Chapter: AT THE "ADMIRAL BENBOW"


Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having
asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from
the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the
island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I
take up my pen in the year of grace 17--, and go back to the time when
my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" Inn, and the brown old seaman, with
the saber cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

[Illustration: _I remember him as if it were yesterday as he came
plodding to the inn door_ (Page 3)]

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn
door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall,
strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pig-tail falling over the
shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with
black, broken nails, and the saber cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid
white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as
he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so
often afterwards:

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

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of
stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared,
called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he
drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste, and still
looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

"This is a handy cove," says he, at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop. Much company, mate?"

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help
up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum
and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch
ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I
see what you're at--there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces
on the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," said
he, looking as fierce as a commander.

And, indeed, bad as his clothes were, and coarsely as he spoke, he had
none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed
like a mate or skipper, accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man
who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning
before at the "Royal George"; that he had inquired what inns there were
along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and
described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of
residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.

He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove, or
upon the cliffs, with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner
of the parlor next the fire, and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly
he would not speak when spoken to; only look up sudden and fierce, and
blow through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came
about our house soon learned to let him be. Every day, when he came back
from his stroll, he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the
road. At first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind
that made him ask this question; but at last we began to see he was
desirous to avoid them. When a seaman put up at the "Admiral Benbow" (as
now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol), he would
look in at him through the curtained door before he entered the parlor;
and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse when any such was
present. For me, at least, there was no secret about the matter; for I
was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms.

He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the
first of every month if I would only keep my "weather eye open for a
seafaring man with one leg," and let him know the moment he appeared.
Often enough when the first of the month came round, and I applied to
him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me, and stare me
down; but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it,
bring me my fourpenny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for "the
seafaring man with one leg."

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On
stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and
the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg
would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
kind of a creature who had never had but one leg, and that in the middle
of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch,
was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my
monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than
his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would call
for glasses round, and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum," all the neighbors joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for
silence all around; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was not
following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till he
had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories
they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and
the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his
own account, he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men
that God ever allowed upon the sea; and the language in which he told
these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the
crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be
ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over
and put down and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his
presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking
back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country
life; and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to
admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog," and a "real old salt," and
such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England
terrible at sea.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us; for he kept on staying week
after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had
been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to
insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through
his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared my poor
father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a
rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have
greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his
dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his
hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it
was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his
coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and which, before
the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter,
and he never spoke with any but the neighbors, and with these, for the
most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had
ever seen open.

He was only once crossed, and that was toward the end, when my poor
father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Doctor Livesey came
late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my
mother, and went into the parlor to smoke a pipe until his horse should
come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old "Benbow." I
followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright
doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and
pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all,
with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting
far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he--the captain,
that is--began to pipe up his eternal song:

    "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest--
      Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!
    Drink and the devil had done for the rest--
      Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!"

At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big
box of his upstairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled
in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this
time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it
was new, that night, to nobody but Doctor Livesey, and on him I observed
it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment
quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the
gardener, on a new cure for rheumatics. In the meantime the captain
gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand
upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean--silence. The
voices stopped at once, all but Doctor Livesey's; he went on as before,
speaking clear and kind, and drawing briskly at his pipe between every
word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand
again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous
oath: "Silence, there, between decks!"

"Were you addressing me, sir?" said the doctor; and when the ruffian had
told him, with another oath, that this was so, replied, "I have only one
thing to say to you, sir, that if you keep on drinking rum, the world
will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

The old fellow's fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened
a sailor's clasp-knife, and balancing it open on the palm of his hand,
threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him, as before, over his
shoulder, and in the same tone of voice, rather high, so that all the
room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady:

"If you do not put that knife this instant into your pocket, I promise,
upon my honor, you shall hang at the next assizes."

Then followed a battle of looks between them; but the captain soon
knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like
a beaten dog.

"And now, sir," continued the doctor, "since I now know there's such a
fellow in my district, you may count I'll have an eye upon you day and
night. I'm not a doctor only, I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath
of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like
to-night's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed
out of this. Let that suffice."

Soon after Doctor Livesey's horse came to the door and he rode away, but
the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.

[Illustration]

 Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey, and others have asked Jim Hawkins to write down his adventures. So Jim is going to start where it all began: at the Admiral Benbow inn, owned by Jim's father. One day, a tall, ragged, suntanned sailor walks into the inn. He is singing a song: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" . The man asks Jim's father if they get many customers. When he hears that business is slow, he decides to stay at the inn. Even though the man's clothes are ragged, his manner is proud and commanding. He tells Jim's father he is a captain, but he won't say much more about himself. He spends all day looking out at the sea through his telescope and spying on the few sailors who pass through the area. The captain takes Jim aside and promises to pay him an allowance each month if Jim will help him keep an eye out for a one-legged sailor. The captain tells terrible stories about the violent life on the high seas, which terrify and fascinate all the men of the neighborhood. The captain keeps staying at the Admiral Benbow inn long after his money runs out. Jim's father is too afraid to ask him to leave. Jim's father is sick, and one evening Doctor Livesey comes by the inn to see him. After seeing Jim's father, Doctor Livesey sits talking to Taylor, the gardener. The captain is singing as usual - the same old song about the "dead man's chest." The captain signals for the whole inn to be quiet, and everyone shuts up except Doctor Livesey. The captain tells Doctor Livesey directly to be quiet. Doctor Livesey asks if the captain is talking to him. When the captain says yes, Doctor Livesey tells him that if the captain doesn't knock off drinking so much rum, the world will have one less "very dirty scoundrel" in it. The captain jumps up and draws a knife. Doctor Livesey doesn't bat an eyelid. He just warns that captain that if he doesn't put the knife away, he'll hang for it. The captain knuckles under, grumbling. Doctor Livesey warns that he's going to keep an eye on the captain from now on. Doctor Livesey is also the local magistrate . If he hears any complaints about the captain, he's going to have him thrown out of the district. Doctor Livesey rides away, and the captain continues to sit quietly.

