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  PENGUINCLASSICS

  TREASURE ISLAND

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but finally was allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted violently against the Presbyterian respectability of the city’s professional classes and this led to painful clashes with his parents. In his early twenties he became afflicted with a severe respiratory illness from which he was to suffer for the rest of his life. In 1879 he nearly killed himself traveling to California to marry Fanny Osbourne, an American ten years his senior. Together they continued his search for a climate kind to his fragile health, eventually settling in Samoa, where he died on 3 December 1894.

  Stevenson’s Calvinistic upbringing gave him a preoccupation with predestination and a fascination with the presence of evil. In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde he explores the darker side of the human psyche, and the character of the Master in The Master of Ballantrae (1889) was intended to be “all I know of the Devil.” Stevenson began his literary career as an essayist and travel writer, but the success of Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886) established his reputation for tales of action and adventure. Kidnapped and its sequel Catriona (1893), The Master of Ballantrae, and stories such as “Thrawn Janet” and “The Merry Men” also reveal his knowledge and feeling for the Scottish cultural past. During the last years of his life Stevenson’s creative range developed considerably, and The Beach of Falesá brought to fiction the kind of scene now associated with Conrad and Maugham. At the time of his death Robert Louis Stevenson was working on The Weir of Hermiston, at once a romantic historical novel and a reworking of one of Stevenson’s own most distressing experiences, the conflict between father and son.

  JOHN SEELYE is graduate research professor of American literature at the University of Florida. He is the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies: A Meditation, and Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Literature.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Treasure Island

  Edited with an Introduction by

  JOHN SEELYE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by

  Charles Scribner & Sons 1894

  This edition with an introduction by John Seelye

  published in Penguin Books 1999

  30

  Introduction copyright © John Seelye, 1999

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Stevenson, Robert Louis, 1850–1894.

  Treasure Island/Robert Louis Stevenson;

  edited with an introduction by John Seelye.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  EISBN: 9781101554944

  1. Treasure-trove—Fiction. 2. Pirates—Fiction.

  I. Seelye, John D. II. Title. III. Series.

  PR5486.A2S44 1999

  823’.8—dc21 99-29994

  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Stempel Garamond

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  TREASURE ISLAND

  PART I

  THE OLD BUCCANEER

  I. The Old Sea Dog at the “Admiral Benbow”

  II. Black Dog Appears and Disappears

  III. The Black Spot

  IV. The Sea-Chest

  V. The Last of the Blind Man

  VI. The Captain’s Papers

  PART II

  THE SEA COOK

  VII. I Go to Bristol

  VIII. At the Sign of the “Spy-glass”

  IX. Powder and Arms

  X. The Voyage

  XI. What I Heard in the Apple Barrel

  XII. Council of War

  PART III

  MY SHORE ADVENTURE

  XIII. How My Shore Adventure Began

  XIV. The First Blow

  XV. The Man of the Island

  PART IV

  THE STOCKADE

  XVI. Narrative Continued by the Doctor:

  How the Ship Was Abandoned

  XVII. Narrative Continued by the Doctor:

  The Jolly-boat’s Last Trip

  XVIII. Narrative Continued by the Doctor:

  End of the First Day’s Fighting

  XIX. Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins:

  The Garrison in the Stockade

  XX. Silver’s Embassy

  XXI. The Attack

  PART V

  My SEA ADVENTURE

  XXII. How My Sea Adventure Began

  XXIII. The Ebb-tide Runs

  XXIV. The Cruise of the Coracle

  XXV. I Strike the Jolly Roger

  XXVI. Israel Hands

  XXVII. “Pieces of Eight”

  PART VI

  CAPTAIN SILVER

  XXVIII. In the Enemy’s Camp

  XXIX. The Black Spot Again

  XXX. On Parole

  XXXI. The Treasure Hunt—Flint’s Pointer

  XXXII. The Treasure Hunt—The Voice among the Trees

  XXXIII. The Fall of a Chieftain

  XXXIV. And Last

  Appendix A: “My First Book” (1894)

  Appendix B: Tales of a Traveller

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island is the quintessential British adventure story, and like so many such is aimed at a young and chiefly male readership. It belongs in part to the castaway tradition, commencing with Robinson Crusoe and continuing with The Swiss Family Robinson and Marryat’s Masterman Ready, all of which Stevenson read as a boy. But like other Stevenson tales, it was also inspired by the example and form of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, and contains as well characters obviously indebted to Charles Dickens, who had by midcentury replaced Scott as the popular author of the day.

  But