Treasure Island

By Robert Louis Stevenson

Perhaps the greatest of all adventure stories for boys and girls, Treasure Island began, a brave boy who finds himself among pirates, and of the sinister pirate-cook Long John Silver holds children as entranced today as it did a century ago. It has appeared with illustrations by many leading artists, but none so apt as Peake's--first published in 1949 and out of print until now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 30, 2004
• ISBN: 9780553898590

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born on 13 November 1850, changing his second name to ‘Louis’ at the age of eighteen. He has always been loved and admired by countless readers and critics for ‘the excitement, the fierce joy, the delight in strangeness, the pleasure in deep and dark adventures’ found in his classic stories and, without doubt, he created some of the most horribly unforgettable characters in literature and, above all, Mr. Edward Hyde.

Reviews for Treasure Island

[kflach1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are many reasons why I liked this book “Treasure Island”. One of the reasons is this book was written about an adventure of pirates sailing the sea to find a lost treasure. The main character, Jim, narrates the story. “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!” This is an example of the songs pirates would sing when on the boat. The story engages the reader to feel they are part of the pirates’ journey looking for the treasure. “In the immediate nearness of the gold, all else had been forgotten [...], and I could not doubt that he hoped to seize upon the treasure, find and board the Hispanola under cover of night, cut every honest throat about that island, and sail away as he had at first intended, laden with crimes and riches.” Jim describes his difficult times on the boat by describing the conditions and what other men are doing when living there. Even though I like this book, I feel sometimes it is hard to follow the dialogue written is the pirate slang. Some examples would be “easy with that gun, sir or you’ll swamp the boat. All hands stand by to trim her when he aims” and “If I die like a dog, I’ll die in my dooty”. The end is very upbeat because Jim and his crew on the boat find the treasure. The first time I read this book I was in the seventh grade. I remember loving this book and wanting to read it over to recapture the journey. Treasure Island is a classic adventure tale, and also the story of one boy’s coming of age. The big idea of this story is the search for heroic role models, the satisfaction of desires, and the lack of adventure in the modern age.

[mahallett · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

the reader was good, i was into it right away, then i seemed to loose focus.

[tkcrabtree-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read it before and I'm sure I will read it again. Timeless classic with a great story, hope to read it to my son someday to show him there were pirates before Johnny Depp.

[nosajeel · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Re-reading this was an absolute pleasure from the first sentence to the last. Or to be precise, listening the audiobook with outstanding narration by Alfred Molina.

Long John Silver is one of the extraordinary characters of literature, at times he almost feels on par with the creations of Shakespeare and Dickens. His extraordinary physical and psychological aptitude, his ambiguous amorality, and the way in which he controls from a position of servitude. The narrator, Jim Hawkins, and his group are more cookie cutter cardboard romantic heroes, but still interesting and compelling. And many of the characters with walk on parts, like Billy Bones and the blind pirate Pew, are fascinating.

The plot moves along briskly, although the terrors are considerably greater in the first quarter--before the mutineers declare themselves--and toward the end when Jim ends up back with the pirates. In between is a decent amount of fighting and straight up adventure, which is well told and interesting but hardly something that on its own would stand the test of time.

Occasionally all of the pirate talk feels a little oppressive and cliched, but then you remind yourself that this is the novel that invented all of it. But mostly the language lends a strong scent of salty reality to this classic boys adventure novel.

[csweder · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!

What else do I need for a book? Pirates, treasure, deception, lies, murder, fights, and good ol' Christian values.

Maybe that's the conditions Stevenson got from his publisher: Sure you can write about the terrible people pirates are, but make sure they learn their lesson in the face of the Christian God. Whether or not they did learn is up for debate.

The book was good, and definitely makes me want to see Pirates of the Caribbean again. And it was good to see where so many literary allusions come from. Worth the $1 at Half Price Books.

[cebellol · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Now, I realize this was written for young boys, but, as far as classics go, I was underwhelmed. I just wanted SO much more from it. Even the ending was a little disappointing. I just wanted... I don't know what I wanted, but this definitely didn't give it to me. Maybe I was looking for more pirate-y antics? Maybe it was just that there was a lot of waiting around by all parties? I don't know, but it didn't deliver like I wanted it to. I think the most exciting part was when he and his mother were avoiding the pirates in the very beginning.

I still recommend it, because it IS one of the classics, but only for that reason. Although, it could be a good bed time story kind of book. Read a couple chapters a night, or something like that.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is an adult novel, but due to having a child as a POV character, it has become a children's book. But it does remain a great adventure story with wonderful characters and a well crafted plot. Oh, a group of ill-assorted people struggle over the disposition of a hoard of pirate treasure.

[zhyatt-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an excellent book. Although originally intended for younger people, it was written in the 1800s and is thus pretty on-par with a high-school reading level today.Now, just about everyone has had to read this book at some point in school - if you haven't reread it since, I highly recommend you do so. It's the definition of a swashbuckling tale, and it really shines with a second reading.

[mausergem_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic pirate tale. Very entertaining

[edgeworth_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read Kidnapped in 2010 and quite liked it, so I figured I’d give Treasure Island a go. Now I’m reflecting on whether perhaps Kidnapped was a book I enjoyed because it provided me with entertainment at a time when I didn’t have much else to do.Treasure Island is the classic pirate story, a book that spawned thousands of imitators and almost single-handedly created a genre. Young Jim Hawkins, the poor son of innkeepers, is swept up into excitement and adventure after one of his lodgers entrusts him with a treasure map before dying. Jim promptly takes the map to Dr. Livesey, local magistrate and gentleman, and together they assemble an expedition to recover the treasure from the titular Caribbean Island. All doesn’t go to plan, of course, with the crew turning out to be half pirates, and upon arrival on Treasure Island all manner of mutinous hijinks break out in the scramble to seize the treasure.Treasure Island is a pirate story with 19th century mores, where the good guys are upstanding English gentlemen and the pirates are villainous scoundrels – unlike modern incarnations, where Johnny Depp is cast as a dashing and romantic figure of fun, the script neatly sidestepping the fact that pirates are bad people who do bad things. (I dearly love Mister Gibbs, but I expect he’s raped his fair share.) Treasure Island contains a good amount of betrayal, cold-blooded murder and terrible fates, and to his credit, Stevenson does not shy away from the fact that this is the sort of thing that can utterly ruin a boy’s fantasised adventure:Although the sun shone bright and hot, and the shore birds were fishing and crying all around us, and you would have thought anyone would be glad to get to land after so long at sea, my heart sank, as the saying is, into my boots, and from that first look onward I hated the very thought of Treasure Island.And although the book has what you’d technically call a happy ending, it finishes on a dark note, with Jim still haunted by what happened on the island.These good points aside, I can’t recommend Treasure Island, largely because I had trouble maintaining an interest in it. It starts out and finishes well enough, yet drags in the centre, as Jim’s crew hold out a stockade against the pirates. There’s far too much technical detail, a wholly unnecessary switch to Dr. Livesey as narrator, and it’s all just poorly paced. As the book goes on, far too much time is spent debating the loyalties and power struggles of the various crews, and the men within the crews, with overly-wrought dialogue. I also felt that Stevenson was treating the plot like a chess game, moving pieces here and there, and having certain characters do things which made no sense simply because it was necessary for the plot (Jim sneaking off and recovering the ship against all odds is the prime offender here.) Kidnapped, in comparison, contained a number of unexpected twists and turns which never felt out of place or contrived.Not a bad book, but not a good one either – certainly a disappointment compared to its reputation, and not as good as Stevenson’s less-famous Kidnapped.

[fothpaul · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A smashing adventure. Everything you could want, pirates, treasure, betrayal and tropical islands.

[michaelbartley · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found this to be a more complex book then I thought it would be. while it is on its surface a coming of age and adventure story there is much more then that. the character long john silver is very complex. I am glad I read it

[benuathanasia · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book does in seven hours, what could easily be said in one without any loss. Don't get me wrong, the story itself is good, but the writing is terrible. It's purple prose without any poetry to the language or any worthwhile visuals that put the reader there. The dialogue is akin to small talk - boring filler that is - in most cases - completely pointless and no one truly cares about it (I hate small talk with a fiery, fervent passion). If Stevenson had done away with the rambling passages that did nothing to improve the story, it would have been far better. All in all, this book has been done countless times in half an hour and - while I normally hate abridgments - this book really could have done well with some fat trimming.

[captainflint_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love the way the sea cook is introduced!

[lukes_171461 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Stevenson is an all-time classic author, and this book is rightfully held in the front rank of the Stevenson canon. It is often cited as a classic of young adult literature, and it clearly works as such, superbly so. But I would like to cite Mr. Stevenson's sophisticated and subtle portayal of his characters. The motivations are shaded, knowing, understandable, and realistic. We have the evolving, by turns treacherous and ingratiating, journey of Long John Silver. We have the captain of the vessel, and while not as subtle a character, certainly has his depths. And of course, the classic first-person Jim Hawkins, whose courage and resourcefulness are really the entree to this delicious meal.There are some works which seem to carry all in the genre after it. This is one of those. In the words of Jorge Luis Borges: "I like antique maps, 18th-century type styles, the origins of words, the smell of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson." Amen.

[indygo88 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not being at all well-read in the classics, I honestly didn't know any of the basics of this story. This 1-disc edition is certainly very abridged, but I thought that would be a good way for me to get a quick overview of this story. But I felt this was TOO abridged. The reader read quickly & I had a lot of trouble keeping track of the characters, let alone the storyline as to who the good guys & the bad guys were. It was very confusing for someone as ignorant as I was in respect to what was really happening in the story. I just felt like I didn't follow things very well due to how fast it zipped along. For someone who's read the book previously, I think this would probably be a good refresher. However, for those who haven't, you'd probably be better off going with the original unedited text.

[neonjello · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book starts off with a young boy named jim hawkins who starts off helping a pirate at his family's inn. the pirate he is supposed to help belonged to a pirate crew commanded by a notorious captain named flint. The pirate jim hawkins was taking care of was named Billy Bones. one night, a pirate from flint's crew called pew had come to give billy the news that he was going to die that night. soon after billy dies ,but told jim that they were after a treasure map that he had in his treasure chest. jim and his mom retreaive the map, and jim sets off to follow where the treasure is with john trelawny,dr.livesey,long john silvers, and other men. silvers makes a plan to steal the treasure once ashore the island and runs with it with two other men. the rest of the crew finds out and is at war with silvers team. The rest remains an ending suprise :) I liked that i could understand the book but i did not like the story because it's basically a complex pirate story and is very common too.

[billiecat_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A rollicking adventure story, a coming of age, a swashbuckling sea-tale, a boy's book. I read this to my son over many nights before bed, and while I feared the violence would frighten him and cause nightmares, it did not; but it did hold his attention and get him talking and thinking (and drawing treasure maps). What fun!

[cecrow · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is not the classic I was expecting. I can see the roots of adventure stories, all the original establishment of what have become pirate cliches, but I just wasn't grabbed for most of the story and I'm not sure why that is. Some of Jim Hawkin's actions were too reckless for me to believe and I never grew close to his character, but then I lack the 19th century sense of British forthrightness that might have made me think his decisions more rational. Long John Silver I did like and appreciate throughout, and I was disappointed that his story's ending lacked any sort of power; you can see how this has been corrected in any movie rendition. Among RLS' works, his Jekyl and Hyde remains my favourite.

[ben_a_11 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A classic. Pirates are bad people. Let me add to that. Glamorous evil is a problem in fiction. I say 'a problem' not because positive representation of wicked characters has bad effects (although doubtless it does), but because it is so false to fact as to be jarring, to break fictional tone. There are exceptions to this rule. Satan is glamorous, but he's an angel -- and as the first or second most powerful created being, of course he's going to have some pace on the ball. But in general, wickedness is not glamorous, or inventive, or interesting. It's a person who will kill a stranger for money, and then spend the money on trash -- as squalid, loathsome, and weak as a humanity gets. That's the type of person who becomes a pirate, in point of fact; that's who a pirate is. Simone Weil has a great quote to this effect: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Stevenson invests his pirates with real evil, in Weil's sense, and it's the critical tone-setting choice in the novel....my name is Alexander Smollett, I've flown my sovereign's colours, and I'll see you all to Davy Jones. You can't find the treasure. You can't sail the ship—there's not a man among you fit to sail the ship. You can't fight us—Gray, there, got away from five of you. Your ship's in irons, Master Silver; you're on a lee shore, and so you'll find. I stand here and tell you so; and they're the last good words you'll get from me, for in the name of heaven, I'll put a bullet in your back when next I meet you

[jasonpettus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write essays on whether or not they deserve the labelEssay #32: Treasure Island (1883), by Robert Louis StevensonThe story in a nutshell:Inspired by a doodle from his step-son and originally written as a rainy-day family diversion, the slim 1883 children's book Treasure Island (originally published serially in 1881 and '82) was not only the first novel of sickly genre author Robert Louis Stevenson's short career, but eventually one of his most famous. Essentially the tale of young adventurer Jim Hawkins, the story opens with him as a dutiful mama's boy off the southwest coast of England, helping to run a family inn that sees little action because of being located much more inland than most of the other local sailor-oriented hotels. Ah, but this is exactly what brings the drunken, scary Billy Bones there, where it becomes quickly apparent that he is on the run and in semi-hiding from a whole crew of mysterious, nefarious characters; and when they finally show up after Bones' alcoholism-related death, the family realizes that they are in fact pirates, on the hunt for a treasure map that Bones stole from a recent mutinous voyage that went horribly, horribly wrong. This then convinces a group of local Victorian gentlemen and family friends to go after the treasure themselves, eventually buying a boat and hiring a local crew to take them to this far-off tropical island; but little do they realize that the sailors they've hired are none other than the surviving pirates of the former mutiny, led by the charismatic yet psychopathic one-legged "ship's cook" Long John Silver, who plan on turning on the ship's owners once actually reaching the island and retrieving the treasure they were forced to leave behind during their last voyage. The rest of the book, then, is essentially an adventure tale, full of all kinds of legitimate surprises that I won't spoil here; let's just say that a lot of swashbuckling takes place, that many details regarding ship-sailing are faithfully recorded, and that the day is eventually saved by our fast-thinking teenage hero Jim, no surprise at all for a book designed specifically to amuse fellow teenage boys.The argument for it being a classic:Well, to begin with, it's arguably the most famous pirate tale ever written, and in fact established for the first time many of the stereotypes now known within the genre, including one-legged buccaneers, treasure maps with a big 'X' on them, shoulder-sitting parrots squawking "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!," and even the very idea of British pirates being associated with exotic tropical islands in the Caribbean, an association now so strong that it's almost impossible to separate the two; and of course it's also the novel that created the unforgettable Long John Silver, now a thoroughly ingrained part of our Western culture at large. Add to this that it's simply an incredibly thrilling tale (rumor has it that England's Prime Minister at the time stayed up until two in the morning to finish his first reading of it), that it still holds up surprisingly well even 126 years later, and that it's also of immense importance to fans of Stevenson, a prolific author whose genius is just now starting to be widely recognized, after being dismissed by the literary community for almost a century as a frivolous "kiddie writer;" and now add to all this that Treasure Island is a surprisingly sophisticated examination of the era's ethics and moral code as well, taking an unblinking look at the "Victorian Ideal" as manifested in different ways among the stuffy gentlemen "heroes" (unable to improvise in changing circumstances, much to their detriment), the anarchic pirate villains (who almost kill themselves off just on their own, through drunkenness, ignorance and jealousy), and the ruthless yet principled Silver who straddles both these extremes.The argument against:A weak one at best; like many of the genre prototypes of the late Victorian Age, one could argue that this is simply too flippant a tale to be considered a classic. But we already established a long time ago here at the CCLaP 100 that genre stories are indeed eligible for "classic" status in this series, making this argument inapplicable in our case.My verdict:Holy crap! What an incredible book! And what a refreshing change in this case to not have to add my usual caveat to statements like these regarding late Victorian genre experiments: "...you know, for a century-old children's story that's kind of outdated and that you need to take with a grain of salt." Because the fact is that Treasure Island to this day still reads as fresh and exciting as the day it came out, which is a real testament to the writing skills of Robert Louis Stevenson (who I was already a big fan of before this essay series even started, because of his superbly creepy and also surprisingly relevant Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde); what a shame that this illness-plagued author ended up dying at the age of 44 in the prime of his career, instead of surviving to pen the truly mindblowing mature works I'm convinced that he had been capable of. And it's exactly for the reasons that his fans bring up that this book remains such an amazing one, and how it is that it can still easily be read for pleasure instead of having to force one's way through for historical purposes; because it is indeed not only a thrilling adventure tale, not only written in a style that largely rejects the purplish finery of the Victorian Age in which it was created, but is also a deceptively complex look at the entire nature of "gentlemanness" that was so prevalent at the time, gently poking holes in the entire notion of what it means to be a Refined Citizen of the Empire, even while acknowledging that a complete disavowal of these gentlemanly standards is even worse. There's a very good reason that Long John Silver has endured so strongly in our collective imagination over the last century, when so many other fictional pirates have fallen by the wayside, because he turns out to be a surprisingly complicated character worth coming back to again and again, a vicious killer but with a consistent internal moral code worth perversely admiring; it's but one of many reasons that I confidently label this book a undeniable classic today, and highly recommend it to anyone on the search for the best of 19th-century literature.Is it a classic? Absolutely

[theboylatham_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Five out of ten.

Stevenson's novel is narrated by the teenage Jim Hawkins, who outwits a gang of murderous pirates led by that unforgettable avatar of amorality, Long John Silver.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Young Jim Hawkins finds adventure when a "gentleman of fortune" stays at his father's inn, and the old pirate's compatriots come looking for him -- and a treasure map!Treasure Island is the quintessential adventure tale: a daring hero, a treasure, and dastardly pirates. I had a few false starts trying to read it as a kid, but I drowned in the antiquated language due to a book that's a hundred years old set in the 1700s. But when I was without power for several days, it was the perfect book to take me far and away from my circumstances. Partly because I knew much of the storyline (mostly, I am embarrassed to admit, through watching Muppet Treasure Island as a kid), partly because Jim is clearly narrating events that happened before, there was never any doubt that our English heroes would make it through unscathed, but this true blue adventure tale is certainly entertaining.

[jburlinson_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A very great classic, and no one needs me to inform them of this fact. Of the many, many pleasures this book holds in store, let me just mention the riveting chapter on Israel Hands, a character based on the real-life second in command to Blackbeard himself, whose creepy conversation, struggle with , and pursuit of Jim Hawkins ends with a deadly encounter on the mizzen-mast. Even now, many years later, I recall my own instinctive recoil and shudder as the knife found its home.

[missteacher_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A nice adventure book...one I cannot believe I haven't read before!! Long John Silver was well developed and very well balanced, and I am a sucker for an antagonist with a heart!The characters, though not fleshed out or fully developed, are enticing and realistic. This is, by far, a pure adventure story, though the adventure is slow in rolling itself out. The simple suspense is delightful, and the justice dispensed to those of blacker hearts seems reasonable and natural. Long John Silver's disappearance at the end definitely leaves a wide window for future legends, ideas and adventures to form themselves.

[bookborrowers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

this book is awsome its about a boy named jim his dad dies at the resterant his mom and dad own and affter hes gone a while in the book some pirates come and kidnap jim well thats all i can say but this is an awsome book about adventure

[readingrat_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A true adventure classic.

[figgles_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rollicking adventure tale - great fun and now I know more about the allusions in Arthur Ransome's novels.

[391_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It's slow starting, but once I got to about the middle of the book, I couldn't put it down. It's pretty much a straight-up adventure novel, with action and pirates and everything you could ever want, really.

[evertrap · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A great adventure for all ages.