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    Robert Louis Stevenson: Seven Novels
    Robert Louis Stevenson: Seven Novels
    Robert Louis Stevenson: Seven Novels
    Ebook1,711 pages32 hours

    Robert Louis Stevenson: Seven Novels

    By Robert Louis Stevenson and Michael A. Cramer

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    About this ebook

    No library's complete without the classics! This edition collects the greatest works of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose stories of excitement and adventure will never be forgotten.

    He wrote stories of chance and peril, pirates and buried gold. He told tales of good and evil, of men struggling with the darkest parts of their souls. Acclaimed Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson was a master whose works offer compelling insight into our hearts and minds. His novels should be studied and treasured, kept in every home library.

     

    Featuring the full texts of Treasure Island, Prince Otto, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, The Black Arrow, The Master of Ballantrae, and David Balfour, this Canterbury Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson collects his greatest yarns. With an introduction by a renowned Stevenson scholar that illuminates his meanings and intentions, this edition is perfect for new and old fans alike.

     

    Readers will want to keep Robert Louis Stevenson forever--and go on a never-ending adventure!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCanterbury Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2012
    ISBN9781607108788
    Robert Louis Stevenson: Seven Novels
    Author

    Robert Louis Stevenson

    Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, and essayist. His most popular works include Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped.

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    Robert Louis Stevenson - Robert Louis Stevenson

    ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

    ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

    SEVEN NOVELS

    Treasure Island

    Prince Otto

    Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

    Kidnapped

    The Black Arrow

    The Master of Ballantrae

    David Balfour

    Introduction by Michael A. Cramer, PhD

    CANTERBURY CLASSICS

    San Diego

    Copyright ©2011 Canterbury Classics

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

    Canterbury Classics

    An imprint of Printers Row Publishing Group

    10350 Barnes Canyon Road, Suite 100, San Diego, CA 92121

    www.canterburyclassicsbooks.com

    Printers Row Publishing Group is a division of Readerlink Distribution Services, LLC.

    Canterbury Classics, A Novel Journal, and Word Cloud Classics are registered trademarks of Readerlink Distribution Services, LLC.

    All correspondence concerning the content of this book should be addressed to Canterbury Classics, Editorial Department, at the above address.

    Publisher: Peter Norton

    Associate Publisher: Ana Parker

    Publishing/Editorial Team: April Farr, Kelly Larsen, Kathryn Chipinka, Aaron Guzman

    Editorial Team: JoAnn Padgett, Melinda Allman

    Production Team: Jonathan Lopes, Rusty von Dyl

    eISBN: 978-1-60710-878-8

    eBook Edition: January 2013

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION

    TREASURE ISLAND

    PRINCE OTTO

    STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE

    KIDNAPPED

    THE BLACK ARROW

    THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE

    DAVID BALFOUR

    ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

    INTRODUCTION

    Oh, to be a boy in Robert Louis Stevenson’s world! To be such a boy is to live the life that Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer could only dream of. It is to fight with pirates, to rescue beautiful damsels, to consort with revolutionaries, and to live a life of high adventure. It is to be a squire or a cabin boy or a dispossessed heir sold into indenture. This is Stevenson’s milieu. If Stevenson’s stories seem clichéd, it is because they introduced so many of the tropes we recognize today. You can look at Treasure Island and see just another pirate story, until you realize that it influenced every pirate story since. It is impossible to read Kidnapped and not recognize the plot of The Lion King . Stevenson’s stories are so influential, we barely notice it.

    This is also his curse. For years Stevenson’s writings have been dismissed as boys’ fiction, the stuff of fairy tales and fantasies: overly romantic, melodramatic, and painfully simple, with no literary value whatsoever. Critics have been harsh to Stevenson, and academics even more so. One of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century, Stevenson was demoted to a level just above comic books in the twentieth, and eventually dropped from the canon. That most canonical of all tomes, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, omitted him altogether in 1968, a year when heroic melodrama was being seriously challenged on all fronts. In the eyes of literary experts, Stevenson was no longer a writer to be taken seriously.

    To be sure, the plots of Stevenson’s stories are, for the most part, easy. We know going in who the good and bad guys are, and that the good guys will win in the end. He foreshadows with a two-by-four. It is obvious to readers—but not to the protagonists—that the crew of the Hispaniola in Treasure Island is Flint’s old crew, or that John Matcham in The Black Arrow is a girl in disguise. Nonetheless, Stevenson is not so simple as all that, and recently his works have been rehabilitated.

    His novels adhere to an almost naturalistic realism in terms of his descriptions of place. Many people spend a lot of time describing the sea, but Stevenson writes of sea voyages as well as anybody. Furthermore, his so-called happy endings are always tainted with a sense of loss. Indeed, to be a boy in a Robert Louis Stevenson novel is not all adventure and fun because (like Huck Finn) Stevenson’s boys come face-to-face with a harsh, cruel world, and in the end gain wisdom that is born of betrayal. To be one of Stevenson’s boys is to learn that the princess you love wants you imprisoned, that the uncle who should protect you will steal your inheritance, that the man you serve is in fact the man who murdered your father, or that your best friend is a bloodthirsty pirate who would just as soon see you dead. Stevenson’s boys have to grow up. In 2000, as a mark of Stevenson’s resurgence as an important author, Norton put his most critically acclaimed work, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, back in its anthology.

    Writing from Experience

    Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850. His father and grandfather were engineers who built many of the lighthouses on the Scottish coast of the North Sea. They are as famous among engineers as Stevenson is among men of letters. Stevenson’s grandfather, also named Robert, was a national hero who accomplished incredible feats of engineering, including building lighthouses whose foundations were entirely underwater. It seems quaint today in the age of space travel to celebrate people for building lighthouses, but in the early 1800s, lighthouses were among the most important structures on earth. They enabled commerce to move and, more importantly, they kept people alive. They were also incredibly romantic: bright, shining towers on desolate, windswept coasts—often isolated from civilization and cut off by dangerous seas. Stevenson’s uncles were also lighthouse builders, and Robert Louis often sailed with them over the black North Sea, living near seascapes that were as stunning as anything he would later write of; parts of Kidnapped take place on coastlines he visited with his father. When he writes of storms and shipwrecks and rocky coasts, he is speaking from experience.

    As a young man, Stevenson studied engineering at the University of Edinburgh, but he soon tired of it and turned to his imagination, which had long been his refuge. He had always written stories, and at Edinburgh his writing flourished. He was on the forefront of a Scottish literary surge that later included Arthur Conan Doyle and J. M. Barrie, both of whom also attended Edinburgh. All three could be accused of writing juvenile fiction, but they could also be heralded as heirs to Sir Walter Scott, as Scottish writers of adventure fiction. Dashing and romantic in appearance, Stevenson was not the adventurer he wrote about. He was frail and sickly for much of his life, and he is something of a cliché: the young man who, too weak to seek adventures in life, makes them up in his head. He did some of his best writing while bedridden.

    He traveled the world, first to Europe, then to America, Hawaii, and Samoa, seeking a climate that he could live in (though he always yearned to return to Scotland). In 1876, while in France, he met and fell in love with a married American woman, Fanny Vandergift Osbourne, whom he pursued to California and eventually convinced to leave her unfaithful husband. They were married in 1880 in San Francisco and, over the next several years, lived in America, Europe, and the South Pacific. Fanny became Stevenson’s editor, and his writing did not really take off until their collaboration began. It was during this period that all the books in this volume were written.

    Stevenson, having gone to the South Pacific to live in a better climate, died in Samoa in 1894 at the age of 44. He left a collection of writings that have remained hugely popular—especially among young men who yearn to live the life of a Jim Hawkins or a David Balfour, and to consort with Long John Silver.

    The books contained here—Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, Prince Otto, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, The Master of Ballantrae, and David Balfour—represent the painfully short arc of Stevenson’s success. It was only ten years from the publication of Treasure Island (1883) to David Balfour (1893). Most of these pieces are adventure tales. Treasure Island is a pirate story (the pirate story). The Black Arrow is Stevenson’s chivalric tale. Kidnapped and David Balfour are tales of disinheritance. Prince Otto is a political romance. The Master of Ballantrae is an epic. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his most acclaimed work, is hard to pigeonhole. It is simply great.

    Stevenson’s stories are quick, easy reads. Although his Victorian language may seem stilted at times, he moves rapidly through his plots. His chapters are short and exuberant. Battle scenes ring with gunshots and the clash of steel. Dark seas swell and roar. Sea voyages figure in several of the tales. Three of them deal with the Jacobite rebellion. There is piracy in several. These are exciting stories. All of them also deal with death. Stevenson’s writings, often dismissed as adolescent fiction, would likely not be popular with parents today were it not for their existing fame because they are so violent. Death is commonplace. Alan Breck Stewart from Kidnapped and Dick Shelton, the hero of The Black Arrow, rack up staggering body counts. Stevenson’s heroes are not without remorse—David Balfour and Jim Hawkins are revolted by the death around them, and act as a kind of conscience for the more violent men in the tales—but death seems to be a big part of Robert Louis Stevenson’s life and is nothing for the reader to shy away from, even if the hero momentarily does.

    A Creator of Language

    Among Stevenson’s most prominent traits is his use of language and dialect to delineate character. He has a good ear. Kidnapped is full of people with thick Scottish brogues. France is a braw place, nae doubt, says Alan Breck Stewart in a Highland lilt, but I weary for the heather and the deer. David’s uncle is nearly unintelligible with his lowland Edinburgh tongue: Ca’ cannie, man—ca’ cannie! Bide a day or two. I am nea warlock, to find a fortune for you in the bottom of a parritch bowl. The forsooth speech of the knights of The Black Arrow is just as practiced: Ye deal in treason, rogue; ye trudge the country leasing; y’ are heavily suspicioned of the death of several, says Sir Daniel.

    Of course, it is Long John Silver who has left his colloquial mark on popular culture. Stevenson invented the so-called pirate speak and put it into Silver’s mouth, and since 1995, every September 19 is celebrated as International Talk Like a Pirate Day among pirate aficionados (a lot of credit also goes to Robert Newton, who played Silver in two films and is credited with giving the pirate his Cornish accent). Silver is one of the great characters of English literature. His speech, mannerisms, and props have been copied by comic book artists, actors, and writers. Most of the standard pirate clichés are there: the long coat, the tricorn hat, the missing leg, and the parrot. He was the first pirate to say Shiver my timbers, and his parrot was the first to squawk Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! Stevenson’s pirates were also the first to sing Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Many people who have watched a pirate movie or read a pirate comic recognize these clichés without knowing where they came from. They came from Treasure Island, and without Long John Silver, there would be no Captain Blood or Jack Sparrow. Movies like Swashbuckler, Cutthroat Island, and Pirates of the Caribbean would never have been made. Treasure Island is not the first pirate story by far, but it is the archetypal pirate story. At the center of it all is Long John Silver, one of the most recognizable literary characters of all time. As with Don Quixote with his washbasin helmet and lance; Robin Hood with his Lincoln-green jerkin and his longbow; Sherlock Holmes with his deerstalker cap, Inverness cape, and pipe—any illustration or photograph or Halloween costume that includes a tricorn hat, a parrot, a frock coat, and a crutch is instantly recognizable as Long John Silver. When you have a chain of fast-food restaurants named after you, you are iconic. When you have been mocked by the Muppets, you are immortal.

    Silver, of course, has literary antecedents, and none closer than Falstaff. He plays a father figure to the fatherless Jim Hawkins. He is charming and charismatic and lovable while being evil as well. Squire Trelewny, Dr. Livesy, and especially Jim are all instantly taken in by him. He is so good-natured and helpful that they trust him immediately. Like Prince Hal with Falstaff, Jim loves Silver and, like Hal, he will reject him in the end. Silver’s attraction comes not just from the fact that he is a free and bloodthirsty pirate or a charming rogue. Like a cowboy in a Western, Silver occupies a place in between civilization and the wild, in between the gentlemen of the cabin and the pirates of the crew. Silver is more intelligent than his shipmates and more frugal, but also more ruthless. They are afraid of him. He had good schooling in his young days and can speak like a book when so minded, says Israel Hands, and brave—a lion’s nothing alongside of Long John. Silver seems to be the only pirate in the book who is married. However, it is an important point to the other characters that his wife is black. In the colonialist world of nineteenth-century England, this puts Silver outside civilized society: marrying a black woman, in their eyes, linked him to the savage. But Silver also owns his own business and, unlike his pirate companions, saves his money in bank accounts instead of spending it on a spree as soon as he comes ashore. As he proudly explains to Dick, Tain’t earning now, it’s saving does it, you may lay to that. He also has aspirations beyond drink and women: I’m fifty, mark you; once back from this cruise, I set up gentleman in earnest. Like a cowboy, Silver’s status living in a world in between the civilized and the savage means he is not at home anywhere. Not fitting in with the honest crewmen because of his piracy, he also does not fit in with the pirates because of his education and temperance. When he offers terms to Captain Smollett, he is rejected. The pirates, tired of Silver’s efforts to restrain them, eventually mutiny against him as well and give him the black spot. Destined to be hanged if he goes back to England or to be murdered if he stays with the pirates, he has nowhere to go. But Silver is a survivor above all else, and he will live to fight on no matter what.

    For Love and Honor

    The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses introduces a theme that Stevenson returns to often, the dispossessed heir. Dick Shelton serves the wicked knight Sir Daniel, who is constantly switching sides in the War of the Roses. Dick, honest and true like most Stevenson heroes, seeks only honor, not riches. The two things he admires most are a man who has killed someone in battle and a boy who can swim. He falls in love with Johanna Sedley, a girl Sir Daniel has kidnapped, and spends most of his time trying to rescue her, eventually with the aid of the future Richard III. Richard admires the boy’s courage but not his honesty: It is not valour of hands, it is a man’s mind of iron, that he lacks. He will not rise, Lord Foxham. The Black Arrow strangely throws together romance, war, knighthood, greenwood thieves, and a sea voyage. The Richard of Black Arrow is not the historical Richard III, but Shakespeare’s melodramatic villain. The bandits resemble ones straight out of the tale of Robin Hood. The sailors Dick encounters are true anachronisms, and would be more at home in Kidnapped or Treasure Island. But it is a poignant tale. Dick becomes a little more disillusioned at every turn. Sir Daniel is a murderer, and Richard is a tyrant. Worst of all, Dick discovers that his own actions—actions which he saw as deeds of honor and just part of his adventure—have harmed innocent people. Taken in that light, The Black Arrow is a cautionary tale.

    Stevenson’s stories could also be political. In Prince Otto: A Romance, the romance is wrapped up in political intrigue, and the novel stakes out a strong political position in the process. You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald. An independent principality, an infinitesimal member of the German Empire, she played, for several centuries, her part in the discord of Europe; and, at last, in the ripeness of time and at the spiriting of several bald diplomatists, vanished like a morning ghost. The story of a prince who loses his throne in order to regain his wife’s love, Prince Otto is a much-maligned book. Stevenson called Prince Otto a romance—and indeed it is. It is full of soaring passions and cruel heartbreak. It is also the most difficult of Stevenson’s books for a modern reader. The language is florid, the metaphors far too broad, and the sheer number of words is difficult to digest. Take this elaborate description of a mountain stream: Great had been the labours of that stream, and great and agreeable the changes it had wrought. It had cut through dykes of stubborn rock, and now, like a blowing dolphin, spouted through the orifice; along all its humble coasts, it had undermined and rafted-down the goodlier timber of the forest; and on these rough clearings it now set and tended primrose gardens, and planted woods of willow, and made a favourite of the silver birch. What a mouthful!

    Otto is a strange tale. It is the story of an ineffectual ruler and his cruel wife, Princess Seraphina. He is viewed by one and all as an idiot. She runs the country with Baron Gondremark. Everyone believes they are having an affair, including, apparently, Baron Gondremark—in truth, Seraphina is only trying to make sure the country is being run efficiently. Otto, discovering how he is viewed by his subjects and how difficult life is for them, tries vainly to be a good prince. Seraphina, attempting to be both a faithful wife and a good ruler, eventually can’t juggle both responsibilities and orders her husband imprisoned. Only when they finally lose their kingdom are they able to be husband and wife and love each other without reservation.

    Stevenson understood the book’s difficulty. He said it was the hardest of his stories to write. It was rewritten several times, both by him and by his wife. The reviews were mediocre and the public’s response was tepid. After the success of Treasure Island, Prince Otto was a disappointment. It also prompted condemnation from the most important critic of the time, William Archer, who accused Stevenson of being a poor writer and rebuked him for his sunny optimism and his love of a happy ending. This bashing came as no surprise. Archer is best known as the most ardent champion of Henrik Ibsen in England at the time (the cartoonist Max Beerbohm once drew a famous cartoon of Archer licking Ibsen’s boot). In all his critical works, Archer favored the harsh and unsympathetic world of the realists to the romance and melodrama of writers like Stevenson. Archer, of course, may have been the first to level such criticism at Stevenson, but he was far from the last. Academics and critics ever since have dismissed Stevenson as frivolous.

    In spite of the density of its prose, Prince Otto is a worthwhile story. It succeeds on several levels. On the one hand, it is full of villainous nobles, innocent peasants, and star-crossed lovers. Yet it is also a deeply political work. Beneath the romance of Otto and Seraphina lurks a full-throated condemnation of the state of European monarchy in the nineteenth century. Otto, born to rule, should devote his time and energy to governing his realm wisely, but he is incapable of doing so. Seraphina and Gondremark have to take up the slack, but this exposes the peasants to exploitation. Many of them see Gondremark as their champion, but he turns out to be a cad who attempts to rape Seraphina, who stabs him. The personal lives of the nobles, which among most people would result in the petty conflicts stemming from infidelity, disrupt the whole kingdom and eventually cost Otto and Seraphina their thrones. The message is clear: politics is not a game and people’s lives are not to be played with. Birth does not qualify someone to rule, and the power of the nobility is corrupt. The last line of the book is the most significant by far: after Otto and Seraphina’s final professions of love for one another, the story ends simply with, So they spake in the spring woods; and meanwhile, in Mittwalden Rath-haus, the Republic was declared.

    The Duality of Man

    Archer’s complaints were dispatched a year later when Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There are few original stories. Dostoyevsky once said that there are only two types of stories: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town (in fact, if Dostoyevsky is correct, then there is only one type of story, but from two different perspectives). The point is that true originality is a hard thing to find. That is one of the things that makes Jekyll and Hyde so amazing—it is unique.

    Structurally, the story is fascinating. The whole thing is presented as a mystery written in an omniscient view but from the perspective of the lawyer Mr. Utterson. Over the course of several months, Utterson encounters and begins to investigate a sinister neighbor named Edward Hyde, who seems to be connected in some way with Utterson’s friend Dr. Henry Jekyll. As Hyde’s crimes become worse, Jekyll becomes more and more agitated. When Hyde is away, Jekyll seems more at ease. But the solution of the mystery is solved only through the two separate first-person accounts with which the tale ends: the first by the late Dr. Lanyon, who discovered Mr. Hyde’s secret, and the second a written confession by Dr. Jekyll. Although there had been stories of disguise, of transformation, and of murder long before, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was altogether new.

    The story of the writing of Jekyll and Hyde is almost as famous and celebrated as the novella itself. Stevenson was bedridden when he wrote much of it, yet he completed the whole thing in just a few days. After reading the manuscript to his family, which shocked them considerably, Stevenson gave it to his wife for editing. When he read her margin notes, he threw the first manuscript in the fire and rewrote the whole thing in three days. It was a physically daunting task, and when he left his bedroom with the completed work, drenched in sweat and shaking from exertion, he must have resembled Henry Jekyll emerging from his laboratory after a transformation—or so the legend goes. It may not be true, but one would like to think that it is.

    There was really nothing quite like the story before. For this reason, countless PhDs have been minted based on dissertations analyzing Jekyll and Hyde. Is it an allegory for drug addiction? A musing on the duality of man? Is it a Faustian story of intellectual greed or a Promethean story of hubris? Is it propaganda for the temperance movement or simply a good tale? Some would argue that, like mysteries and penny dreadfuls, it represents the fears and anxieties of Londoners facing the realities of urban crime. Or it might be a repudiation of Dickensian reformers who wished to treat crime as a disease that could be cured. Still yet, it could be an expression of a mistrust of science and technology in a rapidly changing era of discovery. Only one thing is certain: it is a brilliant masterwork of horror. It has been copied and re-created hundreds of times in comics, films, and television. At least eight movie versions were made between 1900 and 1913, and dozens have been made since. Long John Silver may be Stevenson’s most enduring character, but Jekyll and Hyde are his most profound.

    The Master of Ballantrae, on the other hand, is Stevenson’s grandest epic. The story spans more than twenty years and traipses across three continents. It begins with the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, in which Scottish highlanders revolted against King George II of England. As Master of Ballantrae begins, the Laird of Durisdeer does not want to risk his lands in the rebellion. In order to protect the family estates, his sons Henry and James (Jamie, the Master of Ballantrae) flip a coin to see who will join the rebels and who will stay at home. James wins and goes off to fight with Bonnie Prince Charlie. When the rebels are defeated, everyone assumes that James is dead, so Henry assumes his place and inherits their father’s estates. However, James returns years later, and the brothers begin a struggle for inheritance that will eventually kill them both.

    The Master of Ballantrae contains elements found in Stevenson’s other stories. It includes a pirate voyage and buried treasure, though this time it is buried in upstate New York near where Stevenson had lived in the Adirondacks. It has action in India, the Americas, and Scotland. There is a longed-for return, a descent into madness, plots of revenge, and eventual comeuppance. And, like Jekyll and Hyde, it deals in a way with the duality of man, as the brothers represent two sides of human nature. Although The Master of Ballantrae can be said to be derivative of Stevenson’s other works, its scale makes it notable.

    The Ultimate Adventure Tale

    As entertaining as Stevenson’s other stories are, nothing beats Kidnapped as a ripping good yarn. Its subtitle alone sets the reader’s imagination into overdrive: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: How he was Kidnapped and Cast away; his Sufferings in a Desert Isle; his Journey in the Wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he Suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called: Written by Himself and now set forth by Robert Louis Stevenson. The book was so popular that Stevenson eventually had to write a sequel—originally titled Catriona but included in this collection under its American title, David Balfour.

    In Kidnapped Stevenson mixes his love of youthful adventure with historical events surrounding the Jacobite rebellion. The story is essentially picaresque, as David moves from one adventure to another as described in the subtitle. It is a story of battles, shipwrecks, murders, and even a bagpipe duel. Like all of Stevenson’s young heroes, David Balfour is righteous and resourceful, a natural fighter and an honest friend—the typical hero of boys’ fiction. However, the book deals with actual people and events to a great degree and, although it is not historically accurate, it does express a Scotsman’s view of Scottish history and, more importantly, of Scottish nationalism. The main historical event of the novel is the so-called Appin murder, in which a royal officer named Colin Roy Campbell was assassinated. Campbell was a king’s agent, or factor, who was responsible for evicting people who had forfeited their estates—including, naturally, some of the Stewart clan, with whom the Campbells had a longstanding feud. The men accused of the murder were Alan Breck Stewart, who was tried and convicted in absentia, and James Stewart of the Glens, head of the clan, who was convicted and hanged. In Kidnapped, Stevenson makes Alan Breck Stewart a leading character, David’s friend and protector, and he places David close enough to the crime to have been accused of being an accomplice. Although David is a Whig and therefore a loyalist, the novel is mostly sympathetic to the Jacobite cause, and presents the Stewarts’ version of the assassination. With the exception of Alan Breck Stewart, the famous Jacobites whom David encounters and whom Stevenson treats sympathetically were, as David narrates, all eventually hanged. Even so, the novel has no pretensions to historical accuracy. Stevenson even places the murder in the wrong year and mixes up the geography. He is not aiming for history but for adventure with no greater purpose, as he describes it, than to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid.

    Kidnapped presents an oft-told tale, that of a young man dispossessed of his inheritance and sent away to his doom, only to return and be avenged. The basic plot has worked in numerous stories, from Hamlet to The Lion King. However, Stevenson was inspired to write Kidnapped by one of the most celebrated court cases of eighteenth-century Ireland, that of James Annesley, heir to the earldom of Anglesea, who in 1728, at the age of twelve, was kidnapped by his uncle and sold into indenture in the Americas. He worked for twelve years to earn his freedom and spent twelve more suing his uncle for his inheritance. As chronicled in A. Roger Ekirch’s 2010 book Birthright: The True Story That Inspired Kidnapped, the court cases involving Annesley were among the most important in British law at the time, gutting lawyer/client privilege for many years and even pioneering the use of forensic evidence in a murder trial in which James Annesley stood accused. The story was well known in the nineteenth century. James Annelsy was something of a folk hero, and his saga inspired several other novels in addition to Kidnapped, including Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering.

    Stevenson was also inspired by one of Scott’s other novels, Rob Roy, which Stevenson proclaimed to be his favorite book. In fact, it’s not too much a stretch to view Kidnapped as Stevenson’s sequel to Rob Roy, as Rob Roy’s son Robin Oig plays a role in Kidnapped and another of Rob Roy’s sons, James MacGregor Drummond, plays an even larger one in David Balfour, in which Balfour continues his associations with the Jacobites and woos Drummond’s daughter Catriona. Balfour, knowing that Alan is innocent of the Appin murder, attempts to clear Alan’s name. He offers to give testimony that will exonerate Alan, but it leads to a second kidnapping and a second string of adventures, most of which take place with exiled Jacobites in Holland and France. However, perhaps owing to the amount of time passed and the change in Stevenson’s circumstances—he was now ill and had long since left Scotland behind—David Balfour is less adventuresome, more romantic, and more mature than Kidnapped.

    Stevenson’s impact is broad. Today he is seen as one of Scotland’s most influential writers, and his books as surprisingly complex. He gave us Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins, David Balfour and Dick Shelton, providing roles for actors as diverse and Wallace Beery, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Tim Curry (all of whom have played Long John Silver). Errol Flynn owes much of his career to Stevenson, not only for developing the pirate genre but for writing The Master of Ballantrae, in which Flynn portrayed Jamie Durie, and Michael Caine’s turn as Alan Breck Stewart was overlooked by film critics only because it was part of such a great career. (His exclamation, lifted from the book, Am I no’ a bonny fighter? captures the exhilaration of the character and Stevenson’s love of the Highlands as much as anything.) Fredric March won an Oscar for playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jekyll and Hyde also appear in a film with Abbott and Costello and in the graphic steampunk novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Authors from Ernest Hemingway to Vladimir Nabokov have praised Stevenson’s ability to turn a phrase, and adventure movies, comic books, pulp fiction, and several literary genres owe much of their form and popularity to the groundwork he laid. Yet, even with all these adaptations available to us today, Stevenson’s books are still fantastic reads.

    Michael A. Cramer, PhD

    Brooklyn, New York

    May 2, 2011

    TREASURE ISLAND

    TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER

    If sailor tales to sailor tunes,

    Storm and adventure, heat and cold,

    If schooners, islands, and maroons,

    And buccaneers, and buried gold,

    And all the old romance, retold

    Exactly in the ancient way,

    Can please, as me they pleased of old,

    The wiser youngsters of today—

    So be it, and fall on! If not,—

    If studious youth no longer crave,

    His ancient appetites forgot,

    Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,

    Or Cooper of the wood and wave—

    So be it, also! And may I

    And all my pirates share the grave

    Where these and their creations lie!

    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 four-penny 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 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 neighbours, 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 towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlour 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 for 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 Dr. 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 the 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 Dr. 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, low oath, Silence, there, between decks!

    Were you addressing me, sir? says the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, I have only one thing to say to you, sir, replies the doctor, 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 in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, 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 tonight’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice.

    Soon after, Dr. Livesey’s horse came to the door and he rode away, but the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.

    2

    Black Dog Appears and Disappears

    It was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you will see, of his affairs. It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor father was little likely to see the spring. He sank daily, and my mother and I had all the inn upon our hands, and were kept busy enough without paying much regard to our unpleasant guest.

    It was one January morning, very early—a pinching, frosty morning—the cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to seaward. The captain had risen earlier than usual and set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and the last sound I heard of him as he turned the big rock was a loud snort of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

    Well, mother was upstairs with father and I was laying the breakfast-table against the captain’s return when the parlour door opened and a man stepped in on whom I had never set my eyes before. He was a pale, tallowy creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand, and though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a fighter. I had always my eye open for seafaring men, with one leg or two, and I remember this one puzzled me. He was not sailorly, and yet he had a smack of the sea about him too.

    I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would take rum; but as I was going out of the room to fetch it, he sat down upon a table and motioned me to draw near. I paused where I was, with my napkin in my hand.

    Come here, sonny, says he. Come nearer here.

    I took a step nearer.

    Is this here table for my mate Bill? he asked with a kind of leer.

    I told him I did not know his mate Bill, and this was for a person who stayed in our house whom we called the captain.

    Well, said he, my mate Bill would be called the captain, as like as not. He has a cut on one cheek and a mighty pleasant way with him, particularly in drink, has my mate Bill. We’ll put it, for argument like, that your captain has a cut on one cheek—and we’ll put it, if you like, that that cheek’s the right one. Ah, well! I told you. Now, is my mate Bill in this here house?

    I told him he was out walking.

    Which way, sonny? Which way is he gone?

    And when I had pointed out the rock and told him how the captain was likely to return, and how soon, and answered a few other questions, Ah, said he, this’ll be as good as drink to my mate Bill.

    The expression of his face as he said these words was not at all pleasant, and I had my own reasons for thinking that the stranger was mistaken, even supposing he meant what he said. But it was no affair of mine, I thought; and besides, it was difficult to know what to do. The stranger kept hanging about just inside the inn door, peering round the corner like a cat waiting for a mouse. Once I stepped out myself into the road, but he immediately called me back, and as I did not obey quick enough for his fancy, a most horrible change came over his tallowy face, and he ordered me in with an oath that made me jump. As soon as I was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy and he had taken quite a fancy to me. I have a son of my own, said he, as like you as two blocks, and he’s all the pride of my ’art. But the great thing for boys is discipline, sonny—discipline. Now, if you had sailed along of Bill, you wouldn’t have stood there to be spoke to twice—not you. That was never Bill’s way, nor the way of sich as sailed with him. And here, sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a Spyglass under his arm, bless his old ’art, to be sure. You and me’ll just go back into the parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we’ll give Bill a little surprise—bless his ’art, I say again.

    So saying, the stranger backed along with me into the parlour and put me behind him in the corner so that we were both hidden by the open door. I was very uneasy and alarmed, as you may fancy, and it rather added to my fears to observe that the stranger was certainly frightened himself. He cleared the hilt of his cutlass and loosened the blade in the sheath; and all the time we were waiting there he kept swallowing as if he felt what we used to call a lump in the throat.

    At last in strode the captain, slammed the door behind him, without looking to the right or left, and marched straight across the room to where his breakfast awaited him.

    Bill, said the stranger in a voice that I thought he had tried to make bold and big.

    The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all the brown had gone out of his face, and even his nose was blue; he had the look of a man who sees a ghost, or the evil one, or something worse, if anything can be; and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a moment turn so old and sick.

    Come, Bill, you know me; you know an old shipmate, Bill, surely, said the stranger.

    The captain made a sort of gasp.

    Black Dog! said he.

    And who else? returned the other, getting more at his ease. Black Dog as ever was, come for to see his old shipmate Billy, at the Admiral Benbow Inn. Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since I lost them two talons, holding up his mutilated hand.

    Now, look here, said the captain; you’ve run me down; here I am; well, then, speak up; what is it?

    That’s you, Bill, returned Black Dog, you’re in the right of it, Billy. I’ll have a glass of rum from this dear child here, as I’ve took such a liking to; and we’ll sit down, if you please, and talk square, like old shipmates.

    When I returned with the rum, they were already seated on either side of the captain’s breakfast-table—Black Dog next to the door and sitting sideways so as to have one eye on his old shipmate and one, as I thought, on his retreat.

    He bade me go and leave the door wide open. None of your keyholes for me, sonny, he said; and I left them together and retired into the bar.

    For a long time, though I certainly did my best to listen, I could hear nothing but a low gattling; but at last the voices began to grow higher, and I could pick up a word or two, mostly oaths, from the captain.

    No, no, no, no; and an end of it! he cried once. And again, If it comes to swinging, swing all, say I.

    Then all of a sudden there was a tremendous explosion of oaths and other noises—the chair and table went over in a lump, a clash of steel followed, and then a cry of pain, and the next instant I saw Black Dog in full flight, and the captain hotly pursuing, both with drawn cutlasses, and the former streaming blood from the left shoulder. Just at the door the captain aimed at the fugitive one last tremendous cut, which would certainly have split him to the chine had it not been intercepted by our big signboard of Admiral Benbow. You may see the notch on the lower side of the frame to this day.

    That blow was the last of the battle. Once out upon the road, Black Dog, in spite of his wound, showed a wonderful clean pair of heels and disappeared over the edge of the hill in half a minute. The captain, for his part, stood staring at the signboard like a bewildered man. Then he passed his hand over his eyes several times and at last turned back into the house.

    Jim, says he, rum; and as he spoke, he reeled a little, and caught himself with one hand against the wall.

    Are you hurt? cried I.

    Rum, he repeated. I must get away from here. Rum! Rum!

    I ran to fetch it, but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and running in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor. At the same instant my mother, alarmed by the cries and fighting, came running downstairs to help me. Between us we raised his head. He was breathing very loud and hard, but his eyes were closed and his face a horrible colour.

    Dear, deary me, cried my mother, what a disgrace upon the house! And your poor father sick!

    In the meantime, we had no idea what to do to help the captain, nor any other thought but that he had got his death-hurt in the scuffle with the stranger. I got the rum, to be sure, and tried to put it down his throat, but his teeth were tightly shut and his jaws as strong as iron. It was a happy relief for us when the door opened and Doctor Livesey came in, on his visit to my father.

    Oh, doctor, we cried, what shall we do? Where is he wounded?

    Wounded? A fiddle-stick’s end! said the doctor. No more wounded than you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him. Now, Mrs. Hawkins, just you run upstairs to your husband and tell him, if possible, nothing about it. For my part, I must do my best to save this fellow’s trebly worthless life; Jim, you get me a basin.

    When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the captain’s sleeve and exposed his great sinewy arm. It was tattooed in several places. Here’s luck, A fair wind, and Billy Bones his fancy, were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from it—done, as I thought, with great spirit.

    Prophetic, said the doctor, touching this picture with his finger. And now, Master Billy Bones, if that be your name, we’ll have a look at the colour of your blood. Jim, he said, are you afraid of blood?

    No, sir, said I.

    Well, then, said he, you hold the basin; and with that he took his lancet and opened a vein.

    A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes and looked mistily about him. First he recognized the doctor with an unmistakable frown; then his glance fell upon me, and he looked relieved. But suddenly his colour changed, and he tried to raise himself, crying, Where’s Black Dog?

    There is no Black Dog here, said the doctor, except what you have on your own back. You have been drinking rum; you have had a stroke, precisely as I told you; and I have just, very much against my own will, dragged you headforemost out of the grave. Now, Mr. Bones—

    That’s not my name, he interrupted.

    Much I care, returned the doctor. It’s the name of a buccaneer of my acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I have to say to you is this; one glass of rum won’t kill you, but if you take one you’ll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you don’t break off short, you’ll die—do you understand that?—die, and go to your own place, like the man in the Bible. Come, now, make an effort. I’ll help you to your bed for once.

    Between us, with much trouble, we managed to hoist him upstairs, and laid him on his bed, where his head fell back on the pillow as if he were almost fainting.

    Now, mind you, said the doctor, I clear my conscience—the name of rum for you is death.

    And with that he went off to see my father, taking me with him by the arm.

    This is nothing, he said as soon as he had closed the door. I have drawn blood enough to keep him quiet awhile; he should lie for a week where he is—that is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke would settle him.

    3

    The Black Spot

    About noon I stopped at the captain’s door with some cooling drinks and medicines. He was lying very

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