Inspired by Treasure Island
LITERATURE
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island can be seen as the high point of several well-established modes of adventure storytelling, including the “deserted island” novel (epitomized by Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), the pirate novel (including Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, one of Stevenson’s favorite books), and the myth of buried treasure (as exemplified in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” in which William Legrand searches for the spoils of Captain Kidd) .
The great popularity of Stevenson’s “first book,” as he lovingly called it, has secured a special place in the English lexicon for the phrases “Shiver me timbers” and “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum,” and Long John Silver is the archetypal peg-legged pirate. In J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911)—a book riddled with references to Treasure Island-the villainous Captain Hook, his hand eaten by a crocodile, is based almost exclusively on Stevenson’s original.
When Treasure Island was first serialized in Young Folks magazine in 1881, it did not fare well. But when it came out in book form the tale generated such excitement, especially among young boys, that Young Folks commissioned another such story from Stevenson. The result was The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1888). Overspilling with war, treachery, and high romance, The Black Arrow is nevertheless Stevenson’s most serious historical novel. In The Master of Ballantrae (1889), set in eighteenth-century Scotland, Stevenson wrote a tale of the rivalry of two brothers that involves sea voyages, piracy, and buried treasure, among other magical and nightmarish elements.
H. Rider Haggard began his best-selling King Solomon’s Mines (1885) when his brother bet him that he couldn’t write a story of the same caliber as Treasure Island. Haggard’s tale of a search for riches furthers the buried treasure myth, by that time deeply ingrained in popular culture. Haggard traded the maritime setting for the mysterious landscape of Africa, which Britain was just beginning to explore in earnest. A treasure map falls into the hands of Allan Quatermain, the novel’s hero. Quatermain and his companions brave fierce terrain, unforgiving elements, and tribal warfare in their efforts to find the buried diamonds of the dead King Solomon. Appearing in more than a dozen of Haggard’s sequels, Quatermain is the prototype of the explorer-hero. Modern moviegoers know him as Indiana Jones.
As the nineteenth century wound down and the twentieth began, the literary public’s taste began to favor naturalism and realism, but a few promulgators of adventure fiction persisted. Robert Neilson Stephens—sometimes called the American Robert Louis Stevenson—published the rousing Captain Ravenshaw; or, the Maid of Cheapside in 1901. Rafael Sabatini kept the swashbuckling tale alive with his novels Scaramouche (1921) and Captain Blood (1922).
FILM
Only a few decades after Stevenson’s classic was published, Hollywood began bringing Treasure Island to the silver screen. The many film renditions that followed range widely in style, from Orson Welles’s nearly unintelligible turn as Long John Silver in 1972 to Brian Henson’s rollicking Muppet Treasure Island (1996). Among the first cinematic adaptations were a handful of efforts from the era before sound: a lost 1908 version, a rarely shown silent from 1912 produced by the Edison Company, and a “kiddie” version of 1918. In 1920 Paramount produced the first large-scale silent adaptation of the pirate classic, which began the trend of making Jim Hawkins a young boy.
One of the best-loved Treasure Island movies is the humorous 1934 film by Victor Fleming, who later directed The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939). Silver’s parrot has a more prominent role in this film than in the book, which helped establish that comic avian character, along with Silver’s peg leg, as a paradigmatic piratical appendage. Wallace Berry plays a staid Long John Silver, Jackie Cooper is Jim Hawkins, and Lionel Barrymore hams it up as Billy Bones. Stevenson’s colorful song “Dead Man’s Chest” adds flavor to the light, warm-hearted adventure, which focuses with great feeling on the relationship between good-hearted Jim and the conniving Silver.
The Walt Disney Company has long been fascinated with Stevenson’s classic tale. Indeed, the 1950 Treasure Island, directed by Byron Haskin, was Disney’s first live-action film. (The Disney theme-park ride has itself inspired a film, 2003’s exemplary Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, starring Johnny Depp.) Though by no means the first pirate movie, Haskin’s Treasure Island codified the genre for film audiences, mostly due to the rascally, scowling, shifty-eyed Robert Newton, who plays Long John Silver. Newton’s “Aargh, Jim lad!” and “Har, har, har, mates!” have become emblematic of pirate parodies. A clean-cut, wet-behind-the-ears Bobby Driscoll plays Jim Hawkins, and Finlay Currie is Bones. Backed by an Australian production company, Haskin and Newton teamed up four years later to make Long, john Silver’s Return to Treasure Island, in which Silver attempts to rescue a friend’s daughter from the Spanish blackguard El Toro.
Disney revisited Treasure Island in 1985 with the ten-part television miniseries Return to Treasure Island, which picks up a decade after the novel’s end and furthers the adventures of Jim and Silver. An even more ambitious Disney project was 2002’s Treasure Planet, a lushly animated (both hand-drawn and computer-enhanced) re-imagining of Stevenson’s yarn. Co-directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (The Little Mermaid), Treasure Planet explores a spacescape of the future peopled by cyborgs who jet across the marbleized sky in rocket-propelled galleons. The incongruities between eighteenth-century swashbuckling and modern science fiction are left intact for the viewer; the result is a novel visual aesthetic that includes a crescent-moon-shaped spaceport with docks timbered with wooden planks, not to mention windsails (or breathable air, for that matter) in deep space. Featuring the voices of David Hyde Pierce, Martin Short, and Emma Thornpson, among others, Treasure Planet may be the most inventive version of Stevenson’s tale, self-assuredly substituting much of the original story with eye-popping visuals, swirling action sequences, and fanciful musical numbers.
The most faithful and serious adaptation of Treasure Island stars Charlton Heston as Long John Silver. Carefully picking up dialogue and scenery straight from the novel, the 1990 television movie conveys the complexities in the novel’s plot and characterization, especially Silver’s moral ambiguity. Written and directed by Heston’s son Fraser Heston, the adaptation also features Christian Bale as Jim Hawkins and Oliver Reed as Billy Bones. Sparing in its use of pirate cliches, the convincingly staged film is set in lush locations in Jamaica and along the British coast.
