Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (the top 100 crime novels of all time TXT) đź“–
- Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
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latitude and longitude exactly.
“I never told that,” cried the squire, “to a soul!”
“The hands know it, sir,” returned the captain.
“Livesey, that must have been you or Hawkins,” cried
the squire.
“It doesn’t much matter who it was,” replied the
doctor. And I could see that neither he nor the
captain paid much regard to Mr. Trelawney’s
protestations. Neither did I, to be sure, he was so
loose a talker; yet in this case I believe he was
really right and that nobody had told the situation of
the island.
“Well, gentlemen,” continued the captain, “I don’t know
who has this map; but I make it a point, it shall be
kept secret even from me and Mr. Arrow. Otherwise I
would ask you to let me resign.”
“I see,” said the doctor. “You wish us to keep this
matter dark and to make a garrison of the stern part of
the ship, manned with my friend’s own people, and
provided with all the arms and powder on board. In
other words, you fear a mutiny.”
“Sir,” said Captain Smollett, “with no intention to
take offence, I deny your right to put words into my
mouth. No captain, sir, would be justified in going to
sea at all if he had ground enough to say that. As for
Mr. Arrow, I believe him thoroughly honest; some of the
men are the same; all may be for what I know. But I am
responsible for the ship’s safety and the life of every
man Jack aboard of her. I see things going, as I
think, not quite right. And I ask you to take certain
precautions or let me resign my berth. And that’s all.”
“Captain Smollett,” began the doctor with a smile, “did
ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse?
You’ll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that
fable. When you came in here, I’ll stake my wig, you
meant more than this.”
“Doctor,” said the captain, “you are smart. When I
came in here I meant to get discharged. I had no
thought that Mr. Trelawney would hear a word.”
“No more I would,” cried the squire. “Had Livesey not
been here I should have seen you to the deuce. As it
is, I have heard you. I will do as you desire, but I
think the worse of you.”
“That’s as you please, sir,” said the captain. “You’ll
find I do my duty.”
And with that he took his leave.
“Trelawney,” said the doctor, “contrary to all my
notions, I believed you have managed to get two honest
men on board with you—that man and John Silver.”
“Silver, if you like,” cried the squire; “but as for
that intolerable humbug, I declare I think his conduct
unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English.”
“Well,” says the doctor, “we shall see.”
When we came on deck, the men had begun already to take
out the arms and powder, yo-ho-ing at their work, while
the captain and Mr. Arrow stood by superintending.
The new arrangement was quite to my liking. The whole
schooner had been overhauled; six berths had been made
astern out of what had been the after-part of the main
hold; and this set of cabins was only joined to the
galley and forecastle by a sparred passage on the port
side. It had been originally meant that the captain,
Mr. Arrow, Hunter, Joyce, the doctor, and the squire
were to occupy these six berths. Now Redruth and I
were to get two of them and Mr. Arrow and the captain
were to sleep on deck in the companion, which had been
enlarged on each side till you might almost have called
it a round-house. Very low it was still, of course;
but there was room to swing two hammocks, and even the
mate seemed pleased with the arrangement. Even he,
perhaps, had been doubtful as to the crew, but that is
only guess, for as you shall hear, we had not long the
benefit of his opinion.
We were all hard at work, changing the powder and the
berths, when the last man or two, and Long John along
with them, came off in a shore-boat.
The cook came up the side like a monkey for cleverness,
and as soon as he saw what was doing, “So ho, mates!”
says he. “What’s this?”
“We’re a-changing of the powder, Jack,” answers one.
“Why, by the powers,” cried Long John, “if we do, we’ll
miss the morning tide!”
“My orders!” said the captain shortly. “You may go
below, my man. Hands will want supper.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the cook, and touching his
forelock, he disappeared at once in the direction of
his galley.
“That’s a good man, captain,” said the doctor.
“Very likely, sir,” replied Captain Smollett. “Easy
with that, men—easy,” he ran on, to the fellows who
were shifting the powder; and then suddenly observing
me examining the swivel we carried amidships, a long
brass nine, “Here you, ship’s boy,” he cried, “out o’
that! Off with you to the cook and get some work.”
And then as I was hurrying off I heard him say, quite loudly,
to the doctor, “I’ll have no favourites on my ship.”
I assure you I was quite of the squire’s way of
thinking, and hated the captain deeply.
10
The Voyage
ALL that night we were in a great bustle getting things
stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squire’s
friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish
him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a
night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work;
and I was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the
boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man
the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary,
yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and
interesting to me—the brief commands, the shrill note
of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the
glimmer of the ship’s lanterns.
“Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave,” cried one voice.
“The old one,” cried another.
“Aye, aye, mates,” said Long John, who was standing by,
with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in
the air and words I knew so well:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—”
And then the whole crew bore chorus:—
“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
And at the third “Ho!” drove the bars before them with
a will.
Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old
Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice
of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor
was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows;
soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping
to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to
snatch an hour of slumber the HISPANIOLA had begun her
voyage to the Isle of Treasure.
I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was
fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship,
the crew were capable seamen, and the captain
thoroughly understood his business. But before we came
the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had
happened which require to be known.
Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the
captain had feared. He had no command among the men,
and people did what they pleased with him. But that
was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two
at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red
cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of
drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in
disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes
he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of
the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be
almost sober and attend to his work at least passably.
In the meantime, we could never make out where he got
the drink. That was the ship’s mystery. Watch him as
we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when
we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he
were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he
ever tasted anything but water.
He was not only useless as an officer and a bad
influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this
rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was
much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with
a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more.
“Overboard!” said the captain. “Well, gentlemen, that
saves the trouble of putting him in irons.”
But there we were, without a mate; and it was
necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The
boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard,
and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as
mate. Mr. Trelawney had followed the sea, and his
knowledge made him very useful, for he often took a watch
himself in easy weather. And the coxswain, Israel Hands,
was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who could be
trusted at a pinch with almost anything.
He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so
the mention of his name leads me on to speak of our
ship’s cook, Barbecue, as the men called him.
Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round
his neck, to have both hands as free as possible. It
was something to see him wedge the foot of the crutch
against a bulkhead, and propped against it, yielding to
every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking
like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to
see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He
had a line or two rigged up to help him across the
widest spaces—Long John’s earrings, they were called;
and he would hand himself from one place to another,
now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the
lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet
some of the men who had sailed with him before
expressed their pity to see him so reduced.
“He’s no common man, Barbecue,” said the coxswain to
me. “He had good schooling in his young days and can
speak like a book when so minded; and brave—a lion’s
nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple
four and knock their heads together—him unarmed.”
All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a
way of talking to each and doing everybody some
particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and
always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as
clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and
his parrot in a cage in one corner.
“Come away, Hawkins,” he would say; “come and have a
yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my
son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here’s Cap’n
Flint—I calls my parrot Cap’n Flint, after the famous
buccaneer—here’s Cap’n Flint predicting success to our
v’yage. Wasn’t you, cap’n?”
And the parrot would say, with great rapidity, “Pieces
of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” till you
wondered that it was not out of breath, or till John
threw his handkerchief over the cage.
“Now, that bird,” he would say, “is, maybe, two hundred
years old, Hawkins—they live forever mostly; and if
anybody’s
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