Treasure Island
When young Jim Hawkins finds a pirate’s treasure map at his family’s inn, he sets sail for a distant island. But the ship’s cook, Long John Silver, has plans of his own, and Jim must decide whom to trust.
Why we recommend it
Jim’s account invites readers to track clues, weigh characters’ motives, and notice how a narrator shapes what we know. The nautical vocabulary builds word knowledge in context, while Jim’s choices open up discussion about courage, loyalty, and trust.
Start of the book
Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sword wound first took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his sticky pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sword wound across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest— Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
in the high, old, tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.
“This is a handy cove,” he said at last; “and a pleasant, well-situated bar. Much company, mate?”
My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.
