Synopsis: An adventurous boy, Jim Hawkins, gets hold of a treasure map and sets off with an adult crew in search of buried treasure. Among the crew, however, is the treacherous Long John Silver who is determined to keep the treasure for himself.
Title: Treasure Island
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Pages: 311
Genres/Shelves: Classics, Children, Adventure
Originally Published: January 1882
This Edition: 2001 by Kingfisher
This Book on Goodreads
This Review on Goodreads
Treasure Island: the book that’s been misinforming people about pirates since the day it was published. It’s pretty impressive how many inventions of pirate culture Stevenson came up with, and how many we still take as fact today!
I was 30 pages into Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, a non-fiction book about the romanticization vs reality of pirate culture, when it started talking an awful lot about Treasure Island. I figured I should stop and read this first. I’m surprised I haven’t, with pirates being one of my favourite fascinations. For anyone curious about just how much Stevenson reshaped our “knowledge” of pirates with Treasure Island, I encourage you to read the first chapter of David Cordingly’s Under The Black Flag.
Treasure Island such a good time, and such a fun adventure, that I can see why people would believe in Stevenson’s inventions. His seafaring knowledge is so exact and he uses such technical terms to describe sailing that why wouldn’t we believe that pirates marked their treasure on a map with an X or made people walk the plank?
Not going to lie, Treasure Island is kind of hard to understand and I did struggle to break down the writing in places. I managed to eke out the main ideas from most of it, but to tell you the truth, many sentences went right over my head. I don’t think it’s because of the time, or because of the pirate talk, because I don’t have that problem reading other works from the 1800s. I felt kind of stupid about it until I read some other reviews. To think it was a children’s book back in the day. Were kids able to understand this then? I have an illustrated edition that I attempted to read many many times growing up but it was just too hard. Despite it being difficult to understand at times, as an adult it was easy to binge read because the story is so fun. The story itself not overly complicated and moves along fairly quickly.
Pure adventure fraught with treachery and murder!
Me on: YouTube | Goodreads | Instagram
4 Ships
The Book Armada 
Leave a comment