Starvard.Starvard.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Young Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map in a dead sailor's chest and sails off to find the gold, with a ship's cook named Long John Silver who has one leg, a parrot, and a smile you should not trust. This is the book that invented the pirate as we know him: the map marked X, the desert island, the mutiny at sea.
Jim Hawkins, an innkeeper's son, pulls a treasure map from a dead seaman's chest and sails for the island as cabin boy. The ship's cook, Long John Silver, is charming, funny, and planning a mutiny; Jim learns this hiding in an apple barrel, overhearing everything. On the island there are a stockade, a marooned sailor who has lived alone three years dreaming of cheese, and a fight for gold that nobody finds quite where they expect.
Underneath is a boy measuring grown men. The respectable squire and doctor are brave but reckless; Silver, the villain, is the most capable person aboard, and Jim cannot help admiring him. Stevenson refuses to sort people into clean piles: greed sits next to loyalty, and courage next to folly, often inside the same chest.
It set the pattern for every pirate tale since, and still moves like a drumbeat. Watch Silver closely: the book's real treasure is a character you root for and fear in the same paragraph.
Young Jim Hawkins finds a map in a dead sailor's chest, and soon he is cabin boy on a ship full of pirates, with one legged Long John Silver cooking the food and plotting the mutiny. Robert Louis Stevenson invented nearly everything we still picture about pirates, buried gold, and maps marked with an X, and he did it in one rattling adventure.
The first chapter
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
—So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:
—So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!
Source: Standard Ebooks. Published 1883. Author died 1894. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp