C1 · Advanced

Treasure Island

Name: Treasure Island
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson · complete original text

34 chapters
69,726 words
about 537 min
adventure

Young Jim Hawkins finds an old pirate's map to buried treasure. He sails to a faraway island with the doctor and the squire, but the friendly ship's cook, Long John Silver, has his own plans.

Listen while you read Coming soonNarration with each sentence highlighted as it is read.

Read the openingThe whole book opens when EnglishReads launches.

Prefer an easier version? The B1 graded reader →

Read the opening

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 shoulder 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: