Chapter 1 — PART ONE—The Old Buccaneer

I
The Old Sea-dog at the “Admiral Benbow”

quire 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 cove
and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking 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!”

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.

“This is a handy cove,” says he at length; “and a pleasant sittyated 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 berth for me. Here you, matey,” he cried to
the man who trundled the barrow; “bring 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 mought
call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you’re at—there”; and he
threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. “You can tell me when
I’ve worked through that,” says he, looking as fierce as a commander.

And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the
appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or
skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow
told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that
he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well
spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others
for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.

He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or upon the
cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the parlour
next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would not speak
when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a
fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our house soon learned to let
him be. Every day when he came back from his stroll he would ask if any
seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we thought it was the want
of company of his own kind that made him ask this question, but at last we
began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When a seaman did put up at the
Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol)
he would look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the
parlour; 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 alarms. He had taken me aside one day and promised me a
silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my
“weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg” and let him know the moment
he appeared. Often enough when the first of the month came round and I applied
to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me
down, but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me
my four-penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for “the seafaring man
with one leg.”

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy
nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared
along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with
a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee,
now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but
the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and
pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I
paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these
abominable fancies.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one leg, I
was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who knew him.
There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head would
carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked, old, wild
sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for glasses round and
force all the trembling company to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to
his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle
of rum,” all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with the fear of death
upon them, and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these
fits he was the most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on
the table for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a
question, or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was
not following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had
drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they
were—about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry
Tortugas, and wild deeds and places 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 was
always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there
to be tyrannized over and put down, 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, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a “true sea-dog” and a “real old salt” and such like
names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week after
week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long
exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having
more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly that
you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of the room. I have seen
him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am 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
but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having
fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great
annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched
himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, 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 crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was
far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to
see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlour
to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no
stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him in, and I remember observing the
contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his
bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk,
and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours,
sitting, far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he—the captain,
that is—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 identical big box of
his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my
nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time we had
all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that
night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an
agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on
with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the rheumatics. In
the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last
flapped 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 briskly at his pipe between every
word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again,
glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath,
“Silence, there, between decks!”

“Were you addressing me, sir?” says 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,” replies the doctor, “that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will
soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

The old fellow’s fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a
sailor’s clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened
to pin the doctor to the wall.

The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as before, over his shoulder
and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the room might hear,
but perfectly calm and steady: “If you do not 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 knuckled
under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog.

“And now, sir,” continued the doctor, “since I now know there’s such a fellow
in my district, you may count I’ll have an eye upon you day and night. I’m not
a doctor only; I’m a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint against
you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like tonight’s, I’ll take effectual
means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice.”

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.