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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 startsout 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