Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

Jan 1883 · Bantam Classics

About this ebook

Treasure Island, published in 1883, popularized the now familiar characters of pirates and brought them to rum-swilling life. When an old sailor named Billy Bones dies in the inn belonging to young Jim Hawkins’s parents, he leaves a greasy old map on which an “X” marks the spot where treasure is buried. Jim joins the crew of a ship in pursuit of Bones’s treasure, and on the seas meets up with Long John Silver, a peg-legged pirate who has infiltrated their ranks. Jim must survive mutinies and counter-mutinies, face hand-to-hand combat with drunken sailors, and outwit double-crossing thieves before the treasure can be his.

Ratings and reviews

A cracking yarn told in the person of an ordinary lad who gets mixed up with pirates and adventurers on a quest for Treasure on an isolated and distant island. When I first read this book at the age of 11 the 18th Century prose get the better of me; and even now, the slang of the ordinary seaman doesn't scan so well. But no matter, it's still an easily digested tale.

I never read this when I was young, but what fun it has been to discover its treasures a half century later. The best parts were pirate-speak (I wonder how authentic it is) and the Long John Silver character (who inescapably resembles Wallace Berry in my imagination). Much of the rest, alas, is pretty mediocre for adult readers.

This is an adventure to make you young again. And worth repeated reading. While the words do not change, time changes us, and therefore we view the action diferently. As time changes technology; vocabularity and civility advances, changes, and more patience and thinking (about old books) is needed. Read to adventure (like Hawkins ran to adventure and gold in the book)and the DATA of KNOWLEDGE of older times and a different way of life, will be your adventure, and GOLD of KNOWLEDGE.

About the author

Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson remains one of English literature’s most translated authors, thanks to his relentless pacing and vividly realized characters. His tales of adventure helped define the genre, and introduced a level of nuance to children’s literature along with a rare and unique wit. Stevenson’s life was as colorful as his stories. He travelled extensively in Europe, the United States, and the South Seas, where he died in Samoa in 1894.