Treasure Island, first published as a book in 1883, catapulted Robert Louis Stevenson onto the world stage as an author of adventure stories. The spur to write this timeless masterpiece of storytelling was drawing a map of the island for the amusement for Lloyd Osborne, the young son of his American wife Fanny, on a wet day in Braemar during the summer of 1881.
The tale (first entitled The Sea Cook) has the last of the New Providence ‘gentlemen of fortune’, led by the immortal Long John Silver, as the most memorable of characters. The pirate’s name was borrowed from the owner (Juan Silverado) of a remote bunkhouse in the mountains behind the Napa Valley of California where he and Fanny had spent their honeymoon the previous year. Stevenson freely confessed to modelling the personality of Silver on his close friend and collaborator William Henley, who had lost a foot to tuberculosis of the bone:
It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver. Of course he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you: but the idea of the maimed man ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely from you.
Henley contributed greatly to the tale, which was written at breakneck speed, by sending books on pirates up to Braemar. There, Stevenson, bedridden for most of the day, devoured them. He later told his agent, T. I. came out of Kingsley’s At Last; where I got the ‘Dead Man’s Chest’ – and that was the seed – and out of the great Captain Johnson’s History of Notorious Pyrates.
In the latter he found the peg-legged saviour of Captain Macrae on the Cassandra – the historical match for his blood-soaked old pirate Silver. In a close parallel to the Macrae story, he has Silver save Hawkins from pirate bloodlust, by the dramatic intervention, I’ve never seen a better boy than that … let me see him that’ll lay a hand on him – that’s what I say, and you may lay to it.
Earlier in the plot, the fifty-year-old Silver refers to his time as a pirate on the Cassandra when recruiting new hands to his latest mutiny – unaware that Hawkins was hiding in the apple barrel:
Flint was cap’n; I was quartermaster, along with my timber leg. The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his dead-lights. It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me – out of college and all – Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle. That was Roberts’s men, that was, and comed of changing names to their ships Royal Fortune and so on. Now, what a ship was christened, so let her stay, I says. So it was with the Cassandra, as brought us safe home from Malabar, after England took the Viceroy of the Indies; so it was with the old Walrus, Flint’s old ship, as I’ve seen a-muck with the red blood and fit to sink with gold … Davis was a man, too, by all accounts … I never sailed with him; first England, then with Flint, that’s my story.
Stevenson had, of course, switched round the name of the treasure ship from the Nostra Senhro de Cabo to that of its Portuguese owner – the Viceroy of the Indies – as one eminently more suited to an Anglo-Saxon audience. Flint was probably modelled on England’s consort, the ruthless John Taylor, and hence the old Walrus is the old Victory in Johnson’s Pyrates.
Stevenson also borrowed other characters from the same source. Israel ‘Basilica’ Hands sailed with Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach who shot him through the kneecap with a pistol under the table during a drinking bout. Stevenson was, no doubt, unable to resist deploying such a wonderful name and its association with the extremes of pirate cruelty.
The character of the marooned Ben Gunn is taken straight out of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Indeed, Stevenson initially penned the character as chasing goats and dressed in their skins. But at the first evening reading of this new chapter in Braemar both stepson Lloyd and father Thomas Stevenson protested that the character was blatantly a take-off of Crusoe. Consequently, the goats were dropped and Gunn’s attire changed to tatters of ship’s canvas and old sea cloth.
Stevenson displays his new-found mastery of pirate history when he first raises the spectre of the bygone Golden Age of Piracy in the tale. The vehicle is the feathery Captain Flint – Silver’s parrot:
And that bird … is, may be two hundred years old, Hawkins – they lives for ever mostly; and if anybody’s seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself. She sailed with England, the great Cap’n England, the pirate. She’s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up of the wrecked Plate ships. It’s there she learned ‘Pieces of eight’, and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of ‘em, Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the Viceroy of the Indies out of Goa, she was; and to look at her you would think she was a babby. But you smelt powder – didn’t you, cap’n.
Stevenson’s description of Flint’s buried treasure fits that plundered in the Indian Ocean rather than the Caribbean: a strange collection … English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Georges and Louises, doubloons and moidores and sequins … Oriental pieces stamped with what looked like wisps of string or bits of spider’s web, round pieces and square pieces, and pieces bored through the middle …
He acknowledged that he got the idea of buried treasure from reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug (1824). This short story was based on the legend of Blackbeard’s loot buried on Sullivan’s Island in the entrance to Charleston harbour. The hoard was located by a dead-man’s skull in a tree, a device that Stevenson transformed to a stretched out human skeleton on the ground in Treasure Island.
It is, however, well nigh impossible to determine where Stevenson’s island is. In the story, the young Hawkins’s deliberately strikes out the island’s longitude and latitude in his copy of Billy Bones’s map. Likewise, he simply passes over, in a few words, the voyages to and from the island. His explanation is that Flint’s hoard of silver is still buried on the island. This masterstroke of storytelling, along with the disappearance of Silver at an unnamed port on the Spanish Main, leaves the tale as but one episode in a murky saga of unfinished pirate business, stretching back through thirty-odd years of violent crimes committed across half the globe.
Stevenson steadfastly refused to give as much as a hint as to the island’s location. A crafty reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald tried to corner him on this matter, in February 1890, with a sneaky adjoiner to a lead question: I suppose that you will utilise your experience in the South Sea in your next work of fiction? By the by, did you visit Treasure Island? Stevenson wryly smiled at this ploy and palmed him off with: Treasure Island is not in the Pacific. In fact, I only wish myself that I knew where it was. When I wrote the book I was careful to give no indication as to its whereabouts, for fear that there might be an undue rush towards it. However, it is generally supposed to be in the West Indies. But to be serious … At which point he changed the subject to a new plot he was working on.
Local Scottish tradition has the last word. It holds that Stevenson loosely based the physical layout of Treasure Island on the horseshoe islet of Fidra in the Firth of Forth. This claim is founded on the fact that he visited that island as a youth, when his father was building the lighthouse there and he later used this location in his Scottish novel Catriona.