Treasure Island Youth

There is a repeated theme in Treasure Island that illness makes us dependent and childlike. First there is Billy Bones's weakness, in which he takes his medicine "like a child." Then there is poor, feverish Dick Johnson, who begins babbling and clutching his Bible toward the end of the novel. He totally goes to pieces as he gets sick and follows the other pirates like a child. How does illness make us more childlike? What does this analogy suggest about how Stevenson feels about childhood?

As soon as Billy Bones enters the Admiral Benbow Inn, Jim shows signs of the secretiveness and independent thinking that will characterize his behavior on the island. Jim hasn't told his mother about Billy Bones's origins, although he thinks in passing that "perhaps [he] should have told her long before." This reflection sounds a lot like Jim's passing regret over leaving the fort without permission. Even in this tiny exchange, we can see foreshadowing of how Jim is going to develop as a character over the course of the novel.

Jim is leaving the nest, and even though he's ready to go, he still regrets it a little bit once he realizes that it's actually happening. "This clumsy stranger," his mother's apprentice, is a symbol of Jim's own childhood, which he is now leaving behind to go on a treasure hunt. We wish our own transitions from childhood to adulthood had come with gold bars.

It sounds like Jim is feeling a rush about the fact that "the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on [him] alone." Suddenly, he's going from cabin boy, the lowliest member of the crew, to the savior of all. One reason Jim always finds himself in the right place at the right time is because he's so young. He's small and childlike enough to climb right into an apple barrel and fall asleep, which sounds like something we would have done when we were kids. Jim childlike nature is the very thing that saves the "honest men" on board the Hispaniola (or at least, many of them) from death at the hands of the pirates.

Jim is recalling tall tales and freaking himself out as he sees the then unknown Ben Gunn in the distance. But he suddenly remembers that he's not "defenceless" – he is armed – and he takes confidence. We can contrast Jim's ability to overcome his fear with the cowardice of the pirates, who believe the forests are haunted in the later chapters of the novel. Jim is slowly becoming more mature than full-grown men like Tom Morgan and George Merry. Something about pirate life seems to keep them from maturing. For all of their violence and toughness, they still seem like self-indulgent and easily frightened children.

These guerilla actions against the pirates seem to come completely out of the blue. Sure, Jim says he "thought it would be a fine thing to prevent" the mutineers from escaping, but it's quite a jump from that to rowing out to the boat and setting it adrift. Do we see any signs that Jim is learning how to fight pirates from experience, or is he just naturally gifted at waging war against a small band of bloodthirsty criminals?

There is only one other moment in the book we can think of when Jim tries to justify his actions – in a scene we discuss in the "Quotes: Friendship." He must feel that leaving his friends behind with no warning was the worst thing he did, because this is the one act he explains away as that of "a boy." Do you buy the explanation that Jim sneaks off because he is "only a boy"? Does it matter to you why he leaves his friends? By the way, taking "French leave" means abandoning your post without permission – a slur on French sailors, as you can imagine.

This quote is one of the few moments when Jim alludes to his later life after the novel ("I have seen one since"). What on earth could Jim be doing with his time that he has now observed "a coracle, such as the ancient Britons made?" Why do you think Stevenson introduces this time lag between the Jim narrating Treasure Island and the Jim experiencing Treasure Island?

It's a little unclear what Captain Smollett means by "the born favourite." Does he mean Jim is too lucky? Too independent? Too disobedient? Certainly we can see why a by-the-book captain like Smollett would find Jim too much of a handful to manage, but we're also intrigued by Captain Smollett's description of Jim as "a good boy in [his] line." This implies that there are other boys like Jim out there. Perhaps this is another subtle suggestion to us by Stevenson to imagine ourselves like Jim or in his place.