Treasure Island is a novel almost everyone knows something about: a sea yarn about pirates and a hunt for buried treasure on a tropical island, with a heroic young lad as narrator and protagonist. Published in 1883, it was Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s first big success and his most popular and best-selling novel. Yet it may be easy to dismiss the book as merely an adventure story for boys, especially considering that it was originally published in serialized form in a magazine called Young Folks between October 1881 and January 1882—and that its original title was The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys. Accordingly Stevenson, who was widely admired in his own time as more or less the heir of Sir Walter Scott’s tales of adventure in contrast with the giants of Victorian realism like Dickens and George Elliott, is represented on the “Greatest Books” lists that I consulted originally only by The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on the Observer’s list of the “100 Greatest World Novels,” and by his novel Kidnapped on the Guardian’s list of the “100 Greatest English Language Novels.”
Treasure Island does appear, however, as number 36 on the BBC’s 2003 “Big Read” list, as chosen by voters. The “Greatest Books of All Time” web site, which now has updated to compiling its figures from something more than 400 “Greatest Books” lists, includes Treasure Island as the 65th highest ranking novel in English. On the BBC list of the “100 Greatest Children’s Books of All Time,” Stevenson’s pirate story was ranked as number 50. It was included also earlier in 2024 on Parade’s unranked “222 Best Books of All Time That Deserve a Spot on Your Bookshelf, With Picks from Bestselling Authors and Indie Booksellers.” On a list published by the worldwide library organization OCLC, Treasure Island was ranked at number 5 in the world based on how many libraries have a copy of the book on their shelves. Most fascinating, in a list published in 2013 and compiled by the Union of Russian Writers denoting “100 Greatest Books of Classical and Modern Foreign Literature,” Treasure Island was ranked number 25. And further, in a poll by the Spanish periodical El País of the favorite books of 100 significant Spanish authors, Treasure Island was listed as number 10. I have a good deal of support, then for including Treasure Island as number 81 on my own list of the “100 Most Lovable Novels in the English Language.”
The novel opens on the Devon coast of England, sometime in the late 18th century, where young Jim Hawkins helps his parents run the Admiral Benbow inn. When a rough looking old seaman takes a room in the inn, most people are afraid of him. He drinks a great deal of rum and overstays his welcome and neglects to pay for his bed and board. Jim, however, calling him “the captain,” remains on fairly friendly terms with him, until the captain is visited by another old seaman, Black Dog, a one-time mate of the captain, whose name is revealed as Billy Bones. The visit upsets the captain so that he suffers a stroke. Dr. Livesey, who is tending Jim’s ailing father, tells the captain he must quit the rum or the next stroke will kill him. Bones’ drinking continues, and one night in his cups he tells Jim he is a former mate of the notorious pirate Captain Flint and has Flint’s treasure map in his sea trunk. And he urges Jim to keep a lookout for a one-legged seaman who he fears will come looking for him.
Jim’s father dies soon after, and no one-legged man shows up looking for Billy Bones. But a blind beggar comes looking for him, who is another former pirate named Pew, and who delivers into Billy’s hand a paper with a black spot—a sign he has been convicted by his former pirate band. Stunned with fear, Bones has another stoke and dies. Knowing that the pirates will be coming to get Billy at the inn, Jim and his mother go through Bones’ sea chest, and take the money Billy owes the inn as well as a packet of papers. They flee and hide outside the inn as they hear the pirates approaching. The band of pirates, directed by Pew, rifle through the sea-chest and turn their attention to the inn itself, but clearly cannot find what they are searching for. When they leave the inn to look for the boy and his mother, assuming they have got away with their desired prize, Jim and his mother shrink in fear, but the pirates are frightened off by the sound of approaching horses, and blind Pew is trampled to death.
Correctly assuming that the pirates were after the packet he has taken from Billy’s sea-chest, Jim takes the packet to Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawny, and in it they discover Flint’s treasure map of a small south sea isle named Skeleton Island. They soon decide to use the map to seek out the untold riches that must be buried on that island. Trelawny buys a ship, hires a captain, and begins putting together a crew, though he is so loose-tongued that all the seamen in Portsmouth are soon aware of the “secret” of the treasure hunt. And he is unwittingly convinced to hire a number of Flint’s old crew, including a one-legged cook who is in fact the leader of the pirate band, Long John Silver.
On the voyage to Skeleton Island, Jim acts as cabin boy and is often under Silver’s eye. One day, having climbed into a large barrel to get one of the apples at its bottom, Jim overhears Silver plotting with some of his mates to steal the treasure for themselves, and convincing one of the honest hands to join them. I won’t describe the later parts of the novel in detail, so as not to create any spoilers to this lively adventure as mutiny looms and as Jim, Dr. Livesey, Squire Trelawny, and Captain Smollet struggle against the pirates’ superior numbers—aided by Ben Gunn, another survivor from Flint’s crew, who has been marooned for years on the island.
While chiefly an entertaining adventure tale, Treasure Island is also a thoughtful coming of age story. Jim’s father having died, he spends the bulk of the novel looking for a father figure. Two unsatisfactory possibilities are Billy Bones, whose drunkenness and bullying make him unattractive, and Squire Trelawney, whose foolish gossiping and mistaken self-confidence disqualify him as a potential father figure. The two most significant such figures for Jim are Dr. Livesey, whose courage, wisdom, common sense and intellectual prowess inspire Jim’s admiration, and Long John Silver. Silver is the most colorful and memorable character in the novel, and is indeed one of the great and most immediately recognizable figures in world literature. His charisma wins Jim’s admiration, his command of the pirate crew displays the power of his personality, and his protection of Jim against the other pirates wins the readers’ sympathy despite his ruthlessness at other times. Jim, who begins the novel as a frightened lad, develops courage and resourcefulness and independence in part at least through Silver’s example, for he also takes some foolish chances and deserts the Captain at one point, perhaps following that same role model.
Stevenson found his inspiration in a number of sources, having taken the idea of the marooned sailor from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Sir Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1822) and Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveller (1824) also contributed to the genre, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug” supplied the idea of the secret map leading to buried pirate’s treasure. But the influence of Treasure Island itself has been more widespread than any of these. Every pirate story conceived since Stevenson, from Peter Pan to Pirates of the Caribbean, owes its very existence to Treasure Island. There have been more than fifty film or television adaptations of the novel, beginning with a silent film in 1918. The two most memorable versions may be the 1934 film that starred Wallace Beery as Silver and child star Jackie Cooper as Jim, and the 1950 Disney version (Disneys first all live-action film) starring Robert Newton as Silver. Orson Welles played Silver in a 1972 film, and Charlton Heston did so, supported by Oliver Reed, Christian Bale, and Christopher Lee, in a 1990 TNT television film. There have been a good number of foreign language films as well, interestingly several Russian versions. There have also been at least 24 major stage adaptations since 1915, several of them musicals. So even if you haven’t actually read the book, it’s unlikely you’re unfamiliar with the story. But I recommend you read the actual novel to see what all the fuss has been about.