Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey and the other gentlemen have asked me to write down the whole story of Treasure Island. I will tell everything except where the island is, because there is still treasure there. So I go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn, and the old sailor first came to stay with us.
I remember him as if it were yesterday. He walked slowly up to the inn door, and a man followed him with his sea chest in a handcart. He was tall, strong and brown, and across one cheek he had an old white scar from a sword. He looked around the cove and began to sing the old sea song that he sang so often later:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
Then he asked roughly for a glass of rum.
“This is a good place,” he said when he had drunk it. “Do many people come here, mate?”
My father told him no, very few.
“Then this is the place for me. Rum and bacon and eggs is all I want, and that hill up there to watch the ships from. You can call me captain.” He threw three or four gold coins down on the doorstep. “Tell me when I’ve used that up,” he said, and he looked as fierce as a commander.
He was a very silent man. All day he walked on the cliffs with a brass telescope, and all evening he sat by the fire in the main room and drank strong rum and water. Every day he asked if any sailors had gone by along the road, and we soon saw that he wanted to avoid them.
For me, it was no secret. One day he took me aside. “I’ll give you a silver coin on the first of every month,” he said, “if you keep your eyes open for a sailor with one leg. Tell me the moment he appears.”
The sailor with one leg came into my dreams. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the house, I saw him chasing me over fields and walls on his one leg, and that was the worst dream of all.
But I was less afraid of the captain himself than anyone else was. Some nights he drank too much rum. Then he made the frightened guests listen to his terrible stories about hanging and storms and cruel men at sea, or sing his song with him. The whole house shook with “Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum,” and nobody could leave until he was sleepy and went up to bed.
He stayed week after week, then month after month. Soon his money was all used up, but my father never had the courage to insist. When he mentioned it, the captain only stared at him until he left the room. I am sure the worry helped to bring my father to his early death.
Only once did anyone stand up to the captain. It was near the end, when my father was very ill. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see him and then sat in the main room with his pipe. The captain sat at his table, full of rum, and suddenly he began his song:
“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
Then he hit the table with his hand. We all knew that meant silence. Everyone stopped talking except Dr. Livesey, who went on speaking calmly to his neighbor. The captain stared at him, hit the table again, and at last shouted, “Silence, there!”
“Were you speaking to me, sir?” asked the doctor. When the captain said yes, with a curse, the doctor answered, “I have only one thing to say to you, sir. If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be free of a very dirty old rascal!”
The captain jumped to his feet in a terrible rage. He pulled out a sailor’s knife, opened it and threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.
The doctor did not even move. He spoke over his shoulder, loudly enough for the whole room to hear, in a perfectly calm voice: “If you do not put that knife in your pocket this minute, I promise you will hang for it.”
For a while they looked at each other, but soon the captain put the knife away and sat down, grumbling like a beaten dog.
“And now, sir,” the doctor went on, “now that I know there is a man like you in my district, I will watch you day and night. I am not only a doctor. I am a judge too. If I hear one complaint about you, I will have you thrown out of here.”
Soon the doctor rode away. But the captain was quiet that evening, and for many evenings after.