Treasure Island

?One more step, Mr. Hands,? said I, ?and I'll blow your brains out! Dead men don't bite, you know,? I added with a chuckle...!

eBook DESCRIPTION

The most popular pirate story ever written in English, featuring one of literature?s most beloved ?bad guys,? Treasure Island has been happily devoured by several generations of teens and adults. Its unforgettable characters include: young Jim Hawkins, who finds himself owner of a map to Treasure Island, where the fabled pirate booty is buried; honest Captain Smollett, heroic Dr. Livesey, and the good-hearted but obtuse Squire Trelawney, who help Jim on his quest for the treasure; the frightening Blind Pew, double-dealing Israel Hands, and seemingly mad Ben Gunn, buccaneers of varying shades of menace; and, of course, garrulous, affable, ambiguous Long John Silver, who is one moment a friendly, laughing, one-legged sea-cook... and the next a dangerous pirate leader! It contains over 100 of the original engravings, illustrations, and decorations.

eBook TAGS

Adventure, Suspence, Pirates, Treasure Map, Murder, Scottish Highlands, Historical Novel, Buccaneers, Dead Man's Chest, Sea Captain

eBook EXCERPT or SYNOPSIS

The guy who invented pretty much everything we know about pirates is Robert Louis Stevenson, in a little book called Treasure Island. Oh sure, Stevenson mixes in a lot of real sea language, with his boatswains and coxswains and jibs and bowsprits. But Treasure Island was also key in popularizing a certain idea of how pirates talk ? and look, too. Peg-legged, parrot-touting Long John Silver has become everyone's image of a pirate, and we owe it all to Stevenson's gift for language, suspense, and invention. Stevenson is even the one who wrote that song, "Dead Man's Chest" ? the title of the second Pirates of the Caribbean flick. So obviously Treasure Island has left fingerprints all over our popular understanding of pirate culture.
His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were?about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a ?true sea-dog? and a ?real old salt? and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.
All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbors, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.
He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlor to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting, far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he?the captain, that is?began to pipe up his eternal song:

?Fifteen men on the dead man's chest?
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest?
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!?

At first I had supposed ?the dead man's chest? to be that identical big box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man.

It contains over 100 of the original engravings, illustrations, and decorations.
The images in this eBook are of absolute format: they do not reduce in size for Tablets, Smart Phones, PDAs and small computer screens.