Chương Chương 1 · I. The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral Benbow

. I. 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 cove 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.