It is an easy sentence to write, but a dreadful thing to record. I heard voices shrieking as they fell, saw arms and legs scrabbling for purchase and finding none, felt the thud of bones against wood, skulls against skulls, and in a blurred glance found our entire little world had been flung aside. Bo’sun Kirkby I saw, torn from the wheel, with his mouth wide open in a scream that showed all the pegs of his teeth. And Mr. Tickle I saw, with his brave red cap finally dashed from his white head. And Mr. Allan, who seemed to be clutching a spoon. And Mr. Stevenson, who had somehow found a way into the captain’s cabin and taken a bar of silver; he held this with straight arms as he skidded into the waves, so the weight would accelerate his journey to the bottom of the sea. “I cannot swim, I cannot swim,” he called in his gentle brogue, and then disappeared.
As for me, I should consider myself lucky to be the witness of these things, because I am their survivor. For the plain fact of the matter is this: our upending began when I had dragged myself close to the mainmast, and as it continued I was caught in a spider’s web of rigging. Whether I wished it or not, I was snagged and held. I struggled at first, thinking I would be dragged underwater and drowned, but in fact the ropes supported me. This meant I was able to lie in a sort of cradle as my companions slithered into the sea—able to lie; able to turn; and able to search for Natty with a last desperate scouring—and miraculously to find her. As suddenly as if I had actually invented her, I saw her hurtle through a window of the roundhouse with her arms crossed over her face. She bounced on the deck like a toy made of Indian rubber. She ricocheted into the waves. She sank, then immediately shot back to the surface, where I saw her face clenched in what seemed to be fury. She sank again and I saw her no more.
I writhed in my trap of ropes, kicking with my legs until I was free enough to wriggle around and follow. But follow where, exactly? Even with the moonlight falling in a steady wash, the surface of the sea was now so churned with arms and legs and heads and whole bodies and ropes and barrels and pieces of clothing and spars of wreckage, it was impossible to be sure exactly where she had vanished. But this did not deter me—how could it, when the thing I most valued in the world was on the point of leaving it? I marked a spot which I thought might be her place—a few of our apples had collected there, looking as red as starfish in the white spume. I took as large a breath as I could, and dived down.
The quiet that followed was uncanny. After the screams, and the curses of some men, and the prayers of others, and the continuous boom of the wind, and the crash of the waves, there was only the drum of my pulse, and the gurgle of bubbles as they trickled up from my lips and across my face. Could I see anything? Darkness. Could I feel anything? Only the soft nudging of flesh that I burrowed past into deeper water.
Nothing. When I burst to the surface again I struggled wildly, attempting to gauge by my distance from this piece of jagged timber, or that rag of sailcloth, how far I had drifted from the spot I had tried to hit. But the sea does not allow precise calculations of this sort. Everything drifts—as I remembered Natty and I had said to one another, after the death of Jordan Hands. Nowhere remains steady. All I could do was dive again, and then again, and then again, with each plunge more desperate than the last.
Whenever I swam beneath the waves, I might as well have been blundering through a dream. When my head was above water, and I was gasping to fill my lungs again, my dream became a vision of hell itself. There was never a trace of Natty—only devastation, revealed by flashes of moonlight. At one point I saw Spot, still in his cage, dragged in a cartwheel as the current bowled him through the foam; his small wings raggedly opened and closed, but there was no life in them. At another I found Mr. Tickle and Bo’sun Kirkby, their limp bodies snared in the ropes of a cross-mast. Mr. Allan I noticed, still alive. “Stay there, old girl,” he was calling, speaking to the Nightingale as his arms flailed to keep himself afloat. “Stay there and we’ll come and empty you.” His voice was full of foam, and his words bubbled.
In my fifth or sixth dive I was able to stay underwater for no more than a few seconds at a time. After that, my efforts were pure instinct, and had nothing to do with hope or reason. I was certain I had lost Natty. If my heart had not been frozen already, it would have broken there and then.
This is when I surrendered to the forces of the world. When it did not matter to me any longer whether I sank or swam, breathed air or water, lived or died. I was not even concerned to notice the storm, still less the moon sailing above me, or the stars. Sleep was all I wanted; or rather indifference; or rather unconsciousness. I therefore let the waves turn me onto my back, and spread my arms and legs wide so the current would take me wherever it chose.
My preference (supposing I had the will to make any choice at all) was for oblivion. My fate, which the numbness of my mind and body allowed me to understand only very gradually, was to live.
To survive, at any rate. For while others struggled and died in the lee of the ship, I was lifted and carried—swept away from the furious battering of the waves, and along the edge of the reef which had been our undoing, until I was brought into a stretch of water that lay cradled between a crescent of rock and the shore.
I did not immediately see what sort of place it was, or what a safe harbor it must be. But as warmth and stillness restored feeling to my body, as well as wits to my head, I began to realize that within this shelter the sea was calm as a lake. Like a man raised from the grave, I lifted my head and looked about me. On my left, a hundred yards out to sea yet apparently in a different world, I saw moonlit waves continuing to pound the Nightingale—as remote as if she were an etching on glass. Looming close on my right were the black cliffs I had thought entirely featureless, but which I now saw were incised with little paths here and there, which had steps cut ingeniously into the stone, and handrails made of rope. At their foot lay a narrow and gently sloping beach. As I continued to float toward it, I heard waves that were really no more than ripples, making a peaceful silvery clatter.
I had been saved, as surely as if the sea itself had chosen me. I had been saved—along with another who was already waiting on the shore. I could not tell who this was, only that they appeared slim and youthful; the head was covered with a shawl and the face was invisible. When I had drifted closer still, and felt my shoulders brush against smooth stones, this figure lifted one hand in a solemn salute and a voice spoke. “Are you there, Jim?” it said, with a sweet note I recognized. “Is it you?”
About the Author
ANDREW MOTION is a poet, critic, novelist, biographer, professor, and editor. He served as poet laureate of the United Kingdom for ten years and was knighted for his services to literature in 2009. He is now professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Treasure Island
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Andrew Motion
Introduction
First published over one hundred years ago, in 1883, Treasure Island has made a continuous and very strong appeal to readers who enjoy a ‘boy’s adventure story’. And not only that. In recent time its audience has widened to a startling degree – within the space of a few months in 2011–12 it provoked a new blockbuster TV serial (not to mention those pirates of the Caribbean it had already helped to inspire), a scholarly article featured on the front page of the Times Literary Supplement, and my own ‘Return to Treasure Island’, Silver. It is difficult to think of any other writer from our islands, apart from Dickens and Shakespeare, who commands such a large, diverse and fascinated audience.
How does Stevenson do it? What is the secret of his success? A part of the explanation has to do with his genius for dramatising (in the years immediately before Freud began working) recurrent psychological archetypes. This is true of most of his best-known books. But whereas Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) articulates these archetypes very clearly and �
�� for all its narrative excitements – sets a debate about good and evil at the centre of the action, Treasure Island makes all such considerations defer to the story. It embeds them within events to a greater depth; it has a less obvious thesis.
Stevenson took several of his main ingredients for Treasure Island from other people: Washington Irving, W.H.G. Kingston, Daniel Defoe, Captain Frederick Marryat were among several authors he plundered (cheerfully admitting in his essay ‘My First Story’ that ‘plagiarism was rarely carried further’); Charles E. Pearce, as John Sutherland has recently pointed out, was yet another that he kept quiet about. From time to time critics have cited these borrowings as a way of undermining the reputation of the novel – of making it seem second-hand. In fact something like the opposite is true. Stevenson lifted parts of his story from here and there not because he felt incapable of writing something original himself, but because he wanted to collect all the elements essential to the kind of narrative he had in mind, and bring them together in one place. It was a calculated attempt to create an archetype – and the book’s reception proves that he succeeded.
Many of these borrowings were chosen to provide the deep structure and the incidental details of an adventure yarn: an innocent boy among villainous buccaneers, a treasure map and a treasure island, concealment in an apple barrel, a nearly-lunatic wild man (Ben Gunn), a skeleton used as a signpost: all these things have precedents in earlier stories. As they are blended with Stevenson’s original contributions, and animated by the marvellously vivid simplicity of his style, they create a narrative that moves at breakneck speed, allows for very little in the way of retrospection, and is jam-packed with different kinds of violence (amputation, tramplings, shootings, knifings) and different kinds of suspense (of arrival, discovery, recovery and departure).
The drama is made especially intense – and also given another sort of cohesion – because Stevenson continually reminds us that every character in the book is surrounded by the potential for misunderstanding. Although the geography of the novel is very confined (a pub, a ship, a small island) its inhabitants are always discovering ways in which they don’t have the same principles and experience as one another. Not surprisingly, this is usually demonstrated by their actions. But it is also anticipated and reflected in the different ways they speak. Fault- lines run between Jim’s boy-language, which we are asked to imagine narrates most of the book, and the Doctor’s more adult voice that tells the middle part of the story. Others exist between these lucid and well-to-do voices, and pirate language (which is generally very dense and peculiar); between various kinds of familiar language, and deranged language (as spoken by Ben Gunn); and between landlubbers’ language, and technical language (as used by sailors especially). In their various ways, all these differences contribute not just to our sense of division between and among the main players, but to the air of excited puzzlement that envelops the entire novel.
These structures of misunderstanding are part of a deeper pattern that simultaneously holds the book together and drives it forward. This pattern is essentially to do with uncertainty. The most obvious kind revolves around the questions that give the book its main narrative thrust: will the ship reach the island safely, will the pirates overwhelm the Doctor et al, will the treasure still be there, will ‘the right people’ lift it, will they make it back to England in one piece?
These questions are compelling – they keep us turning the pages – but they are also hooks from which other and more subtle doubts depend (these constitute the psychological archetype, if you like). The doubt, for instance, that exists about the difference between what a person says and what a person thinks (the duplicity of the pirates is the obvious case in point). Or the difference between the authority a person wields in life and the control they might continue to exert after death (the pirates, in particular, are regularly troubled by the thought that Captain Flint can shape their ends from beyond the grave). Or the difference between what is sympathetic (because it shows a humanity common to all) and what is menacing (because it is violently selfish).
All these things are presented to us most powerfully in the figure of Long John Silver. He is certainly the most devious, and possibly the most powerful character in the narrative. Appropriately he is also the one whose menace and poignancy are most complicatedly entwined. Think of him, for instance, at the end of the scene in which he bargains with the captain in the compound, and is sent packing:
‘Give me a hand up!’ he cried
‘Not I,’ returned the captain.
‘Who’ll give me a hand up?’ he roared.
Not a man among us moved. Growling the foulest imprecations, he crawled along the sand untill he got hold of the porch and could hoist himself again upon his crutch. Then he spat into the spring.
The mixed feelings elicited by this scene run in parallel to others provoked by the book’s most tangled relationship – that between Silver and Jim. As Silver himself realises, and acknowledges more openly than Jim is willing or able to do, they have certain things in common, despite their manifest differences in age, experience, and moral disposition. That’s to say, they are both bent on discovering the treasure buried on the island. And although the novel ends with Jim roundly praised as the hero of the hour, whose own moments of madness have all turned out to be of benefit to his party, this approval rings less loudly in our ears than Silver’s estimation of him, ‘I’ve always liked you, I have, for a lad of spirit, and the picter of my own self when I was young and handsome.’ It is Silver who clarifies the common purpose of each and every one on board the Hispaniola, ‘you’re all gentlemen o’fortune, by your account’, and also that he and Jim are bound together by a mutual obligation, ‘I’ll save your life—if so be as I can—from them. But, see here, Jim—tit for tat—you save Long save Long John from swinging.’
As if in recognition of these ambiguities, over-lappings and resemblances, Stevenson does indeed allow Silver to escape the gallows: he hops off into Spanish America with ‘one of the sacks of coin, worth, perhaps, three or four hundred guineas, to help him on his further wanderings’. His disappearance, combined with the safe return of the ‘Hispaniola’ to England, and the equitable dispersal of the treasure, seems to settle all the tensions that have dominated (and in a sense actually created) the story.
At the same time, it leaves one question hanging in the air unanswered: Silver’s question. Were Jim, the Captain, the doctor, the Squire and their apparently virtuous colleagues right to go after the treasure as they did? Although not murderous and slippery like their crew, were they in fact contaminated by the same greed and (as we would call it these days) materialism? The ripples of these thoughts travel a long way, and soon touch other questions about imperialism, oppression and domination. They mean that before long we are no longer looking at the silhouette of Treasure Island from the deck of the ‘Hispaniola’, but standing beside Charles Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, staring at the Congo wilderness.
Andrew Motion, 2012
TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
– So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient apetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave.
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!
TO LLOYD OSBOURNE
An American gentleman in accordance with whose classic taste the following narrative has been designed, it is now, in return for numerous delightful hours and with the ki
ndest wishes, dedicated by his affectionate friend
THE AUTHOR
Contents
PART I
THE OLD BUCCANEER
I. The Old Sea-Dog at the “Admiral Benbow”
II. Black Dog appears and disappears
III. The Black Spot
IV. The Sea Chest
V. The Last of the Blind Man
VI. The Captain’s Papers
PART II
THE SEA COOK
VII. I go to Bristol
VIII. At the Sign of the “Spy Glass”
IX. Powder and Arms
X. The Voyage
XI. What I heard in the Apple-Barrel
XII. Council of War
PART III
MY SHORE ADVENTURE
XIII. How I began my Shore Adventure
XIV. The First Blow
XV. The Man of the Island
PART IV
THE STOCKADE
XVI. Narrative continued by the Doctor:
How the Ship was Abandoned
XVII. Narrative continued by the Doctor:
Silver Page 36