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pays her for his lodging with various articles scavenged from his massive chest: a sailmaker’s needles and protective leather “palm,” a fid, seashells salvaged from tropical beaches, and a carved whale’s tooth. Captain Gardiner is charged with selling Daggett’s property, piece by piece, in Sag Harbor, and Gardiner’s aid in fetching a doctor is also enlisted when it becomes apparent that the old sailor’s health is failing fast.
    But in the meantime a conversation between Daggett and the greedy Deacon reveals that the dying sailor has in his chest a chart and a journal that pinpoint the location of certain unknown islands near the Antarctic Circle where an abundance of fur-bearing seals (sea lions) can be found. Unaware that he is close to death, Daggett refuses to give up the chart and journal, having sworn a mutual oathwith a band of other sailors not to reveal the location of the islands until 1820, a date still a year away. He is willing, however, to ship on the Deacon’s newly built sloop, the
Sea-Lion
, and to direct Captain Gardiner to the place where the seals may be found. Also mentioned is a “key,” a tiny island in the West Indies, where a treasure is buried, a chart of which is also kept in the locked sea chest. Daggett is supposed to have been given this information by a pirate with whom he briefly shared a jail cell before being cleared of any complicity with the brigand, who was subsequently hanged.
    The Deacon attempts to wheedle at least a glance at the chart and journal, but Daggett sticks by his oath, claiming that it “was none of your custom-house oaths, of which a chap might take a dozen of a morning, and all should be false; but it was an oath that put a seaman on his honor, since it was a good-fellowship affair, all round.” Though the Deacon is interested in the potential profits from a successful voyage after seal pelts, his avarice is chiefly aroused by the prospect of securing the pirate treasure. Daggett plays on this greed, using language anticipating that of Stevenson’s rascally sea dogs: “Ay, ay, sir, gold is gold; and any of it good enough for me, though doubloons is my favo
rites
. When a fellow has got half-a-dozen doubloons alongside of his ribs, he can look the landlord full in the eye; and no one thinks of saying to sich as he, ‘It’s time to think of shipping ag’in.’”
    Neither the Deacon nor Daggett has an idea how close the old sailor is to death, until the doctor fetched by Roswell Gardiner announces, “This poor man … [is] in the last stages of a decline … and medicine can do him no good. He may live a month; though it would not surprise me to hear of his death in an hour.” A firm opinion expressed “coolly,” it looks forward to Dr. Livesey’s diagnosis of Billy Bones’s condition. Unlike Bones, Daggett dies a peaceful death, but not before repeating his description of the islands where a great wealth of seal pelts may be harvested, further arousing the Deacon’s cupidity but without revealing the islands’ exact latitude and longitude. No sooner has he learned of Daggett’s death than the Deacon has the sailor’s chest removed to his own-house, where at the first opportunity he pillages it of the “two old, dirty, and ragged charts.” After transferring the valuable information regarding latitude and longitude to a memorandum book, he scratches off the data from the original charts, returns them to thechest, and records the information on charts of his own. The rest of the sea romance concerns the efforts of Captain Gardiner to locate both the seals and the treasure, and need not concern us here, though there are other, minor points of tangency with
Treasure Island
.
    It should be noted that
The Sea Lions
as a maritime romance is of interest today chiefly to historians of the genre, while
Treasure Island
remains a classic of its kind. Indeed, what is of interest to us here is less the similarities than the differences between Cooper’s