The Question
Where is the gold? Everyone in the book is walking toward the same pit, and one man already knows it is empty.
This is the ending of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel explained, so it spoils everything. I read the Project Gutenberg text, and I cover chapters twenty-nine to thirty-four, about nineteen percent of the book by my count. I’ll quote only a few words, and I’ll tell you what is stated, and what the book leaves open.
Deposed
Start with where we left Jim, a prisoner in the stockade, and Long John Silver in command of a crew that no longer trusts him. Chapter twenty-nine is the black spot again. The pirates cut a page out of a Bible, blacken it with ash, and write the word deposed on the blank side. Silver reads it with a smile, and jokes that cutting up a Bible is unlucky. It was Dick’s Bible.
Then he fights for his job. He lists their four complaints, and answers all four. One of them is the boy, and he says a hostage is worth keeping. Then he throws down the real argument, the map with the three red crosses. The doctor gave it to him, and the men do not know why. They fall on it like cats on a mouse. Silver says, you lost the ship; I found the treasure. They elect him captain again.
On Parole
In chapter thirty, the doctor walks up the hill and is let in, as the mutineers’ physician. He treats the fevers, and scolds them for camping in a swamp. Then he asks to speak to Jim, and Silver agrees on one condition, that Jim gives his word not to run. Jim does.
Through the stockade palings the doctor urges him to run. Jim says no, because Silver trusted him, and he will go back. He tells the doctor where the ship is, and the doctor, after hearing the whole story, says that at every step it has been Jim who saved them. Then the doctor warns Silver, in front of Jim. Don’t be in a hurry after that treasure, and look out for squalls when you find it. Silver cannot guess what it means. The doctor promises one thing, to save him if he can, short of perjury. Remember what Silver told his own men a moment before. It is us who must break the treaty, when the time comes.
Flint’s Pointer
Chapter thirty-one begins the hunt. Jim walks tied to Silver by a rope, like a dancing bear. The men carry picks and shovels, and the stores are all from the doctor’s supply. Silver has two guns, two pistols and the parrot on his shoulder.
The clue on the map says to find a tall tree, and the mark of Skeleton Island. Then the men find a skeleton lying perfectly straight, with its arms raised above its head. Silver takes a bearing along the bones, and they point exactly at Skeleton Island. It is a pointer, and Flint laid it there himself. Silver names the dead man Allardyce. The men go cold, because they remember how Flint died, raving for rum.
The Voice
In chapter thirty-two they stop on the plateau to rest, and a thin voice sings that song in the trees. Then it calls, Darby M’Graw, fetch aft the rum. The men go grey. Dick pulls out his ruined Bible. Silver does not run. He says there is seven hundred thousand pounds not a quarter of a mile away, and he argues that a spirit would not have an echo. Merry, relieved, thinks it sounds like somebody else, and Silver shouts the name. Ben Gunn. Nobody minds Ben Gunn, says Merry. Then they find the great pine, and the pit.
It is open, and old, with grass in the bottom. There is a broken pick and a board branded Walrus, the name of Flint’s ship. The money is gone. Morgan finds one two-guinea piece, and it is passed from hand to hand.
The Fall of a Chieftain
Chapter thirty-three is the turn. In a second Silver changes his plan, and hands Jim a double-barrelled pistol. Jim says, you have changed sides again. Silver does not answer. Merry makes a speech, and calls them a cripple and a cub. Three shots from the thicket drop him into the pit and kill the man with the bandage. Silver fires two barrels into Merry as he dies. The doctor, Gray and Ben Gunn step out of the nutmeg trees.
Here is the explanation. Ben Gunn found the skeleton, and the treasure. He dug it up and carried it, load by load, to a cave on the two-pointed hill, two months before the Hispaniola arrived. The doctor learned it on the afternoon of the stockade fight. He gave Silver the chart and the stores to get his people to healthier ground and guard the gold. Then he crossed the island with Gray and Ben Gunn, and Ben, being fleet of foot, was sent ahead to do the haunting.
At the cave, the squire is cold to Silver, and the captain says only, Ah. They see the gold at last, heaps of coin and bars. It has cost seventeen men of the Hispaniola already. The narrator names three left on the island who shared in the crimes, Silver, Morgan and Ben Gunn.
And Last
Chapter thirty-four is the cleanup. It takes days to carry the gold to the ship. Jim sorts coins from every kingdom into bread bags. The three mutineers still loose are drunk or ill, and the doctor wants to help and Silver tells him he would lose his life. They decide to leave them, with powder, shot, salt goat, medicine and tobacco.
As the ship sails, the three kneel on a spit of sand with their arms up. One fires a shot over Silver’s head, through the main-sail. At a Spanish port, Ben Gunn confesses that Silver is gone, and that he helped him. Silver cut through a bulkhead and took one sack of coin, about three or four hundred guineas. Jim says everyone was pleased to be so cheaply quit of him.
The fates are short. Five of the men who sailed come home. Smollett retires. Gray becomes mate and part owner of a ship. Ben Gunn spends a thousand pounds in nineteen days, then keeps a lodge. Of Silver, Jim says only that he has heard no more, and hopes he found comfort with his wife and the parrot, though his chances in the next world are very small.
What It Means
First the arithmetic, and this one is mine. Twenty-six men sail from Bristol. By the cave, the narrator says the gold has cost seventeen. Three are left on the island, Silver slips away, and five come home. Seventeen, three, one and five make twenty-six.
So does Silver die? The book does not say. And what about the bar silver and the arms, still buried where Flint left them? That is why Jim kept back the bearings in chapter one. Jim says that oxen and wain-ropes would not bring him back, and that his worst dreams are of the parrot crying, pieces of eight.
One more link back. Silver’s green parrot is named Captain Flint, after the dead pirate, and in chapter twenty-seven it is what announces Jim at the stockade. The book ends on that voice, not on the gold. A dead man’s name is still shouting about money, in Jim’s sleep.
Here is my reading, and it is an opinion. The treasure is the least interesting thing in the ending. It was never there for the villains to find. What the last chapters care about is who changes sides, and who keeps his word. Jim keeps his word. Silver keeps it only when it saves his neck. The book lets him go because Jim owes him, and the book pays the debt.
If this helped, subscribe, and tap like. And tell me in the comments what you think happened to Silver.
