Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Read online

  THE COMPLETE WORKS OF

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  (1850-1894)

  Contents

  The Novels

  TREASURE ISLAND

  THE BLACK ARROW

  PRINCE OTTO

  THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

  KIDNAPPED

  THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE

  THE WRONG BOX

  THE WRECKER

  CATRIONA

  THE EBB-TIDE

  WEIR OF HERMISTON

  ST. IVES

  The Unfinished Novels

  HEATHERCAT

  THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

  THE YOUNG CHEVALIER

  The Short Story Collections

  NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS

  MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS - THE DYNAMITER

  THE MERRY MEN AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES

  ISLAND NIGHTS’ ENTERTAINMENTS

  FABLES

  TALES AND FANTASIES

  The Short Stories

  CHRONOLGOICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

  ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

  The Poetry Collections

  A CHILD’S GARDEN OF VERSES

  UNDERWOODS

  BALLADS

  SONGS OF TRAVEL AND OTHER VERSES

  ADDITIONAL POEMS

  The Poems

  CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF POEMS

  ALPHABETICAL LIST OF POEMS

  The Plays

  DEACON BRODIE

  BEAU AUSTIN

  ADMIRAL GUINEA

  MACAIRE

  THE CHARITY BAZAAR

  The Travel Writing

  AN INLAND VOYAGE

  TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES

  A MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE

  EDINBURGH: PICTURESQUE NOTES

  THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT

  ACROSS THE PLAINS

  THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS

  THE OLD AND NEW PACIFIC CAPITALS

  The Non-Fiction

  VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE AND OTHER PAPERS

  FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS

  MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

  MEMOIR OF FLEEMING JENKIN

  RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS

  ADDITIONAL MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

  LATER ESSAYS

  LAY MORALS

  PRAYERS WRITTEN FOR FAMILY USE AT VAILIMA

  A FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY

  IN THE SOUTH SEAS

  LETTERS FROM SAMOA

  LETTERS TO YOUNG PEOPLE

  JUVENILIA AND OTHER PAPERS

  PIERRE JEAN DE BÉRANGER ARTICLE

  THE COMPLETE LETTERS

  The Biographies

  THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON By Sir Graham Balfour

  THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON FOR BOYS AND GIRLS By Jacqueline M. Overton

  THE LIFE OF MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON By Nellie Van De Grift Sanchez

  © Delphi Classics 2012

  Version 3

  THE COMPLETE WORKS OF

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Interested in Robert Louis Stevenson?

  Then you’ll love this collection…

  Sir Walter Scott is Scotland’s leading classic novelist and the Father of the Historical novel. Ever since the phenomenal success of his first novel Waverley, Scott has entertained readers across the world for nearly two centuries.

  For the first time ever, Scott’s complete and prolific works are available in digital format, with hundreds of beautiful illustrations and many bonus texts.

  The Novels

  No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Stevenson’s birthplace

  TREASUREISLAND

  Stevenson’s most famous work was first published as a serial in the children’s magazine Young Folks between 1881–82. A coming-of-age story, the novel is an adventure tale known for its atmosphere, character and action. The anti-hero, due to his ambiguity of his morality, Long John Silver is an unusual component in children’s literature. This work is one of the most frequently dramatised of all Victorian novels and the influence of Treasure Island on popular perception of pirates is vast, including treasure maps with an “X”, schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders.

  The novel opens in a seaside village in south-west England in the mid-18th century. The narrator, Jim Hawkins, is the young son of the owners of the Admiral Benbow Inn. An old drunken seaman named Billy Bones becomes a long-term lodger at the inn, only paying for the first week of his stay. Sooner than later, the secrets he hides have life changing effects on Hawkins and his family.

  How the novel first appeared in the serial ‘Young Folks’

  To

  LLOYD OSBOURNE

  An American Gentleman

  In accordance with whose classic taste

  The following narrative has been designed

  It is now, in return for numerous delightful hours

  And with the kindest wishes, dedicated

  By his affectionate friend

  THE AUTHOR

  CONTENTS

  PART I THE OLD BUCCANEER

  CHAPTER I AT THE “ADMIRAL BENBOW”

  CHAPTER II BLACK DOG APPEARS AND DISAPPEARS

  CHAPTER III THE BLACK SPOT

  CHAPTER IV THE SEA-CHEST

  CHAPTER V THE LAST OF THE BLIND MAN

  CHAPTER VI THE CAPTAIN’S PAPERS

  PART II THE SEA-COOK

  CHAPTER VII I GO TO BRISTOL

  CHAPTER VIII AT THE SIGN OF THE “SPY-GLASS”

  CHAPTER IX POWDER AND ARMS

  CHAPTER X THE VOYAGE

  CHAPTER XI WHAT I HEARD IN THE APPLE BARREL

  CHAPTER XII COUNCIL OF WAR

  PART III MY SHORE ADVENTURE

  CHAPTER XIII HOW MY SHORE ADVENTURE BEGAN

  CHAPTER XIV THE FIRST BLOW

  CHAPTER XV THE MAN OF THE ISLAND

  PART IV THE STOCKADE

  CHAPTER XVI NARRATIVE CONTINUED BY THE DOCTOR — HOW THE SHIP WAS ABANDONED

  CHAPTER XVII NARRATIVE CONTINUED BY THE DOCTOR — THE JOLLY-BOAT’S LAST TRIP

  CHAPTER XVIII NARRATIVE CONTINUED BY THE DOCTOR — END OF THE FIRST DAY’S FIGHTING

  CHAPTER XIX NARRATIVE RESUMED BY JIM HAWKINS — THE GARRISON IN THE STOCKADE

  CHAPTER XX SILVER’S EMBASSY

  CHAPTER XXI THE ATTACK

  PART V MY SEA ADVENTURE

  CHAPTER XXII HOW MY SEA ADVENTURE BEGAN

  CHAPTER XXIII THE EBB-TIDE RUNS

  CHAPTER XXIV THE CRUISE OF THE CORACLE

  CHAPTER XXV I STRIKE THE JOLLY ROGER

  CHAPTER XXVI ISRAEL HANDS

  CHAPTER XXVII “PIECES OF EIGHT”

  PART VI CAPTAIN SILVER

  CHAPTER XXVIII IN THE ENEMY’S CAMP

  CHAPTER XXIX THE BLACK SPOT AGAIN

  CHAPTER XXX ON PAROLE

  CHAPTER XXXI THE TREASURE-HUNT — FLINT’S POINTER

  CHAPTER XXXII THE TREASURE-HUNT — THE VOICE AMONG THE TREES

  CHAPTER XXXIII THE FALL OF A CHIEFTAIN

  CHAPTER XXXIV AND LAST

  PART I

  THE OLD BUCCANEER

  CHAPTER I

  AT THE “ADMIRAL BENBOW”

  Squire Trelawney, Doctor 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 saber cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
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br />   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 pig-tail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove 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!”

  I remember him as if it were yesterday as he came plodding to the inn door

  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,” said 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 parlor 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 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 parlor; 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 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 neighbors 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 around; 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 him a “true sea-dog,” and a “real old salt,” and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

  In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us; for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

  All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbors, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.

  He was only once crossed, and that was toward the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Doctor Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlor to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old “Benbow.” I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he — the captain, that is — began to pipe up his eternal song:

  “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest —

  Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

  Drink and the devil had done fo
r the rest —

  Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”

  At first I had supposed “the dead man’s chest” to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody but Doctor Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for rheumatics. In the meantime the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean — silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Doctor Livesey’s; he went on as before, speaking clear and kind, and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous oath: “Silence, there, between decks!”

  “Were you addressing me, sir?” said the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, replied, “I have only one thing to say to you, sir, that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

  The old fellow’s fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a sailor’s clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

  The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him, as before, over his shoulder, and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady:

  “If you do not put that knife this instant into your pocket, I promise, upon my honor, you shall hang at the next assizes.”

  Then followed a battle of looks between them; but the captain soon knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog.

  “And now, sir,” continued the doctor, “since I now know there’s such a fellow in my district, you may count I’ll have an eye upon you day and night. I’m not a doctor only, I’m a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like to-night’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice.”