Treasure Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

to the daydreams (and, as we have added, the nightmares) of real boys, putting them vicariously not only in exciting and exotic places but, most important,
in charge
. Gone are the tiresome adult mentors associated with the earliest books for boys, such as
The Swiss Family Robinson
and
Masterman Ready
, and their absence is a declaration of independence that makes way for
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, in which a boy is granted superiormoral qualities as well, against which the twisted values of the entire white adult South are measured.
    This reversed perspective results in some curious inversions. The pirates, so terrible as adversaries, a nightmarish quality carried forward from Blind Pew to Israel Hands, at times seem no more threatening than a pack of wayward children, as they fall to quarreling over the implications of using a page torn from a Bible for a message of death or tremble in superstitious terror when they hear what they assume is the ghostly voice of the dead Captain Flint. These touches, which diminish the pirates to a disorganized and fractious crew, “shouting at the oars like children,” and even further vitiated by too much rum, act to give Jim further stature, culminating in his confrontation with the ferocious Hands, the conclusion of which is, like so much that happens to the hero, the result of a happy accident that leaves Jim the victor. Here again we have that fairy-tale element shared by
Treasure Island
and
Tom Sawyer
, whose young heroes are latter-day Jacks who climb the equivalent of beanstalks to destroy giants and make off with the treasure.
    For his part, Stevenson seems to have retreated from this radical standpoint in later adventure stories. Mark Twain’s fiction became humorless and bitter and his subsequent sequels to
Tom Sawyer
were failures, while Stevenson eventually abandoned sheer fantasy for realism, and, as in
Kidnapped
, his youthful heroes become relatively passive, abstractions from those indecisive young men given pattern by Scott’s Waverley novels. Ironically, as he became more sure of his landscapes, giving his stories distinctly British (or Scottish) settings, Stevenson began to diminish the rebellious element in his young narrator-heroes. Let me say without prejudice that they became less American.
    It would be Kipling who picked up the theme of the strong-willed youth. In
Captains Courageous
he told the story of a spoiled American rich boy converted to the Puritan doctrine of hard work by a tough Yankee captain; and, more importantly, in
Kim
he gave a distinctly British coloration to
Tom Sawyer, Detective
, the hero being a boy who does not play games derived from literature but plays the Great Game, not cricket but espionage derived from geopolitical antagonisms between Great Britain and Russia over the borderlands of India. It is not I think too much to claim that inKipling’s Kim the idea of James Bond was born. But given Stevenson’s priority, this British paternity must be accorded its true origins in Jim Hawkins, that marvelous boy who ever and again saves the day and navigates through the most dangerous waters unharmed, as if watched over by a benevolent Providence, which brings us back once again to Fenimore Cooper and
    The End

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
    Collected Works
    Robert Louis Stevenson
. 26 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909.
    Secondary Studies
    Balfour, Graham.
The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. 2
vols. London: Methuen, 1901.
    Bell, Ian.
Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, a Biography
. New York: Holt, 1993.
    Eigner, Edwin M.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Romantic Tradition
. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.
    Furnas, J. C.
Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
. London: Faber & Faber, 1952.
    Kiely, Robert.
Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.
    McLynn, Frank.
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography
. New York: Random