Adventures of Long John Silver

If you loved Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island," Denis Judd's prequel to it is a book you must not miss. Written over 30 years ago--long before the current vogue for rewritten classics, sequels and prequels, and mysteries featuring literary characters--this is the story of that one-legged sailorman, Long John Silver, the central figure of the seminal pirate novel of all time. Unexpectedly reunited with his old shipmate Jim Hawkins (who is now grown up, married, and a doctor in practice in Gloucestershire), and dying of consumption, Silver decides to set the record straight and tell the full tale of his life. His experiences are probably very typical of those of many pirates of his day--not necessarily innately criminal or vicious, but more or less falling into the life out of mischance, a lust for adventure, or the ease of running afoul of the harsh laws of the time. Born and raised in Bristol, he wearies of his father's shoemaking trade and, searching for a life that will satisfy his boyish hungers, first falls in with a smuggler, is captured and jailed, escapes, joins a slaver, takes part (not entirely willingly) in a mutiny against a brain-damaged captain, helps quash an uprising by the chattel in the hold, survives a hurricane, is betrayed as a mutineer and sold into slavery in the West Indies, rises to overseer, falls in love with his master's daughter, saves her from certain death or dishonor when a crew of pirates raids the plantation, and to preserve both their skins joins the marauders, alternately privateering and pirating as opportunity offers. Along the way he meets several other characters who will loom large in the events later recorded by the young Hawkins--Billy Bones, Black Dog, Gabriel Pew, Israel Hands, Tom Morgan, Job Anderson, Michael O'Brien, Dirk Campbell--and learns to employ a tongue as silver as his name, manipulating men into things they might not otherwise have elected to do. With this, plus a rudimentary education (his mother taught him to read in his childhood) and a tall and powerful frame, his success and influence, while not rapid in coming, are assured. Yet for all the unsavory trades he follows, Silver as portrayed here is not an evil man. He loves plunder and kills his share of men, but he has no brief for torture or the harming of women (he once sets a young Spanish widow and her father free), and is faithful to Annette, his mulatto wife, even when his voyagings keep them long apart. Judd captures the feel of Stevenson's original, especially in Silver and Hawkins's reunion in the first chapter, and fills his story with the salty lingo of the sea. He has a sound grasp of what life was like in that era and lets us look into it as through a microscope. Though perhaps better suited to teens than to the younger boys who comprise the chief audience for "Treasure Island," this is a volume that all who enjoyed the latter should relish too.