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Treasure Island
Chapter 1. The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the other gentlemen asked me to write down the whole story of Treasure Island from beginning to end.
I keep nothing back except the bearings of the island, and that only because there's still treasure not yet lifted.
So I take up my pen in the year 1750, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn.
That was when the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first stayed under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday.
He came walking heavily to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow.
He was a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man.
His tarry pigtail fell over the shoulder of his dirty blue coat.
His hands were ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails.
The sabre cut across one cheek was a dirty, pale white.
I remember him looking around the cove and whistling to himself.
Then he broke out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards,
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
He sang in a high, old, shaking voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars.
Then he knocked on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried.
When my father appeared, he called roughly for a glass of rum.
When it was brought, he drank it slowly like a connoisseur, enjoying the taste while looking at the cliffs and our signboard.
"This is a handy cove," he said at last, "and a nice little grog-shop. Much company, mate?"
My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
"Well, then," said he, "this is the place for me. Here you, matey," he called to the man who pushed the barrow.
"Bring it up alongside and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued.
"I'm a plain man."
"Rum and bacon and eggs is what I want."
"And that head up there for to watch ships off."
"What you might call me?"
"You might call me captain."
"Oh, I see what you're at - there." And he threw down three or four gold pieces on the doorstep.
"You can tell me when I've used that up," he said, looking as fierce as a commander.
And indeed, bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he didn't look like a man who sailed before the mast.
He seemed more like a mate or skipper used to being obeyed or to striking.
The man who came with the barrow told us the mail coach had set him down the morning before at the Royal George.
He had asked what inns there were along the coast.
Hearing ours well spoken of and described as lonely, he chose it for his place to stay.
And that was all we could learn about our guest.
He was a very silent man by habit.
All day he hung around the cove or on the cliffs with a brass telescope.
All evening he sat in a corner of the parlour next to the fire and drank rum and water very strong.
Mostly he wouldn't speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a fog-horn.
We and the people who came to our house soon learned to leave him alone.
Every day when he came back from his walk, he'd ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road.
At first we thought it was the lack of company of his own kind that made him ask this question.
But at last we began to see he wanted to avoid them.
When a seaman stayed at the Admiral Benbow, he'd look in at him through the curtained door.
This happened before he entered the parlour.
Some seamen did stay there, going by the coast road to Bristol.
And he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was present.
For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his fears.
He took me aside one day, he promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month.
I only had to keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg." I'd let him know the moment he appeared.
Often enough when the first of the month came around.
I asked him for my wage, he'd only blow through his nose at me and stare me down.
Before the week was out he changed his mind, gave me my fourpence, and repeated his orders to watch for the one-legged seaman.
"the seafaring man with one leg."
How that person haunted my dreams, I hardly need tell you.
On stormy nights, the wind shook the four corners of the house.
The surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs.
I'd see him in a thousand forms, with a thousand evil expressions.
Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip.
Now he was a monstrous kind of creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body.
To see him leap and run and chase me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.
And all together, I paid pretty dearly for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these terrible fancies.
Though I was terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself.
Others who knew him were more afraid of the captain.
There were nights when he took a lot more rum and water than his head could carry.
And then he'd sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild sea-songs, paying no attention to anyone.
Sometimes he'd call for glasses and force the trembling company to listen to his stories or join the chorus.
Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum."
All the neighbours joined in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid notice.
For in these fits, he was the most overbearing companion ever known.
He'd slap his hand on the table for silence all around.
He'd fly into a passion at a question, or if none was asked, thinking the company wasn't following his story.
Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn until he had drunk himself sleepy and staggered off to bed.
His stories were what frightened people worst of all.
They were dreadful stories, hanging, walking the plank, storms at sea, the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds on the Spanish Main.
By his own account, he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea.
And the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described.
My father always said the inn would be ruined, for people would stop coming, bullied and sent shivering to their beds.
But I really believe his presence did us good.
People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it.
It was a fine excitement in a quiet country life.
There was even a group of younger men who pretended to admire him.
They called him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt." They said he was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.
In one way, indeed, he seemed likely to ruin us.
He kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long used up.
And still my father never found the courage to insist on having more.
If he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly he roared and stared my poor father out of the room.
I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rejection.
And I'm sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.
All the time he lived with us, the captain made no change whatever in his dress except to buy some stockings from a hawker.
One corner of his hat had fallen, and he let it hang from that day, though it annoyed him when it blew.
I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room.
And before the end, it was nothing but patches.
He never wrote or received a letter.
And he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum.
The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.
He was only once challenged, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a sickness that took him off.
Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient.
He took a bit of dinner from my mother.
Then he went into the parlour to smoke a pipe.
He waited there until his horse came down from the village.
We had no stabling at the old Benbow, I followed him in.
I remember noticing the contrast the neat, bright doctor made with the rough country folk.
He had powder as white as snow, bright black eyes, and pleasant manners.
Above all, he contrasted with that dirty, heavy, bleary scarecrow of a pirate, sitting drunk with his arms on the table.
Suddenly he - the captain, that's - began to pipe up his eternal song,
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
"Drink and the devil had done for the rest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that same big box of his upstairs in the front room.
And the thought had been mixed in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man.
But by this time we had all long stopped paying any particular notice to the song.
It was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey.
I observed it didn't produce a pleasant effect on him.
He looked up for a moment quite angrily, then went on talking to old Taylor, the gardener, about a new cure for rheumatism.
In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music.
And at last he slapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence.
The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's.
He went on as before, speaking clear and kind and drawing quickly at his pipe between every word or two.
The captain glared at him for a while, slapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a wicked, low oath.
"Silence, there, between decks!"
"Were you addressing me, sir?" said the doctor.
And when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to say to you, sir," replied the doctor.
"If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be rid of a very dirty scoundrel!"
The old fellow's fury was awful, his face purple and hands trembling with rage.
He jumped up, drew a sailor's clasp-knife, balanced it on his palm, and threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.
The doctor never so much as moved.
He spoke as before, over his shoulder in the same loud tone so the whole room could hear, but calm and steady.
"If you don't put that knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at the next assizes."
Then followed a battle of looks between them.
But the captain soon gave in, put away his weapon, and sat down again, grumbling like a beaten dog.
"And now, sir," continued the doctor.
"Since I now know there's such a fellow in my district, you can be sure I'll have an eye upon you day and night."
"I'm not only a doctor."
"I'm a magistrate."
"And if I catch a breath of complaint against you, even for rudeness like tonight's, I'll take effective means."
"I'll have you hunted down and forced out of this place," continued the doctor.
"Let that be enough."
Soon after, Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away.
But the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.