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STUDIO/AGENTS: The
Foundation are developing (adapting) this story to a screenplay
Treasure
Island was written by Robert Louis Stevenson, becoming an instant hit,
popular with children and adults, the subject of many films and graphic
novels.
There
are many islands, especially in the Caribbean, where pirates and privateers
have buried their treasure to keep it safe from other plunderer's and thieves,
including kings and queens, looking to enrich their treasuries the easiest way of all,
by stealing from the pirates. Finally, going into business with the pirates,
granting them license to rob other ships at sea as privateers.
TREASURE
ISLAND
Treasure Island was originally titled 'The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys' is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, telling a story of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action.
The novel was originally serialised from 1881 to 1882 in the children's magazine Young Folks, under the title Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola, credited to the pseudonym "Captain George North". It was first published as a book on 14 November 1883 by Cassell & Co. It has since become one of the most often dramatized and adapted of all novels, in numerous media.
Since its publication, Treasure Island has had significant influence on depictions of pirates in popular culture, including such elements as deserted tropical islands, treasure maps marked with an "X", and one-legged seamen with parrots perched on their shoulders.
The plot is set in the mid-18th century, where an old sailor named Billy Bones starts to lodge at the rural Admiral Benbow Inn on England's Bristol Channel. He tells the innkeeper's son, Jim Hawkins, to keep a lookout for "a one-legged seafaring man". A former shipmate named Black Dog confronts Bones and they get into a fight, causing Black Dog to flee. A blind beggar named Pew then visits the inn, delivering a summons to Bones called "the black spot". Shortly thereafter, Bones suffers a stroke and dies. Pew and his accomplices attack the inn, but are routed by excise officers, and Pew is trampled to death. Jim and his mother escape with a mysterious packet from Bones' sea chest, which is found to contain a map of an island on which the infamous pirate Captain Flint hid his treasure. Jim shows the map to the local physician Dr. Livesey and the squire John Trelawney, and they decide to make an expedition to the island, with Jim serving as a cabin boy.
They set sail on Trelawney's schooner, the Hispaniola, under Captain Smollett and Jim forms a strong bond with the ship's one-legged cook, Long John Silver. The crew suffers tragedy when first mate Mr. Arrow, a drunkard, is washed overboard during a storm. While hidden in an apple-barrel, Jim overhears a conversation among the Hispaniola's crew which reveals that many of them are pirates who had served on Captain Flint's ship, the Walrus, with Silver leading them. They plan to mutiny after the salvage of the treasure, and to murder the captain and the few remaining loyal crew.
Arriving at the island, Jim joins the shore party and they begin to explore. He meets a marooned pirate named Ben Gunn, who is also a former member of Flint's crew. The mutineers arm themselves and take the ship while Smollett's loyal men take refuge in an abandoned stockade on the island. After a brief truce, the mutineers attack them, with casualties on both sides of the battle. Jim makes his way to the Hispaniola and cuts the ship from its anchor, drifting it along the ebb tide. He boards the Hispaniola and encounters the pirate Israel Hands, who had been injured in a drunken dispute with one of his companions. Hands helps Jim beach the schooner in the northern bay, then attempts to kill Jim with a knife, but Jim shoots him dead with two pistols.
Jim goes ashore and returns to the stockade, where he is horrified to find only Silver and the pirates. Silver tells Jim that when everyone found the ship was gone, Captain Flint's party had agreed to a truce whereby they take the map and allow the besieged party to leave. In the morning, Livesey arrives to treat the wounded and sick pirates and tells Silver to look out for trouble once he's found the site of the treasure. After a dispute over leadership, Silver and the others set out with the map, taking Jim along as a hostage. They find a skeleton with its arms oriented toward the treasure, unnerving the party. Scaring the crew, Ben Gunn shouts Captain Flint's last words from the forest, making the pirates believe that Flint's ghost is haunting the island. They eventually find the treasure cache, but it is empty. The pirates prepare to kill Silver and Jim, but they are ambushed by the officers along with Gunn. Livesey explains that Gunn had already found the treasure and taken it to his cave long ago. The expedition members load a portion of the treasure onto the Hispaniola and depart the island, with Silver as a prisoner. At their first port, in Spanish America, Silver steals a bag of money and escapes. The rest of them sail back to Bristol and divide up the treasure. Still, Jim says that there is more left on the island, but he will not undertake another voyage to claim it.
CONCEPT
Stevenson conceived the idea for the novel based on a map of an imaginary, romantic island which he drew with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, during a holiday in Braemar, Scotland in the summer of 1881. He had clearly started work by 25 August, writing to a friend, "If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the Admiral Benbow public house on the Devon coast, that it's all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship... It's quite silly and horrid fun – and what I want is the best book about Buccaneers that can be had".Jim Hawkins: The narrator of most of the novel. Jim is the son of an innkeeper near Bristol, England, and appears to be in his mid-teens. He is eager to go to sea and hunt for treasure. Jim consistently displays courage and heroism, but is also sometimes impulsive and impetuous. He exhibits increasing sensitivity and wisdom as the journey progresses.
Stevenson originally gave the book the title The Sea Cook. One month after conceiving of the book, chapters began to appear in the pages of the Young Folks magazine. After completing fifteen or nineteen chapters rapidly, Stevenson was interrupted by illness; he left Scotland and continued working on the first draft near London, where he and his father discussed points of the tale, and his father suggested elements that he included. The novel eventually ran in seventeen weekly instalments from October 1, 1881, to January 28, 1882. The book was later republished as the novel Treasure Island and proved to be Stevenson's first financial and critical success. The Liberal politician William Ewart Gladstone, who served four terms as British Prime Minister between 1868 and 1894, was one of the book's biggest fans.
Two general types of sea novels were popular during the 19th century: the navy yarn, which places a capable officer in adventurous situations amid realistic settings and historical events, and the desert island romance, which features shipwrecked or marooned characters confronted by treasure-seeking pirates or angry natives. Around 1815, the latter genre became one of the most popular fictional styles in Great Britain, perhaps because of the philosophical interest in Rousseau and Chateaubriand's "noble savage". Treasure Island was a climax of this development. The growth of the desert island genre can be traced back to 1719 when
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published. A century later, novels such as S. H. Burney's The Shipwreck (1816), and Sir Walter Scott's The Pirate (1822) continued to expand upon Defoe's classic. Other authors, in the mid-19th century, continued this trend, with works including James Fenimore Cooper's The Pilot (1823). During the same period, Edgar Allan Poe wrote, "MS Found in a Bottle" (1833) and "The Gold-Bug" (1843). All of these works influenced Stevenson's end product.
Stevenson also consciously borrowed material from previous authors. In a July 1884 letter to Sidney Colvin, he wrote that "Treasure Island came out of Kingsley's At Last, where I got the Dead Man's Chest
- and that was the seed - and out of the great Captain Johnson's History of the Notorious Pirates". Stevenson also admits that he took the idea of Captain Flint's pointing skeleton from Poe's The Gold-Bug and he constructed Billy Bones' history from the "Money-Diggers" section ("Golden Dreams" in particular) of Tales of a Traveller by Washington Irving, one of his favorite writers.
Half of Stevenson's manuscripts are lost, including those of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, and The Master of Ballantrae. Stevenson's heirs sold his papers during World War I; many of his documents were auctioned off in 1918.
MAIN
CHARACTERS
Long John Silver: The one-legged cook aboard the
Hispaniola. Silver is the secret leader of the pirates. He is deceitful and greedy, but also charismatic, and his physical and mental strength are impressive. He is kind toward Jim and appears genuinely fond of him. Silver was based in part on Stevenson's friend and mentor William Ernest Henley.
Dr. David Livesey: A doctor and magistrate; he narrates a few chapters of the novel. He exhibits common sense and rationality, and is fair-minded, treating wounded pirates just as he does his own comrades. Some years prior to the events of the novel, he had participated in the Battle of Fontenoy, during which he was wounded in action.
Captain Alexander Smollett: The captain of the Hispaniola. He is savvy and is rightly suspicious of the crew that Trelawney hires. Smollett is a real professional, taking his job seriously and displaying skill as a negotiator. Smollett believes in rules and does not like Jim's disobedience, but later in the novel states that he and Jim shouldn't go to sea together again as Jim was too much of the born favourite for him.
Squire John Trelawney: A wealthy landowner who arranges the voyage to the island. He is too trusting and is duped by Silver into hiring pirates as the ship's crew.
Billy Bones: An old seaman who resides at the Admiral Benbow Inn. He used to be Flint's first mate, and is surly and rude. He exhorts Jim to be on the lookout for a one-legged man. A treasure map in his possession set the events of the novel in motion.
Ben Gunn: A former member of Captain Flint's crew who was found on Treasure Island, having been marooned there by Flint's crew several years earlier. He is described as being "insane", at least partially, and has a craving for cheese.
Ben
Gunn - Marooned pirate
Billy
Bones - Former mate of Captain Flint
Black
Dog - Pirate
Blind
Pew - Pirate
Captain
Alexander Smollett - Hispaniola captain
Captain
Joseph Flint - Deceased pirate, owner of buried treasure chest and map
Doctor
David Livesey - Medical man and magistrate
Jim
Hawkins - Cabin boy
Job
Anderson - Ship's boatswain
Israel
Hands - Ship's coxwain, mate of Captain Flint
Long
John Silver
Squire
John Trelawney
STORY
DEVELOPMENT BASED OF REAL LIFE EVENTS
Historian Luis Junco suggests that Treasure Island is a combination of the story of the murder of Captain George Glas on board the Earl of Sandwich in 1765 and the taking of the ship Walrus off the island of La Graciosa near Tenerife. The pirates of La Graciosa buried their treasure there, and were subsequently all killed in a bloody battle with the British navy; the treasure was never recovered.
In his book Pirates of the Carraigin, David Kelly deals with the piracy and murder of Captain Glas and others on board a ship travelling from Tenerife to London by the Ship's Cook and his gang. The perpetrators of this crime also buried the considerable treasure they had stolen but most of it was later recovered. They were all executed in Dublin in 1766. In his research, Kelly showed that Stevenson was a neighbour of the named victim in Edinburgh, and so was aware from an early age of these events, which had been a scandal at the time. Stevenson and his family were members of a church congregation set up by the victim's father. Although he never visited Ireland, Stevenson based at least two other books, Kidnapped and Catriona on real crimes that were perpetrated in Dublin; these crimes were all reported in detail in The Gentleman's Magazine, published in Dublin and Edinburgh.
In the semi-official prequel story Porto Bello Gold by Arthur D. Howden Smith, Ben Gunn was the servant of captain Andrew "Rip-Rap" Murray, Flint's associate and the mastermind behind the capture of the treasure ship Santissima Trinidad, whence the buried treasure was taken. Murray described Ben Gunn as a "half-wit" whom he kept as servant specifically because he considered him intellectually incapable of treachery. After Flint's crew killed Murray and overpowered his crew, Ben Gunn went to serve Flint and fled the Walrus in Savannah after Flint's death.
According to The Adventures of Ben Gunn, he was Nic Allardyce's servant and friend from back home.
OTHER ALLUSIONS TO REAL PIRACY AS STORY
STEERAGE
Five real-life pirates mentioned are William Kidd (active 1696–99), Blackbeard (1716–18), Edward England (1717–20), Howell Davis (1718–19), and Bartholomew Roberts (1718–22). Kidd buried treasure on Gardiners Island, though the booty was recovered by authorities soon afterwards.
The name "Israel Hands" was taken from that of a real pirate in Blackbeard's crew, whom Blackbeard maimed (by shooting him in the knee) simply to ensure that his crew remained in terror of him. Allegedly, Hands was taken ashore to be treated for his injury and was not at Blackbeard's last fight (the incident is depicted in Tim Powers' novel On Stranger Tides), and this alone saved him from the gallows. Supposedly, he later became a beggar in England.
Silver refers to "three hundred and fifty thousand" pieces of eight at the "fishing up of the wrecked plate ships". This remark conflates two related events: first, the salvage of treasure from the 1715 Treasure Fleet which was wrecked off the coast of Florida in a hurricane; second, the seizure of 350,000 salvaged pieces of eight the following year (out of several million) by privateer Henry Jennings. This event is mentioned in the introduction to Johnson's General History of the Pyrates.
Silver refers to a ship's surgeon from Roberts' crew who amputated his leg and was later hanged at Cape Coast Castle, a British fortification on the Gold Coast of Africa. The records of the trial of Roberts' men list Peter Scudamore as the chief surgeon of Roberts' ship Royal Fortune. Scudamore was found guilty of willingly serving with Roberts' pirates and various related criminal acts, as well as attempting to lead a rebellion to escape once he had been apprehended. He was, as Silver relates, hanged, in 1722.
Stevenson refers to the Viceroy of the Indies, a ship sailing from Goa, India (then a Portuguese colony), which was taken by Edward England off Malabar while John Silver was serving aboard England's ship the Cassandra. No such exploit of England's is known, nor any ship by the name of the Viceroy of the Indies. However, in April 1721, the captain of the Cassandra, John Taylor (originally England's second in command who had marooned him for being insufficiently ruthless), together with his pirate partner, Olivier Levasseur, captured the vessel Nostra Senhora do Cabo near Réunion island in the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese galleon was returning from Goa to Lisbon with the Conde da Ericeira, the recently retired Viceroy of Portuguese India, aboard. The viceroy had much of his treasure with him, making this capture one of the richest pirate hauls ever. This is possibly the event that Stevenson referred to, though his (or Silver's) memory of the event seems to be slightly confused. The Cassandra was last heard of in 1723 at Portobelo, Panama, a place that also briefly figures in Treasure Island as "Portobello".
The preceding two references are inconsistent, as the Cassandra (and presumably Silver) was in the Indian Ocean during the time that Scudamore was surgeon on board the Royal Fortune, in the Gulf of Guinea.
A real life 1800s smuggling gang, the "Benbow Brandy Men", operated out of the Benbow pub in Penzance, smuggling gin, brandy, and tobacco to avoid paying the massive import taxes imposed by the Crown to fund its foreign wars
PART ONE - The Old Buccaneer
1. The Old Sea-dog at the “Admiral Benbow”
2. Black Dog Appears and Disappears
3. The Black Spot
4. The Sea-chest
5. The Last of the Blind Man
6. The Captain’s Papers
PART TWO - The Sea-cook
7. I Go to Bristol
8. At the Sign of the Spy-glass
9. Powder and Arms
10. The Voyage
11. What I Heard in the Apple Barrel
12. Council of War
PART THREE - My Shore Adventure
13. How My Shore Adventure Began
14. The First Blow
15. The Man of the Island
PART FOUR - The Stockade
16. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: How the Ship Was Abandoned
17. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: The Jolly-boat’s Last Trip
18. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: End of the First Day’s Fighting
19. Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins: The Garrison in the Stockade
20. Silver’s Embassy
21. The Attack
PART FIVE - My Sea Adventure
22. How My Sea Adventure Began
23. The Ebb-tide Runs
24. The Cruise of the Coracle
25. I Strike the Jolly Roger
26. Israel Hands
27. “Pieces of Eight”
PART SIX - Captain Silver
28. In the Enemy’s Camp
29. The Black Spot Again
30. On Parole
31. The Treasure-hunt - Flint’s Pointer
32. The Treasure-hunt - The Voice Among the Trees
33. The Fall of a Chieftain
34. And Last
STUDIO/AGENTS: A draft script for
Kulo-Luna is available on request. Cleopatra The Mummy is currently under
development
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