Treasure Island (3 page)

As for Stevenson’s other, acknowledged borrowings, such as the parrot from
Robinson Crusoe
, the stockade from Marryat, and the pointing skeleton from Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” these are perhaps best regarded as tributes to authors Stevenson admired. To them we can add the device of Ben Gunn’s ghostly singing to terrify the superstitious pirates, taken most likely from Crusoe’s use of Friday to bewilder the mutineers who have landed on his island, or from Prospero’s equivalent use of Ariel in
The Tempest
. They are of a class with the parallel between Jim’s receiving valuable information while hiding in the apple barrel and the episode in the haunted house in
Tom Sawyer
, which brings closure by the way to the boy hero’s own search for buried treasure, the “rules” for which are also borrowed from Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.”

And so it goes, that joint interweaving between texts that is not only essential to the notion of genre but suggests the larger kinship, the DNA as it were, that joins the various members of the great family of adventure fiction in one common blood bond. Thus the diminished treasure that provides an ironic ending to Cooper’s novel becomes the empty pit that turns the plot in Stevenson’s book which in turn was borrowed by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a decisive moment in
Tarzan
, as his wild man of the African jungle plays the same trick on pirates that Ben Gunn, the wild man of Treasure Island, plays on Long John Silver. The world of literature is assuredly very large, but it is also very small, much as Stevenson takes us from England to his tropical island in a bound, even while, with
Cooper, leaving out the exact longitude and latitude of that place where much of Flint’s treasure still remains, left behind with the remnant pirates when the
Hispaniola
heads for home.

III

There is, it should perhaps be said, a real Hispaniola, the name Columbus gave the island now containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and in whose waters a sunken Spanish galleon was discovered by a legendary Puritan governor-adventurer, William Phips, who recovered a fortune from the wreck and left some treasure behind for others to claim. The story was told by Cotton Mather in his great book of marvels,
Magnolia Christi Americana
, in which Phips plays a significant role as the embodiment of the energy and initiative of the emerging Yankee, who would be epitomized by Benjamin Franklin.

Stevenson, who detested Ben Franklin, the most enterprising Yankee of them all, probably did not read Mather’s ponderous tome. But the story of Phips and Hispaniola was famous enough, and gave further validity to Stevenson’s romance, enhancing as it did the association of Caribbean islands with the fabulous gold fleets that carried back home to Spain the treasures that had been literally wrung out of the native populations of Central and South America. For surely the island to which Stevenson takes us with seven-league boots is one of the West Indies, like the “key” on the map Thomas Daggett drew from information given him by the pirate condemned to hang.

But where, exactly,
is
Treasure Island? I often direct this question to my students, who look at me as though I am asking them the location of the Brooklyn Bridge, the answer seems so obvious: It must be, once again, somewhere in the Caribbean. But then I call their attention to certain matters of flora and fauna, which inform the careful reader that Treasure Island cannot possibly be located in the Caribbean; instead, like the island made famous by the original of Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk (that half-crazy maroon who is the most likely model for Ben Gunn), it lies on the Pacific side of the American continent.

The island is covered with live oaks, for one thing, and Jim hears the warning buzz of rattlesnakes, and live oaks and rattlesnakes are
not native to the Caribbean. We hear of malarial swamps, not unusual in Caribbean islands, but hardly found in company with giant “pine-trees” and, most important of all, those even larger conifers, three of which provide prominent landmarks on the island and clues to the location of the treasure pit:

The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearing, proved the wrong one. So with the second. The third rose nearly two hundred feet into the air above a clump of underwood; a giant of a vegetable, with a red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a company could have manœuvred. It was conspicuous far to sea both on the east and west, and might have been entered as a sailing mark upon the chart.

This last is without doubt a redwood tree, and though as a late president of the United States and former governor of California announced, to have seen one redwood is to have seen them all, to see one you must travel to California. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, like the one located in San Francisco Bay that was once the site of a world’s fair, is as Californian as the Golden Gate itself. It has to be; it cannot be otherwise. And that is a very American fact, is it not? Yes, Stevenson found his island where he found his bride-to-be, having pursued her across the great American continent, in California, specifically Monterey, on whose rocky shores sea lions as off Treasure Island play.

This is always news to my students, but it is not to Stevenson specialists, for some years ago there appeared Harold Francis Watson’s
Coasts of Treasure Island
. This idiosyncratic ramble is devoted to the literary background, chiefly maritime, of Stevenson’s romance, but Watson does give considerable space to a discussion of the California connection. He quotes a letter in which Stevenson admitted that the scenery in
Treasure Island
is “Californian in part,” and then goes on to attribute that scenery to Stevenson’s brief sojourn in Silverado, which inspired “the strangely shaped hills, tall pines, live oaks, fog, bright sunshine, changing vistas, poisonous green, sandy slopes, rattle-snakes, and chirping insects of Treasure Island” (160).

Watson for whatever reasons scants Monterey, but then so did Stevenson, who, having been reunited there with Fanny Osbourne,
who was in the process of detaching herself from her first husband, was not unhappy to leave a spot famous for its fogs, unhealthy for tubercular persons such as himself. In Stevenson’s account of Monterey in
Across the Plains
, he is very short in his description of the place, chiefly remarkable for always being within hearing of “the haunting presence of the ocean,” yet the following bit of landscape description hints at what was to follow: “Inshore, a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach. Here and there a lagoon, more or less brackish, attracts the birds and hunters. A rough, spotty undergrowth partially conceals the sand. The crouching, hardy, live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets—
the kind of wood for murderers to crawl among
—and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung with Spaniard’s Beard” [italics added].

As his “Gossip on Romance” indicates, Stevenson identified the genre with the power over his imagination of place, most often buildings with an ominous Gothic outline or setting, associated with historical dark doings or regarded as potential stage sets for same. Indeed, character seems always to have been secondary with him, and save for Long John Silver and a few others, most of his fictional people are one-dimensional whereas his settings are modeled in three. Jim Hawkins tells us he will never forget his first sight of Treasure Island, and that he hated it from the start:

Perhaps … it was the look of the island, with its grey, melancholy woods, and wild stone spires, and the surf that we could both see and hear foaming and thundering on the steep beach—at least, although the sun shone bright and hot, and the shore birds were fishing and crying all around us, and you would have thought any one would have been glad to get to land after being 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.

Stevenson even drew a map of Treasure Island so as to render it all the more vivid (a map that has been compared to the outline of the Monterey Peninsula), and it is frequently (as here) printed with the book itself. There, the murderers Stevenson imagined crawling through the manzanita and live-oak undergrowth became real (at least to his and our imaginations), John Silver and his cutthroats being
an omnipresent threat far greater than the rattlesnakes that, having been described, disappear from the scene.

We need not quarrel with Watson and dismiss the Silverado experience; indeed, the association of Treasure Island with gold and silver reinforces that as well as another California connection. Starting in 1849, the year before Stevenson was born, California was a place known in the eastern states and much of the rest of the world for its great quantities of gold, promising sudden and untold wealth for those lucky enough to find it. In 1872, seven years before Stevenson made his own trip west, Mark Twain published
Roughing It
—a book that Thomas Stevenson found so funny he thought the author should be condemned—which told not only of the great silver bonanza in Nevada but of the gold that could still be panned in California.

But we need to add to this the plain fact that Stevenson had never traveled to the Caribbean, apparently had no idea of the physical appearance of the islands there, and had perhaps in casual desperation substituted his memories of California. This was, after all, intended to be a book for boy readers, who are not critical about such matters, like the nutmeg trees with which Stevenson also furnishes his island, which are found in the East not the West Indies. Then too, it was his favorite author, Ballantyne, who provided his boy heroes sustenance by means of coconuts the size of baseballs, confusing what was sold by grocers with the much larger husk that contains the inner nut.

And, once again, Stevenson had before him the example of
Tom Sawyer
, which while given a setting the author clearly recalled from his youth, including a cave that was very real despite its highly romantic literary associations, was plainly preposterous as a realistic account of boyhood in Missouri circa 1845. Twain’s book was, as Andrew Lang called it, a romance, and central to that romantic element was the matter of gold. We laugh as Tom and Huck set out, with Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” in hand, to find buried treasure, but we stop laughing when we see through their startled eyes Injun Joe dig up a very real hoard of gold hidden in the haunted house.

Indeed, it is with the first appearance of Injun Joe in the graveyard that Mark Twain’s story for boys abandons its realistic depiction of village life at midcentury for an increasingly romantic tale, justifying Lang’s definition. As a result, Tom Sawyer, who starts
out acting the role of heroes abstracted from his favorite romances, ends up a hero of romance himself. It is Tom who saves Becky and himself from the cave; Tom who too late leads the crowd back to the cave to find the corpse of Injun Joe; Tom who deciphers the code and finds once again the treasure, credited to the notorious gang of Murrell, the infamous river “pirate.” How many boys, we may reasonably ask, have had such adventures, then or now? Was treasure, real treasure, ever found in Twain’s day along the banks of the Mississippi? None, we must answer, and no.

But here lies the key to the strongest connection of all between
Treasure Island
and American literature as represented by
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
. Much as Tom’s love of mischief is part and parcel of his creativeness, so his heroic deeds spring from the same source; and his counterpart, Jim Hawkins, who repeatedly disobeys the orders given by his adult companions, always by doing so saves the day, there being “an odd train of circumstances” by which “through me … safety came.” If Tom is in Leslie Fiedler’s terms a “Good Bad Boy,” then so is Jim, and in Calvinistic terms, with which Stevenson was very familiar, he is clearly in a permanent state of grace. True enough, in
The Coral Island
Ballantyne created a trio of brave and enterprising youths who act outside of adult supervision and interference, but they, unlike Tom Sawyer and Jim Hawkins, are mostly separated from the adult world, are on their own, on holiday as it were, which is what gives the book its magic.

But in Tom Sawyer and Jim Hawkins we have boys who are clearly superior to the adults with whom they are surrounded, whether villains such as Injun Joe and Long John Silver or moral arbiters such as Judge Thatcher and Doctor Livesey. In both books these adults fade into the background whence they are summoned as needed by the brave youths, who like the heroes of fairy tales are engaged in impossible adventures and are fabulously rewarded. They are fantasy boys, clearly, created, as Stevenson maintained, to give fictional flesh to the daydreams (and, as we have added, the nightmares) of real boys, putting them vicariously not only in exciting and exotic places but, most important,
in charge
. Gone are the tiresome adult mentors associated with the earliest books for boys, such as
The Swiss Family Robinson
and
Masterman Ready
, and their absence is a declaration of independence that makes way for
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, in which a boy is granted superior
moral qualities as well, against which the twisted values of the entire white adult South are measured.

This reversed perspective results in some curious inversions. The pirates, so terrible as adversaries, a nightmarish quality carried forward from Blind Pew to Israel Hands, at times seem no more threatening than a pack of wayward children, as they fall to quarreling over the implications of using a page torn from a Bible for a message of death or tremble in superstitious terror when they hear what they assume is the ghostly voice of the dead Captain Flint. These touches, which diminish the pirates to a disorganized and fractious crew, “shouting at the oars like children,” and even further vitiated by too much rum, act to give Jim further stature, culminating in his confrontation with the ferocious Hands, the conclusion of which is, like so much that happens to the hero, the result of a happy accident that leaves Jim the victor. Here again we have that fairy-tale element shared by
Treasure Island
and
Tom Sawyer
, whose young heroes are latter-day Jacks who climb the equivalent of beanstalks to destroy giants and make off with the treasure.