2 Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island as Anti–Adventure Story

Nineteenth-century adventure stories often invite their audience to admire and emulate the figure George Santayana has dubbed “the schoolboy master of the world” (quoted in Richards 74). The Victorians themselves recognized that Robinson Crusoe (1719) inspired a cascade of texts that set authoritative boys loose on unsuspecting islands. In his 1888 survey Juvenile Literature as It Is, Edward Salmon opens his chapter on boys’ books by mentioning Defoe’s tale, and attempts to unpack the secret of its appeal in his conclusion. “The chief charm of a supreme figure, like that of Robinson Crusoe,” he opines, “is that it constitutes an ideal. Unless the hero dominates every situation, the story loses for boys its directness…. The whole body of successful boys’ literature cannot be more concisely described than as a vast system of hero-worship” (217). Anticipating Rose, Salmon suggests that the appealing autonomy of the plucky boy adventurer is often enhanced by the fact that he is allowed to tell his own tale. Master of his fate, unchallenged narrator of his own life story: the spectacular potency of characters like R. M. Ballantyne’s Ralph Rover and W. H. G. Kingston’s Mark Seaworth encourages boy readers to believe that a juvenile crewmate—however young and inexperienced he may be—can function as an invaluable collaborator in the important work of taming the unruly world outside England.

It has long been taken for granted that Treasure Island stands as an exemplar of this sort of story. For those who admire the genre, Treasure Island is not just a typical boys’ book but “the best of boys’ books” (Meredith 730), not just an adventure yarn but “one of the most satisfying adventure stories ever told” (Kiely 68). Those who object to the imperialistic tendencies of the Robinsonade likewise consider Treasure Island a classic specimen. Joseph Bristow asserts that Stevenson’s story brings this “tried-and-tested genre” to perfection by presenting its young hero as a masterful figure who performs the lion’s share both of the narration and of the daring deeds that ensure the success of the gentlemen’s quest (95).¹Close This argument is enabled by the fact that the prefatory poem Stevenson affixes to Treasure Island—addressed “To the Hesitating Purchaser”—promises that the tale that follows will offer “all the old romance, retold / Exactly in the ancient way” of “Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, / Or Cooper of the wood and wave” (xxx). And indeed, as numerous critics have demonstrated, Stevenson borrows many incidents from the work of these unabashedly imperialist authors, including the triumphant scene in which Jim Hawkins manages to pilot the ship back into the island harbor almost single-handedly.²Close This episode, which is lifted directly out of The Coral Island, seems to exemplify the urge to characterize the boy hero as a supremely commanding figure.

But although Treasure Island’s status as an energizing myth of empire has become a critical commonplace, the novel can more plausibly be read as an anti–adventure story. Rather than encouraging youngsters to seek out wealth and glory overseas, Stevenson depicts the project of draining foreign lands of riches as terrifying, traumatizing, and ethically problematic, a move that is fully in keeping with the “anti-imperialist sentiment” that critics have begun to discern in his later work (Rothstein 12). As I will demonstrate, the classic elements of the Robinsonade remain in place, but only to be parodied, deflated, or subversively transformed. Moreover, Stevenson’s critique extends past content to form; he exposes flattery as the key narrative technique adult storytellers employ to seduce boys into going along with imperialist schemes. Whereas typical desert island romances curry favor with child readers by portraying their young protagonists as the monarchs of all they survey, Stevenson gives the lie to such fantasies of potency. Moments in which Jim triumphs in the traditional way are inevitably followed by ones that undermine the idea that he functions as an autonomous agent and empowered colleague. Over and over again, the reader is forced to recognize Jim’s essential passivity and vulnerability, and thus to distrust the moments when the narrative shifts back into its sycophantic, adulatory mode.

The opening poem, then, represents the first of many moments when the reader is suckered into believing that he is reading a classic adventure story, only to realize afterward that he—like Jim—has been seduced and betrayed by a silver-tongued stranger who is out to make a profit. Hoping to ensnare the “Hesitating Purchaser,” Stevenson delicately flatters his potential readers by wondering in the first stanza whether the traditional trappings of the quest romance “Can please, as me they pleased of old / The wiser youngsters of to-day” (xxx). Glib, greedy adults who compliment children cannot be trusted, a lesson Jim learns in his encounters with the “obsequious” Long John (186). Tellingly, Silver and other sly adults take Jim in by addressing him as an equal, promising to tell him the truth, and portraying him as a hero, the very strategies authors of boys’ adventure stories routinely employed in their effort to appeal to child readers. Treasure Island thus warns children to beware of the treachery of adult storytellers, especially those who court children by pretending to treat them as powerful allies. Jim’s most upsetting experiences attest to the pain of realizing that you are not a collaborator but a pawn in someone else’s game: rather than functioning as a self-determining agent, you have been co-opted into complying with the plans of a “partner” who turns out to be stronger, smarter, and far more cunning than you are.

Treasure Island thus grapples with the very problem that proponents of the colonization paradigm claim children’s fiction ignores: the power imbalance that complicates the adult author–child reader relationship. As the Victorians themselves recognized, the act of addressing children often entails a desire to influence, mold, or manipulate them, and the difference in age and status that divides writer from addressee(s)—a unique feature of the genre—raises the possibility that narrative might exert a coercive force. Knowing that Empire enthusiasts were making a play for the hearts and minds of young readers, Stevenson presents the cautionary tale of a boy whose cooperation is conscripted by a parade of grasping grown-ups who “speak like … book[s]” (54). Like Craik and company, he does not employ a youthful narrator in order to deny the presence and power of adults and secure the child reader’s unreflective identification with his hero. On the contrary, he presents his audience with the negative example of a boy who fails to evade the pressure of adult influence: his child protagonist ultimately functions as a helpless parrot, whose pained passivity incites child readers to act as artful dodgers—to see through the seductive propaganda of books that urge them to take part in the project of imperialist expansion.

A key feature of the desert island romance is that it glamorizes the act of exploration. Ralph Rover, the aptly (nick)named hero of The Coral Island, opens his story by declaring:

Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion, the joy of my heart, the very sunshine of my existence. In childhood, in boyhood, and in man’s estate, I have been a rover; not a mere rambler among the woody glens and upon the hill-tops of my own native land, but an enthusiastic rover throughout the length and breadth of the wide, wide world. (9)

“Enthusiastic” is an understatement. Before setting out on his journey, Ralph relates, “my heart glowed ardently within me as [the seamen I knew] recounted their wild adventures in foreign lands”—exciting yarns that inspire him to go to sea as well (12). After boarding the vessel that is to carry him to the South Seas, Ralph exclaims, “Oh, how my heart bounded with delight!” (15). Even being shipwrecked cannot quench his cheerfulness; as he looks around the eponymous island, he observes, “my heart expanded more and more with an exulting gladness, the like of which I had never felt before” (47–48). It is no wonder that Ralph compares his life abroad to “a delightful dream” (15). During his sojourn on the island, he and his two young mates mount successful expeditions, make discoveries, solve problems, and rescue themselves from sharks, savages, and pirates. Eventually they commandeer a ship and sail home, none the worse for their hair-raising experiences. Indeed, Ralph concludes that he has spent “the happiest months [of] my life on that Coral Island” (272).

Ralph’s exciting chronicle seems calculated to produce the same effect on boy readers that the sailors’ stories had on him: to inspire them to venture out into the world that has afforded him such intense and various pleasures. In contrast, Treasure Island recasts roving as the stuff of nightmare. Rather than dwelling happily on the hero’s bounding, glowing heart, the early chapters attest to Jim’s rapidly escalating anxiety as a parade of fierce, mutilated seamen intrudes on his father’s inn: “I was very uneasy and alarmed” (9); “I was in mortal fear” (15); “I was so utterly terrified” (17); “I jumped in my skin for terror” (19). Indeed, as Harold Frances Watson notes, Treasure Island “opens with one nightmare and closes with another” (129), and both these moments attest to the horror of being conscripted as a pawn in someone else’s game. Whereas the typical hero of the desert island romance feels an inner compulsion to go to sea—often against the wishes of his family—Jim expresses no such desire. Instead, he is co-opted into participating in an adult’s affair when the scarred old sailor Billy Bones takes him aside and instructs him to look out for “a seafaring man with one leg” (3).

Far from expressing any excitement or pleasure about being included in Bones’s business, Jim is “so terrified” of the thought of the one-legged man that he begins having terrible nightmares, which he famously describes at some length (3).³Close Like his jolly counterparts in The Coral Island, Bones recounts his various adventures at sea, but these “dreadful stories” do not inflame Jim with a longing to follow in the sailor’s footsteps (4). Thus, when the treasure map surfaces, it is Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney who are “filled … with delight” at the prospect of setting out in search of the prize (34). Standing by silently as the adults enthuse, Jim once again finds himself drafted into someone else’s scheme: “‘Hawkins shall come as cabin-boy,’” the squire decrees, and the doctor accepts for Jim, declaring, “‘I’ll go with you; and … so will Jim’” (34).

Moreover, it soon becomes clear that Jim was right to be cautious, because his adventures abroad prove just as upsetting as the “abominable fancies” that disturb his sleep (3). Whereas Ralph’s happy experiences on the Coral Island encourage him to continue roving for the rest of his life, Jim is so traumatized by his excursion that he decides never to roam again. In the final lines of the novel, he admits that although the island still holds hidden treasure, “oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!’” (191). This is hardly a conclusion that encourages young people to journey out into the world to make their fortunes. Of the twenty-six men who set out on the quest, Jim reminds us, only five have returned alive—hardly encouraging odds. One might expect that this drastic reduction would make each surviving crewmate fabulously rich. But Stevenson resolutely undercuts the squire’s exultant prediction that the quest will bring the men “money to eat—to roll in—to play duck and drake with ever after” (34). Ben Gunn, the man who discovers the cache, manages to fritter his share away “in three weeks, or, to be more exact, in nineteen days, for he was back begging on the twentieth” (191). As for the rest, the cursory account Jim gives of how his shipmates dispose of their money does not suggest that their lives have been radically transformed. Abraham Gray, for example, manages to become part-owner of a ship—but only after he “saved his money [and] studied his profession” (191).

In other words, rather than romanticizing the quest for money, Stevenson suggests that it is simply not worthwhile to engage in such dangerous, greed-driven forays. His portrayal of the treasure itself drives home this point. To begin with, he organizes his narrative in such as way as to deprive readers of the pleasure of discovery. The frenzied scene in which Jim and the pirates follow the map to the treasure site ends in “horrid disappointment” (184); the gold is gone, having been discovered months earlier by Ben Gunn. It is hard to imagine a more anticlimactic end to a novel built around a treasure hunt. Moreover, when Jim finally gets to see the cache that has been squirreled away by Gunn, the description he gives of it attests not to the romance of money but to the terrible human cost involved in its accumulation:

I beheld great heaps of coin and quadrilaterals built of bars of gold. That was Flint’s treasure that we had come so far to seek, and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the amassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell. (185)⁴Close

Just as the silver fourpenny Billy Bones pays Jim to look out for the one-legged man does not make up for the nightmares this task triggers, the treasure in no way mitigates the widespread misery it engenders. Indeed, the trauma Jim has undergone seems to have rendered him incapable of enjoying his prize; as a number of critics have noted, he says nothing whatever about how he spends his share. Rather than representing the act of roaming the world as the surest path to pleasure and profit, Stevenson strongly implies that roving damages and depletes young men. Venturing abroad has put Jim into the same category as the scarred souls who arrive at the inn at the start of the story: maimed men, haunted by their violent pasts.

I have begun by discussing the beginning and end of Treasure Island, but these are not the only sections of the novel that broadcast Stevenson’s determination to depart from the traditional Robinsonade formula. After the doctor and squire begin to make arrangements for the journey, it is true, Stevenson allows his hero a period of “charming anticipation” during which he fantasizes about the classic pleasures of imperial adventuring: “I approached that island in my fancy, from every possible direction; I explored every acre of its surface; I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spy-glass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us” (36). Immediately afterward, however, Jim admits that his “actual adventures” bore no resemblance to these pleasant fancies; they were not exhilarating but “tragic” and terrifying (36).⁵Close The long-anticipated act of approaching the island proves sickening rather than exciting. Having just overheard Silver’s murderous plan to take over the ship, Jim admits “my heart sank … into my boots; and from that first look onward, I hated the very thought of Treasure Island” (69).

Moreover, as the novel unfolds, every single aspect of Jim’s fantasy fails to come true, thus invalidating the common critical claim that Treasure Island “fulfill[s] the ‘sea-dreams’ of its boy hero, Jim Hawkins” (K. Blake, “Sea-Dream” 165).⁶Close To begin with, Jim never gets a chance to perform an exhaustive inspection of the island, and therefore misses out on the sense of mastery this act inevitably engenders. After making his “Survey of the Island,” for example, Robinson Crusoe confidently declares, “I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and had a Right of Possession” (Defoe 78, 80). When Jim first lands on the island, he seems poised to follow in his predecessor’s footsteps; having eluded the pirates, he begins to look around, noting, “I now felt for the first time the joy of exploration” (73). But moments later his progress is arrested when he stumbles on Silver murdering another crew member. Horrified by this sight, Jim falls into a swoon, the first of several fainting fits in which he loses “possession of myself” (143). Such moments indicate that Jim does not function as a “supreme figure” who asserts dominion over the territory he surveys (Salmon, Juvenile 217). Rather, the landscape he dreams of conquering overpowers him: “the whole world swam away from me in a whirling mist; Silver and the birds, and the tall Spy-glass hill-top, going round and round and topsy-turvy before my eyes” (76).

To reinforce this point, Stevenson denies Jim the moment of mountaintop mastery he dreams about, no doubt as a result of having read stories like The Coral Island. The rapturous chapters in which Ralph chronicles the boys’ exploration of “our island” culminate with a long description of clambering up hills that afford them one “new, and … grander prospect” after another (55, 62). When they finally reach the highest point of the island, Ralph’s account of this moment indicates his firm belief that the mere act of traversing this terrain grants the boys jurisdiction over it: “we saw our kingdom lying, as it were, like a map around us” (65). In contrast, when Jim finally gets to mount Spy-glass Hill, it is not as a masterful adventurer but as a pathetic prisoner. Having been caught by the pirates, he is dragged along as they race to find the treasure, tethered to Long John Silver: “I had a line about my waist, and followed obediently after the sea-cook…. For all the world, I was led like a dancing bear” (171). Stumbling along in a “wretched” state of alarm (179), Jim never gets to enjoy a moment of monarchic mastery; he remains a helpless hostage until he is rescued by the gentleman.

Moreover, Stevenson’s characterization of the terrain of Treasure Island decisively departs from the deserted isle prototype. As Diana Loxley notes, one major way Victorian writers glamorize imperial roving is by describing islands as “idyllic space” characterized by “fertility and abundance” (3, 2). From Robinson Crusoe onward, such stories contain purple passages in which the adventurer breathlessly compares the island to a paradise, as when one excited member of The Welsh Family Crusoes (1857) exclaims, “‘How exquisite! How lovely! What rocks! What trees! Look, a gushing stream, a lovely water-fall! I see birds, bright birds, and beauteous flowers, I am sure! What colors! What a lovely bay! What blue water! What golden sands! Was ever such a scene beheld by mortal eyes!’” (quoted in H. Watson 85). All that is missing from this example is the characteristic use of the word “luxuriant” to describe the varied vegetation and the traditional long list of natural resources that provide food and shelter to the resourceful visitors. Such descriptions form a crucial part of the “rising curve of achievement and accumulation” that Martin Green identifies as a key aspect of the Robinsonade (“Robinson Crusoe Story” 36).

It is impossible to overemphasize Stevenson’s determination to undermine this vision of the island as an inviting, enriching environment. Instead of celebrating profusion, Jim’s first description of Treasure Island stresses its stark sterility: “Grey-coloured woods covered a large part of the surface…. The general colouring was uniform and sad. The hills ran up clear about the vegetation in spires of naked rock…. There was not a breath of air moving…. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree trunks” (68, 70).⁷Close Rather than portray the island as an Edenic haven, Stevenson represents it as a lethal swamp that threatens to engulf Jim in its “poisonous” embrace (69). As Dr. Livesey instantly recognizes, this type of environment is more likely to deplete than to enrich visitors: “‘I don’t know about treasure,’ he said, ‘but I’ll stake my wig there’s fever here’” (70). Indeed, a few chapters later the doctor notes that “the nasty stench of the place turned me sick,” and the pirates soon begin to succumb to malaria (84). Here again, Stevenson intimates that pursuing treasure is a dangerous sport that may well lead to death rather than pleasure and profit. To underline this point, he twins Treasure Island with another body of land called Skeleton Island.⁸Close

Just as the landscape of Treasure Island fails to conform to the imperialist’s playground paradigm, its inhabitants also prove disappointing. Indeed, Stevenson not only refuses to provide the requisite predatory beasts and savages, he comically deflates his hero’s expectations. When Jim beholds “huge slimy monsters” crawling on the craggy shore of the island and “making the rocks … echo with their barkings” (126), it seems that his fantasy about being hunted by dangerous animals may be about to come true. Instead, it is doubly undermined. Far from relishing this encounter with the animal kingdom, Jim decides to avoid it, declaring himself “willing rather to starve at sea than to confront such perils” (126). This is especially funny because, as Jim sheepishly admits, these creatures in fact pose no threat at all: “I have understood since that they were sea lions, and entirely harmless” (126). Instead of wrestling with lions, Jim is petrified by sea lions. His evasive action stands in stark contrast to Crusoe’s bold attacks on various ravenous beasts, including leopards and “a terrible great Lyon” he hunts for fun (Defoe 24). Thus, when Crusoe encounters a group of barking sea creatures, he naturally views himself as the aggressor, recounting how the seals “got into the Sea and escap’d me for that time” (58).

Jim’s long-anticipated encounter with savage folk does not fit the Robinsonade mold either. Fleeing from Silver in a “frenzy” of fear (77), Jim suddenly spies a “dark and shaggy” creature “unlike any man that I had ever seen” trailing him though the woods (78). Like any reader familiar with the conventions of the desert island romance, Jim knows what to expect: “I began to recall what I had heard of cannibals” (78). Once again, though, Stevenson subverts our expectations. His hero does not grapple with a fierce, benighted Other but instead finds himself face to face with “a white man like myself”: Ben Gunn, who is hungry not for human flesh but for a nice piece of cheese (79). The comic aspect of this revelation is enhanced by the fact that Gunn prefaces it with a bit of Robinsonian rhetoric: “‘Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself. But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet…. Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese—toasted, mostly’” (79). Here Stevenson parodies what Rousseau celebrates as the moral of Defoe’s story: the reassuring idea that “each man suffices unto himself” (Emile 185). Like Crusoe, Gunn has access to wild goats—yet he never produces his own cheese. Perhaps, Stevenson hints, it is silly to assume that a man marooned on an island could reproduce all the products of the civilized world. How likely is it, after all, that although Crusoe “had never milk’d a Cow, much less a Goat, or seen Butter or Cheese made,” he nevertheless manages to produce both in unlimited quantities (Defoe 116)?

Besides dispensing with the fantasy of masculine self-sufficiency, Stevenson also refuses to champion the civilizing power of Christianity, another central theme of the desert island romance. Whereas writers such as Ballantyne enthusiastically extol the missionary efforts of British rovers, whose noble presence brings “inestimable blessings to these islands of dark and bloody idolatry,” Stevenson declines to include any pro-Empire propaganda in his story (384). Critics have dealt with this notable absence in two ways. The first wave of respondents, which included John Rowe Townsend and Maurice Rooke Kingsford, celebrated the novel for its lack of didacticism, claiming that it “represents almost a complete break from the traditions of the past” because it “was not designed to teach anything at all, but … to provide untrammeled hours of spontaneous refreshment and delight” (Kingsford 205). More recently, commentators like Rose and Loxley have rejected the idea that Treasure Island offers “pure” fun. By dropping “the most obvious trappings of the colonialist ethos,” they argue, Stevenson produces a novel that can indoctrinate readers far more effectively than its preachy predecessors (Rose 79).

The problem with this reading is that evangelical and imperialist rhetoric is not just absent from Stevenson’s story; it is parodied and subversively undercut. For example, as William Hardesty and David Mann point out, Stevenson sends up his precursors’ penchant for miraculous conversion scenes, since Jim’s encounter with the wounded pirate Israel Hands is a comic reworking of Ralph Rover’s interaction with a dying buccaneer named Bloody Bill (189). Whereas Ralph easily convinces the wily old sea dog to repent and save his soul, Jim’s pompous moralizing has no effect whatsoever on Hands; when Jim intones “‘You can kill the body, Mr. Hands, but not the spirit,’” Hands cheerfully replies, “‘Well, that’s unfort’nate—appears as if killing parties was a waste of time. Howsomever, sperrits don’t reckon for much, by what I’ve seen. I’ll chance it with the sperrits, Jim’” (136). Here Stevenson prompts readers to recognize the absurdity inherent in the idea that a boy could convert a lifelong criminal to Christianity with a few well-chosen words.

Working in a more serious vein, Stevenson takes up the damning adjectives Ballantyne and company use to denigrate “savages” and applies them to his white characters. On their journey home, the gentlemen stop at a port where they encounter “negroes, and Mexican Indians, and half-bloods” (190). Far from requiring enlightenment at the hands of the whites, these hospitable people are associated with civilization and illumination; Jim observes that their kind faces, delicious food, and “above all, the lights that began to shine in the town, made a most charming contrast to our dark and bloody sojourn on the island” (190). Rather than bringing blessings to “islands of dark and bloody idolatry” (Ballantyne 384), Stevenson’s rovers are themselves the source of violence and brutality. This authorial choice links Treasure Island to Stevenson’s later work, which often “subverts European assumptions of superiority” by refusing to align whiteness with wisdom, culture, and progress (Jolly xiv). “Will you please to observe,” Stevenson urged his friend and literary advisor Sidney Colvin, “that almost all that is ugly is in the whites?” (Letters 7:282). He was referring here to the action that takes place in his South Seas story “The Beach of Falesá” (1892); he could just as easily have been talking about Treasure Island.

By refusing to promote a strong sense of religious and racial superiority in his adventure story, Stevenson drains imperialist roving of its primary claim to moral legitimacy. His skepticism about the true motivations of Englishmen who spout religious rhetoric is evident in his portrayal of Ben Gunn. Critics have noticed that the maroon functions as a Crusoe figure but have failed to pick up that in shaping his character, Stevenson exaggerates the least attractive qualities of Defoe’s iconic empire-builder. Thus, although Gunn echoes Crusoe when he asserts that “it were Providence that put me here” (80), the terms in which he does so underscore his predecessor’s religious fickleness, a quality most Victorian readers preferred to ignore.⁹Close “‘I’ve thought it all out in this here lonely island,’” Ben announces, “‘and I’m back on piety’” (80). His phrasing suggests that piousness is a superficial adornment one can slip on and off as easily as a goatskin garment. Similarly, when Ben insists that he was a very religious child, the proof he gives reveals that he does not know the meaning of deep devotion: “‘[I] could rattle off my catechism that fast, as you couldn’t tell one word from another’” (80). Moreover, Gunn’s name and murderous behavior remind us of Crusoe’s fascination with firearms, while his actions on the island attest to a tremendous lust for money, a motivation that Crusoe explicitly disowns, even as he ends up earning a fortune by exploiting the resources of various foreign lands.

Viewed in light of these unpleasant character traits, the narrative logic behind Gunn’s entrance comes into sharper focus. By having the bestial “creature” Jim mistakes for a savage turn out to be British (78), Stevenson once again suggests that whites occupy the position of moral depravity when action takes place on islands. Indeed, rather than encouraging Anglo-Saxon chauvinism, Stevenson repeatedly undermines the idea that Englishness and godliness are synonymous. As Naomi J. Wood has persuasively demonstrated, “the pirates and the official representatives of English society are difficult to distinguish”: both the “gentlemen born” and the “gentlemen of fortune” are greedy men who commit acts of awful violence solely in order to enrich themselves (69). Such blurring undercuts the nationalistic pride that pervades imperialist adventure stories by suggesting that British rovers are nothing more than common pirates.

Thus, as Wood notes, various characters in the novel identify bloodthirsty buccaneers as exemplary British citizens, as when the squire admits that he often felt “proud [that Flint] was an Englishman” when he considered how thoroughly the pirate had terrified the Spanish (32). Such admiration links the squire to Silver, who names his parrot after Flint. Even more striking is the moment when Long John recounts why his bird has “seen more wickedness” than the devil: “She’s sailed with England,” he explains (54). To be sure, Silver immediately clarifies his meaning; the parrot traveled with “the great Cap’n England, the pirate” (54). And Stevenson did not create a dastardly buccaneer called England out of whole cloth. As Emma Letley points out, the exploits of Edward England were chronicled in Defoe’s book A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (1724), which Stevenson used as a source for his story. Still, it is telling that he chose to mention this particular pirate—and that the structure of Silver’s sentence invites us to mistake his meaning: to assume that the bird witnessed untold evils while accompanying English military missions.

Indeed, although Dr. Livesey seems proud of having served under the duke of Cumberland, Alan Sandison reminds us that this fearfully effective general earned the sobriquet “Butcher” Cumberland for “his brutal tactics in the battle of Culloden which ensured the decimation of the Jacobite forces and the disfavor of romantic nationalists like Stevenson” (59). It is also striking that Stevenson chooses to call the gentlemen’s ship the Hispaniola, thus linking his rovers to the Spanish, a people whose imperialist forays the British had historically condemned as tyrannical efforts to extort massive amounts of money and minerals from their colonies.¹⁰Close English commentators routinely contrasted the rapacious actions of Spanish explorers—whom they blamed for destroying the New World and its inhabitants in their relentless pursuit of gold and silver—with their own determination to cultivate the land of colonies and improve the lives of natives. Clearly, Stevenson’s portrayal of the gentlemen’s quest undercuts this differentiation; no one cares about cultivating Treasure Island. Critics have suggested that Stevenson’s decision to set the novel in the eighteenth century represents a nostalgic return to the early years of British colonialism.¹¹Close Yet the fact that he names the ship after England’s most hated imperial rival from those years—a rival whose empire eventually fell apart—suggests skepticism about both the morality and the durability of empires.

Critics who study Stevenson have acknowledged that anti-imperialist sentiments inform his later work. Following the lead of Patrick Brantlinger, who shows how “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1894) undercut the conventions of the classic imperial adventure story (39–42, 239), Katherine Linehan, Rosalyn Jolly, and Rod Edmond argue that Stevenson, having witnessed the devastating effects of white rule during his travels in the South Seas, produced narratives pervaded by a Conradian pessimism about what he saw as the “folly and injustice and unconscious rapacity” of an ethically problematic system (quoted in Jolly xiii). Similarly, Julia Reid notes that Stevenson’s Scottishness made him particularly prone to ambivalence about English efforts to domineer over other countries and contends that his Scottish and Polynesian writings are pervaded by a profound “skepticism about a confident evolutionary narrative” that asserts the superiority of the “civilized” over the “savage” (55).¹²Close

Given that Stevenson’s later romances have been described as “psychological and moral attacks on empire” (D. Jackson 31), why do commentators shy away from the possibility that Treasure Island subverts rather than participates in the Robinsonade tradition?¹³Close One probable cause is that the novel’s status as children’s literature—it first appeared as a serial in the magazine Young Folks—leads critics to assume that it follows a familiar formula, since many of the boys’ adventure stories that appeared in journals like this one celebrated Empire unreservedly. Then, too, critics have been misled by Stevenson’s own account of his work in the essays “A Gossip on Romance” (1882) and “A Humble Remonstrance” (1884). Indeed, the argument that we should read Treasure Island as a boy’s daydream is lifted directly out of Stevenson’s own account of the novel’s genesis in “A Humble Remonstrance.” Assuming that his audience had indulged in “youthful day-dreams” about going to sea, Stevenson explains, “the author, counting upon that, and well aware (cunning and low-minded man!) that this class of interest, having been frequently treated, finds a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader, addressed himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream” (“Humble Remonstrance” 197).

Stevenson’s characterization of himself as “Humble” is no empty boast; besides suggesting that his “little book about a quest for buried treasure” is merely an “elementary” exercise in giving the public what it wants, he goes on to characterize the protagonists of Treasure Island as one-dimensional “puppets” who exhibit “but one class of qualities” (196–97). As a romancer, he explains, he does not aim to engage the intellect: “To add more traits, to be too clever, to start the hare of moral or intellectual interest while we are running the fox of material interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your tale” (197).

Stevenson’s intensely self-deprecating stance has had a chilling effect on critical accounts of Treasure Island. Choosing to take Stevenson at his word when he insists that we should not analyze romances but allow ourselves “to be submerged by the tale as by a billow” (“Humble” 196), critics have insisted that “an adult can get nothing more from Treasure Island than a boy does” (Aldington 143); that “Treasure Island is a very simple book” (Kiely 68); that Stevenson’s “artistic maturation” did not occur until after writing Treasure Island (K. Blake, “Sea-Dream” 175). Similarly, Alastair Fowler warns that “every critic of Treasure Island has to begin by noticing the limitations of kind and Stevenson’s zestful acceptance of them” (109). To scrutinize the story too much, he concludes, would be “to break a butterfly on the wheel” (115). Even Sandison, who resists such dismissive accounts and characterizes Stevenson as an innovative and intensely self-conscious writer, twice worries that he will be criticized for “taking a spade to a soufflé” (16, 50).

Stevenson himself often expressed concern that he was a literary lightweight, as when he declared, “I cannot take myself seriously, as an artist; the limitations are so obvious” and “There must be something wrong in me, or I would not be popular” (quoted in J. Smith 44, 28). But surely we should not echo such sentiments or accept Stevenson’s excessively modest claims for his “little book” at face value. Henry James, who condescendingly praised Treasure Island for being excellent “in its way,” nevertheless knew better than to listen to its author: “the figures are not puppets with vague faces,” he insisted in his 1888 essay “Robert Louis Stevenson” (154). Following the lead of recent critics who locate a profound ambivalence about imperialism in Stevenson’s later writings, we should recognize that Treasure Island does not deny or repress late Victorian anxieties about empire; it reflects and amplifies them.

Another critical commonplace reviewers have stolen from Stevenson is the idea that Treasure Island encourages readers to identify themselves closely with Jim Hawkins. In “A Gossip on Romance,” Stevenson declares that the great “triumph of romantic story-telling” comes when the reader “plays at being the hero,” submerging himself uncritically in the story (179). But like the other stories featuring young narrators that I discussed in chapter 1, Treasure Island simultaneously invites and disrupts identification. To begin with, Stevenson’s habit of parodying other popular books reminds readers of the artificiality of his narrative. But more than this, the novel dramatizes the danger of being duped by silver-tongued storytellers. Thus, even as imperialist roving is associated with piracy, so, too, is the act of telling tales aimed at seducing children to involve themselves in the act of exploration. From the start, duplicitous pirates like Bones and Silver are the ones who relate exciting sea yarns. And crucially, it is Silver—the archvillain—who invites Jim to view Treasure Island as an alluring environment to explore and master: “‘Ah,’” he exclaims when they first spot land, “‘this here is a sweet spot, this island—a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on. You’ll bathe, and you’ll climb trees, and you’ll hunt goats, you will; and you’ll get aloft on them hills like a goat yourself’” (64).

Here again, Stevenson marks his story’s distance from the traditional Robinsonade, in which boy heroes do indeed indulge in such pleasures. Jim does not: having just overheard Silver’s murderous plans, he can only “shudder” in “horror” at the pirate’s inviting overture (64). Treasure Island prods its audience to share this response, to recognize that the flattering fantasy of potency such storytellers peddle (“you’ll climb trees,” “you’ll hunt goats”) is a dangerous delusion (you’ll actually be “a goat yourself”). The pirates are not just storytellers but shameless child flatterers, and this deluge of admiration mimics—and thus draws attention to—the way the narrative itself repeatedly shifts into an obsequious, adulatory mode. As Hayden W. Ward notes, Jim “is made a collaborator in grown-up enterprises” (310), and his inclusion, prominence, and conspicuous achievements combine to paint a highly complimentary picture of what boys can do. Yet this pleasing vision of juvenile power and potency is constantly punctured; each time Jim gets established as a heroic figure, his agency is quickly shown to be chimerical; his collaboration compelled; his actions circumscribed.

This dynamic is evident from the start of the story; pressured into helping Billy Bones, Jim becomes an unwilling “sharer in his alarms” (3). Tellingly, Bones is at his most coercive when he adopts the role of raconteur; on evenings when he would “force all the trembling company” at the inn “to listen to his stories or bear a chorus to his singing,” the pirate was, according to Jim, “the most overriding companion ever known”: “Often I have heard the house shaking with ‘Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum’; all the neighbors joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them” (3). Bones also employs more subtle tactics to ensure cooperation. Indeed, he is the first in a parade of adult storytellers who flatter Jim in an effort to manipulate the boy into satisfying various greedy desires of their own. “‘You’re the only one here that’s worth anything,’” Bones tells the boy, hoping to cajole Jim into bringing him rum despite the doctor’s orders (13).

Meanwhile, the narrative itself is busy confirming this gratifying statement. Jim’s pathetic father never musters up the strength to confront Bones about the money he owes him, and dies soon after the pirate arrives. Terrified by the reputation of the buccaneers, the townspeople likewise prove useless and cowardly; not one of them will agree to help Jim and his mother defend the inn when the barbaric crew returns to find the treasure map. Thus, the narrative neatly aligns itself with piratical praise; Jim’s bravery earns him the right to disparage more mature members of the community with the words “You would have thought men would have been ashamed of themselves—no soul would consent to return with us to the ‘Admiral Benbow’” (20). Right from the start, Treasure Island floats the complimentary idea that a mere child is more manly than an entire town of grown-ups.

At the same time, however, the arrival of two more sycophantic criminals reminds readers to beware the cost of succumbing to such flattery. Requesting rum, the buccaneer Black Dog echoes Bones by referring to Jim as “this dear child here, as I’ve took such a liking to” (9), and a few scenes later the blind pirate Pew likewise addresses the boy as “my kind, young friend” in order to lure him into taking his hand and leading him into the inn (16). In both cases, sweet words do little to mask the utter ruthlessness of these men. Waiting with Black Dog for Bones to return to the inn, Jim relates:

Once I stepped out myself into the road, but he immediately called me back, and, as I did not obey quick enough for his fancy, a most horrible change came over his tallowy face, and he ordered me in, with an oath that made me jump. As soon as I was back again he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a good boy, and he had taken quite a fancy to me. (8)

Pew quickly proves equally hypocritical; as soon as Jim proffers his arm, the ostensibly amiable old man startles him, he says, when he “gripped it in a moment like a vice,” causing the boy to cry out in pain (16). Like Black Dog’s metamorphosis, this physical transformation is coupled with a sudden change in tone of voice; the blind man begins by speaking in an ingratiating, obsequious “sing-song” (16), and then switches over to “a voice so cruel, and cold, and ugly” that it “cowed me more than the pain” (17).

These radical shifts echo and alert us to the endless rocking of Stevenson’s sea story. Like the “half-fawning, half-sneering” pirates who use flattery to manipulate Jim, Treasure Island is a two-faced text that alternately exalts Jim to heroic status and undermines his achievements. Even as Stevenson characterizes his hero as an indispensable partner in the adults’ enterprise, he suggests that Jim is not so much collaborating as collaborating with the enemy, functioning as a helpless pawn rather than a genuine colleague. First enlisted to help Billy Bones, Jim quickly finds himself coerced into abetting the man who is out to trap Bones: pushing Jim along, Black Dog declares, “‘You and me’ll just go back into the parlour, sonny, and get behind the door, and we’ll give Bill a little surprise’” (8–9). Scenes involving the gentlemen likewise convey the sense that Jim is strong-armed into compliance with their wishes. As I have already noted, this oddly passive hero does not volunteer to join the adults’ treasure quest—he is drafted. His limited agency is made evident by the fact that after the discovery of the map, the doctor is so set on “keeping [Jim] beside him” that he arranges for the boy to be held captive, kept “almost [as] a prisoner” at the squire’s house (36).

This dynamic even extends to Jim’s interactions with his mother. Indeed, the most striking way Jim’s agency is undermined in these early chapters is that he discovers the treasure map as a result of his mother’s plucky heroism, not his own. Mrs. Hawkins is the one who takes action after the townspeople decline to come to her assistance, boldly declaring that she refuses to “lose money that belong[s] to her fatherless boy”: “‘If none of the rest of you dare,’ she said, ‘Jim and I dare. Back we will go, the way we came, and small thanks to you big, hulking, chicken-hearted men. We’ll have that chest open, if we die for it’” (20). Once again, Jim is exposed as a reactive recruit rather than an autonomous agent; rather lamely, he adds, “Of course, I said I would go with my mother” (20). Noting that Mrs. Hawkins fusses over the money and faints when the pirates arrive, commentators typically dismiss her as a silly woman, apt to lose her head in a crisis. This seems unfair, given that male characters in Treasure Island are also prone to foolish utterances and blackouts. Moreover, when Jim tells the story to the gentlemen, they instantly recognize that Mrs. Hawkins is the real hero: “When they heard how my mother went back to the inn, Dr. Livesey fairly slapped his thigh, and the squire cried ‘Bravo!’” (31).

Perhaps because he senses that he is not the undisputed star of his own story, Jim quickly succumbs to the solicitations of the next pirate bearing praise who appears on the scene: Long John Silver, the greatest child-flatterer of them all. When Jim arrives at Silver’s inn, he has every reason to suspect that the one-legged landlord is the dreaded pirate Bones feared. Not only is Silver missing the appropriate limb, he has christened his inn the “Spy-glass” after the tallest hill on Treasure Island. Moreover, Jim sees Black Dog sneaking out of the tavern, which ought to confirm beyond question his suspicion that Silver is another member of Flint’s old crew. Yet Jim ignores all of this evidence, in part because he is fooled by Silver’s pleasant appearance, but mostly because the “obsequious” Silver massages his ego by treating him as if he is more mature than a grown man (186). After questioning an elderly sailor named Morgan about his relationship to Black Dog, Long John remarks to Jim “in a confidential whisper, that was very flattering, as I thought:—‘He’s quite an honest man, Tom Morgan, on’y stupid’” (44). Thrilled to be treated as a superior specimen of manhood, Jim ignores the overwhelming evidence of Silver’s guilt and drinks in his praise: “‘You’re a lad, you are, but you’re as smart as paint. I see that when you first came in’” (45).

Silver also stokes Jim’s sense of self-worth by choosing him as the favored audience for his sea stories, seeking him out once they are onboard the Hispaniola: “‘Come away, Hawkins,’ he would say; ‘come and have a yarn with John. Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son’” (54). From the start, Stevenson links Silver’s seductiveness to his ability to purvey fascinating tales and tidbits of information about life at sea. Describing one of their earliest conversations, Jim recollects how the sea-cook “made himself the most interesting companion, telling me about the different ships that we passed by, their rig, tonnage, and nationality, explaining the work that was going forward … and every now and then telling me some little anecdote of ships or seamen, or repeating a nautical phrase till I had learned it perfectly” (45–46). As Israel Hands observes, Silver “can speak like a book” (54), and the nonfictional nature of his narration links him to tellers of boys’ adventure stories, who frequently adopted an encyclopedic style in order to educate their young audience about the world around them. Desert island romances like The Swiss Family Robinson (1814, 1818) and Masterman Ready (1841) are full of lengthy explanations of phenomena like typhoons and the Gulf Stream, mini-lectures on the habits of African birds, or the way coral islands form. Child readers are intended to react just as Jim does in this scene with Silver: to absorb and parrot back the information offered.¹⁴Close In fact, authors are so intent on encouraging this sort of response that they often have their boy protagonists model it. For example, faced with task of trying to herd antelope, one of the sons in The Swiss Family Robinson recalls a Hottentot technique he read about in a book, prompting his father to exclaim, “‘Well done … I am glad to see that you remember what you have read’” (Wyss 291).¹⁵Close

As this compliment suggests, an encyclopedic style is not only thing Silver has in common with authors such as Marryat, Ballantyne, and Wyss. Like Long John, these storytellers routinely ingratiate themselves with boy readers by suggesting that young people are smarter, braver, and more powerful than grown men. When shipwrecks occur in their stories, experienced sailors sink into a watery grave, while amateur cabin boys survive and thrive. Or, if adult authority figures live, they spend most of their time lavishing extravagant praise on juveniles. “‘Well done, Franz!’” booms the patriarch of the Swiss Family Robinson, “‘these fish hooks, which you the youngest have found, may contribute more than anything else … to save our lives’” (6–7). Similarly, when experienced seaman Masterman Ready finds himself wrecked on an island with the Seagrave family, he soon begins to depend on the steadiness of the boy rather than his parents. “I will not at present say anything to Mr. and Mrs. Seagrave,” he muses in the midst of one crisis, “And yet I cannot do without help—I must trust Master William—he is a noble boy that, and clever beyond his years” (Marryat 209).

As the narrative of Treasure Island unfolds, Stevenson himself seems to indulge more and more in this sort of puffery. Out of all the crew members, Jim is the one who salvages the gentlemen’s mission by discovering the mutiny and commandeering the ship. And even as he basks in the glow of adult appreciation—“‘Every step, it’s you that saves our lives,’” the doctor marvels (168)—he enjoys the privilege of scoffing at the “silly,” “childish” behavior of much older men (71, 79). Yet while Stevenson fawns in the typical fashion, he repeatedly warns readers about the dangers of placing their trust in pandering adults who pretend to worship youthful prowess. The first such cautionary moment occurs onboard the Hispaniola, when a horrified Jim overhears Silver buttering up another juvenile victim:

“You’re young, you are, but you’re as smart as paint. I see that when I set my eyes on you, and I’ll talk to you like a man.”

You may imagine how I felt when I heard this abominable old rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used on myself. I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him. (57–58)

In a narrative full of traumatizing events, this scene stands out as the one in which Jim expresses the most extreme emotional distress. His feelings of rage and pain result from being forced to recognize the falseness of adult flattery, to doubt his own status as a uniquely intelligent and manly colleague.

Jim’s habit of viewing the buccaneers, the squire, and Ben Gunn as simple-minded children receives similar treatment: even as Stevenson lays this form of narrative flattery on rather thickly, he undermines it at the same time, since none of these grown-ups turns out to be as moronic as he seems. Ultimately, Jim has to admit that the man he refers to as “the half-idiot maroon … was the hero from beginning to end” (183). In fact, Gunn functions as yet another adult who successfully coerces Jim into cooperating with his self-promoting plan. Having hidden the treasure away, he uses the boy as a go-between to align himself with the squire, putting words into Jim’s mouth and pinching him hard every few minutes to punctuate his points. The squire also proves far less flighty than he originally seems; after injudiciously blabbing news of the treasure map while on land, he grows “silent” and “cool as steel” when the bloody battle commences at sea (93, 91).

But the best example of how Stevenson undercuts the idea that Jim’s adult companions are infantile idiots comes when the boy faces off against Israel Hands aboard the Hispaniola. This is the scene that seems to indulge most fully in the fantasy that a boy can effortlessly become “the master of his fate and the captain of his soul” (Bristow 95). Working alone, Jim quickly wrests away control of the ship from the pirates, who fail to notice his approach because they are fighting among themselves. Locked in a one-on-one struggle with Hands, Jim deftly evades his opponent’s knife thrusts by climbing up into the cross-trees and chortles as he considers how “densely stupid” the pirate is: “I could see by the working of his face that he was trying to think, and the process was so slow and laborious that … I laughed aloud” (137, 142). In a moment that may well have inspired J. M. Barrie to make cockiness Peter Pan’s primary characteristic, Hands bemoans how hard it is for a “master mariner” like himself to lose to a mere youth—flattery Jim swallows greedily: “I was drinking in his words and smiling away, as conceited as a cock upon a wall … ” (142). But note how this sentence ends:

when, all in a breath, back went his right hand over his shoulder. Something sang like an arrow through the air; I felt a blow and then a sharp pang, and there I was pinned by the shoulder to the mast. In the horrid pain and surprise of the moment—I can scarce say it was by my own volition, and I am sure it was without a conscious aim—both my pistols went off, and both escaped out of my hands. (142)

Like the scene in which Jim overhears Silver sweet-talking another boy, this incident vividly illustrates that adults who curry favor with children by praising their superior potency cannot be trusted. Boys who succumb to such solicitations put their lives at risk. Only dumb luck enables Jim to triumph over Hands, who is clearly not as stupid as he seems.

Thinking back, we realize that this was evident from the start of the story, since Israel Hands is introduced as “a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman, who could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything” (53). Indeed, Jim is the one who makes rookie mistakes during their fight. Even though he knows that Hands plans to kill him, Jim forgets to keep him under surveillance; excited to witness the moment when the ship finally touches the shore, Jim fails to notice that Hands has begun his attack. When Jim then tries to shoot Hands, his gun refuses to fire because he has forgotten to reprime and reload it. Here and elsewhere, Jim wins the day not because he is especially intelligent or brave but simply because his opponents—as Hands repeatedly complains—“don’t have no luck” (142).¹⁶Close Indeed, only considerable “good fortune” with regard to wind and tide enables Jim to reach the Hispaniola in the first place (121). Rather than ingeniously piloting his coracle to the ship, Jim can only sit there and hope for the best: “I could in no way influence her course” (127). A similar combination of passivity and luck enables Jim to kill Hands; it is amazing that he hits his target, given that he fires accidentally, without even aiming his weapons.

By attributing Jim’s triumphs to fickle chance, Stevenson again departs from the traditional desert island romance formula, since such stories pound home the message that success depends on continual hard work that earns men the blessing of a benevolent providence. “‘There is nothing to be had in this world without labour,’” Masterman Ready observes (Marryat 205), an opinion backed up by the basic plot of the Robinsonade, which compulsively chronicles the endless tasks that must be done in order to improve the productivity of already fertile space. Luck plays no part in the carefully controlled, hierarchical universe posited by writers like Marryat, Ballantyne, and Wyss; instead “everything is governed by fixed laws” (Marryat 153). Of these, perhaps the most sacred is “‘God helps those who help themselves!’” (Wyss 2), a credo perfectly in keeping with the imperialist mindset. Treasure Island, by contrast, declines to promote the reassuring idea that man can shape his destiny through faith and hard work. Instead, this novel reads like “a record of queer chances,” as Henry James observed (“Robert Louis Stevenson” 154). Jim succeeds only because “fortune … particularly favoured me,” while “the dice [keep] going against” his enemies (Treasure Island 121, 142). He is not the master of his fate but fortune’s fool, as Captain Smollett realizes. As the quest draws to a close, the captain remarks, “‘You’re a good boy in your line, Jim, but I don’t think you and me’ll go to sea again. You’re too much the born favourite for me’” (185).

Other adult characters also chime in to remind Jim of his youthful inadequacy, and their comments further undermine the flattering idea that boys can routinely expect to best men. “‘You’re a good boy,’” Ben Gunn tells Jim, “‘but you’re on’y a boy, all told’” (98). In contrast, as the maroon himself observes, “‘Benn Gunn’s the man’” who can and does save the day (81). Similarly, although Hands agrees to call the boy “Cap’n Hawkins” when he unexpectedly appears onboard the Hispaniola, the pirate nevertheless remains firmly in control of the vessel. Noting that Jim cannot sail to shore without his help, Hands wryly remarks, “‘Without I gives you a hint, you ain’t that man,’” and Jim, recognizing truth when he hears it, meekly agrees to follow orders: “I think I was a good, prompt subaltern, and I am very sure that Hands was an excellent pilot” (134, 139). Thus, the scene that attests most strongly to Jim’s independence and self-sufficiency—“I was greatly elated with my new command,” he proudly reports (135)—simultaneously reveals that he is still subject to adult supervision: Hands “issued his commands, which I breathlessly obeyed” (140).

The overarching structure of the narrative likewise reflects Stevenson’s determination to oscillate back and forth between setting Jim up as a heroic figure and cutting him down to size. In the grandly titled sections “My Shore Adventure” and “My Sea Adventure,” Jim gets a chance to chronicle his adventures as a free-ranging troubleshooter who strikes out on his own. Yet in between these stirring segments, the doctor takes over the narration for three chapters, a fact that has puzzled generations of critics. Rightly so, because Jim’s inability to maintain control over his own story presents a major challenge to the idea that he functions as the undisputed master of his fate. According to Salmon and Rose, the use of the first person functions as a crucial signifier of the alluring autonomy of fictional boy adventurers. On the flimsiest of pretexts, Stevenson deprives Jim of this privilege, thus puncturing our sense of him as an independent agent.

Of course, it could be argued that the doctor’s participation merely attests to Jim’s position as a valued collaborator who works with the gentlemen to achieve his glorious success. But the problem with this reading is that, once again, Stevenson manages to suggest that Jim’s adult partners wield much more power than he does. Despite the fact that Jim narrates the lion’s share of the story, Stevenson makes it clear from the start that his hero’s authority over the act of storytelling is minimal. In his opening sentence, Jim informs us that he picks up the pen not on his own behalf but because adults have roped him into it: “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 … I take up my pen” (1). Although the memory of this adventure gives him terrible nightmares, Jim nevertheless complies with the adults’ demand that he “go back” and recount all the details of this terrifying time (1). When Jim interrupts a description of their journey to the island with the words “I am not allowed to be more plain” (56), it reinforces our impression that the gentlemen are looking over his shoulder and exercising control over his story. The very act of narration is haunted by a sense of coercion.

Acknowledging that Jim starts off as a relatively passive figure, a number of commentators have suggested that Treasure Island is a bildungsroman that eventually promotes its boy protagonist to heroic status.¹⁷Close But in fact, Stevenson never stops seesawing back and forth between flattery and insistent, undercutting irony. Thus, Jim’s climactic encounter with Silver at the stockade—the scene in which he makes his famous speech advertising his own valor—runs precisely parallel to his earlier altercation with Hands. Here, too, Jim’s inflated self-regard leads him to make a foolish mistake that almost costs him his life. Returning from the newly recovered Hispaniola “in famous spirits,” Jim notices that none of the gentlemen have stayed up to guard the stockade (145). Mentally chastising his elders for keeping “an infamous bad watch,” Jim enjoys “a silent chuckle” at their expense, imagining how surprised they will be when they wake up to find him back among them (147). Yet once again, the laugh (and the surprise) is on him. Though he knows that his companions are not in the habit of building large fires or failing to keep watch—those are things that the pirates do, and the gentlemen scorn them for it—Jim disregards the deserted, smoldering bonfire and enters the stockade, only to discover that he has stumbled right into the arms of the enemy.¹⁸Close

Shortly after making this enormous error, Jim launches into his declaration of superiority. After taunting the pirates that their “whole business [has] gone to wreck,” he exults: “and if you want to know who did it—it was I! I was in the apple barrel the night we sighted land, and I heard you, John … and told every word you said before the hour was out. And as for the schooner, it was I who cut her cable, and it was I that killed the men you had aboard of her, and it was I who brought her where you’ll never see her more, not one of you. The laugh’s on my side; I’ve had the top of this business from the first” (152). Treasure Island’s status as a two-faced text is nowhere more clear than at this instant. Jim’s proclamation of supremacy can (and has) been read as a straightforward statement of truth. But given that it occurs at the precise moment in the narrative when Jim wields the least power, it is hard to take this assertion of strength at face value. Helpless in the hands of his enemy, his “worst … apprehensions realised” (149), Jim himself hints that his bravado is a façade when he describes how he presents himself to Silver “pluckily enough, I hope, to all outward appearance, but with black despair in my heart” (150).

Silver’s response to Jim’s speech illustrates the ambiguity Stevenson builds in to this moment. When Jim dramatically winds up his monologue by asking the pirates to inform the doctor that he took his death like a man, Long John replies to this defiant entreaty “with an accent so curious that I could not, for the life of me, decide whether he were laughing at my request, or had been favourably affected by my courage” (152). Should we consider Jim heroic or ridiculous, powerful or puny? Silver’s immediate reaction gives us no clue. Admittedly, the next wave of responses suggests that Jim really does function as the hero of the story. Rather than losing their tempers and attacking Jim, as one might expect, the pirates first regard him in awed silence—“staring at me like as many sheep”—and then begin affirming his claims and admiring his other achievements (152). For example, Tom Morgan marvels, “‘It was him that knowed Black Dog,’” while Silver adds, “‘I’ll put another again to that, by thunder! for it was this same boy that faked the chart from Billy Bones. First and last, we’ve split upon Jim Hawkins!’” (152).

But given that this sycophantic frenzy takes place after countless other incidents attest to the dangers of being beguiled by adult adulation, it seems evident that we are meant to follow Jim’s lead in learning to distrust such discourse. Still playing his old game, Silver continues to pile compliments onto Jim, remarking loudly to his crew, “‘I never seen a better boy than that. He’s more a man than any pair of rats of you’” (153). But now that Jim has overheard Silver seducing a series of juvenile victims with the same move, he knows better than to trust him. Reading this scene, avid consumers of boys’ adventure stories would have experienced a similar sense of déjà vu, since this incident is closely patterned on the moment in The Coral Island when Ralph Rover boldly confronts the pirate captain who has captured him, wrapping up his defiant speech with the words “‘I am made of such stuff as the like of you shall never tame, though you should do your worst’” (Ballantyne 263). “Instead of flying into a rage,” the buccaneers regard Ralph with looks of amazement and sing his praises: “‘Well done, lad! you’re a brick’” (262–63). Ballantyne expects his audience to agree with this sentiment and place complete trust in books that trumpet boyish vigor. But Stevenson prods his readers to become suspicious of textual overtures of this sort.

This commitment to creating skeptical readers sets Treasure Island even further apart from the typical Robinsonade, which insists on being taken as the gospel truth. As I have already noted, such stories celebrate and encourage the act of echoing back information that one has gleaned from books of travel and adventure, whereas Stevenson aims to deter such behavior by sending up the conventions of the genre and by presenting the negative example of Silver’s parrot. If Jim’s suspicious stance at the end of the novel represents the best attitude to take toward silver-tongued storytellers, the bird’s habit of mindless reiteration signifies the worst. The parrot serves as a haunting symbol of voicelessness and an utter lack of autonomy, and the fact that he gets the last word confirms that Treasure Island is not a story about achieving maturity and mastery. For Jim, skepticism comes too late; he has already played the parrot’s part.

Thus, in his first encounter with Silver, Jim begins repeating back information fed to him by the one-legged pirate, just as he reiterates the story to suit the gentlemen. Like “Cap’n Flint,” “Cap’n Hawkins” frequently acts in a clueless, compliant way, as when he finds the gentlemen’s excitement about the map “incomprehensible” yet participates in their quest (34); or when he cannot help laughing along with Silver “though I did not see the joke” (45); or when he agrees to follow Gunn’s directions while admitting “‘I don’t understand one word that you’ve been saying’” (83). Tellingly, the sea-cook lavishes the same sort of sweet talk on the bird that he does on the boy: “‘Ah, she’s a handsome craft, she is,’ the cook would say, and give her sugar from his pocket” (55). The sharp cries of Silver’s ancient yet innocent “babby” haunt Jim’s dreams because he represents the terrifying possibility that one may age yet never acquire any real power, authority, or agency (55). Indeed, Jim fails to gain command over himself or the world around him: Silver escapes; the rest of the treasure remains on the island; and our hero is too immobilized by the horrors he has seen to seek out any more trouble.

Still, it is odd that Jim’s worst nightmares after his adventure ends are not about Silver or any of the brutal scenes of physical violence that he has witnessed but instead involve “the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!’” (191). Stevenson clearly intends us to interpret this dream as a flashback to the horrible surprise Jim suffers in the stockade; that chapter is entitled “Pieces of Eight” because the boy realizes he has made a terrible mistake when he hears the parrot’s cry. This moment attests to the trauma of recognizing that the people you thought were your friends are actually your most dangerous enemies—the very message Treasure Island sends about manipulative storytellers who cozy up to boys by championing their superior prowess. Whereas the fantasized audience for this sort of story is profoundly passive and parrot-like, readers of Treasure Island are invited to take a more active stance. Committed to creating a more truly collaborative reader–writer relationship, Stevenson does not merely present the cautionary tale of a boy who is seduced and betrayed by adult raconteurs, he also employs a range of literary techniques that challenge his readers to draw their own conclusions, including understated satire, ambiguity, and incomplete closure.

Indeed, it is a sign of how much leeway he gives to his audience to exercise their own judgment that generations of readers have missed his critique of Empire completely, interpreting the novel as a simplistic, humorless, and pro-imperialist text.¹⁹Close That is the risk of moving away from an autocratic authorial stance: people have the freedom to construe your tale in a variety of ways. In writing Treasure Island, Stevenson did not merely aim to accommodate active, skeptical readers, but to create them. Yet precisely because the text is informed by this desire, it too constitutes an effort to produce a particular kind of young person. Hoping to mold juvenile readers into becoming less moldable does not magically erase the power imbalance built in to the adult author–child reader relationship. Nothing can do that, and the overarching message of Treasure Island is that getting involved in the plots of people more powerful than you are can profoundly endanger your mental, physical, and emotional well-being. As I will show, the same anxiety pervades the work of Lewis Carroll; he, too, dwells on the difficulties that ensue when young and old beings interact, including the danger that the child will function as a pawn who parrots back adult propaganda. Even as Carroll self-consciously tries to create children’s fiction that invites audience members to operate as active collaborators in the production of meaning, he remains keenly aware that nonsense itself can be experienced as a form of coercion, a brand of “fun” that pushy adults foist on profoundly uninterested children.