Treasure Island

Robert Louis Stevenson

4 ideas

1. Jim overhears mutiny from apple barrel

   Aboard the Hispaniola, Jim Hawkins climbs into an apple barrel and overhears Long John Silver, the ship's cook, recruiting crewmen for a mutiny to seize the treasure and kill the gentlemen once it is found. Because a boy nobody bothered to guard against learned the plot, Captain Smollett, Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey could count their few loyal men and plan ahead instead of being ambushed. The whole expedition turns on information picked up by the person everyone ignored.

2. The likable villain who plays both sides

   Long John Silver is warm, capable and fatherly toward Jim while plotting murder, and his charm is real rather than a mask, so both attraction and danger come from the same person. When the mutiny fails he shields Jim and moves toward the gentlemen, switching sides whenever the odds shift, and in the end he escapes with a bag of coin. The moral point is that charm and loyalty to your own survival can live in one person, so charm tells you nothing about trustworthiness.

3. Impulsive disobedience repeatedly saves the expedition

   Jim twice leaves the group without permission. He jumps ashore with the mutineers, and later he deserts the stockade, cuts the Hispaniola adrift and recaptures her from Israel Hands, and each time he gains something the cautious adults could not. The novel treats a boy's reckless initiative as a real, if dangerous, source of advantage, while still making him pay for it: he walks back into the stockade and is captured.

4. Greed as the force that undoes pirates

   The treasure hunt is a study in how greed wrecks cooperation: the pirates drink, quarrel, depose leaders with the black spot and break discipline, so they lose to a smaller, orderly party. When they finally reach the cache it is already empty, because the marooned Ben Gunn dug it up and moved it long before. Read this way, the prize itself dissolves the group chasing it, and the patient, organized side wins.

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