Treasure Island

This second part of the book develops three of the major characters more fully. Two of these are Jim and Squire Trelawney, who seem to have much in common despite their different stations in life. Both are romantics, such that the lure of the sea, the colorful talk and dress and walk of seafarers, the idea of the voyage of adventure — in short, everything about the enterprise they are on — appeals to them both tremendously. Jim's description of Bristol, in the mid-eighteenth century a busy port in the busiest sea-going nation of Europe, is positively lyrical; and the squire's very language, in the letter that opens Chapter 7, shows that he has immediately chosen, wholeheartedly, to adopt the life of the seafaring man as the new object of his immense and more than a little silly enthusiasm. Both Jim and Trelawney, too, are inclined to judge people according to how much their own egos are flattered. Trelawney's "old friend" Blandly, who sold him the ship, has obviously assured him that he is making a deal he can be proud of, and the squire loves to be proud of his own accomplishments (in fact, Blandly has lied outright to Trelawney, hiding his own ownership and sale of the ship, a fact that Trelawney has heard but refuses to believe); Long John Silver, having heard of this rich, voluble country squire who has already told "all of Bristol" that he will sail in search of treasure, has read him well and, thus, posing as an honest and rather touching old fellow who lost his leg in service of his country, has no trouble in taking over the hiring of the first mate and crew. Silver certainly knows that Trelawney and his friends are the ones in possession of Billy Bones' chart. Jim, too, is flattered by Silver's treating him like an adult, and after only a few minutes has convinced himself that this one-legged man cannot be the one whom Billy Bones paid him to look out for. By the same token, both Jim and Trelawney dislike Captain Smollett because he does not flatter them, and, because they dislike him, both are sure that he does not know his business as well as they do. Of course, Jim knows absolutely nothing about the sea except, as you may surmise, what he has read in romanticized histories, and Trelawney — although he is said to have "followed" it — knows not a great deal more. All of this childishness is natural and perfectly understandable in Jim, who is, after all, about twelve or thirteen years old. But Trelawney, who calls himself an "old bachelor," must be in his thirties or forties and ought to know better.