Part One

The Old Buccaneer



1

The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow


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, 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.

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 cover and whistling to himself as he
did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that
he sang so often afterwards:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

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.

"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a
pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?"

My father told him no, very little company, the more
was the pity.

"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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

"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!"

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!"

"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!"

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.

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."

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.

"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."

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.