Nearly all the pirate kit was invented here
Real pirates did not bury treasure, did not use maps marked with an X, and did not talk in any particular accent. The buried CHEST, the MAP, the parrot on a shoulder, the black spot, the one-legged sea-cook and the phrase pieces of eight all come from one novel written in 1883.
The exception proves it. There is exactly one documented case of a pirate burying loot — Captain Kidd, on Gardiners Island in 1699 — and it was dug up almost immediately and used as evidence at his trial. Robert Louis STEVENSON read about Kidd, took the single incident and built an entire genre from it. Every pirate film since has been copying the copy.
It started with a rainy afternoon and a drawing
Stevenson was on holiday in Braemar in Scotland in 1881, the weather was foul, and to occupy his twelve-year-old stepson Lloyd Osbourne he drew and coloured a MAP of an imaginary island. He wrote later that as he looked at it the characters began appearing among the imaginary woods.
He wrote the first chapters at a chapter a day, reading each one aloud to the household after dinner. His father, a lighthouse engineer, got so involved that he supplied the contents of Billy BONES's sea chest and the detail of the apple BARREL. It was published as a serial first, under a pen name, and flopped; the book edition two years later did not.
Long John Silver is the whole point
Stevenson said he built SILVER out of a friend — the poet W.E. Henley, who had lost a leg to tuberculosis of the bone and whose energy and booming confidence Stevenson found overwhelming. Henley is also the man who wrote Invictus, so the same person produced the most quoted poem about unbreakable will and the model for literature's most charming traitor.
What makes SILVER work is that he is not pretending. He likes Jim HAWKINS, really likes him, and he would still kill him without much hesitation. He is brave, competent, funny and completely untrustworthy, and he is the only pirate in the book who survives and escapes with any money. Children's fiction had not really done a villain like that before, and Stevenson gets away with it by never letting Jim — or the reader — decide how to feel.
What is in the grid
The voyage sets out from the Admiral BENBOW inn with SQUIRE TRELAWNEY and Doctor LIVESEY aboard the SCHOONER HISPANIOLA, bound for the island old FLINT buried his hoard on. Blind PEW comes tapping down the road, BLACKDOG appears at the door, and there is a SPYGLASS, a STOCKADE ashore, a homemade CORACLE and a BUCCANEER left MAROONED for three years.
Jim narrates most of it from a CABIN boy's eye level, which is the trick that makes the danger land — he is small, out of his depth and frequently terrified. If the real history behind the costume interests you, our pirates page covers what the job actually involved, which was mostly boredom, disease and very little gold.