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 parlour next to 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 did 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 parlour; 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. 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 the 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. For in these fits he was the most overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table for silence all round; 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.
Whilst Jim is hiding he comes across Ben Gunn, an ex-pirate who had been marooned on the island three years ago, by his crewmates. Ben has given up piracy and promises to help Jim and his friends. Meanwhile the Captain and the others abandon the Hispaniola and take refuge in an old stockade on the Island.
The pirates quickly realise that their plans have been discovered and attack the Captain and the others to get the treasure map. However, for the time being the Captain and his crew are safe in the stockade. Jim manages to sneak into the stockade and is reunited with his friends. They spend the night in the stockade and the next morning Silver approaches waving a flag of truce.
Silver offers them their lives in exchange for the treasure map but the Captain refuses and soon another gunfight starts. The stockade is attacked by the pirates, who are fought off, though there are men killed on both sides. Captain Smollett is also injured. Jim decides to escape from the stockade and goes off without telling the others. He finds a boat that Ben Gunn has told him he has hidden and then sails out to the Hispaniola and cuts its mooring ropes.
He falls asleep in the boat exhausted. In the morning he only just manages to escape from drowning as the sea has become very rough. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read.
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By Robert Louis Stevenson. Previous Next. Finally, the five pirates come back inside. The youngest one is holding something in his hand, which he gives fearfully to Long John Silver.
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