From Barnes & Noble

Young Jim Hawkins suddenly comes into possession of an old map showing the location on a small island where a fortune in gold lies buried. Accompanying Long John Silver & his band of pirates, Jim sails toward the treasure...and more trouble than he can imagine. Ages 10 & up

From the Publisher

First published over a century ago, this extraordinary tale of long-lost treasure and revenge remains one of the most memorable in classic literature. In this unabridged gift edition, two-time Cladecott Medal-winning illustrators Leo and Diane Dillon capture perfectly the grandeur, beauty and perils of Captain Nemo's underwater world.

Publishers Weekly

The Scribner Storybook Classic line adds Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, abridged by Timothy Meis, with vintage illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. Young Jim Hawkins finds a treasure map and follows it to South America, only to wind up in the hands of the notorious pirate Long John Silver. Climactic scenes of aggressive mutineers or the hero's valiant attempt to keep the evil Mr. Hands at bay come alive in Wyeth's atmospheric oil paintings. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Children's Literature

In another classic story, Ron Miller has retold of Professor Aronnax's time as a guest/prisoner of Captain Nemo aboard the submarine Nautilus. In addition to the exciting story, readers are offered plenty of information about the period, whaling, undersea life, diving suits and submarines through factual insets that are accompanied by photographs, paintings, drawings, maps and artifacts. It is more than the story, it is a lesson in history, social studies, oceanography and more. The most amazing fact is that this story was written in 1870 when science and technology had yet to produce submarines or scuba equipment and the many other things of which Captain Nemo was so proud. Verne was a true visionary and one of the earliest science fiction writers; this underwater saga continues to fascinate readers more than a hundred years after publication. This title and others in the "Eyewitness Classics" series are a wonderful way to introduce today's kids to yesterday's great stories.

Children's Literature

Part of Viking's "Whole Story" series, this is an elegant volume that allows a reader access to the original, unabridged text of Stevenson's classic. The special appeal of this edition, however, lies not in its glossy pages, enticing as they are, but in its very unusual design. The story is treated like a documentary of its time, and the book includes wonderfully engrossing side-bars on everything from the clothing of 18th century gentlemen to fish, sea shells and the barbarism of pirates. Richly illustrated spreads highlight such topics as ship's compass, sails and rigging; the one on knots will have a young reader's hands itching to try them.

Children's Literature

A glorious adventure set in the day of the infamous pirate Long John Silver. It is when young Jim Hawkins encounters an "Old Sea Dog" by the name of Billy Bones that his adventures begin. The death of Billy Bones, early in the story, brings Jim into contact with Dr. Livesey and the Squire. Upon the discovery of a treasure map among the belongings of Billy Bones, they decide that the three of them--Jim, Dr. Livesey and the Squire--will sail for this island where it has been discovered that the notorious Captain Flint buried his treasure. Long John Silver, in an attempt to get the treasure, comes on board their ship, the Hispaniola. Amazingly enough, it is the young Hawkins who is the spoiler of Silver's plan and one of the heroes of the story. Stevenson writes with such color and detail that the reader is transported onto the ship and into Jim Hawkins' adventure. In addition to the story, this edition of this timeless classic has a wonderful foreword written by Newberry author Avi. 2000, Aladdin Classics, Ages 7 to Adult, $7.98, $15.98, $6.95, $3.99. Reviewer: John D. Orsborn

Children's Literature

The classic adventure story is presented to young readers in a shortened, fully illustrated version in this book which is part of the "Graphic Revolve" series. Jim Hawkins is a young lad working in his mother's inn when he meets Billy Bones. The excitement begins when Jim comes into possession of a treasure map. When a crew sets off to find the treasure, Jim is taken on as a cabin boy and finds that pirates are also after the gold. The book includes discussion questions, writing prompts, a listing of internet sites and suggestions for further reading, in addition to a glossary and background information about sailing ships during the 1700s. Especially informative is a paragraph about Robert Louis Stevenson. Young people might find it interesting to know that the writer was inspired to write the book after a vacation during which he and his stepson drew imaginary treasure maps and made up stories.

Children's Literature

When an old sea captain appears at the inn that Jim Hawkins' family owns, a series of events begins that sends Jim into one of the most classic adventures in children's literature. Jim holds the keys to the treasure of the late Captain Flint, which attracts the attention of many pirates, including a certain Long John Silver. From taverns in England to exotic islands, Jim, the pirates, and some helpers from home all travel to find this elusive treasure. Young Jim finds that it is hard to look for a treasure when people want you dead—and you never know who to trust! While the new reader may find some of the story cliche, one must remember that this is the pirate story upon which all modern pirate stories are modeled. The original pirate story for children still reigns supreme, now with a wonderful forward by Eoin Colfer. Reviewer: Amie Rose Rotruck

Joel BangilanCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information. - School Library Journal

Gr 4–6
The format of these retellings provides a gateway to otherwise daunting works of literature. By no means are these graphic novels meant to replace the originals; the vocabulary is limited, and the narrative, dialogue, and descriptive elements are rudimentary. Yet in combination with the bold, fresh, action-packed graphic elements, the stories will attract reluctant readers. What is verbal in the original novels, such as characterization or imagery, is dependent on the art. Line qualities in the color drawings are varied and show evidence of an accomplished illustrator. The books include discussion questions that teachers might find useful. These titles are visually attractive and will see a lot of circulation. Once in the hands of developing readers, they may open the doors to the masterful works on which they are based.

School Library Journal

Gr 6-10-- The striking jacket of this new edition of an old classic promises more than it delivers. Thirty-one plates, full-color but predominantly in earth-tone hues, are dropped into the text, sometimes mindlessly. For example, the cover art, a pirate digging in sand among pieces of eight, reappears on page 61, facing text that sketches the lives of pirates, "gentlemen of fortune.'' The text never relates to the art. Ingpen's style is impressionistic but evocative of N. C. Wyeth's illustrations for the same title (Scribners, 1911, reissued by Time Warner, 1992); his plate of Blind Pow shows the subject in much the same pose. In some paintings, Ingpen uses angle and perspective effectively; interest is added by superimposing people upon background, or vice-versa. Spot line drawings, some used more than once, accent many pages. Unfortunately, in some cases, a subject is not recognizable from one page to the next, and the hazy impressionistic style makes it difficult to interpret some pictures. Although superficially handsome, this title has stiff competition from many other editions of Treasure Island, the Wyeth edition, especially. --Carolyn Noah, Central Mass. Regional Library System, Worcester, MA

School Library Journal

Gr 3-5-Stripped down from the original, this version reads smoothly enough for younger readers to get the plot and essential characters straight and the oversized format gives the story and pictures import. But 14 Wyeth illustrations, murkily reproduced and in a garishly yellowed tint, hardly convey the artist's full-color, masterful, and classic depictions of the action. To see the real pictures, suggest that children look at the version published by Atheneum (1981). They might even read the whole story.-Susan Hepler, Burgundy Farm Country Day School, Alexandria, VA Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0970802269
  
• ISBN-13: 9780970802262
• Format: Other Format
• Publisher: One Voice Recordings
• Pub. Date: December 2006
• Edition Description: MP3 CD
• Sales Rank: 534,315

• Table of Contents
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

Treasure Island

NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company

Chapter One

Chapter I

The Old Sea Dog at the "Admiral Benbow"

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.

I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:-

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then herapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.

"This is a handy cove," says he, at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?"

My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity.

"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum and bacon and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're at-there;" and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. "You can tell me when I've worked through that," says he, looking as fierce as a commander.

And, indeed, bad as his clothes were, and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast; but seemed like a mate or skipper, accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the "Royal George;" that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. 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 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 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. He had taken me aside one day, and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg," and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough, when the first of the month came round, and I applied to him for my wage, he would only blow through his nose at me, and stare me down; but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me my fourpenny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring man with one leg."

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. Often I have heard the house shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum;" all the neighbours joining in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing louder than the other, to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most over-riding 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. Nor would he allow any one to leave the inn till he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.

His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were; about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea; and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannised over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life; and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog," and a "real old salt," and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us; for he kept on staying week after week, and at last month after month, so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through his nose so loudly, that you might say he roared, and stared my poor father out of the room. I have seen him wringing his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his early and unhappy death.

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down, he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his coat, which he patched himself up-stairs in his room, and which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part, only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us had ever seen open.

He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end, when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse should come down from the hamlet, for we had no stabling at the old "Benbow." I followed him in, and I remember observing the contrast the neat, bright doctor, with his powder as white as snow, and his bright, black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy, bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting far gone in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he-the captain, that is-began to pipe up his eternal song:-

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil had done for the rest-

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

At first I had supposed "the dead man's chest" to be that identical big box of his up-stairs in the front room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this time we had all long ceased to pay any particular notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did not produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to mean-silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr. Livesey's; he went on as before, speaking clear and kind, and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke out with a villainous, low oath: "Silence, there, between decks!"

"Were you addressing me, sir?" says the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, "I have only one thing to say to you, sir," replies the doctor, "that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!"

The old fellow's fury was awful. He sprang to his feet, drew and opened a sailor's clasp-knife, and, balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened to pin the doctor to the wall.

The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him, as before, over his shoulder, and in the same tone of voice; rather high, so that all the room might hear, but perfectly calm and steady:-

"If you do not put that knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my honour, you shall hang at the next assizes."

Then followed a battle of looks between them; but the captain soon knuckled under, put up his weapon, and resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog.

"And now, sir," continued the doctor, "since I now know there's such a fellow in my district, you may count I'll have an eye upon you day and night. I'm not a doctor only; I'm a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint against you, if it's only for a piece of incivility like to-night's, I'll take effectual means to have you hunted down and routed out of this. Let that suffice."

Soon after Dr. Livesey's horse came to the door, and he rode away; but the captain held his peace that evening, and for many evenings to come.

chapter II

Black Dog Appears

and Disappears

It was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you will see, of his affairs. It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor father was little likely to see the spring. He sank daily, and my mother and I had all the inn upon our hands; and were kept busy enough, without paying much regard to our unpleasant guest.

It was one January morning, very early-a pinching, frosty morning-the cove all grey with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low and only touching the hilltops and shining far to seaward. The captain had risen earlier than usual, and set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under the broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as he strode off, and the last sound I heard of him, as he turned the big rock, was a loud snort of indignation, as though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

Well, mother was up-stairs with father; and I was laying the breakfast-table against the captain's return, when the parlour door opened, and a man stepped in on whom I had never set my eyes before. He was a pale, tallowy creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand; and, though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a fighter. I had always my eye open for seafaring men, with one leg or two, and I remember this one puzzled me. He was not sailorly, and yet he had a smack of the sea about him too.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Copyright © 1998 by Robert Louis Stevenson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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