The narrative wastes not a word as it moves along, encountering the vagaries of chance. The story is designed to show Jim’s powers of survival, especially by pitting him against a man he secretly admires, the devious pirate sea cook Long John Silver. The narrative tests Jim’s conscience, much in the old religious Calvinist manner, and also in a new way. We discover a psychological depth not unconnected to Calvinism. For example, Jim admits openly that he hated a man he was about to kill; this realism reflects the fact that Stevenson was tough and modern enough to create Dr. Jekyll and his ferocious double, Mr. Hyde. There is more inwardness in the story than one might have anticipated; human good and evil are constantly intermixed. The struggle is not only against malignant material power; the battle Jim really wages is against fear itself, against dark, uncanny threats, the frightening turns of a fearsome dream. Early in the book Jim leaves the safety of a picturesque home—his father dies at the outset of the story, and Jim must leave his mother and her comforting common sense, to be suddenly thrown among the most redneck of all men, common sailors who may or may not be pirates. Almost the first thing we find him confronting is “captain” Billy Bones, an old pirate with a deep scar across his face. The door over the scene he now enters is marked: Danger! At every turn his motto must be Stevenson’s own: “The great affair is to move,” for his creator was always on the move, walking, climbing, canoeing, sailing, trying for a better climate to bolster his frail tubercular health, writing essays and memoirs of these travels. As Mark Twain would have said, here was an author who knew about “roughing it.”

There is an old-fashioned side to the way the story reaches back to simpler, more adventurous times. In Treasure Island the narrative transports us from an isolated seacoast inn to the bustle of Bristol, a thriving seaport with an ancient maritime history. We get vivid sketches and character types, such as the country squire, the country doctor, the experienced sea captain, and a whole crew of very tough sailors. Later in the novel we meet a believably disturbed castaway, Ben Gunn, who recalls Robinson Crusoe, after Odysseus the best known of all outcasts. Exotic associations provide a subtle meaning to the story, whose narrator, for example, is aptly named Jim Hawkins; he is evidently named after notorious Elizabethan privateer Sir John Hawkins. Harassing the Spanish at sea, out-maneuvering them in victorious battle against the Spanish Armada (1588), Sir John Hawkins may today be known chiefly as a slave trader, but in his day he was a hero, and Queen Elizabeth knighted him for his valor—a model of greed, skill, courage, and military foresight. The social sweep is not entirely full, however. In the interests of raw adventure and Victorian literary convention, as almost always in Stevenson’s early tales, women and what the author called “psychology” are excluded from the story. The vivid role of the boy’s mother ends almost the moment it begins. She seems the origin of his unfailing practical sense, she is courageous in the midst of mayhem, but then she disappears from the plot.

The society whose story the book recounts is therefore entirely constructed around a narrow quest. The narrative is not intended to rival the complicated three-volume novels of its day. Instead all virtue, villainy, and courage are consigned to a tight-knit band of adventurers whose common bond is simply the search for treasure. No matter how cleverly Stevenson deploys touches of realistic class distinctions, he abandons the wider social interests of the classic novel, preferring instead to create a male-dominated form of romance, and yet the idea of men venturing upon the Spanish Main, sailing a ship aptly named the Hispaniola with little or no guarantee of loyalty, brings unexpected depth to Stevenson’s book. If he has a higher philosophic aim, it is to shine a light on the meaning of action in a real and dangerous world. As the author insists more than once in his critical writings and his letters, when he downplays “psychology” he substitutes a cinematic realism of specific gesture and scene, providing imaginative depth by observing external facts with a rare finesse of sensory perception. Like Joseph Conrad, he can describe precisely how a body falls to the ground, having been cut by a saber. Psychology is confined to the briefest and most simply telling moments.

Nevertheless, while Treasure Island centers on discovering buried treasure, it pins its deeper revelation on an encounter between a young boy and an older man from which something like a relationship gradually develops. Jim Hawkins discovers that his object of admiration, Long John Silver, is devious, greedy, and dangerous, an unforeseen truth Jim discovers through the course of the novel’s twists and turns.