Treasure Island

Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson

Book Summary

Jim Hawkins has led an ordinary life as an innkeeper's son until the day he inadvertently discovers a treasure map in a trunk belonging to an old sea captain, and thus, suddenly, his ordinary life turns into the extraordinary adventure of a lifetime. Jim and his companions decide ato follow the map to the coast of South America to find their fortune, but their plans run awry when they discover that the ship's crew is comprised primarily of pirates -- out to claim the treasure as their own! If he ever wants to return home, Jim must outsmart Long John Silver and his gang, using all the cunning he can muster to come up with a plan to defeat the pirates, and to find the treasure.

Book Excerpt

SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17 and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea–chest following behind him in a hand–barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut–brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea–song that he sang so often afterwards:

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

The book is in English!