Treasure Island

Treasure Island begins with the narrator, Jim—who narrates in first person—taking up his pen “in the year of grace 17” (3) and recalling “the time when my father kept the ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn, and the brown old seaman with the saber cut first took up his lodging under our roof” (3). The old sea captain is described as “a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man” (3) with dirty, broken fingernails and a sword cut across one cheek. He arrives at the inn with a servant who carries his sea chest in a wheelbarrow. He asks Jim’s father for rum when he arrives and then settles into a room. He does little but hang around the cove or go to the cliffs; in the night, he sits by the fire and drinks rum. He strikes up an arrangement with Jim in which he pays Jim “a silver fourpenny on the first of every month” (6) if Jim promises to stay on the lookout for a seaman with one leg. Jim has frightening nightmares of this man with one leg. Sometimes the captain drinks “a deal more rum and water than his head would carry” (7) and sings old sea songs in the inn; sometimes he tells colorful stories of his travels on the sea.