Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Part One—The Old Buccaneer
1
The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow
SQUIRE TRELAWNEY,
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,
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,
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!
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.
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.
very little company,
the more was the pity.
“this is the berth for me.
Here you,
the man who trundled the barrow;
“bring up alongside and help up my chest.
” 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,
