Treasure Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 beingan 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