy, and a map.

A map of an island, with three red crosses marking buried treasure, and the words: “Bulk of treasure here.”

The Voyage

Jim takes the map to Dr. Livesey, the local physician, and Squire Trelawney, a wealthy landowner. The squire is beside himself with excitement.

“I’ll fit out a ship in Bristol!” he cries. “We’ll have the treasure if I search a year!”

Within weeks, the squire has purchased a schooner called the Hispaniola and hired a crew. He writes to Jim with wonderful news: he’s found the perfect ship’s cook, a one-legged man named Long John Silver who “hobbled down to the docks to get a smell of the salt.” Silver helped recruit the rest of the crew—tough old salts, exactly what they need.

Jim’s blood runs cold when he reads this. A one-legged seafaring man. But when he meets Silver in Bristol, his fears dissolve. This is no villain. Silver is cheerful, intelligent, kind. He keeps his tavern spotless. He has a parrot named Captain Flint who screams “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” until Silver throws a handkerchief over the cage.

Silver makes Jim feel like the most important person in the world.

“Come away, Hawkins,” he says. “Come and have a yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son.”

The voyage begins. The Hispaniola sails for Treasure Island.

The Apple Barrel

One night, near the end of the voyage, Jim climbs into an apple barrel to get a late snack. The apples are nearly gone. He sits in the dark, drowsy from the rocking of the ship.

Then someone sits down against the barrel, and Jim hears Silver’s voice.

What follows destroys everything Jim thought he knew.

Silver is a pirate. He sailed with the terrible Captain Flint. He was Flint’s quartermaster—the man even Flint was afraid of. And every man he helped recruit for this voyage is a pirate too. They’re planning mutiny. They’ll wait until the treasure is loaded aboard, then murder everyone who isn’t part of the conspiracy.

“I give my vote—death,” Silver says. “When I’m in Parliament and riding in my coach, I don’t want none of these sea-lawyers coming home unlooked for.”

Jim can’t move. He can barely breathe. When one of the pirates suggests getting an apple from the barrel, Jim nearly faints with terror. But before anyone can discover him, the lookout cries “Land ho!” and the pirates rush to see the island.

Jim slips out and tells the Captain, the Doctor, and the Squire everything.

They’re outnumbered. Nineteen pirates to their seven. And the island is in sight.

The Island

Treasure Island is a grim place—grey woods, bare rock spires, swamps that reek of rot. The men grow restless and surly. Silver senses the danger and suggests letting them go ashore to blow off steam.

Jim, on impulse, goes with them. The moment his boat touches sand, he runs into the woods. He doesn’t know why. He just runs.

Deep in the forest, he meets a wild creature—a man so sun-blackened and ragged he seems barely human. This is Ben Gunn, marooned on the island three years ago by his shipmates after a failed treasure hunt. Ben knows where Flint buried his gold. He’s been dreaming of cheese for three years.

“Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly,” he tells Jim.

While Jim is gone, violence erupts. Silver kills a sailor who refuses to join the mutiny, and the pirates take over the ship. The Captain, Doctor, Squire, and their loyal men barely escape to an old stockade on the island—a log fort left by Flint’s crew years ago.

Jim finds them there as gunfire crackles through the trees.

The Stockade

The battle for Treasure Island begins.

Silver approaches the stockade under a flag of truce. He wants the map. He’ll let them live—strand them on the island—if they hand it over.

Captain Smollett refuses. “Before the hour’s out, I’ll put your crew in irons,” he says.

The pirates attack. The fighting is fierce and close. Men die on both sides. The defenders hold the stockade, but they’re wounded and exhausted. Their situation is desperate.

That night, Jim makes another impulsive decision. He slips away alone. He finds the little boat Ben Gunn told him about—a tiny coracle hidden on the beach. He paddles out to the Hispaniola, which the pirates have left at anchor with only two men aboard.

What follows is Jim’s greatest adventure. He cuts the ship’s anchor cable, setting her adrift. He clings to the coracle as currents carry him around the island. He boards the drifting Hispaniola and finds one pirate dead and the other, Israel Hands, wounded but alive.

Hands agrees to help Jim sail the ship to safety—then tries to kill him. Jim shoots him dead. He beaches the Hispaniola in a hidden cove and returns to the stockade, triumphant.

But the stockade is full of pirates.

In Enemy Hands

Jim has walked into a trap. Silver and his men have somehow taken the fort while he was gone. The Doctor, the Captain, the Squire—Jim doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead.

Silver saves Jim’s life. The other pirates want to kill the boy immediately, but Silver faces them down.

“You keep this boy quiet!” one pirate snarls. “Who are you?”

“I’m Cap’n here,” Silver answers. “I’m Cap’n because I’m the best man by a long sea-mile.”

The pirates give Silver the black spot—a summons to step down as leader. Silver laughs at them. He still has the treasure map. How? Dr. Livesey gave it to him. Jim doesn’t understand. Nothing makes sense.

The next morning, Silver leads the pirates—and Jim, now their hostage—on the treasure hunt. They follow Flint’s directions to a tall tree on the shoulder of Spy-glass Hill. They find the skeleton of a pirate, arranged as a pointer toward the cache.

They dig.

The treasure is gone.

Ben Gunn’s Secret

The pirates turn on Silver, but before they can attack, gunfire erupts from the trees. It’s the Doctor, Ben Gunn, and the others. They rout the pirates. Silver switches sides instantly, fighting beside the men he was trying to murder hours ago.

Everything becomes clear. Ben Gunn found the treasure months ago. He dug it up and hid it in his cave. When Dr. Livesey learned this, he gave Silver the now-useless map to buy time. The Doctor knew the pirates would find nothing but an empty hole.

The treasure is staggering: gold bars, coins from every nation, diamonds, rubies, strange Eastern pieces. It takes many trips to load it all onto the Hispaniola.

They leave three pirates marooned on the island—a kinder fate than they deserved. Silver comes with them, his servility disgusting to everyone. But he’s earned his life, barely.

The Return

On the voyage home, at a port in Spanish America, Long John Silver escapes. He takes a bag of coins—nothing compared to the fortune in the hold, but enough to fund whatever schemes he has in mind.

No one mourns his departure.

Jim returns to England rich beyond his dreams. He gives Ben Gunn his share, which Ben spends in three weeks on drink and gambling. Captain Smollett retires. Dr. Livesey prospers.

And Jim Hawkins? He still dreams of Treasure Island. He hears the surf booming around its coast. He hears the parrot screaming:

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

What It Means

Treasure Island seems simple—a boy’s adventure, pirates and treasure, good versus evil. But the genius is in Long John Silver, one of the most fascinating villains in literature.

Silver is charming. He’s intelligent. He genuinely likes Jim Hawkins. And he’s a murderer who would kill everyone aboard the Hispaniola without remorse if it served his purposes.

The terrifying thing about Silver is that he almost makes you forget what he is. He’s so personable, so reasonable, so quick with a friendly word, that Jim keeps wanting to trust him even after hearing him plan mass murder. That’s the real horror: not the violence, but the seduction. Silver shows us how evil works in the real world—not through obvious villainy but through charm, flattery, and the careful management of appearances.

Jim is saved not by his courage—though he has plenty—but by his impulsiveness. He acts without thinking. He runs into the woods. He cuts the ship’s cable. He walks into the enemy camp by accident. In a carefully planned story, these random acts shouldn’t work. But they do, because life isn’t a carefully planned story.

Stevenson wrote Treasure Island for his stepson, drawing the map first and letting the story grow from it. He captured something true about childhood: the terror of discovering that adults lie, that the world is dangerous, that people you trust might mean you harm. Jim loses his innocence on Treasure Island. He gains treasure and nightmares in equal measure.

The book ends with Jim’s vow never to return to that island for all the treasure in the world. But he still dreams of it.

Some islands, once visited, never let you go.