Treasure Island

by Robert Louis Stevenson

First published 1883

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4.6(856)

Eighteenth-century England. Jim Hawkins discovers a map among the possessions of the dead sailor Billy Bones at his family’s inn and joins Squire Trelawney and Dr Livesey on an expedition aboard the Hispaniola. The ship’s apparently dependable cook, Long John Silver, is in fact the leader of a crew of former pirates who once served Captain Flint and intend to seize the vessel and recover Flint’s buried treasure for themselves.

On the island, Jim moves between the loyal party, the mutineers and the marooned Ben Gunn, learning that courage and survival require judgment rather than simple obedience. The novel’s pirates and island are fictional, but its weapons, ships, labour hierarchy and memories of privateering belong to the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Stevenson turns those materials into a formative adventure about greed, authority and the ambiguous charisma of Silver.