Treasure Island Drugs and Alcohol

Billy Bones has spent many evenings shocking and impressing the quiet country folk of Jim's town with his tales of distant places and adventures. Here, after his stroke, we get the full story: he's lived through terrible situations and has used rum to drown his sorrows. Now he's become so dependent on rum that he demands it even though it will kill him. This contrast between how fun pirate adventures sound and how awful they really are may explain why we can enjoy the story of Treasure Island even as Jim ends the novel swearing that it was horrible and he would never repeat his adventures. (Btw, "Yellow Jack" is yellow fever.)

Mr. Arrow can't maintain discipline with the crew because he's drunk all the time. Long John Silver clearly has no trouble identifying and manipulating Mr. Arrow's weakness, just like he exploits Squire Trelawney's blind patriotism and Jim's vanity. Mr. Arrow's weakness isn't so different from the others'; it's just more visible and difficult to ignore. This is why we find Jim's contemptuous conclusion that Mr. Arrow is better off dead a little bit hard to take: it's not like Jim has been so perfect.

Long John Silver offers this diatribe to Israel Hands when Hands tries to hurry him into mutinying before they reach the island. He points out that he's got experience and a plan on his side, but the other pirates are so impatient that they want everything right now. Long John Silver's go-to symbol for this self-indulgence is their "mouthful of rum tomorrow": they would rather have a shot of rum tomorrow than carriages in the future. And Silver proves correct: as soon as they fall to open warfare with the good guys, all the pirates get drunk, leaving them vulnerable to more sober minds.

Captain Smollett tricks the pirates into holding off their mutiny temporarily in the simplest way possible: he offers them a round of drinks in the name of Squire Trelawney, and they are so cheerful that they wait to rise up against their leaders. The thing that surprises us to no end about this book is that the pirates are so cheap! They are like children, easily bought off. Their willingness to get drunk at a moment's notice allows Captain Smollett and Squire Trelawney to get the drop on the mutineers and take the Hispaniola for themselves before rowing to the island fort.

Ben Gunn has spent three years on Treasure Island, and all this time alone has made him decide to go back to God (he's "back on piety"). But we can already see signs that he's just waiting for the chance to go back to his old ways. Even though he swears that "you don't catch me tasting rum so much," he'd take "a thimbleful for luck [...] the first chance [he has]." And indeed, the first chance Gunn has to drink a thimbleful of rum, he doesn't stop there: he goes on a nineteen-day bender that leaves him penniless. We find the foreshadowing of this future self-indulgence right here in his speech on the island.

Long John Silver comes to make a deal with Captain Smollett (which Captain Smollett promptly rejects) in response to an incident that has "shook" all of his men, even the unshakeable Long John Silver. While all his men were drunk on rum the night before, someone crept into their camp and killed one of them. Even the disciplined Long John Silver can't keep his men sober enough to stand guard. This inability to keep watch because of drunkenness proves to be a repeated theme: not only does Ben Gunn come around and kill a pirate their first night on the island, but Jim Hawkins walks right into their fort unnoticed. It's lucky for the pirates that Jim has no clue what he is doing.

Like Billy Bones, Israel Hands is physically badly off (from a stab wound rather than a stroke) but he still wants nothing more than alcohol. The dependence on alcohol leaves all of these characters in a sorry state not only because they're drunk all the time, and therefore careless, but also because when they're sick or injured, they become totally dependent on whoever is nearest to them. In both Billy Bones and Israel Hands's cases, that would be Jim.

When Jim takes control of the Hispaniola once more, he discovers what's been pretty clear from the pirates' behavior (their singing on the beach, their inability to keep watch): they've been drunk pretty much this whole time. We have to wonder, if the pirates had been at all sober during their time on Treasure Island, would the outcome of the novel have been entirely different?

In our discussion of "Quotes: Duty," we use this passage to explore Doctor Livesey's dedication to treating the pirates even at the risk of his own life. Here we will focus on the fact that the three remaining pirates on Treasure Island are either drunk or crazed (or both). Now that these pirates have lost the treasure, the ship, and their leaders, their drunkenness is perhaps like Billy Bones's: an effort to avoid acknowledging a horrible reality. We find their descent into total drunkenness and/or sickness both pitiful and tragic. This detail makes the decision of the good guys to leave them behind on Treasure Island seem all the more cruel and ethically problematic to us. What do you think?