Treasure Island
- Written By Robert Louis Stephenson
Treasure Island
- Robert Louis Stephenson
$19.99
Where treasure sleeps, the dead keep watch.
Jim Hawkins is fifteen when a dying sailor arrives at his parents’ inn with a sea chest full of secrets, setting in motion a chain of events that will take him far from everything he knows. A hand-drawn map promises buried gold and the adventure of a lifetime. What it delivers is much more complicated: a voyage into a world where loyalty serves as both currency and counterfeit, and the men Jim admires most are the very ones he should fear.
He joins the crew of the Hispaniola among pirates disguised as honest men โ one more dangerous than the rest. Long John Silver charms the crew as the shipโs cook, nurturing alliances while plotting mutiny. Jim watches him, trusts him against his better judgment, and discovers too late that the line between ally and enemy shifts with the tide. Marooned on a brutal Caribbean island and surrounded by men who would kill for what’s buried underneath, Jim must choose the kind of man he will become.
Treasure Island is the adventure story against which all others are measured. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote it for entertainment, and produced a swashbuckling coming-of-age story that never ages or dies.
โFifteen men on the dead manโs chestโYoโhoโho, and a bottle of rum!โ
About the Author
- Robert Louis Stephenson
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850โ1894) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, into a family of lighthouse engineers, a profession he was expected to follow. Instead, after a turbulent youth marked by chronic illness, religious conflict with his father, and restless wandering across Europe, he turned to writing.
By the time Treasure Island appeared in book form in 1883 โ first serialized in the children’s magazine Young Folks โ Stevenson was already known as an essayist and travel writer of considerable skill. The work cemented his fame as a novelist, paving the way for such later works as Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both published in 1886. Treasure Island, which has never gone out of print, invented the modern pirate โ buried treasure, the black spot, the one-legged villain โ so completely that his inventions have been mistaken for history ever since.
In his final years, Stevenson left Europe, chartering a yacht and sailing across the Pacific in search of a climate his lungs could bear. In 1894, he died in Samoa at age forty-four, his travels at rest and his legacy just beginning.
