Before You Begin

It begins quietly enough: a brown old seaman with a sabre cut across one cheek comes plodding up to the door of the Admiral Benbow inn, calls roughly for a glass of rum, and warns the innkeeper's son to keep a weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg. From that single ominous arrival unspools one of the greatest adventures ever written — a battered chart, a hired schooner, a far Caribbean island, and a ship's company in which honest men and murderous pirates sit down to the same table.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Treasure Island in 1883, and in doing so he practically invented the treasure map, the black spot, the one-legged sea-cook, and the parrot that screams for pieces of eight. He gave us Long John Silver, perhaps the most charming villain in English fiction — a man you cannot quite bring yourself to hate even as he plots murder over the apple barrel. More than a century on, the book still reads at a gallop, because Stevenson never forgot that he was writing, first and last, to thrill.

We meet it all through the eyes of young Jim Hawkins, an ordinary boy thrown among extraordinary dangers, who learns that courage is something you discover only when you have no choice. The sea is wide, the island is full of menace, and nobody — least of all Jim — can be sure who will keep faith and who will turn.

The tale is told in six parts, from the coming of the old buccaneer to the winning of the treasure. Weigh anchor, and the voyage is yours.