Meanwhile, the location and precise kind of treasure sought was immaterial: The quest might involve discovering a northwest passage to the fabled Orient. For the tragic hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, it might be to find gold at the Orinoco River in South America. After Marco Polo it might be to carry rare commodities overland from India and farther east, along the routes of the spice trade and silk trade. Furthermore, if the acquisition of wealth underlay this new mode of venturing forth, religion and missionary zeal could underwrite any such enterprise, as with the medieval Crusades.

For Bible readers treasure might recall the gold and frankincense and myrrh brought to Bethlehem by the three wise men of the East, sage kings who followed a guiding providential star. In romantic terms treasure meant what John Keats, reading the Elizabethan translation of Homer, once called “the realms of gold.” Realistically we could say that the quest for treasure—the grown-up version of the child’s treasure hunt, amounted finally to a falsely legalized grab for loot; this is how Joseph Conrad viewed unrestrained imperialism. The buccaneer, the pirate, and later the mercenary “privateer” went off on their adventures solely to seize wealth laboriously or murderously accumulated by others. Armed expeditions were sent out from European harbors, to dispossess other nations who had already sent their own predatory engines of conquest to the New World. And of course these representatives of other nations were themselves virtual pirates, the agents of new empires in the making.

In fact, the gentleman adventurer was a licensed pirate-licensed because piracy was otherwise a crime on the high seas, punishable by death. Some notorious pirates made sure they had enough money back home to buy off any possible prosecution. The famed Captain Kidd was a kind of maritime mafioso, using and abusing the law at will. The career of pirate, we might say, was almost officially sanctioned, since commonly sea captains of the sixteenth century were given letters of marque from king and country, authorizing them to prey upon the fleets of other nations. English sailors were especially prone to this dangerous occupation. Royal authority tended to make theft and violence legal, in the eyes of the home country, so it may be more accurate to say that pirates were mercenaries who paid their expenses by keeping a major share of the booty they took from unsuspecting traders. We are not surprised, in the present account of Stevenson’s literary context, that besides Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe wrote a large General History of the Pyrates (1724), a book whose title page carries the name Captain Charles Johnson as author. The book was often later known as “Johnson’s History of Pirates,” and under that name Stevenson would have studied it.

The striking and significant thing about such histories is at once apparent from Defoe’s title page, where thirteen different pirate captains are listed by name, the first of them mentioned as “the famous Captain Avery and his Companions,” implying that pirates and piracy enjoyed glamour then, as they still do. Theft, mayhem, and murder are by no means unpopular subjects, and the father of all such stars is the pirate on the Spanish Main. The pirate is in some important sense the natural hero of romance, for he is allowed to do what no ordinary person may do. He can be violent in pursuit of his ends. He can enslave the crews of ships he boards. He can rob and kill owners at will. He is the romantic highwayman of the oceans. He is, in a word, a hero, the man of action. In adventure stories he may be treated as cruel and sinister, like J. M. Barrie’s Captain Hook, but he slides away in many stories, having earned our sneaking admiration for his daring. He is the bad man Huck Finn never wanted to be. He is the one who refuses to live a life “of quiet desperation.”

There is a kind of wild poetic justice, then, in the link Stevenson himself draws between his methods as the author of Treasure Island and the piracy that is required in principle if any treasure is truly to be sought and won. His novel seems to be not only about piracy but itself actually practices piracy, and he admits this, almost as if he can hardly believe it. The author calls himself a pirate of a most unusual kind, which in fact carries us back to our first question: How can a mythical story like Treasure Island come from our modern print culture? The question arises from the thought: Who owns the stories inherited from ancient tradition? Close to the end of his life Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a short essay on this subject, “My First Book—Treasure Island,” in which he confessed that his novel had taken many small bits and pieces from various sources, including Robinson Crusoe, at least one novel by his English predecessor Captain Marryat, Poe’s famous short stories, and works by two other pioneering American authors, James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.

More than one author in the past has proudly announced he was stealing, not borrowing, such materials. Piracy in literature, admired by some, enraging to others, would include “taking prizes” like the fort Stevenson had discovered in Captain Marryat’s Masterman Ready (1841-1842).