About the Book
An old sailor, calling himself "the captain" but really called Billy Bones, comes to lodge at the Admiral Benbow Inn on the English coast during the mid 1700s, paying the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, a few pennies to keep a lookout for "seafaring men." One of these shows up, frightening Billy (who drinks far too much rum) into a stroke, and Billy tells Jim that his former shipmates covet the contents of his sea chest. After a visit from another man, Billy has another stroke and dies; Jim and his mother (his father has died only a few days before) unlock the sea chest, finding some money, a journal, and a map. The local physician, Dr. Livesey, deduces that the map is of an island where the pirate Flint buried a vast treasure. The district squire, Trelawney, proposes buying a ship and going after the treasure, taking Livesey as ship's doctor and Jim as cabin boy. Several weeks later, Trelawney sends for Jim and Livesey and introduces them to Long John Silver, a Bristol tavern-keeper whom he has hired as ship's cook. They also meet Captain Smollett, who tells them that he does not like the crew or the voyage, which it seems everyone in Bristol knows is a search for treasure. After taking a few precautions, however, they set sail for the distant island. During the voyage the first mate, a drunkard, disappears overboard. And just before the island is sighted, Jim overhears Silver talking with two other crewmen and realizes that he and most of the others are pirates and have planned a mutiny. Jim tells the captain, Trelawney, and Livesey, and they calculate that they will be seven to nineteen against the mutineers and must pretend not to suspect anything until the treasure is found, when they can surprise their adversaries. But after the ship is anchored, Silver and some of the others go ashore, and two men who refuse to join the mutiny are killed - one with so loud a scream that everyone realizes there can be no more pretense. Jim has impulsively joined the shore party, and now in running away from them he encounters a half-crazy Englishman, Ben Gunn, who tells him he was marooned here and can help against the mutineers in return for passage home and part of the treasure. Meanwhile Smollett, Trelawney, and Livesey, along with Trelawney's three servants and one of the other hands, Abraham Gray, abandon the ship and come ashore to occupy a stockade. The men still on the ship, led by the coxswain Israel Hands, run up the pirate flag. One of Trelawney's servants and one of the pirates are killed in the fight to reach the stockade, and the ship's gun keeps up a barrage upon them, to no effect, until dark, when Jim finds the stockade and joins them. The next morning Silver appears under a flag of truce, offering terms that Captain Smollett refuses, and revealing that another pirate has been killed in the night (by Ben Gunn, Jim realizes, although Silver does not). At Smollett's refusal to surrender the map, Silver threatens an attack, and, within a short while, the attack on the stockade is launched. After a battle, the surviving mutineers retreat, having lost six men, but two more of the captain's group have been killed and Smollett himself is badly wounded.
About the Author: Robert Louis Stevenson, born November 13, 1850 in Edinburgh and died December 3, 1894 at Vailima (Samoa), is a Scottish writer and traveler, famous for his novel Treasure Island (1883), for its new The strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and for his story Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). Stevenson is sometimes regarded as a writer of adventure novels or teen fantastic stories, but his work has a different dimension: it has also been greeted with enthusiasm by the greatest of his contemporaries and successors. His stories and novels show is a deep understanding of the narrative, its means and its effects. It uses all the resources of the narrative as the multiplication of narrators and points of view, and practical at the same time a very visual style, suitable for particularly striking scenes. Children and Youth Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh where his parents settled, Thomas Stevenson and Margaret Balfour, after their marriage two years earlier, on August 28 1848 His mother Maggie is the youngest daughter of the Rev. Lewis Balfour, a family of Borders. His father Thomas, meanwhile, is a devout Calvinist part of the renowned engineering lineage what the Stevenson family: his grandfather Robert, his father Thomas, his uncles Alan and David, all are leading designers and contributed to securing the Scottish seacoast. December 13, 1850, in the purest respect of the Scottish tradition, it is called "Robert Lewis" by his own grandfather, the Rev. Lewis Balfour. Soon enough, Maggie Stevenson is unable to fully take care of his son. In addition to his inexperience of youth - she was then only 21 years old - she suffers from lung problems likely inherited from his father, plus nerve disorders. It seems necessary to hire a nurse for the child. Three succeed, but it is the latter, entering the service of Stevenson in May 1852, which marked his life Stevenson: Alison Cunningham, affectionately nicknamed "Cummy". December 14, 1852, the little "Smout," as his parents call him, gets very sick, suffered a cooling and a high fever. Attributing this to being too close to the Water of Leith, Thomas and Maggie moved in January 1853 to settle at 1 Inverleith Terrace in a house considered healthier for the child.
