He was something of a wanderer and a dreamer—a romantic who was
better suited as a student than as the engineer his family hoped he would
be. Sickly and weak most of his life, he
was nevertheless an adventurous soul who could never be still for long.
It was during a trip through Europe that our dreamer first
started to write a series of stories for a London magazine. Before long, he had published an impressive
number of travel articles.
It was while traveling through Belgium and France by canoe, that
he met an American woman and despite her
being more than ten years his senior and married with two small children—they quickly
fell in love. Fanny promised to return
to California and obtain a divorce from her philandering husband (from whom she
was already separated) so the two could be could be married.
While Fannie returned to America, our dreamer visited Unst
Island, part of the Shetland Islands northeast of Scotland. There he visited Muckle Flugga (No, I’m
making this shit up—this is a true story—give or take a lie or two.) where his
father and uncle were building the lighthouse that still stands there. (Actually, building lighthouses was the
family business: they were engineering pharologists. The term comes from the Lighthouse of Pharo,
one of the original Seven Wonders of the World.)
When he received word that Fanny had indeed obtained a divorce,
he took passage to New York and after an extensive train journey, joined his
fiancée in San Fernando, California. The
two were quickly married, but within a short time his health collapsed due to
consumption (tuberculosis).
Strangely, his imagination seemed to soar when he was ill, and
for the rest of his life, his best works would be done while he was ill.
One night, his twelve-year-old stepson drew a rough map of an
island, no doubt inspired by the stories his stepfather had related about Unst
Island. The imaginary island even looked
a little like Unst Island if you shut your good eye and squinted at it while
drinking rum. (It also helps if there is
a parrot on your shoulder.)
The boy loved the game as his stepfather began inking onto the
map exotic place names and imaginative features and before long, he was
demanding stories to go along with the map. Since this was just a game, the stepfather “borrowed” details
from both fiction and history, mixed well with double doses of fun and fantasy.
Before long, the map had evolved into an imaginative tale of
pirates and buried treasure—and for the first time ever, the pirates had left
behind a treasure map on which `X` marked the spot where the chest full of
pieces of eight were buried. (There is
no record of any pirate's ever doing anything remotely like this in real
life. Ask yourself, if you had buried a
fortune in gold and silver, would you really need a map to find it again?)
His son liked the stories so much that he decided to write them
down. Writing as much as a chapter a
night, the stories began appearing in a weekly magazine for children, “Young
Folks.” Titled “The Sea Cook:
Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola”, the stories were all but
ignored, perhaps for the simple reason that no child in history has ever
referred to himself as a “young folk.”
(I strongly suspect that the magazine had a paid subscription list close
to zero).
The next year, 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson republished the
stories in a book, with a simplified title, Treasure Island. Since then, the book has never been out of
print, has become one of the most widely translated books in literary history,
and has been made into more than fifty movies or television shows. And, of course, the book has spawned an
entire industry of imitators and spinoffs from Captain Jack Sparrow to Peter
Pan’s Captain Hook. (In one of the Peter
Pan books the author, J. M. Barrie, states that the only man who ever
frightened Long John Silver was Captain Hook.)
Stevenson was one of my favorites when I was a kid. Loved his poetry too. The man knew how to write a story.
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