Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,
August 1973

Jim’s finished the Treasure Island piece. Just as well, as the swelling in the stump is becoming worse each day, rather than easing.

Avery Wright’s letter identified the black ant on Old Providence as Solenopsis geminata, the little fire ant, which will do until someone says otherwise. Jim scribbles its name at the bottom of his addendum, The Flora and Fauna of Old Providence. Then gathers his papers together. Twenty pages in all, if you include the chart and addendum. The whole thing scruffy, coffee-stained, full of typos. Still he’s pleased with it. All the likenesses of Treasure Island and Old Providence adequately set out.

Just this morning, he’d typed out a final argument. The way Stevenson makes use of the naval surveyor’s warning about the tricky channel through to the harbor, the unreliable depth readings due to tidal drift. “There’s a strong scour with the ebb . . . and this here passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade,” as Silver puts it.

Straightening the pages, he slips them into an envelope and scribbles Laina’s name on it. Just in time for Fergus to take it to the museum. Now it’s done, he’ll fix himself a drink to celebrate. An icy martini maybe, five shots with just a splash of vermouth—a drink they call the Lone Pine. He’ll wheel himself outside, where the sun is just beginning to set, casting pink reflections across the cove.

He puts his hand on his hot thigh. Finds it painful to stand.

It was just at sundown when we cast anchor in a most beautiful land-locked gulf, and were immediately surrounded by shore boats full of negroes, and Mexican Indians, and half-bloods, selling fruits and vegetables, and offering to dive for bits of money—Stevenson’s description of the port the Hispaniola hobbles into, unprovisioned, undermanned, demasted after the mutiny on the island.

It’s the place Stevenson lets his chief scoundrel free. Where Long John Silver escapes by shore boat with his single bag of treasure. Most likely on the coast of Nicaragua, Jim has argued. I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him, young Hawkins says.

It was far less than he’d hoped for. But still, Stevenson allows Silver to evade the gibbet or any other comeuppance that might await him in Britain. The dire fate of Ben Gunn, who winds up keeping a lodge exactly as he had feared upon the island and singing in church on Sunday.

Of Silver we heard no more . . . but I daresay he met his old negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.

An earthly paradise then for Silver, complete with its piratical trinity: Flint, Silver, Silver’s island wife.

It was just the sort of place Stevenson would soon set sail for himself. Taking his royalties from Treasure Island, and his tubercular cough, the great writer would leave dour Edinburgh and bleak Britain for good. Sail to the South Seas, to the Gilberts, to Tahiti, and finally to Samoa, where he is buried.

Jim finishes his drink and watches the sky light up across the cove. Stevenson dreamed it all before, Jim thinks. He sent Silver ahead to scout, to reconnoiter, to lead him in.