Treasure Island

Treasure Island (originally The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys) is an adventure novel (1881-1882) by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold."
Its influence is enormous on popular perceptions of pirates, making popular such elements as treasure maps marked with an "X", schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen bearing parrots on their shoulders.
As one of the most frequently dramatised of all novels, "Treasure Island" was originally considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action. It was originally serialised in the children's magazine "Young Folks" from 1881 through 1882 under the title Treasure Island or the mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883, by Cassell & Co.
Plot.
An old sailor named Billy Bones comes to lodge in the rural Admiral Benbow Inn on the Bristol Channel, in England. He tells the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, to keep a lookout for "a one-legged seafaring man". A former shipmate, Black Dog, confronts Bones and engages in a violent fight with him. After Black Dog is run off, a blind beggar named Pew visits to give Bones "the black spot" as a summons to share a map leading to buried treasure. Shortly thereafter, Bones suffers a stroke and dies. Pew and his accomplices attack the inn, but Jim and his mother escape, while taking some money and a mysterious packet from Bones's sea chest. Pew is trampled to death by excise officers. 
Inside the packet, Jim and his mother find a map of an island on which the infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure. Jim shows the map to the local physician Dr. Livesey and the squire John Trelawney. They decide to make an expedition to the island, with Jim serving as a cabin boy. They set sail on Trelawney's schooner, the "Hispaniola", under Captain Smollett. Much of the crew is later revealed to have been pirates who served under Captain Flint; the most notable is the ship's one-legged cook Long John Silver. Jim overhears these conspirators' plan to mutiny after the salvage of the treasure and to assassinate the captain and the loyal men.
After they arrive at the island, Jim joins the shore party and begins to explore the island. He meets a marooned pirate named Ben Gunn, who was also a former member of Flint's crew. The situation comes to a head after the mutineers arm themselves, and Smollett's men take refuge in an abandoned stockade. During an attack on the stockade, Jim finds his way there and re-joins the crew. Jim manages to make his way to the "Hispaniola" and cuts the ship's anchorage, allowing the ship to drift along the ebb tide. Jim boards the "Hispaniola" and encounters Israel Hands, who was severely injured in a dispute with one of his companions. Hands helps Jim beach the schooner in the northern bay, but then attempts to kill Jim with a knife. Jim escapes, climbs into the shrouds of the ship and shoots his pursuer.
Jim goes back ashore and returns to the stockade, where he is horrified to find only Silver and the pirates. Silver prevents Jim's immediate death and tells Jim that when everyone found the ship was gone, the captain's party agreed to a treaty whereby they gave up the stockade and the map. In the morning, the doctor arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates and tells Silver to look out for trouble when they find the site of the treasure. After he leaves, Silver and the others set out with the map, taking Jim along as hostage. They encounter a skeleton, arms oriented toward the treasure, which unnerves the party. Ben Gunn also scares the crew by shouting out Captain Flint's last words from the forest, making the pirates believe Flint's ghost is haunting the island. Eventually, they find the treasure cache empty. The pirates nearly charge at Silver and Jim, but shots are fired by the ship's command along with Gunn, from ambush. Livesey explains that Gunn had already found the treasure and taken it to his cave. The expedition members load much of the treasure onto the ship and sail away. At their first port in Spanish America, where they will sign on more crew, Silver steals a bag of money and escapes. The rest sail back to Bristol and divide up the treasure. Jim says there is more left on the island, but he for one will not undertake another voyage to recover it.
Timeframe.
Stevenson leaves the time period of the novel obscure. Hawkins writes in it that he takes up his pen "in the year of grace 17—." Stevenson's map of the eponymous Island includes the annotations "Treasure Island 1 August 1750 J.F." and "Given by above J.F. to Mr W. Bones Maste of ye Walrus Savannah this twenty July 1754 W B". Other dates mentioned include 1745, the date Dr. Livesey served as a soldier at Fontenoy and also a date appearing in Billy Bones' log.
Background.
Stevenson conceived the idea of "Treasure Island" (originally titled: "The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys") from a map of an imaginary island drawn by Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne on a rainy day in Braemar, Scotland. Stevenson had just returned from his first stay in North America, with memories of poverty, illness, and adventure (including his recent marriage), and a warm reconciliation between his parents had been established. Stevenson said of the idea of the story that, "it was to be a story for boys; no need of psychology or fine writing; and I had a boy at hand to be a touchstone. Women were excluded and then I had an idea for Long John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine, to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, and to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin".
Completing 15 chapters in as many days, Stevenson was interrupted by illness. After leaving Scotland, he continued working on the first draft outside London. While there, his father provided encouragement, as the two discussed points of the tale. Stevenson's father suggested elements that the author included in his account. 
Two general types of sea novels were popular during the 19th century: the navy yarn, which places a capable officer in adventurous situations amid realistic settings and historical events; and the desert island romance, which features shipwrecked or marooned characters confronted by treasure-seeking pirates or angry natives. Around 1815, the latter genre became one of the most popular fictional styles in Great Britain, perhaps because of the philosophical interest in Rousseau and Chateaubriand's "noble savage". "Treasure Island" was a climax of this development. The growth of the desert island genre can be traced back to 1719 when Daniel Defoe's legendary "Robinson Crusoe" was published. A century later, novels such as S. H. Burney's "The Shipwreck" (1816), and Sir Walter Scott's "The Pirate" (1822) continued to expand upon the strong influence of Defoe's classic. However, other authors, in the mid 19th-century, continued this work, including James Fenimore Cooper's "" (1823). During the same period, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, "MS Found in a Bottle" (1833) and the intriguing tale of buried treasure, "The Gold-Bug" (1843). All of these works influenced Stevenson's end product.
However, specifically, Stevenson consciously borrowed material from previous authors. In a July 1884 letter to Sidney Colvin, he writes ""Treasure Island" came out of Kingsley's "At Last", where i got the Dead Man's Chest—and that was the seed—and out of the great Captain Johnson's "History of the Notorious Pirates"". Stevenson also admits that he took the idea of Captain Flint's pointing skeleton from Poe's "The Gold-Bug" and he constructed Billy Bones' history from the "Money-Diggers" section ("Golden Dreams" in particular ) of "Tales of a Traveller" by Washington Irving, one of his favorite writers.
One month after he conceived of "The Sea Cook", chapters began to appear in the pages of "Young Folks" magazine. Eventually, the entire novel ran in 17 weekly instalments from October 1, 1881, through January 28, 1882. Later the book was republished as the novel "Treasure Island" and the book proved to be Stevenson's first financial and critical success. William Gladstone (1809–1898) the zealous Liberal politician who served four terms as British prime minister between 1868 and 1894, was one of the book's biggest fans.
Original manuscripts.
Half of Stevenson's original manuscripts are lost, including those of "Treasure Island", "The Black Arrow", and "The Master of Ballantrae". Stevenson's heirs sold Stevenson's papers during World War I; many of Stevenson's documents were auctioned off in 1918.
Characters.
Minor.
Among other minor characters whose names are not revealed are the four pirates who were killed in an attack on the stockade along with Job Anderson; the pirate killed by the honest men minus Jim Hawkins before the attack on the stockade; the pirate shot by Squire Trelawney when aiming at Israel Hands, who later died of his injuries; and the pirate marooned on the island along with Tom Morgan and Dick.
Historical allusions.
Real pirates and piracy.
Historian Luis Junco suggests that "Treasure Island" is in fact a marriage of the story of the murder of Captain George Glas on board the "Earl of Sandwich" in 1765 and the taking of the ship "Walrus" off the island of La Graciosa near Tenerife. The pirates of La Graciosa buried their treasure there before they were all killed during a bloody battle with the British navy. The treasure was never recovered.
In his book "Pirates of the Carraigin", David Kelly deals with the piracy and murder of Captain Glas and others on board a ship travelling from Tenerife to London by the Ship's Cook and his gang. The perpetrators of this crime also buried the considerable treasure they had stolen but most of it was later recovered. They were all executed in Dublin in 1766. In his research, Kelly proved that Stevenson was a neighbour of the named victim in Edinburgh, and so was intimately aware of what was a scandal at the time, from an early age.
Stevenson and his family were even members of the church congregation set up by the victim's father. Although he never visited Ireland, Stevenson based at least two other books, "Kidnapped" and "Catriona" on real crimes that were perpetrated in Dublin. These were all reported in detail in "The Gentleman's Magazine", published in Dublin and Edinburgh.
Other allusions to real piracy include:
Possible allusions.
Treasure Island.
Various claims have been made that one island or another inspired Treasure Island:
Sequels, prequels, and worldbuilding.
Film and television.
A number of sequels have also been produced in film and television, including:
Adaptations.
There have been over 50 film and TV adaptations of "Treasure Island".
Film.
Film adaptations include:
English Language Films
Foreign Language Films
Theatre.
There have been over 24 major stage adaptations made, though the number of minor adaptations remains countless. The story is also a popular plot and setting for a traditional pantomime wherein Mrs. Hawkins, Jim's mother is the dame.
External links.
[[Category:Treasure Island| ]]
[[Category:1883 British novels]]
[[Category:Bristol in fiction]]
[[Category:British adventure novels]]
[[Category:British novels adapted into films]]
[[Category:British children's novels]]
[[Category:British young adult novels]]
[[Category:Cassell (publisher) books]]
[[Category:Epic novels]]
[[Category:Fictional islands]]
[[Category:Georgia (U.S. state) in fiction]]
[[Category:Hispaniola]]
[[Category:Nautical fiction]]
[[Category:Novels by Robert Louis Stevenson]]
[[Category:Novels first published in serial form]]
[[Category:Novels set in Haiti]]
[[Category:Novels set in the Caribbean]]
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[[Category:Pirate books]]
[[Category:Scottish children's literature]]
[[Category:Works originally published in Young Folks (magazine)]]
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