<h2><SPAN name="link2H_PART1"></SPAN> PART ONE—The Old Buccaneer </h2>
<h2><SPAN name="link2H_4_0004"></SPAN> 1 </h2>
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<h3> The Old Sea-dog at the “Admiral Benbow” </h3>
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<p>QUIRE 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 sabre
cut first took up his lodging under our roof.</p>
<p>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 tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder
of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken
nails, and the sabre cut 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:</p>
<p class="poem">
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—<br/>
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”</p>
<p class="noindent">
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.</p>
<p>“This is a handy cove,” says he at length; “and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop. Much company, mate?”</p>
<p>My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.</p>
<p>“Well, then,” said he, “this is the berth for me. Here you, matey,” he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; “bring up alongside and help up
my chest. I’ll stay here a bit,” he continued. “I’m a plain man; rum and
bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships
off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what
you’re at—there”; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the
threshold. “You can tell me when I’ve worked through that,” says he,
looking as fierce as a commander.</p>
<p>And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none
of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a
mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at
the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the
coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as
lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that
was all we could learn of our guest.</p>
<p>He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or upon
the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of the
parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he would
not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through
his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our house
soon learned to let him be. Every day when he came back from his stroll he
would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At first we
thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him ask this
question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid them. When
a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some did,
making by the coast road for Bristol) he would look in at him through the
curtained door before he entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be
as silent as a mouse when any such was present. For me, at least, there
was no secret about the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his
alarms. He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny
on the first of every month if I would only keep my “weather-eye open for
a seafaring man with one leg” and let him know the moment he appeared.
Often enough when the first of the month came round and I applied to him
for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down,
but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my
four-penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for “the seafaring man
with one leg.”</p>
<p>How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy
nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf
roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand
forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be
cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a
creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his
body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the
worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly
fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.</p>
<p>But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than
his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked,
old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call for
glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his stories
or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house shaking with
“Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum,” all the neighbours joining in for dear
life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the
other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most overriding
companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all
round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question, or sometimes
because none was put, and so he judged the company was not following his
story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he had drunk
himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.</p>
<p>His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories
they were—about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea,
and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By
his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest
men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and
put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a “true sea-dog” and a “real old salt” and such
like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.</p>
<p>In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been
long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist
on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose
so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of
the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am
sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened
his early and unhappy death.</p>
<p>All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his
dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat
having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a
great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which
he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before the end, was
nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never
spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only
when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.</p>
<p>He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor
father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late
one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and
went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down
from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him
in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with
his powder as white as snow and his bright, black eyes and pleasant
manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that
filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting, far gone in
rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he—the captain, that is—began
to pipe up his eternal song:</p>
<p class="poem">
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—<br/>
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!<br/>
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—<br/>
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”</p>
<p class="noindent">
At first I had supposed “the dead man’s chest” to be that identical big
box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in
my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time
we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was
new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did
not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite
angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a
new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually
brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the
table before him in a way we all knew to mean silence. The voices stopped
at once, all but Dr. Livesey’s; he went on as before speaking clear and
kind and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The
captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still
harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath, “Silence,
there, between decks!”</p>
<p>“Were you addressing me, sir?” says the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, “I have only one thing to
say to you, sir,” replies the doctor, “that if you keep on drinking rum,
the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”</p>
<p>The old fellow’s fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a
sailor’s clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.</p>
<p>The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as before, over his
shoulder and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the room
might hear, but perfectly calm and steady: “If you do not put that knife
this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at
the next assizes.”</p>
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<p>Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the captain soon
knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a
beaten dog.</p>
<p>“And now, sir,” continued the doctor, “since I now know there’s such a
fellow in my district, you may count I’ll have an eye upon you day and
night. I’m not a doctor only; I’m a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of
complaint against you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like
tonight’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this. Let that suffice.”</p>
<p>Soon after, Dr. Livesey’s horse came to the door and he rode away, but the
captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.</p>
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