The novel that invented most of what people picture when they picture pirates. Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 adventure begins at the Admiral Benbow inn, where the boy Jim Hawkins encounters an old seaman with a sea chest and a secret, and finds himself in possession of a map marked with the location of Captain Flint's buried treasure. He sails for the island aboard the Hispaniola with Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey, and with a crew quietly assembled by the ship's one-legged cook, Long John Silver. Silver is the book's great creation and the reason it outlasted its genre. He is charming, murderous, genuinely fond of Jim, and entirely without loyalty, a villain constructed so that the reader's sympathy never fully detaches, and he established a template that fiction has been reworking ever since. Stevenson wrote the story for his stepson and serialized it in a children's magazine, but the moral atmosphere is more ambiguous than that origin suggests. Jim's courage repeatedly shades into recklessness, the respectable gentlemen are motivated by the same greed as the mutineers, and the treasure brings no one much happiness. Nearly every convention the pirate story now runs on originates here: the X on the map, the black spot, the parrot on the shoulder, the marooned madman, the rum. It remains, past all its influence, a fast and genuinely suspenseful book.