Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson (best ebook reader txt) 📗

And then he named the

latitude and longitude exactly.

 

“I never told that,” cried the squire, “to a soul!”

 

“The hands know it, sir,” returned the captain.

 

“Livesey, that must have been you or Hawkins,” cried

the squire.

 

“It doesn’t much matter who it was,” replied the

doctor. And I could see that neither he nor the

captain paid much regard to Mr. Trelawney’s

protestations. Neither did I, to be sure, he was so

loose a talker; yet in this case I believe he was

really right and that nobody had told the situation of

the island.

 

“Well, gentlemen,” continued the captain, “I don’t know

who has this map; but I make it a point, it shall be

kept secret even from me and Mr. Arrow. Otherwise I

would ask you to let me resign.”

 

“I see,” said the doctor. “You wish us to keep this

matter dark and to make a garrison of the stern part of

the ship, manned with my friend’s own people, and

provided with all the arms and powder on board. In

other words, you fear a mutiny.”

 

“Sir,” said Captain Smollett, “with no intention to

take offence, I deny your right to put words into my

mouth. No captain, sir, would be justified in going to

sea at all if he had ground enough to say that. As for

Mr. Arrow, I believe him thoroughly honest; some of the

men are the same; all may be for what I know. But I am

responsible for the ship’s safety and the life of every

man Jack aboard of her. I see things going, as I

think, not quite right. And I ask you to take certain

precautions or let me resign my berth. And that’s all.”

 

“Captain Smollett,” began the doctor with a smile, “did

ever you hear the fable of the mountain and the mouse?

You’ll excuse me, I dare say, but you remind me of that

fable. When you came in here, I’ll stake my wig, you

meant more than this.”

 

“Doctor,” said the captain, “you are smart. When I

came in here I meant to get discharged. I had no

thought that Mr. Trelawney would hear a word.”

 

“No more I would,” cried the squire. “Had Livesey not

been here I should have seen you to the deuce. As it

is, I have heard you. I will do as you desire, but I

think the worse of you.”

 

“That’s as you please, sir,” said the captain. “You’ll

find I do my duty.”

 

And with that he took his leave.

 

“Trelawney,” said the doctor, “contrary to all my

notions, I believed you have managed to get two honest

men on board with you—that man and John Silver.”

 

“Silver, if you like,” cried the squire; “but as for

that intolerable humbug, I declare I think his conduct

unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English.”

 

“Well,” says the doctor, “we shall see.”

 

When we came on deck, the men had begun already to take

out the arms and powder, yo-ho-ing at their work, while

the captain and Mr. Arrow stood by superintending.

 

The new arrangement was quite to my liking. The whole

schooner had been overhauled; six berths had been made

astern out of what had been the after-part of the main

hold; and this set of cabins was only joined to the

galley and forecastle by a sparred passage on the port

side. It had been originally meant that the captain,

Mr. Arrow, Hunter, Joyce, the doctor, and the squire

were to occupy these six berths. Now Redruth and I

were to get two of them and Mr. Arrow and the captain

were to sleep on deck in the companion, which had been

enlarged on each side till you might almost have called

it a round-house. Very low it was still, of course;

but there was room to swing two hammocks, and even the

mate seemed pleased with the arrangement. Even he,

perhaps, had been doubtful as to the crew, but that is

only guess, for as you shall hear, we had not long the

benefit of his opinion.

 

We were all hard at work, changing the powder and the

berths, when the last man or two, and Long John along

with them, came off in a shore-boat.

 

The cook came up the side like a monkey for cleverness,

and as soon as he saw what was doing, “So ho, mates!”

says he. “What’s this?”

 

“We’re a-changing of the powder, Jack,” answers one.

 

“Why, by the powers,” cried Long John, “if we do, we’ll

miss the morning tide!”

 

“My orders!” said the captain shortly. “You may go

below, my man. Hands will want supper.”

 

“Aye, aye, sir,” answered the cook, and touching his

forelock, he disappeared at once in the direction of

his galley.

 

“That’s a good man, captain,” said the doctor.

 

“Very likely, sir,” replied Captain Smollett. “Easy

with that, men—easy,” he ran on, to the fellows who

were shifting the powder; and then suddenly observing

me examining the swivel we carried amidships, a long

brass nine, “Here you, ship’s boy,” he cried, “out o’

that! Off with you to the cook and get some work.”

 

And then as I was hurrying off I heard him say, quite loudly,

to the doctor, “I’ll have no favourites on my ship.”

 

I assure you I was quite of the squire’s way of

thinking, and hated the captain deeply.

 

10

 

The Voyage

 

ALL that night we were in a great bustle getting things

stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squire’s

friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish

him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a

night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work;

and I was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the

boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man

the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary,

yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and

interesting to me—the brief commands, the shrill note

of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the

glimmer of the ship’s lanterns.

 

“Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave,” cried one voice.

 

“The old one,” cried another.

 

“Aye, aye, mates,” said Long John, who was standing by,

with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in

the air and words I knew so well:

 

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—”

 

And then the whole crew bore chorus:—

 

“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

 

And at the third “Ho!” drove the bars before them with

a will.

 

Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old

Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice

of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor

was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows;

soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping

to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to

snatch an hour of slumber the HISPANIOLA had begun her

voyage to the Isle of Treasure.

 

I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was

fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship,

the crew were capable seamen, and the captain

thoroughly understood his business. But before we came

the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had

happened which require to be known.

 

Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the

captain had feared. He had no command among the men,

and people did what they pleased with him. But that

was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two

at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red

cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of

drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in

disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes

he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of

the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be

almost sober and attend to his work at least passably.

 

In the meantime, we could never make out where he got

the drink. That was the ship’s mystery. Watch him as

we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when

we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he

were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he

ever tasted anything but water.

 

He was not only useless as an officer and a bad

influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this

rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was

much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with

a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more.

 

“Overboard!” said the captain. “Well, gentlemen, that

saves the trouble of putting him in irons.”

 

But there we were, without a mate; and it was

necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The

boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard,

and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as

mate. Mr. Trelawney had followed the sea, and his

knowledge made him very useful, for he often took a watch

himself in easy weather. And the coxswain, Israel Hands,

was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who could be

trusted at a pinch with almost anything.

 

He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so

the mention of his name leads me on to speak of our

ship’s cook, Barbecue, as the men called him.

 

Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round

his neck, to have both hands as free as possible. It

was something to see him wedge the foot of the crutch

against a bulkhead, and propped against it, yielding to

every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking

like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to

see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He

had a line or two rigged up to help him across the

widest spaces—Long John’s earrings, they were called;

and he would hand himself from one place to another,

now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the

lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet

some of the men who had sailed with him before

expressed their pity to see him so reduced.

 

“He’s no common man, Barbecue,” said the coxswain to

me. “He had good schooling in his young days and can

speak like a book when so minded; and brave—a lion’s

nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple

four and knock their heads together—him unarmed.”

 

All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a

way of talking to each and doing everybody some

particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and

always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as

clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and

his parrot in a cage in one corner.

 

“Come away, Hawkins,” he would say; “come and have a

yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my

son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here’s Cap’n

Flint—I calls my parrot Cap’n Flint, after the famous

buccaneer—here’s Cap’n Flint predicting success to our

v’yage. Wasn’t you, cap’n?”

 

And the parrot would say, with great rapidity, “Pieces

of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” till you

wondered that it was not out of breath, or till John

threw his handkerchief over the cage.

 

“Now, that bird,” he would say, “is, maybe, two hundred

years old, Hawkins—they live forever mostly; and if

anybody’s