‘Treasure Island or, the mutiny of the Hispaniola’ was serialised in 18 instalments in the children’s magazine Young Folks between 1881 and 1882, before being published in book form in 1883. Stevenson used the pseudonym Captain George North. It was the magazine’s editor, James Henderson, who suggested he change the title from The Sea Cook to Treasure Island.
Plot
Presumably most people know the story. What makes the text so gripping is the speed with which the sequence of sensational incidents unfolds, and the vividness of characterisation – the boy hero Jack Hawkins, Long John Silver, marooned Ben Gunn, sinister Blind Pew, sterling Dr Livesey, stout Squire Trelawney – what a cast! And matching speed, incidents and character, Stevenson’s style is intently focused on moving quickly and effectively from one node of action to the next, with a storyteller’s natural touch of suspense.
‘Every man on board seemed well content, and they must have been hard to please if they had been otherwise, for it is my belief there was never a ship’s company so spoiled since Noah put to sea. Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days, as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any man’s birthday, and always a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for anyone to help himself that had a fancy.
‘Never knew good come of it yet,’ the captain said to Dr. Livesey. ‘Spoil forecastle hands, make devils. That’s my belief.’
‘But good did come of the apple barrel, as you shall hear, for if it had not been for that, we should have had no note of warning and might all have perished by the hand of treachery. This was how it came about. (Chapter 10)
Style
Stevenson’s sentences might be long, with numerous subordinate clauses but, unlike Conrad’s sentences, each clause adds new information and so the prose feels pacey. In Conrad the atmosphere is stagnant, impotent, smothered by tautologous repetition. In Stevenson you are continually learning new information at each step.
All that night we were in a great bustle getting things stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squire’s friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work; and I was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and interesting to me – the brief commands, the shrill note of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ship’s lanterns. (Chapter 10)
The three clauses at the end of this last sentence amplify the ‘all’ of the previous phrase. But each one describes something new, something factual and something well-selected to give a panoramic overview of dockside activities. They are like cutaways in a film. In this purely syntactical respect, quite apart from the sensational storyline, Stevenson’s style is cinematic. Also cinematic is RLS’s brisk way with detail:
‘That?’ returned Silver, smiling away, but warier than ever, his eye a mere pin-point in his big face, but gleaming like a crumb of glass. (Chapter 14)
The rest of the arms and powder we dropped overboard in two fathoms and a half of water, so that we could see the bright steel shining far below us in the sun, on the clean, sandy bottom. (Chapter 16)
Just then, with a roar and a whistle, a round-shot passed high above the roof of the log-house and plumped far beyond us in the wood. (Chapter 18)
For Stevenson, poetry is in the lucid detail. The opposite of Conrad, with his murk of synonyms.
Dialogue
In Conrad there is often an unintentionally comic mismatch between the lurid, nihilistic thoughts of the angst-ridden protagonists, dwelt on at great length – and their stiff-upper-lip, stiffly English, and generally brief dialogue. By contrast Stevenson’s dialogue is of a piece with the characters; their speech reveals them in an almost Shakespearian way. He did, after all, write half a dozen plays. Stevenson’s dialogue is wonderfully salty and dramatic, ready to go straight into the screenplay:
‘I saw him dead with these here deadlights,’ said Morgan. ‘Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes.’
‘Dead—aye, sure enough he’s dead and gone below,’ said the fellow with the bandage; ‘but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint’s. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!’
‘Aye, that he did,’ observed another; ‘now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. “Fifteen Men” were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin’ out as clear as clear—and the death-haul on the man already.’
Origins
I came across this excellent account of the book’s origins on a website called Referautile:
—Stevenson was 30 years old when he started to write Treasure Island, and it would be his first success as a novelist. The first fifteen chapters were written at Braemar in the Scottish Highlands in 1881. It was a cold and rainy late-summer and Stevenson was with five family members on holiday in a cottage. Young Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson’s stepson, passed the rainy days painting with watercolours. Remembering the time, Lloyd wrote:
‘… busy with a box of paints I happened to be tinting a map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spyglass Hill, nor the heart-stirring climax of the three red crosses! And the greater climax still when he wrote down the words Treasure Island at the top right-hand corner! And he seemed to know so much about it too – the pirates, the buried treasure, the man who had been marooned on the island … “Oh, for a story about it”, I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment … ‘
Within three days of drawing the map for Lloyd, Stevenson had written the first three chapters, reading each aloud to his family who added suggestions: Lloyd insisted there be no women in the story; Stevenson’s father came up with the contents of Billy Bones’s sea-chest, and suggested the scene where Jim Hawkins hides in the apple barrel. Two weeks later a friend, Dr Alexander Japp, brought the early chapters to the editor of Young Folks magazine who agreed to publish each chapter weekly.
As autumn came to Scotland, the Stevensons left their summer holiday retreat for London, but Stevenson was troubled with a life-long chronic bronchial condition that put an end to his work on the novel at about chapter fifteen. Concerned about a deadline they travelled in October to Davos, Switzerland where the clean mountain air did him wonders and he was able to continue, and, at a chapter a day, soon finished the story.—
Adaptations
A chapter a day! The brisk pace, the focus on incident and the striking characterisation explain why over 50 movie and TV versions have been made of ‘Treasure Island’. The only one I’m familiar with is the great 1950 Disney version with the fabulous Robert Newton as Long John Silver.
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