How did Long John Silver Lose his Leg?

by Dennis Butts

  In the later books – Good Wives (1869), Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886) – he becomes rather more conspicuous. A quiet, studious man, he serves as minister to a small parish in Good Wives. He is loved for an integrity despite his lack of worldly success, and practices the ‘Socratic method of education’ when Jo and her husband open Plumfield School. A beloved grandfather in Little Men, he becomes the chaplain of Plumfield in Jo’s Boys, still discussing the Socractic method of education with his grandson Demi there. Our general impression is of a good and scholarly man, portrayed with sympathy and gentle humour, but rather dependent on the support of his family.

  This is very like what we know of Louisa’s father, Bronson Alcott (1799-1888). The visionary friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), he was an educational reformer, deeply influenced by the pedagogical ideas of Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and Friedrich Fröbel (1782-1852). However, perhaps because of his controversial beliefs, he had difficulty earning a decent living. He set up various schools, established a short-lived Utopian community called Fruitlands which soon collapsed (in 1843), and tried to earn a living as an itinerant lecturer. Finally, in 1879, he did succeed in establishing the Concord School of Philosophy and Literature, which offered lectures on philosophy and religion to adults during the summer months for nine years, and which lasted up until his death. Alcott has been criticised for failing to support his family financially, as he seems to have always placed his principles before prosperity. He once turned down a teaching job offering an annual salary of $1000-1200 because he did not agree with the school’s beliefs. His death occurred just two days before Louisa died.

  From all this, it looks as if Mr March is very much based upon Louisa’s own father, Bronson Alcott. But Louisa herself always denied it, saying that the figure of Mr March was actually based upon her beloved uncle, Samuel May. Why is this? Why did Louisa wish to repudiate a resemblance which seems so obvious?

  In real life, as we have seen, Bronson was something of a problem. Although deeply loved by his family, his impractical ways undoubtedly led to much frustration and anxiety, as his numerous educational projects failed to provide for his family, and often led to debt. There is a famous story of how in 1853, with the gift of eighteen dollars from Emerson, Alcott left for a lecture-tour of the Midwest. He was away for only five months, but when he returned home he brought with him a single dollar! ‘It was half tragic and half comic’, Louisa wrote in her Journal of 1854. As the editors of the Journals of Louisa M. Alcott say, ‘Louisa’s attitude towards her father was neither baleful nor unquestioningly adoring, but rather a combination of both, a love-hate viewpoint in which exasperation and admiration, impatience and understanding were most humanely commingled.’ The Journals reflect ‘a mingling of pity and impatience, appreciation and irritation.’

  Louisa’s treatment of Mr March in Little Women and its sequels show something of her ambiguous feelings about her father, blaming him for the insecurity his way of life caused the family, but admiring him for his personal kindness and integrity. This is particularly highlighted by Louisa’s treatment of Mr March’s involvement in the Civil War, an account which is almost radical in the way it differs from her handling of the other autobiographical elements which feature so strongly in the novel.

  What happens in Little Women is clear enough. Mr March is absent when the book opens just before Christmas, having gone to serve in the Union Army. Although readers may doubt Mrs Moffat’s assertion that Mr March reached the rank of Colonel, we do know that Bronson Alcott was a staunch abolitionist, and not unwilling to use physical force to defend the vulnerable. (In 1860 he attempted to storm the court-house where a fugitive slave was imprisoned, for example.) Mr March falls seriously ill during the war, and Mrs March goes to visit him in hospital in Washington. After making a gradual recovery, he comes home restored and praises his daughters’ wonderful progress while he has been away.

  All of this is almost the opposite of what happened to the Alcott family in real life, for it was the daughter, not the father, who became involved in the Civil War. ‘I long to be a man’, Louisa wrote, ‘but as I can’t fight, I will content myself with working for those who can.’ She applied for a nursing position in a Washington hospital in November 1862, around the time of her thirtieth birthday, beginning work at the Union Hospital in December. In her short book Hospital Sketches of 1863, she painted a graphic picture of what life was like there, dealing with the wounded from Fredericksburg.

  She helped to feed, nurse and wash the suffering men, and describes trying to get a drink for a soldier who died before water could be found. She wrote letters home to their anxious relatives, and tried to calm a shell-shocked boy from New Jersey. She describes helping Billy, a sobbing twelve year-old drummer boy, and holding John, a dying Virginian blacksmith, in her arms while a surgeon dressed his back. She describes the food, the other nurses, the friendly ‘negroes’, the noises and the dreadful smells in the hospital which she came to call Hurly Burly House. ‘A more perfect pestilence-box than this house I never saw’, she wrote in her Journal – ‘cold, damp, dirty, full of vile odors from wounds, kitchens, wash rooms, & stables. No competent head, male or female, to right matters, & a jumble of good, bad & indifferent nurses, surgeons & attendants to complicate the Chaos still more.’

  Not surprisingly illness was rife, even among the staff. The Matron fell ill and died of pneumonia in January 1863, and Louisa herself was struck by coughs, fever, dizziness and a sharp pain in her side. She was diagnosed with typhoid pneumonia and, unbeknownst to her, a telegraph was sent to her family. Louisa was determined not to give in, however, ‘till, one fine morning, a gray-headed gentleman rose like a welcome ghost on my hearth; and, at the sight of him, my resolution melted away, my heart turned traitor to my boys, and, when he said, “Come home,” I answered, “Yes, father”; and so ended my career as an army nurse.’ (She had served in the hospital for just six weeks.)

  This is powerful stuff, but the puzzle is: why did Louisa not make any use of it in Little Women since she used so much else of her family history? There are some simple explanations, of course. Little Women is a novel, primarily about a group of adolescent girls. Jo, for example, is aged fifteen, and would have been too young to have gone off nursing. Structurally, too, the absence of the girls’ father enables the novel to focus much more on the ability of the daughters and mother to concentrate upon their difficulties more independently.

  By handling Mr March as she does, Louisa is also able to present him sympathetically. In real life, Bronson Alcott was never involved in the Civil War, but by sending the fictitious Mr March off to Washington, Louisa was able to depict him as a quasi-heroic figure. She was also able to avoid depicting the more irritating aspects of his behaviour. Bronson Alcott was an extraordinary man with great gifts, but failed at times to act responsibly towards his family. Sending him away to fight in the Civil War was Louisa May Alcott’s way of giving the March girls a father absent for more noble reasons than her own.

  6. How Long John Silver Lost His Leg and Acquired a Parrot

  R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883)

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure story about pirates and a quest for buried treasure has inspired numerous sequels, most recently Andrew Motion’s Silver (2012). They usually show treasure-seekers returning to the island in search of the bar silver which Jim Hawkins and the earlier venturers left behind. But there seems to be little curiosity about the back-story: the events which happened before the story of Treasure Island opened. In particular, there is little speculation about how Long John Silver, that remarkable villain, acquired the standard spoken English which helps to distinguish him from the other pirates, or how he lost his leg and obtained the crutch which seems to emphasise his criminal agility, or how realistic it was for him to possess a parrot with that ringing and repetitive call: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’

 
Long John Silver’s use of standard speech, as compared with the more colloquial language of the other seafaring men, is remarked on in chapter 10 by Israel Hands, the Hispaniola’s treacherous coxwain:

  ‘He’s no common man, Barbecue’, said the coxwain to me. ‘He had a good schooling in his young days, and can speak like a book when so minded; and brave – a lion’s nothing alongside Long John! I seen him grapple four, and knock their heads together – him unharmed.’

  Emma Letley, in her introduction to the World’s Classics edition of Treasure Island (1985), points out that when Stevenson transferred his serial version of the tale from the magazine Young Folks to book form, he made a number of revisions and alterations. Generally, however, while he made the speech of most characters more colloquial, he rewrote Silver’s speech to make it even more refined and genteel. He amended Silver’s habitual use of the word ‘mought’ to ‘might’, for example, leaving ‘mought’ to be used by the more vulgar pirates. Silver’s use of more standard English not only distinguishes him from the other mutineers, but also makes him appear more complex and morally ambiguous. This makes those occasions when Silver lapses into using non-standard English quite telling. When he mispronounces duty as ‘dooty’, Stevenson is suggesting something – not only of Silver’s possible West Country origins, but his relapse into more savage habits.

  How Silver learned to speak standard English is never fully explained. We can never completely rely on what Silver tells us about himself, and there are numerous contradictions in his claims about his age and his nautical exploits. But it is clear that he has been at sea for many years. He claims to have sailed with Captain English, a genuinely historical pirate whose career ended in about 1720. He also claims to have been Captain Flint’s quarter-master (the ship’s officer in charge of supplies and with other duties, often helping the ship’s captain at the wheel, for example). According to The Wooden World, N.A.M. Rodgers’s classic account of the eighteenth-century navy, all ship’s officers in the eighteenth century had to begin their careers as ratings or ordinary seamen, working on the lower deck and rising by merit. It was thus possible for quite ordinary people, such as domestic servants or farm-hands, to win promotion. No doubt they mixed with all sorts of other seamen and fellow-officers in the process, some of whom had been well educated. A quick-witted and ambitious character like Long John Silver could easily have picked up and learned more elaborate forms of speech as he rose in the ranks.

  ‘I got bodily into the apple barrel’

  How Silver lost his left leg and acquired a crutch is a complicated and gruesome story. ‘His left leg was cut off closely at the hip, and under the left shoulder he carried a crutch which he managed with wonderful dexterity’, Jim tells the reader in chapter 8. In chapter 11 Silver tells us how it came about:

  Flint was cap’n; I was quartermaster, along of my timber leg. The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his deadlights. It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me – out of college and all – Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle.

  There is some confusion here, perhaps deliberate, on Silver’s part. Silver seems to be saying that he lost his leg before serving with Flint, in some bloody fracas, with either of the notorious pirates Edward England or Bartholomew Roberts. Edward England, who plundered along the African coast and in the Indian Ocean, died in 1720, and if Silver lost his leg on one of his expeditions, he must have been a very young teenager then; perhaps only fourteen or so, if his claim in chapter 11 to be fifty is to be credited. For his knowledge of pirates, Stevenson relied greatly upon A General History of the Pyrates (1724), which was once attributed to Captain Charles Johnson, but is now generally believed to have been written by Daniel Defoe. Chapter 9 of the General History deals with Captain Bartholomew Roberts and his crew, and refers to Hunter, his chief surgeon, and to other surgeons on his ships. It is, therefore, completely credible that whoever Long John Silver was sailing with, his amputation was carried out by a competent operator.

  Medical issues were taken extremely seriously in the eighteenth-century navy. Every ship had a surgeon on board, a medical man on whom officers and men relied for the treatment of illnesses and wounds, although the ability of such men varied widely. Precautions were taken against such diseases as scurvy, as every schoolboy knows, and, according to The Wooden World, medical treatments in the Royal Navy were so successful that, during the Seven Years War of 1756-1763, the number of men who died annually at sea was just 1% of the total serving.

  Operations, such as the amputation of a leg, took place either in the ship’s cockpit or on a platform below the ship’s waterline, and the surgeon was usually assisted by one or more surgeon’s mates, one of whose principal tasks was to help hold the patient down on the operating table. Joseph Charrier published a Treatise of the Operation of Surgery in 1712 which shows how operations were carried out before anaesthetics were discovered. His book suggests that patients should bite down on a piece of wood for pain relief, and he recommends cutting ‘quick with a crooked knife.’ Amputation involved cutting through the muscles and then the bone with a saw, but the practice of sealing the stump by cauterisation with boiling tar (used to prevent infection) had been gradually abandoned from the sixteenth century. The sharp and rough edges of the bone were filed down, and the skin and muscle flaps were transposed to cover the stump with the remaining skin. When Sir Robert Wiston, a celebrated surgeon, performed this operation in the 1840s, he took thirty seconds to complete the amputation and tie up the main artery with a reef knot; and it took him another thirty seconds to stitch up the flesh. (Nelson had his life saved by the successful amputation of his right arm at the Battle of Tenerife in 1797.) We might guess that Long John Silver’s operation might not have been so efficient as those practised by Sir Robert Wiston.

  How Long John Silver came by Captain Flint, his famous parrot, which, incidentally, he keeps in a cage in the cook’s galley and not permanently perched on his shoulder, probably has a simple explanation. Parrots have always been prized for their bright-coloured plumage, their sociable nature and their ability to imitate the human voice. Silver probably acquired his on one of his voyages in the Caribbean or South America. Every eighteenth-century ship, again according to The Wooden World, had animals aboard of every kind and description. Dogs were most common as well as monkeys and parrots, hugely popular as sailors’ pets. But they were not always purely objects of personal affection. The demand for exotic birds and animals in eighteenth-century England was always very high, and many sailors had commissions to bring them home for their wives and sweethearts, not only as cherishable pets, but sometimes to sell at a financial profit. But Long John Silver wouldn’t have been so mercenary, would he?

  7. The Moon, the French Chef and the Missionary

  Textual Revisions by H. Rider Haggard. H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and Allan Quatermain (1887)

  Sir Henry Rider Haggard believed that the writing of adventure stories should be ‘swift, clear, and direct, with as little padding as possible.’ He believed that if a book had what he called ‘grip’ – his word for narrative energy – this excused all its faults, and to obtain this, he felt that a story should be written rapidly. ‘The way to write a good romance is to sit down and write it almost without stopping’, he said in his autobiography, The Days of My Life.

  Rider Haggard certainly practiced what he preached, producing his greatest success, She, in six weeks, Jess in nine, Allan Quatermain in ten, and King Solomon’s Mines in fifteen. During 1885, in fact, Rider Haggard wrote no fewer than three complete novels – King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and Jess, all destined to become best-sellers.

  As well as giving ‘grip,’ however, Rider Haggard’s speed of writing often caused him problems, as his difficulties with King Solomon’s Mines shows. Allan Quatermain, Henry Curtis and Captain Good, the three treasure-seekers in
the great adventure story, having made their perilous march across the African desert, enter Kukuanaland which is ruled by the tyrannical king Twala. Here their loyal servant Umbopa claims to be the rightful king and, to prove it, reveals the mark of a great snake tattooed on his body. But the tribal chiefs are not yet convinced, and, before they agree to support him against Twala, ask for another sign. The eccentric naval officer Captain Good has a brilliant idea. According to his almanack, on the next day, 4 June, there is to be a total eclipse of the sun, commencing at 11.15 Greenwich time. He suggests that successfully prophesying the eclipse will win the chiefs over. Allan Quatermain makes the prophecy to the king and his people in Chapter 11, and his words come true: ‘Slowly the dark rim crept on over the blazing surface, and as it did so I heard a deep gasp of fear rise from the multitude around!’ Good addresses the Kukuanas:

  ‘The sun grows dark before your eyes; soon there will be night – ay, night in the noontime. Ye have asked for a sign; it is given to ye . . . Grow dark, O sun! withdraw thy light, thou bright one; bring the proud heart to the dust, and eat up the world with shadows.’