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Treasure Island - The Voyage

1. Dedicated

2. The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow

3. Black Dog Appears and Disappears

4. The Black Spot

5. The Sea-chest

6. The Last of the Blind Man

7. The Captain's Papers

8. I Go to Bristol

9. At the Sign of the Spy-glass

10. Powder and Arms

11. The Voyage

12. What I Heard in the Apple Barrel

13. Council of War

14. How My Shore Adventure Began

15. The First Blow

16. The Man of the Island

17. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: How the Ship Was Abandoned

18. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: The Jolly-boat's Last Trip

19. Narrative Continued by the Doctor: End of the First Day's Fighting

20. Narrative Resumed by Jim Hawkins: The Garrison in the Stockade

21. Silver's Embassy

22. The Attack

23. How My Sea Adventure Began

24. The Ebb-tide Runs

25. The Cruise of the Coracle

26. I Strike the Jolly Roger

27. Israel Hands

28. "Pieces of Eight"

29. In the Enemy's Camp

30. The Black Spot Again

31. On Parole

32. The Treasure-hunt--Flint's Pointer

33. The Treasure-hunt--The Voice Among the Trees

34. The Fall of a Chieftain

35. And Last







10

The Voyage

ALL that night we were in a great bustle getting things
stowed in their place, and boatfuls of the squire's
friends, Mr. Blandly and the like, coming off to wish
him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had a
night at the Admiral Benbow when I had half the work;
and I was dog-tired when, a little before dawn, the
boatswain sounded his pipe and the crew began to man
the capstan-bars. I might have been twice as weary,
yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new and
interesting to me--the brief commands, the shrill note
of the whistle, the men bustling to their places in the
glimmer of the ship's lanterns.

"Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave," cried one voice.

"The old one," cried another.

"Aye, aye, mates," said Long John, who was standing by,
with his crutch under his arm, and at once broke out in
the air and words I knew so well:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--"

And then the whole crew bore chorus:--

"Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

And at the third "Ho!" drove the bars before them with
a will.

Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old
Admiral Benbow in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice
of the captain piping in the chorus. But soon the anchor
was short up; soon it was hanging dripping at the bows;
soon the sails began to draw, and the land and shipping
to flit by on either side; and before I could lie down to
snatch an hour of slumber the HISPANIOLA had begun her
voyage to the Isle of Treasure.

I am not going to relate that voyage in detail. It was
fairly prosperous. The ship proved to be a good ship,
the crew were capable seamen, and the captain
thoroughly understood his business. But before we came
the length of Treasure Island, two or three things had
happened which require to be known.

Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the
captain had feared. He had no command among the men,
and people did what they pleased with him. But that
was by no means the worst of it, for after a day or two
at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red
cheeks, stuttering tongue, and other marks of
drunkenness. Time after time he was ordered below in
disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself; sometimes
he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of
the companion; sometimes for a day or two he would be
almost sober and attend to his work at least passably.

In the meantime, we could never make out where he got
the drink. That was the ship's mystery. Watch him as
we pleased, we could do nothing to solve it; and when
we asked him to his face, he would only laugh if he
were drunk, and if he were sober deny solemnly that he
ever tasted anything but water.

He was not only useless as an officer and a bad
influence amongst the men, but it was plain that at this
rate he must soon kill himself outright, so nobody was
much surprised, nor very sorry, when one dark night, with
a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more.

"Overboard!" said the captain. "Well, gentlemen, that
saves the trouble of putting him in irons."

But there we were, without a mate; and it was
necessary, of course, to advance one of the men. The
boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliest man aboard,
and though he kept his old title, he served in a way as
mate. Mr. Trelawney had followed the sea, and his
knowledge made him very useful, for he often took a watch
himself in easy weather. And the coxswain, Israel Hands,
was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman who could be
trusted at a pinch with almost anything.

He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so
the mention of his name leads me on to speak of our
ship's cook, Barbecue, as the men called him.

Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round
his neck, to have both hands as free as possible. It
was something to see him wedge the foot of the crutch
against a bulkhead, and propped against it, yielding to
every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking
like someone safe ashore. Still more strange was it to
see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He
had a line or two rigged up to help him across the
widest spaces--Long John's earrings, they were called;
and he would hand himself from one place to another,
now using the crutch, now trailing it alongside by the
lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet
some of the men who had sailed with him before
expressed their pity to see him so reduced.

"He's no common man, Barbecue," said the coxswain to
me. "He had good schooling in his young days and can
speak like a book when so minded; and brave--a lion's
nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapple
four and knock their heads together--him unarmed."

All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a
way of talking to each and doing everybody some
particular service. To me he was unweariedly kind, and
always glad to see me in the galley, which he kept as
clean as a new pin, the dishes hanging up burnished and
his parrot in a cage in one corner.

"Come away, Hawkins," he would say; "come and have a
yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my
son. Sit you down and hear the news. Here's Cap'n
Flint--I calls my parrot Cap'n Flint, after the famous
buccaneer--here's Cap'n Flint predicting success to our
v'yage. Wasn't you, cap'n?"

And the parrot would say, with great rapidity, "Pieces
of eight! Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!" till you
wondered that it was not out of breath, or till John
threw his handkerchief over the cage.

"Now, that bird," he would say, "is, maybe, two hundred
years old, Hawkins--they live forever mostly; and if
anybody's seen more wickedness, it must be the devil
himself. She's sailed with England, the great Cap'n
England, the pirate. She's been at Madagascar, and at
Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello.
She was at the fishing up of the wrecked plate ships.
It's there she learned 'Pieces of eight,' and little
wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of 'em,
Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the viceroy of the
Indies out of Goa, she was; and to look at her you
would think she was a babby. But you smelt powder--
didn't you, cap'n?"

"Stand by to go about," the parrot would scream.

"Ah, she's a handsome craft, she is," the cook would say,
and give her sugar from his pocket, and then the bird
would peck at the bars and swear straight on, passing
belief for wickedness. "There," John would add, "you
can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad. Here's this
poor old innocent bird o' mine swearing blue fire, and
none the wiser, you may lay to that. She would swear the
same, in a manner of speaking, before chaplain." And John
would touch his forelock with a solemn way he had that made
me think he was the best of men.

In the meantime, the squire and Captain Smollett were
still on pretty distant terms with one another. The
squire made no bones about the matter; he despised the
captain. The captain, on his part, never spoke but when
he was spoken to, and then sharp and short and dry, and
not a word wasted. He owned, when driven into a corner,
that he seemed to have been wrong about the crew, that
some of them were as brisk as he wanted to see and all
had behaved fairly well. As for the ship, he had taken
a downright fancy to her. "She'll lie a point nearer
the wind than a man has a right to expect of his own
married wife, sir. But," he would add, "all I say is,
we're not home again, and I don't like the cruise."

The squire, at this, would turn away and march up and
down the deck, chin in air.

"A trifle more of that man," he would say, "and I
shall explode."

We had some heavy weather, which only proved the
qualities of the HISPANIOLA. Every man on board
seemed well content, and they must have been hard to
please if they had been otherwise, for it is my belief
there was never a ship's company so spoiled since Noah
put to sea. Double grog was going on the least excuse;
there was duff on odd days, as, for instance, if the
squire heard it was any man's birthday, and always a
barrel of apples standing broached in the waist for
anyone to help himself that had a fancy.

"Never knew good come of it yet," the captain said to
Dr. Livesey. "Spoil forecastle hands, make devils.
That's my belief."

But good did come of the apple barrel, as you shall
hear, for if it had not been for that, we should have
had no note of warning and might all have perished by
the hand of treachery.

This was how it came about.

We had run up the trades to get the wind of the island
we were after--I am not allowed to be more plain--and
now we were running down for it with a bright lookout
day and night. It was about the last day of our
outward voyage by the largest computation; some time
that night, or at latest before noon of the morrow, we
should sight the Treasure Island. We were heading
S.S.W. and had a steady breeze abeam and a quiet sea.
The HISPANIOLA rolled steadily, dipping her
bowsprit now and then with a whiff of spray. All was
drawing alow and aloft; everyone was in the bravest
spirits because we were now so near an end of the first
part of our adventure.

Now, just after sundown, when all my work was over and
I was on my way to my berth, it occurred to me that I
should like an apple. I ran on deck. The watch was
all forward looking out for the island. The man at the
helm was watching the luff of the sail and whistling
away gently to himself, and that was the only sound
excepting the swish of the sea against the bows and
around the sides of the ship.

In I got bodily into the apple barrel, and found there
was scarce an apple left; but sitting down there in the
dark, what with the sound of the waters and the rocking
movement of the ship, I had either fallen asleep or was
on the point of doing so when a heavy man sat down with
rather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leaned
his shoulders against it, and I was just about to jump
up when the man began to speak. It was Silver's voice,
and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have
shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling
and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity, for
from these dozen words I understood that the lives of all
the honest men aboard depended upon me alone.




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