Opening your find
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Opening your find
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of "buccaneers and buried gold". Its influence is enormous on popular perceptions of pirates, including such elements as treasure maps marked with an "X", schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen bearing parrots on their shoulders.
PART I-"THE OLD BUCCANEER" An old sailor, calling himself "the captain"-real name "Billy" Bones-comes to lodge at the Admiral Benbow Inn on the west English coast during the mid-1700s, paying the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, a few pennies to keep a lookout for a one-legged "seafaring man".
A seaman with intact legs 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 yet another man, Billy has another stroke and dies; Jim and his mother (his father has also died just 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 a deceased pirate-Captain 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.
"THE SEA COOK" Several weeks later, Trelawney sends for Jim and Livesey and introduces them to "Long John" Silver, a one-legged Bristol tavern-keeper whom he has hired as ship's cook. (Silver enhances his outre attributes-crutch, pirate argot, etc.-with a talking parrot.) They also meet Captain Smollett, who tells them that he dislikes most of the crew on the voyage, which it seems everyone in Bristol knows is a search for treasure.
After taking a few precautions, however, they set sail on Trelawny's schooner, the Hispaniola, for the distant island. During the voyage, the first mate, a drunkard, disappears overboard. And just before the island is sighted, Jim-concealed in a
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