Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (the top 100 crime novels of all time TXT) 📖

PART ONE

The Old Buccaneer

 

1

 

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow

 

SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these

gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole

particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning

to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the

island, and that only because there is still treasure not

yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__

and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral

Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut

first took up his lodging under our roof.

 

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came

plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following

behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy,

nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the

shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and

scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut

across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him

looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he

did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that

he sang so often afterwards:

 

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—

 

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

 

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have

been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he

rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike

that he carried, and when my father appeared, called

roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought

to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering

on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs

and up at our signboard.

 

“This is a handy cove,” says he at length; “and a

pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?”

 

My father told him no, very little company, the more

was the pity.

 

“Well, then,” said he, “this is the berth for me.

Here you, matey,” he cried to the man who trundled the

barrow; “bring up alongside and help up my chest. I’ll

stay here a bit,” he continued. “I’m a plain man; rum

and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up

there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me?

You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you’re at—

there”; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on

the threshold. “You can tell me when I’ve worked

through that,” says he, looking as fierce as a

commander.

 

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he

spoke, 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. The man who

came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down

the morning before at the Royal George, that he had

inquired what inns there were along the coast, and

hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as

lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of

residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.

 

He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung

round the cove or upon the cliffs with a brass

telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the

parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very

strong. Mostly he would not speak when spoken to, only

look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose

like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about

our house soon learned to let him be. Every day when

he came back from his stroll he would ask if any

seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we

thought it was the want of company of his own kind that

made him ask this question, but at last we began to see

he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did put

up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did,

making by the coast road for Bristol) he would look in

at him through the curtained door before he entered the

parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a

mouse when any such was present. For me, at least,

there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a

way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me aside one

day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of

every month if I would only keep my “weather-eye open

for a seafaring man with one leg” and let him know the

moment he appeared. Often enough when the first of the

month came round and I applied to him for my wage, he

would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down,

but before the week was out he was sure to think better

of it, bring me my fourpenny piece, and repeat his orders

to look out for “the seafaring man with one leg.”

 

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely

tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the

four corners of the house and the surf roared along the

cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand

forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now

the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip;

now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never

had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his

body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge

and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether

I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in

the shape of these abominable fancies.

 

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the

seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of

the captain himself than anybody else who knew him.

There were nights when he took a deal more rum and

water than his head would carry; and then he would

sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs,

minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses

round and force all the trembling company to listen to

his stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I

have heard the house shaking with “Yo-ho-ho, and a

bottle of rum,” all the neighbours joining in for dear

life, with the fear of death upon them, and each

singing louder than the other to avoid remark. For in

these fits he was the most overriding companion ever

known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence

all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a

question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he

judged the company was not following his story. Nor

would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had

drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

 

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. By his own

account he must have lived his life among some of the

wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and

the language in which he told these stories shocked our

plain country people almost as much as the crimes that

he described. My father was always saying the inn

would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming

there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent

shivering to their beds; but I really believe his

presence did us good. People were frightened at the

time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was

a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there

was even a party of the younger men who pretended to

admire him, calling