Success in following the family profession was expected and would surely have been rewarded, though the fledgling writer would most likely have discerned unusual meanings in the profession. Edgar Allan Poe’s unfinished story, probably his last tale, “The Light-house,” tells the dark side of the lighthouse—namely, isolation from all mankind. The connection to Poe could not be more intriguing, for lighthouses are among man’s most direct interventions against the forces of nature, and when they emit intermittent light, they resemble stories symbolically building on their own luminous variety, their “various light,” as the great poet John Milton once phrased it.
The young man’s family, it happens, were famous and financially secure in their chosen field of casting light over the waters. Creative engineering skill, careful and imaginative control over the details of construction, was a major family aim. Stevenson’s uncle built one of the most remarkable of all lighthouses, Skerryvore, an engineering triumph. Thomas Stevenson, the author’s father, would happily have called the technology of “intermittent light” a picturesque effect as much as a practical necessity.
When Treasure Island was composed, Thomas Stevenson called it “my kind of picturesque.” The invention of the story was intended specifically to please, first, an eleven-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne; second, Thomas Stevenson; and third, Stevenson’s new wife, Fanny Osbourne. Fanny was artistically talented, with strong literary tastes, and in later years herself became a writer. Thomas Stevenson had liked her almost at once, in part because he saw that she supported her husband’s literary endeavors. As a wedding present Thomas gave Fanny and Robert a house in England. An American, she had married a high-flying prospector whom she divorced, partly out of a desire to marry Stevenson. In all respects Thomas appreciated her for her strength and intelligence. She nursed her husband when he was ill, had no hesitations about roughing it, and was not afraid to take risks, and she understood the principles of a life of suspense-atmosphere, action, and expectation. She was an ideal partner in the enterprise.
TREASURE AND THE ADVENTUROUS QUEST
If we go back to the origins of adventure story fiction, we discover that the heroic quest remains its principal myth. Quest-romances take many different forms, whether it be the search for the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend, for the Golden Fleece (as in the Argonautica, the ancient epic of Jason and the Argonauts), for the safe return home after perilous Homeric wanderings, as in the Odyssey, or for a wide range of ends both material and spiritual. What is important is that, once established in classic form, the great adventure stories render all readers, of any age, essentially children at heart. The quest gives us our dream of success, and when we tire of daily labor in making a living, it returns us to that time of the dream. Thus for Treasure Island the questing dream comes out of a long preceding history. Besides two early travel books based on journeys in France, Stevenson told stories in homage to the Near Eastern tradition of loosely woven adventures: his New Arabian Nights (1882), in which the exotic nature of travel to distant lands is imagined as occurring in stories set in Europe. This art of romance thrives on the incredible voyage, the sailor’s yarn (in his day perhaps more fashionable than any other type), the tall frontier tale, including exotic or utopian settings that could never actually exist, because romance demands almost complete power to overcome all human obstacles. The mode of romance therefore demands freedom to imagine. Yet the tradition seems to mix realism on some level with such unreal situations for the hero. In Robinson Crusoe (1719) Daniel Defoe mingles fact and fiction liberally. The same mixture appears in Arthurian lore, while with the rise of the modern middle classes a new kind of romance arises around the quest for material success.
By Stevenson’s time Protestant beliefs and secular technology had long since fueled the rise of capitalism. Robinson Crusoe, while it inaugurated the realistic tradition of the novel in England, makes a continuous critical commentary on mercantile capitalism and its value system, especially as they derive aid and comfort from Protestant Christianity. Crusoe, whose name plays on the name of Christ, is in effect a marooned capitalist, who must rebuild his fortune, by returning his commercial skills to their most primitive beginnings. In this process Crusoe learns who he actually is. Such a quest is tied to the science of counting up supplies, enemies, distances, and even dreams, all of which become the very stuff of realistic modern fiction. Typically the castaway begins his lonely sojourn by surveying what is left to him from the ruins of shipwreck—that is, making the inventory of tools available beyond mere life itself. To be sure, virtually all the major novelists comment, directly or allusively, on the nature and sources of wealth, often indicating how these derive from imperial expansion. Scholars have found these middle-class indicators in what might seem the strangest places—for example, the novels of Jane Austen. Character and commerce seem not so secretly linked. Yet how could it be otherwise, since the bourgeois novel attempts an accounting of life? At the end of the nineteenth century, Henry James claimed for the novel that its function was to provide genuine “criticism” of the way we live, to provide a kind of narrative philosophy, storytelling endowed with serious levels of meaning, suggesting profound and often obscure themes. Stevenson’s essay “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884; The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, see “For Further Reading”) countered James’s critical principle by favoring romance. There is no way, the essay claimed, for the novel to “compete with life.” Instead the novel should maintain its exhilarating imaginative independence from the crude facts of existence, drawing upon those facts solely as a resource for delineating passion. (The same article faults the distinguished American novelist and editor William Dean Howells for a similar dependency upon the new naturalistic style.) Stevenson wanted to keep the idea of treasure somehow pure. With Henry James, whom Stevenson so much admired and who became his valued correspondent, the idea of a treasure sought by adventurous quest took on an ironic aspect. James’s critical gaze, enhanced by his own obsession with wealth, led him to analyze the typical methods of acquiring it, such as real estate speculation in the value of houses or New Englanders piling up industrial wealth or European princes marrying American money. In these late novels and stories James’s critical conceptions collide with material obsessions, and the results are often obscure, even uncanny, as in The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl.
By the author’s own account “the seed” of his novel came from the idea of a treasure chest he found in another adventure story, Charles Kingsley’s At Last (1871). As a goal of acquisitive good luck and daring, treasure in general provides the motive, indirectly or directly (consider Rider Haggard’s immensely popular novel King Solomon’s Mines) for all sorts of adventures. The nineteenth century saw a new world of yearning popular literature, much like Hollywood movies and television shows today. Sentimental romances, “penny dreadfuls,” and “shilling shockers” enthralled large masses of readers. The fossilized popular novels of this earlier date now sit moldering on the storage shelves of pre-electronic libraries, their desiccated pages exuding a dismal smell. Once great in number and acclaim among the young, they saved many a tedious day from misery. The adventure novels of G. A. Henty (1832-1902) appeared in more than 150 volumes. In twentieth-century Britain, Henty was displaced by the more up-to-date Percy Westerman (1876-1959; at school youngsters called him “Percy Piffler,” to show they knew their author), who wrote more than 100 such books. In the United States, to match such prolific output one would look to the 135 “dime novels” of Horatio Alger (1832-1899), again showing how the market of books for the young continued and still continues to put a premium on production. This literature multiplies mainly because it lacks any serious, thought-provoking realism about the hazards of either romance or adventure. The book cannot be read fast enough! Sentimental romances and the adventure stories are of course the same commodity, masked by gender difference. If the novel is to work, it must on some level achieve an illusion of escape, and also of achieving
a goal at the same time.
The model for all such escapes, for males or females, for children or grown-ups, is quickly to gain a treasure someone else acquired slowly or systemically, a treasure one takes from the accumulator by a single stroke of violent daring. Treasure hunting is basic adventure, a child’s version of using venture capital. The freebooting sailors of the Elizabethan period, such as Sir John Hawkins or Sir Francis Drake, who circumnavigated the globe in a three-year period, were always called “gentlemen adventurers,” no matter how ugly their greedy manners and predatory customs may have been. The Hudson’s Bay Company was manned and governed by “gentlemen adventurers.” So, later, was the East India Company. The adventuring name was used across the board. Meanwhile, the location and precise kind of treasure sought was immaterial: The quest might involve discovering a northwest passage to the fabled Orient. For the tragic hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, it might be to find gold at the Orinoco River in South America. After Marco Polo it might be to carry rare commodities overland from India and farther east, along the routes of the spice trade and silk trade. Furthermore, if the acquisition of wealth underlay this new mode of venturing forth, religion and missionary zeal could underwrite any such enterprise, as with the medieval Crusades.
For Bible readers treasure might recall the gold and frankincense and myrrh brought to Bethlehem by the three wise men of the East, sage kings who followed a guiding providential star. In romantic terms treasure meant what John Keats, reading the Elizabethan translation of Homer, once called “the realms of gold.” Realistically we could say that the quest for treasure—the grown-up version of the child’s treasure hunt, amounted finally to a falsely legalized grab for loot; this is how Joseph Conrad viewed unrestrained imperialism. The buccaneer, the pirate, and later the mercenary “privateer” went off on their adventures solely to seize wealth laboriously or murderously accumulated by others. Armed expeditions were sent out from European harbors, to dispossess other nations who had already sent their own predatory engines of conquest to the New World. And of course these representatives of other nations were themselves virtual pirates, the agents of new empires in the making.
In fact, the gentleman adventurer was a licensed pirate-licensed because piracy was otherwise a crime on the high seas, punishable by death. Some notorious pirates made sure they had enough money back home to buy off any possible prosecution. The famed Captain Kidd was a kind of maritime mafioso, using and abusing the law at will. The career of pirate, we might say, was almost officially sanctioned, since commonly sea captains of the sixteenth century were given letters of marque from king and country, authorizing them to prey upon the fleets of other nations. English sailors were especially prone to this dangerous occupation. Royal authority tended to make theft and violence legal, in the eyes of the home country, so it may be more accurate to say that pirates were mercenaries who paid their expenses by keeping a major share of the booty they took from unsuspecting traders. We are not surprised, in the present account of Stevenson’s literary context, that besides Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a large General History of the Pyrates (1724), a book whose title page carries the name Captain Charles Johnson as author. The book was often later known as “Johnson’s History of Pirates,” and under that name Stevenson would have studied it.
The striking and significant thing about such histories is at once apparent from Defoe’s title page, where thirteen different pirate captains are listed by name, the first of them mentioned as “the famous Captain Avery and his Companions,” implying that pirates and piracy enjoyed glamour then, as they still do. Theft, mayhem, and murder are by no means unpopular subjects, and the father of all such stars is the pirate on the Spanish Main. The pirate is in some important sense the natural hero of romance, for he is allowed to do what no ordinary person may do. He can be violent in pursuit of his ends. He can enslave the crews of ships he boards. He can rob and kill owners at will. He is the romantic highwayman of the oceans. He is, in a word, a hero, the man of action. In adventure stories he may be treated as cruel and sinister, like J. M. Barrie’s Captain Hook, but he slides away in many stories, having earned our sneaking admiration for his daring. He is the bad man Huck Finn never wanted to be. He is the one who refuses to live a life “of quiet desperation.”
There is a kind of wild poetic justice, then, in the link Stevenson himself draws between his methods as the author of Treasure Island and the piracy that is required in principle if any treasure is truly to be sought and won. His novel seems to be not only about piracy but itself actually practices piracy, and he admits this, almost as if he can hardly believe it. The author calls himself a pirate of a most unusual kind, which in fact carries us back to our first question: How can a mythical story like Treasure Island come from our modern print culture? The question arises from the thought: Who owns the stories inherited from ancient tradition? Close to the end of his life Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a short essay on this subject, “My First Book—Treasure Island,” in which he confessed that his novel had taken many small bits and pieces from various sources, including Robinson Crusoe, at least one novel by his English predecessor Captain Marryat, Poe’s famous short stories, and works by two other pioneering American authors, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.
More than one author in the past has proudly announced he was stealing, not borrowing, such materials. Piracy in literature, admired by some, enraging to others, would include “taking prizes” like the fort Stevenson had discovered in Captain Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841-1842). There is a powerful rule about myth-making, however, and it forgives the writer. When Stevenson uses Marryat’s stockade in chapter XIX, it becomes our author’s own possession (lawyers would call it his intellectual property), because Stevenson transforms the stockade scene for his own uses, according to an ancient literary law of the rights of genius. In his essay he cheerfully admits that “stolen waters are proverbially sweet.” This confession tells a lot about Stevenson, for like Shakespeare he understood the mythological power of proverbs, but more personally he would know about the sweetness of stolen waters, for he had climbed many a mountainside and drunk the clear, free mountain streams (“burns,” as they are called in Scotland) tumbling down hills that legally belonged to someone else. Stevenson understood that all seriously inspired art requires a good deal of trespassing. Thus he cheerfully admitted his purloined letters and captured images: “It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.” This imaginative piracy was a kind of authorized disobedience, justified trespass requiring no legal permission.
One catches a glimpse of this dream in the way Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, chose to spend their honeymoon at an old California mining camp, a sojourn he chronicled in his little book The Silverado Squatters (1883). Their choice suggests they believed that love is prospecting for gold. Maritime yarns, including several of Conrad’s ironic novels, such as Heart of Darkness (1902) and Victory (1915), also suggest there is a link between travel of any kind and the acquisitive drive behind all extreme ventures. Of course, adventure is also fascinating for itself. Mallory’s oft-repeated statement that he climbed Mount Everest “because it is there” is a strong enough reason. Like others who travel much, Stevenson wrote many letters to give his impressions of “what’s going on.” At the end of his life, settled in western Samoa, he wrote letters to condemn imperial abuses in the islands. The letter-writing of empire always indicates its extent, but with Stevenson the range of his journeys everywhere goes further, and his activity as a letter writer is another way of recounting adventure, a method not without parallel among explorers of the period and before. Like others in his day, he often traveled in the least comfortable way, whether it be in the Cévennes in France, around Davos in Switzerland, in New York City, at Saranac in the Adirondack Mountains, crossing the United States by a miserable “emigrant train” (a journey that almost killed him on his way to meet his wife in San Francisco), or traveling by schooner to the Marquesas Islan
ds, Tahiti, and Hawaii and thence to western Samoa, where, seeming to be settled for a change, he bought more than 300 acres of land on which he built Vailima. Even then his lust for movement was unsatisfied—off he went by sea to Australia and New Zealand, then again around to other Pacific islands, including the Marshalls and New Caledonia, mostly in small ships. One journey he was destined never to make, however. Despite some late plans, he never returned to Edinburgh and London, the cities of his science and religion and of his literary freedom. His fate was to be the author of a perpetual escape from his own people, except as he imagined them, including their darker side—in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he mystified the war between the evil and the good sides of the human soul. He wrote as he traveled—almost incessantly, it would seem, in order to defeat death itself. While he never really enjoyed sea travel—indeed was afraid of such voyages—he nevertheless traveled thousands of miles by sea, inevitably in all weathers. At sea he found his health improved. Like Conrad and Conrad’s friend R. B. Cunningham-Graham, both active participants in what we loosely have been calling adventure, Stevenson discovered that by moving from place to place, by standing still in each new place, if only for a moment, the writer gains an ever-changing point of perspective. Life is never then a blur. Life is a focusing process.
Treasure Island (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 3