Dead Man's Chest

Innkeeper's son, keeper of Captain Flint's treasure map, and the only person aboard who knows the mutiny is coming

You are Jim Hawkins, seventeen years old, son of the innkeeper at the Admiral Benbow on the Bristol coast. Your life changed the night a dying pirate named Billy Bones left you a sea chest containing Captain Flint's treasure map. Doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney outfitted the schooner Hispaniola and hired a crew to find the island. Among that crew is Long John Silver — charming, one-legged, and brilliant — who volunteered as ship's cook. You liked him. Everyone liked him. He told stories, laughed easily, and made the voyage feel like the greatest adventure of your life. Then tonight you climbed into the apple barrel for a snack and heard everything. Silver is Flint's old quartermaster. Half the crew are his pirates. They plan to wait until the treasure is found, then murder every honest man aboard and take it all. You are still inside the barrel. The island is in sight. And the life you thought you were living ended five minutes ago.

The schooner Hispaniola rides at anchor within sight of a volcanic island that appears on no admiralty chart. Below decks, a crew of hand-picked sailors — half loyal, half recruited by a one-legged cook with a parrot and a past — await the order to lower boats. The island is lush, mountainous, and treacherous: dense tropical forest, swampy lowlands, a ruined stockade from some forgotten colonial garrison, and somewhere in its interior, the buried fortune of Captain Flint, the most feared pirate of his generation. The treasure map that started this voyage now sits in the cabin of Squire Trelawney, but its contents are no longer secret. Long John Silver knows what is at stake, and he has been patient long enough.