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use of an old sailor’s chest and Stevenson’s. Daggett is a garrulous but peaceable man, a plain sailor not a pirate, who has come by his valuable information honestly; but in emulating Deacon Pratt by transferring the critical contents of Daggett’s chest to the mysterious one owned by the bona fide pirate in Irving’s sketch, Stevenson began his story with some very skillful and imaginative pilfering of his own.
    Again, that Stevenson seems to have borrowed from Cooper’s romance, as well as from Irving and Marryat, is important chiefly because of what he did with the elements he appropriated for his own romance. That is to say, the parallels are of interest as a key to Stevenson’s genius, witnessed by his skill at recombining elements from what are generally conceded to be lesser works of Irving and Cooper into one of the most entertaining novels of all time. For example, in translating the contents of Thomas Daggett’s chest into those found in Billy Bones’s, which includes the selfsame “West Indian shells,” it is typical of Stevenson that he has Jim wonder “why he should have carried about these shells with him in his wandering, guilty, and hunted life.” The speculation was presumably inspired by Cooper’s inclusion of them among much more mundane objects, but neither Cooper nor his hero makes any similar remarks. Similarly, Jim finds “some thread and big needles” in the dead man’s pocket, along with a “thimble,” more easily understood by youthful (or most) readers than the leather “palm” in Cooper’s inventory but associated with mending clothes, not sails.
    We need not dismiss Stevenson’s crediting the contents of Billy Bones’s chest to his father, for to the slim inventory of Daggett’s property are added a number of other items suggesting Bones’s successful piratical career, including compasses, a quadrant, and “twobrace of very handsome pistols,” along with bars of silver and the sack of gold coins buried deep in the chest. This last not only hints at treasure but provides a typical touch of transforming genius: For surely one of the great moments in the story is the stubborn and painstaking effort that Jim’s mother makes in counting out from the bewildering assortment of coins the exact sum due her, a meticulous rendering that she insists on continuing even as the “tap-tapping” of Blind Pew’s cane is heard outside. And when in terror she gives up the count and flees, it is in lieu of the balance as yet unreckoned that Jim seizes the fabulous oilskin packet which will turn out to be the most valuable item in the chest by far, the very thing sought by Pew and his men, and equivalent to the charts found among Daggett’s belongings.
    As for Stevenson’s other, acknowledged borrowings, such as the parrot from
Robinson Crusoe
, the stockade from Marryat, and the pointing skeleton from Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” these are perhaps best regarded as tributes to authors Stevenson admired. To them we can add the device of Ben Gunn’s ghostly singing to terrify the superstitious pirates, taken most likely from Crusoe’s use of Friday to bewilder the mutineers who have landed on his island, or from Prospero’s equivalent use of Ariel in
The Tempest
. They are of a class with the parallel between Jim’s receiving valuable information while hiding in the apple barrel and the episode in the haunted house in
Tom Sawyer
, which brings closure by the way to the boy hero’s own search for buried treasure, the “rules” for which are also borrowed from Poe’s “The Gold-Bug.”
    And so it goes, that joint interweaving between texts that is not only essential to the notion of genre but suggests the larger kinship, the DNA as it were, that joins the various members of the great family of adventure fiction in one common blood bond. Thus the diminished treasure that provides an ironic ending to Cooper’s novel becomes the empty pit that turns the plot in Stevenson’s book