Treasure Island Read Online Free Page B

which in turn was borrowed by Edgar Rice Burroughs for a decisive moment in
Tarzan
, as his wild man of the African jungle plays the same trick on pirates that Ben Gunn, the wild man of Treasure Island, plays on Long John Silver. The world of literature is assuredly very large, but it is also very small, much as Stevenson takes us from England to his tropical island in a bound, even while, withCooper, leaving out the exact longitude and latitude of that place where much of Flint’s treasure still remains, left behind with the remnant pirates when the
Hispaniola
heads for home.
    III
    There is, it should perhaps be said, a real Hispaniola, the name Columbus gave the island now containing the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and in whose waters a sunken Spanish galleon was discovered by a legendary Puritan governor-adventurer, William Phips, who recovered a fortune from the wreck and left some treasure behind for others to claim. The story was told by Cotton Mather in his great book of marvels,
Magnolia Christi Americana
, in which Phips plays a significant role as the embodiment of the energy and initiative of the emerging Yankee, who would be epitomized by Benjamin Franklin.
    Stevenson, who detested Ben Franklin, the most enterprising Yankee of them all, probably did not read Mather’s ponderous tome. But the story of Phips and Hispaniola was famous enough, and gave further validity to Stevenson’s romance, enhancing as it did the association of Caribbean islands with the fabulous gold fleets that carried back home to Spain the treasures that had been literally wrung out of the native populations of Central and South America. For surely the island to which Stevenson takes us with seven-league boots is one of the West Indies, like the “key” on the map Thomas Daggett drew from information given him by the pirate condemned to hang.
    But where, exactly,
is
Treasure Island? I often direct this question to my students, who look at me as though I am asking them the location of the Brooklyn Bridge, the answer seems so obvious: It must be, once again, somewhere in the Caribbean. But then I call their attention to certain matters of flora and fauna, which inform the careful reader that Treasure Island cannot possibly be located in the Caribbean; instead, like the island made famous by the original of Robinson Crusoe, Alexander Selkirk (that half-crazy maroon who is the most likely model for Ben Gunn), it lies on the Pacific side of the American continent.
    The island is covered with live oaks, for one thing, and Jim hears the warning buzz of rattlesnakes, and live oaks and rattlesnakes arenot native to the Caribbean. We hear of malarial swamps, not unusual in Caribbean islands, but hardly found in company with giant “pine-trees” and, most important of all, those even larger conifers, three of which provide prominent landmarks on the island and clues to the location of the treasure pit:
    The first of the tall trees was reached, and by the bearing, proved the wrong one. So with the second. The third rose nearly two hundred feet into the air above a clump of underwood; a giant of a vegetable, with a red column as big as a cottage, and a wide shadow around in which a company could have manœuvred. It was conspicuous far to sea both on the east and west, and might have been entered as a sailing mark upon the chart.
    This last is without doubt a redwood tree, and though as a late president of the United States and former governor of California announced, to have seen one redwood is to have seen them all, to see one you must travel to California. Stevenson’s Treasure Island, like the one located in San Francisco Bay that was once the site of a world’s fair, is as Californian as the Golden Gate itself. It has to be; it cannot be otherwise. And that is a very American fact, is it not? Yes, Stevenson found his island where he found his bride-to-be, having pursued her across the great American continent, in California, specifically