The Man Who Lost Treasure Island

A Poetry Tale about Robert Louis Stevenson, told by Hello Doggo.

Treasure Island began with a rainy holiday.

Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands, summer eighteen eighty-one. Robert Louis Stevenson was stuck indoors with his thirteen-year-old stepson, Lloyd, and a box of paints. And out of that came a map.

Stevenson remembered it lovingly. It was, he said, elaborately and, he thought, beautifully coloured, with harbours that pleased him like sonnets.

Now, who actually drew it? Stevenson said he did. Lloyd, years later, said he’d drawn the island himself, and his stepfather leaned over his shoulder and took over. Take your pick.

Either way, Stevenson labelled it Treasure Island. And as he pored over it, he said, the characters began to appear among the imaginary woods. The novel grew out of the map.

Then, as Stevenson told it, disaster. When the book went to the publishers, Cassell, the map went with the manuscript. The proofs came back. The map didn’t. He wrote to ask, and was told it had never been received.

He sat, as he put it, aghast.

Drawing a map and writing a story to fit it is a joy. Fitting a map to a finished book is not. He had to go back through the whole novel, list every reference, and, with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data.

His father lent a hand, and, having a knack for handwriting, elaborately forged the signature of Captain Flint.

It’s a beautiful map. It’s the one in the book.

But, Stevenson admitted, somehow it was never Treasure Island to him.