We know that Stevenson lived from childhood onward in the constant presence of the threat of death, which finally overtook him in the midst of paradise. Before he died of a cerebral hemorrhage, he could look back over a very short life, in a material sense, but an immensely long life in battle against death. Occasionally he mentions the battle—one thinks of the brutal train journey he jovially recounts in his ultra-realistic book The Amateur Emigrant (1895). He seems to have accepted fear, treating it almost as a form of pleasure. Fear and pity then become pleasurable to a reader of his books, because as Northrop Frye remarks in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), with quest romances like Treasure Island the story generally “turns fear at a distance, or terror, into the adventurous; fear at contact, or horror, into the marvelous, and fear without an object, or dread (Angst), into a pensive melancholy.” Stevenson weaves effects of weird or ghostly terror into a texture of narrative charm, thus diffusing our negative emotions. Adventurous action and total acceptance of a surplus of expectation produce the artist’s antidote to fear.

If, for literature, adventure stories are a deliberate counterattack against fear, they need a talisman for their magic, their charm. But these stories also stimulate excitement, the drive to get the reward, a holy grail, or a chest of gold coins. We know that the novelist, his father, and his stepson drew up an imaginary map of an island, from which the yarn was spun, and this map had all the magic character of a secret message, an encrypted design, full of hidden clues to unknown treasure. For Stevenson first came the map, then the story. The story caught fire from a magical moment, and since the novelist recalls precisely this illumination in one of his last essays, we can imagine Treasure Island as the story of a chart, as sailors would have called it. An alchemical equation is drawn between the island and its plan, not least because the plan includes everything except the story that goes with it.

As a magic design every map suggests the occult outline of human desire, the desire to possess some seemingly infinite delight, to find a treasure. As a magical fragment of writing, a tracery of space, the map seduces the reader into an expectant state of unfulfilled desire: The reader has to know what will happen to those who possess the map, the place where “X marks the spot”; hence the map is almost more important than the treasure itself. Similarly, the pirates signal a death threat by a kind of reverse map, and Treasure Island begins precisely that way, with the chapter on “The Black Spot.” Possession of the map brings danger to the possessor, yet it also creates a mystery about the island, so that throughout his novel Stevenson is able to lean on an abiding sense of ominous foreboding, until a final resolution occurs. One wants to say that in its magically seductive power the map is the most dangerous symbol in the world.

There is nothing new or odd about the significance of the map as the source of a plot in an adventure story. The brilliant and subtle Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges was a lifelong admirer of Stevenson, claiming for him that he had the power to order his stories according to strict narrative outlines, as if following a controlling map. On a more ordinary level the adventure novels of Arthur Ransome (Swallows and Amazons, for example) or the single most important precursors of Treasure Island, namely Robinson Crusoe and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, tell stories of shipwrecked adventurers who must discover the shape and conformation of the islands where they find themselves alone. The explorer actually “maps” his discovery, if not on paper, then in his head. Indeed every map presupposes a traveler who is to discover the correct cartography or at least the most significant features of the terrain about to be “discovered.” Conversely, many of the great explorers have made it a central aim to sketch the map of terrain traversed, a purpose critical to all imperialist expansions, suggesting that maps play a far more important role, psychologically, for such enterprises than their plainly functional use by explorers and settlers. They create a discoverer’s mind-set, the premonition of a world to be explored. One famous case would be that of Joseph Conrad, who thus described the strange origin of his most celebrated story, Heart of Darkness. As a boy he had been fascinated by a large white empty area in the center of his map of Africa; and he vowed he would someday visit this uncharted place, to discover what was there. In Moby Dick (1851), Melville wrote chapters on “The Whiteness of the Whale” and “The Chart.”

Conrad was writing a novel on the whiteness of the map. In realistic terms, while the inscribed outline of a mysterious place has its own mysterious fascination, as it had for Conrad, and while charts are essential to all travels into unknown parts, the travel itself still needs to be undertaken—otherwise the map will be an idle fantasy. What is critical for literature is that as imaginative symbols maps negotiate between fact and fiction, a trick of verisimilitude that, for example, appears in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, an important influence on Stevenson. The imaginary place and its map are subject only to the author’s mind, but as a pictorial figure of thought, they transport the reader from this real place to that imagined place. They initiate mental travel in the story. For literature, meanwhile, the mapped adventure must still be made real and plausible through the action of exploring. The mysterious well of meaning implicit in any map implies, as for Conrad, that one must go on a journey to realize the lines of the map. Making the map real in turn means creating scenes, dialogue, evocations of atmosphere, and detailed descriptions of the physical actions occurring in these scenes.