Free to read
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson
A sea chest, a stolen map, and a voyage that cannot be trusted. Jim Hawkins sets sail for buried gold, but the most dangerous thing aboard may be the ship's charming cook.
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Adventure
- Length
- 34 chapters · About 6 hours
- First published
- 1883
- Availability
- Free
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Is this book for you?
For readers who want mutiny, secret alliances and a proper island adventure. Brisk chapters make it easy to return for another few sentences.
Read it in English. This edition is free to add to your library.
Text source: Project Gutenberg. Source license and territorial terms.
THE OPENING PAGES
Try the first few lines.
Squire Trelawney, Dr. 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 sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.
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 pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre 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…Start reading this book ↗