Treasure Island Summary

Stevenson said the whole plot grew out of a map. In August 1881, laid up at a cottage in Braemar, Scotland, he was entertaining his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd Osbourne on a rainy afternoon. Stevenson's own account says he drew and titled the map himself; Osbourne's later recollection says he'd sketched the island first and Stevenson elaborated it and wrote "Treasure Island" in the corner — accounts differ on whose hand drew the first line, but both agree it was a shared, rainy-day production. Stevenson later wrote that the story simply fell out of the map: names, headlands, a stockade, everything came from staring at that piece of paper.

He then wrote at astonishing speed. Fifteen chapters came out in fifteen days before he stalled completely — "my mouth was empty," as he put it. He picked it back up months later in Davos, Switzerland, and finished at a chapter a day, reading each morning's pages aloud to his family after lunch. His own father got swept up in it and contributed real plot material: he dictated the entire inventory of Billy Bones's sea chest from memory and insisted Flint's old ship be named the Walrus.

The original map, sent off to the publisher with the manuscript, was lost in the post and never returned. Stevenson had to redraw it from scratch, working backward from his own finished text — and said the redrawn version, however useful, was never really "Treasure Island" to him.

This Treasure Island summary starts at the Admiral Benbow Inn, run by Jim Hawkins's parents on the Devon coast. A rough old sailor calling himself "the Captain" — really Billy Bones — takes a room, drinks heavily, and warns Jim to watch for a one-legged seafaring man. An old shipmate, Black Dog, comes looking for a mysterious chart; the confrontation triggers a stroke in Bones. Not long after, a blind beggar named Pew delivers Bones the black spot — a pirate crew's own death warrant — and Bones dies of a second stroke that same night.

Pew and a gang raid the inn for Bones's belongings. Jim and his mother escape just ahead of them with an oilskin packet from his sea chest, and the raiders are scattered by mounted officers, with Pew trampled under their horses. The packet holds a map to the treasure of the pirate Captain Flint. Jim takes it to Dr. Livesey and Squire Trelawney, who decide to fund an expedition, with Jim signed on as cabin boy.

Trelawney outfits a schooner, the Hispaniola, hires Captain Smollett — and, while provisioning in Bristol, indiscreetly lets slip the purpose of the voyage. He ends up hiring most of the crew through the ship's new cook, a one-legged tavern keeper named Long John Silver, who is quietly recruiting Flint's old crew for a mutiny Trelawney has no idea he's about to sail into. Hidden inside an apple barrel on deck, Jim overhears Silver plotting and reports it straight to the captain.

On the island, Jim slips ashore and watches Silver murder a sailor who refuses to join the mutiny. Fleeing into the jungle, he meets Ben Gunn, a marooned former pirate gone a little strange from years alone, obsessed with cheese, and — it turns out — the only person who actually knows where Flint's gold is now.

The mutineers seize the ship. The honest party holes up in an old stockade, and this is where the book's narration switches entirely to Dr. Livesey for three chapters, covering the abandonment of the ship and the first day of fighting — events Jim, off with Ben Gunn, could not have witnessed. Jim slips away again, cuts the Hispaniola loose, and boards her alone, killing the wounded mutineer Israel Hands in self-defense when Hands comes at him with a knife.

Jim returns to find the stockade held only by Silver and the surviving mutineers — the honest party has struck a truce and handed over the map, since the ship is gone anyway. Dr. Livesey quietly warns Silver to watch himself once the gold is found; Silver's loyalty is already bending again.

Silver's crew, with Jim as hostage, follow the map to the marked spot — and find an empty hole. Ben Gunn had already dug up the treasure years earlier and moved every last coin to his own cave. The enraged mutineers turn on Silver and Jim, and are driven off just in time by Livesey's party arriving with Ben Gunn.

The recovered fortune goes aboard the Hispaniola. Only five of the men who sailed from Bristol make the return voyage — "drink and the devil had done for the rest," as the old sea-song puts it.

Silver is never captured, tried, or punished. At a port in Spanish America, while the others are ashore, Ben Gunn deliberately lets him escape in a boat — Gunn later admits he did it to protect the rest of them from whatever Silver might do if he stayed aboard. Silver leaves with a bag of stolen coin worth three or four hundred guineas. Jim's own comment: "I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him." The last the reader hears of him is speculation — Jim guesses he's living comfortably somewhere with an old companion and his parrot, and adds dryly that his chances in the next world are slim.

Ben Gunn gets a thousand pounds of the treasure, blows through all of it in nineteen days, and is given a gamekeeper's lodge to live out his days — the very fate he'd once joked about while marooned. Captain Smollett retires from the sea. The remaining bar silver and arms are left buried on the island for good; Jim says outright that nothing would bring him back to "that accursed island."

The novel's final image isn't triumph. It's the parrot's screech still ringing in Jim's ears in his worst dreams, years later: "Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!"

The most quoted lines from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, checked against the original text:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest— / Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!"

"Pieces of eight! pieces of eight! pieces of eight!"

"Right you are, Cap'n Smollett... Dooty is dooty, to be sure."

"Come back to my dooty, sir."

"Of Silver we have heard no more... I dare say he met his old negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small."

"Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island, and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: 'Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!'"

The first is the pirates' sea-song, sung throughout the novel. The middle two are Silver's catchphrase about duty — invoked whenever it happens to suit him. The last two are Jim's own closing reflections, the very end of the book.