or lost in three weeks, or, to be more exact, in nineteen days, for he was back begging on the twentieth. Then he was given a lodge to keep, exactly as he had feared upon the island; and he still lives, a great favourite, though something of a butt, with the country boys, and a notable singer in church on Sundays and saints' days. Of Silver we have heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I daresay he met his old negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small. The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: "Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!" NOTES TO THE HESITATING PURCHASER PAGE XXXi, line 3. Maroons. Originally the fugitive slaves of Jamaica and Dutch Guiana, who made war on the white settlers. Here persons put ashore and abandoned on a desolate coast: a custom practised by pirates. 1. 4. Buccaneer, or Bucaneer. A curer of meat (from boucaner, smoke meat, from boucan, a place for smoking meat); a name first applied in the early part of the seventeenth century to the French settlers of Hispaniola (San Domingo) and of the neighboring island, Tortuga del Mer, who hunted the flesh of wild animals for purposes of trade. Self-interest and Spanish opposition soon united these adventurers — who later represented all nations save Spain - into a compact confederation; and, as it was but an easy step from smuggling to piracy, these freebooters for more than half a century, either under the high-sounding name of privateer or as plain pirate, laid the entire commerce of the Spanish Main by the heels. Yet, despite their cupidity and foulness, and the human blood that everywhere followed in their wake, such examples of reckless daring and physical courage, such hairbreadth escapes and visions of fabulous wealth are called to mind at the mention of such names as England, Roberts, Davis, Kidd, Morgan, Blackbeard, and others, that few words in the language have a larger romantic connotation than does this word Buccaneer. And while the characters in this tale, in keeping with this connotation, are broadly typical and are not at all historical, nevertheless there is much in the suggested characterization of Flint which reminds us of what tradition has fastened to the career of Edward Teach, the Blackbeard, who also had a subordinate by the name of Hands. Cf. Harper's Monthly, vol. lxxv, 357, 502. 1. 12. Ballantyne. Robert Michael Ballantyne. A writer of juveniles. Born 1825; died 1894. 1. 13. Cooper. James Fenimore Cooper. Born 1789; died 1851. See his sea-tales. Page 1, line 1. Trelawney. This was the name of a celebrated governor of Jamaica. 1.6. In the year of grace 17-. See "A Gossip on Romance" (Memories and Portraits, p. 248) for the way in which Stevenson as a boy liked a story to begin. Do you share this same feeling? 1. 11. A tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, etc. Do these few details readily help you make a picture of the man? Which detail is to you the most vivid? Note in the following descriptions a similar effect. 1. 19. Fifteen men on the dead man's chest- The first two lines of a song of West Indian piracy, which originated in the wreck of an English buccaneer on the cay called "The Dead Man's Chest" (from which it is said only a quantity of rum and fifteen men were saved). For the complete song, which follows, I am indebted to Mr. Jeffery Montague of The Richmond Times, who has pieced from various fragments this song together. BILLY BONES'S FANCY. (To the tune of " Blow the Man Down.") "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest; Yo-'ea' (heave)-ho, and a bottle o' rum! "They drank and they drank and they got so drunk, Each from the dead man bit a chunk; Yo-'ea'-ho, and a bottle o' rum! "They sucked his blood and they crunched his bones; "And Davy Jones had a big black key; "He winked and he blinked like an owl in a tree; And grinned with a horrible kind o' glee; "My men,' says he, 'you must come wi' me-' 'Must come wi' me to the depths o' the sea;' "So he clapped them into his locker in the sea, And he locked them in with his big black key; Note the recurrence of the fragment of this song, and its significance in the development of the tale. Compare Scott's use of this element of romantic invention in The Pirate and in Guy Mannering: see also Stevenson's appreciation of the same in "A Gossip on Romance." Page 2, line 2. Tuned and broken at the capstan bars, has reference to the sing-song indulged in by sailors while heaving at the capstan bars, where, as in the foregoing song, the boatswain lines off the verse and the capstan crew bawls forth the refrain. Capstan bars. The hand-levers for turning the capstan, an appa ratus for hoisting or hauling weights. 1. 6. Connoisseur. One possessing fine critical judgment or taste. · Page 3, line 9. Coast road for Bristol. "When a seaman put up at the Admiral Benbow'... making by the coast road for Bristol." Note the romantic effect of this setting, laid as it is somewhere on the seacoast not far from Bristol, at this time the second seaport in England, which was not only filled with seafaring men, but intimately acquainted with piracy by the depredations done its com merce. Page 4, line 20. Dry Tortugas. The name of a group of coral keys situated in the Gulf of Mexico off the extreme southern coast of Florida. 1. 21. Spanish Main. A name vaguely applied to the northern coast of South America; popularly used to designate the Caribbean Sea. 1. 34. Terrible at sea. Compare Billy Bones and his conduct with Irving's account of the buccaneer and his behavior in the inn in Wolfert Webber: Stevenson Page 14, line 19. Another stroke would settle him. once wrote to a friend of the first sixteen pages of a story then under way (The Beach of Falesá): “Make another end of it? Ah, yes, but that's not the way I write the whole tale is implied; I never use an effect, when I can help it, unless it prepares the effects that are to follow; that's what a story consists in. To make an other end, that is to make the beginning all wrong."— Vailima Letters, vol. I, p. 147. Also: "If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. "The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, vol. II, p. 320. See likewise his advice to the young writer in "A Humble Remonstrance": Memories and Portraits, pp. 295 ff. How much of this tale is implied in these two chapters? Does the tale end badly? Note the effects that prepare for other effects, and how this economy of interest serves the purpose of plot as the tale progresses. |