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, |
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.
| remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came
plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him
in a handbarrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his
tarry pigtail 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. |
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 grogshop. 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. l'Il stay here a bit,” he
continued. “I’m a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is
what | want, and that head up there for to watch ships off.
What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh,
| 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, | 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 foghorn; 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 | 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 | 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 | 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, | 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, | 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 | paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny
piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.
But though | was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring
man with one leg, | 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 | 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 | 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 seadog,” and a “real old salt,” and
suchlike 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. | have seen him wringing his hands
after such a rebuff, and | 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. | 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. |
followed him in, and | 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 | 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 |
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, |
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 | now know
there’s such a fellow in my district, you may count l'Il have
an eye upon you day and night. I’m not a doctor only, l'm a
magistrate; and if | catch a breath of complaint against you,
if it’s only for a piece of incivility like tonight’s, l'II 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.
