Jill Simonian: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson | The Book Club | PragerU Kids

Welcome back to the book club. I'm Michael Knowles, and this month we are reading a book that for me is at least 23 years overdue. That is Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Maybe the best kids book ever written. So very fitting that I'm joined by Jill Simonian from PragerU Kids. Hi. Jill, thank you for being here. Oh, thank you. This is going to be fun. I am embarrassed. I'm embarrassed that I haven't read a lot of books. In fact, this show exists in no small part because I should have read a bunch of books when I was in college and high school and I didn't, and so now I have to make up for it in my 30s. This one I should have read in middle school. Treasure Island, this great pirate adventure, so many characters and themes that are just part of the culture. Long John Silver, the pirate. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. Yes. And I'd never read it, and you hadn't read it either. I hadn't read it either, and it's hard for me not to just burst into joy and laughter right now knowing that you had not read this book. I'm going to add 10 years to being overdue to your 23 years or whatever you said. I had never read this. Both of my teenage daughters have read this thanks to the wonderful gem of a school that they attend that insists on celebrating classic literature. I had never read it, and I was embarrassed too. So I noticed my kids also were in a kind of classical, more conservative school, and all the grades I've noticed at the end of the year, they read Robert Louis Stevenson poems. There's something about him, and he was kind of a wild guy when he was young. I think he died at the age of 44. He died in Samoa. He really is an adventurer, and he renounced Christianity. He was an atheist, though I think he kind of a little bit came back around to it by the end. He was politically kind of radical and leftist, and he's just a wild figure, and yet his works are really, they really lend themselves to a classical education. Probably his most famous work other than this is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Oh, yeah. But he wrote lots of other stuff. So before we delve too deeply into the meaning, what happens in the book? Oh, it's such a great story. So it begins with this young man, Jim Hawkins, who's about 14 years old, and he's living a very sheltered life. His family owns an inn. The Admiral Benbow. Yes, the Admiral Benbow, and there is a group of pirates that come in and out. There's this one particular pirate, Billy Bones, who ends up dying at this inn, and Jim's father also dies at this inn, which is a life-changing moment, obviously, for him. But when this pirate Billy Bones dies, Jim finds this treasure map, and Jim's mother is very encouraging to Jim, saying, we need to get the money that is owed to us from these pirates. So what happens is there are a few associates. There's a doctor and there's a squire who are, by all means, upstanding people, who tell Jim, we are going to sail to this island, Treasure Island, follow the treasure map, seek this treasure, find this treasure. And in the meantime, they enlist this unruly group of folks. One of them, a pirate, Long John Silver, unbeknownst to the upstanding gentleman that these guys are pirates, but they form a crew. They get a ship. It's called the Hispaniola. They sail to Treasure Island, and chaos and mutiny ensues. And Jim, on the journey there, finds out that Long John Silver is plotting against these men to kill them and take the treasure for themselves. So they get to the island, and Jim finds himself and all of the men in very dangerous situations, has to make life-changing decisions, and grows up. It's a coming-of-age story. Yes, it's a coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman, as some call it. The boy, Jim Hawkins, is a teenager, and something that happens offstage, but right at the beginning of the book, is his dad dies. Yes. And then there's this pirate captain here, Billy Bones, who has been staying at the inn, and he's accosted by some more pirates, and they threaten his life, and Billy Bones dies, and Jim's mother says, oh, we're going to get the money that he owes us for his stay at the inn. We're not going to rob him. We're not going to take any more money than we're owed, but we're going to take that money. Lo and behold, as they're going through his stuff, they find this treasure map, and right off the bat, a boy whose father dies. Okay, well, that's an incident that can make you grow up a little bit. But then what strikes me is the mother, who's running this inn, says, okay, son, well, if you There's this squire who's kind of funding the expedition, but the squire's really, he's naive, so he hires the men that he naively trusts as being good men, but they're pirates, led by Long John Silver, and say, okay, son, well, if you want to go sail for some far-flung island to go get the treasure, you know, be back soon, be back before dinner, and you think, well, wow, these days, you know, if a 15-year-old boy is allowed to, I don't know, go to the park for an hour on his own, that's a big deal. This is, we live in a much more sheltered time than Jim Hawkins did, and that made me think, I wonder if that's why I didn't read this book, because the coming-of-age novels that we read today, probably the main one is Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, maybe Catcher in the Rye, but they're these, I don't know, soft, they're soft, and this is not soft, you know, Treasure Island, some people might think that it's like Pirates of the Caribbean or something, like Disney, it's not, a lot of people get killed, there's a lot of blood, there's shooting, there's stabbing, there's mutiny, it's very violent, this is tough, I mean, Jim Hawkins, this 14, 15-year-old kid, kills a guy, you know, and he sees a lot of other people get killed, and he goes and he gets this treasure, and I do wonder, Chesterton, he has a blurb on the back of this book, the wonderful author G.K. Chesterton, and he just loved Treasure Island, and maybe this is why people who are more conservative and classical seem to like it, but I wonder if the novel is, it's a little too hard for our soft times. One thing that struck me in particular, when I was reading it, was this whole mentality of never giving up and being resilient. Near the end of the story, when Jim was up against Israel hands, when they were back on the Hispaniola, on the boat, and they're going, you know, head-to-head, and you know someone's gonna end up dead, and Jim ends up getting, I don't know, flung and pinned to the boat, and he thinks, this is it, this is it, and Israel's in the water, and Jim is, you know, the knife is stabbing his shoulder, you know, pinning him to the boat, but he never had that moment of, oh, I'm just gonna give up. He kept going, he kept figuring out in his mind through the storytelling, how am I going to get out of this, what are my choices, I'm either gonna fall in the water, or I'm gonna, he ends up wriggling out of his clothing. It was a never-give-up attitude. That, again, would any freshman boy now have that sort of resilience? But it was really, it was incredible to read, and that's, you know, that's one of the things, I think, that young people in particular can take away from this. There is always a way, fight, fight, fight, fight. We've somehow lost that ability to fight. Yeah, and to have ambition. It's not that people don't have ambition anymore, but it does seem like we're in a, I don't know, a more decadent or complacent kind of age. We're a little more risk-averse, and that doesn't set you up for a flourishing life, and it doesn't set you up for a flourishing society. That in itself, I think, is more reason why we parents have to really hunker down and pay attention to what our kids are reading, because if we do not champion these types of stories, we're going to get softer and softer and softer, and we're going to raise a generation that is less resilient, less capable. There's a lot to unpack in this, but it's so important. Even down to the island. You know, the island is not a little theme park at Disney either. No, it's not. As they're pulling up, one of the men, one of the associates who is helping to put together this trip is this doctor, Dr. Livesey. Yes, Livesey, Livesey, I tried to find it, yeah. So the doctor, as they're pulling up, it's not, you know, natives and monkeys throwing coconuts in the air playing ukulele. The first thing he notices is he says, there's fever on that island, germs, bacteria, it's fetid, which mirrors the moral darkness of these mutineers, these pirates. And then there's ambiguity, because it's, look, it's in paradise, but there's also this risk of disease. There's prospect of great gain, but risk of great danger. And then there is the most morally ambiguous character, Long John Silver, who's the cook. His other name in the story is Barbecue. And it's not like he was forthright about being a pirate. No, exactly. And it was interesting because when the squire is trying to find this group of men to help them, he's very naive, very innocent, does not do his homework. He says, hey, I found these guys, they're great. And it's funny because in the beginning, the whole thing is foreshadowed because Jim said that he would always, in his mind and imagination, fear the pirate with the one leg, with the peg leg. I feel like in the beginning of the story, Jim knew that Long John Silver was an unsavory character, to say the least, but he was too young to speak up and say anything. And when the squire brought this group in, there you are, you're on the journey. So Long John Silver, bad guy, signs up to take over the ship, to steal the treasure, and kills one of the good guys. I mean, he's a hardcore pirate, but he also saves the life of Jim when it's threatened by the other pirates. And then later on, when we see that Jim really has grown up, you know, killing some pirates will do that to you, when he sees that he has grown up, Jim saves Long John Silver's life as well, and insists, kind of mans up, even as the doctor, says, forget about this guy, leave him, we're gonna go, let's just go on our own. He says, no, he saved my life, I'm gonna save his. And they take him away, they abandon the rest of the pirates, but then Long John Silver, yet again, he escapes, he says, well, I gotta go, listen, I would've killed you guys anyway. Maybe he's doing something good for the good party, but he also steals a little bit of their money, but he doesn't steal all their money, and he's this just delightful, wonderful character, he's a silver-tongued devil, he can talk his way out of anything. Very likable. Very likable, he switches sides, he's got a foot in every camp, even though he's only got one foot, actually, he's got one peg leg. We haven't touched, though, on one of the great characters of the novel, Ben Gunn. Well, I wanna go back, really quickly, if we can, to Jim, and Long John Silver. Because Jim, throughout the story, we see that he is a very virtuous character, he is a Christian, there are different passages that allude to the fact that he is faithful, that he wants to do the right thing, that he's trying to make the right choices according to virtue. And he's very loyal to Long John Silver, and loyalty, I think, is one of those traits that many young people can really learn about today. Now, there's a moral dilemma when someone is trying to kill you, are you loyal to them? No, you shouldn't be. But in the end, like you said, Long John Silver did save his life, and at the end, Long John Silver did not inflict more harm on those that he was trying to kill in the beginning, he took his treasure, he got out of there, he really didn't have another choice. But I think that Jim's loyalty and his virtue really is an example that a lot of people can learn from. Yes, and it also shows you the different priorities, the different objectives of the people on this voyage. Because also, to make the Disney comparison, in the Disney world, the pirates are all sort of fun and wearing silly makeup and dancing and singing around, and these pirates laugh and sing, but the stakes are real. It reads as much more realistic, weirdly enough, even though we have pirates with parrots on their shoulders. But what they're after is rum and money, and they'll kill each other for the money, and we see them kill each other. The stakes are real. You don't really see that in Disney. And what our protagonist here, Jim Hawkins, is after is something else. He's learning how to be a man in his own right, and he doesn't become a pirate. In fact, the novel ends, he says... I love the last line. Yeah. Captain Flint, who was already dead by the time they got to the island, Captain Flint, who they only hear as a ghost, or a performance of a ghost, but who kicks off the whole adventure even before the book begins. He hears this echoing from beyond his time, and part of a coming-of-age experience is often as much to learn about what you don't want to do as what you do want to do. We live in this very safe, manicured culture, the Disneyland culture, where you're never supposed to make any mistakes, you're never supposed to do anything wrong. But of course, anyone who's ever really grown up knows you learn a lot by doing wrong things, by seeing the consequences of doing wrong things. And so by the end of this wonderful story, we all want to stay here, we all want to be on the ship, and we all want to be on the island and searching for the treasure. And his conclusion, of course, is, I don't want that life. I don't want that life. And that's one of the other themes of the book, is the greed. They're pirates, obviously, are driven by finding the money, by being selfish. Yes, Jim was able to take home a portion of that treasure, but once he went through what, like you said, the real stakes were, what the real costs were, what the real consequences were, and all these life decisions he had to make, he said, I don't want that. And that's an example of the type of, I was talking with my daughters about this, that's a type of grounded virtue that this character had. He experienced it. He started out in the story very excited about this whole adventure, very excited to join the pirates. Oh, let's see what we can find. And after he actually went through it, after he heard Long John Silver plotting to kill all of them, he started to understand what it means to be betrayed, what it means to be in a situation where someone is trying to kill you, and you're almost dead, and you end up firing the guns and killing them. And to walk away from that is a big deal, and it's a big lesson that I think, you know, I continue to learn from, and I want my kids to learn that type of fortitude, to say, I've been there, I saw, I got what I came to get. He went home with the treasure, but I'm good. At the risk of anachronistic psychobabble, by the end, he actually has PTSD. He does. That's what I thought. He's traumatized for the rest of his life. Whenever he hears the sound of the waves, he has these horrible dreams. I mean, it's that reality that's so wonderful. On the one hand, you have these fanciful caricatures, as fantastical as you can imagine. And then on the other, you have this reality. And of course, this is the key to a real coming of age, is coming to grips with reality. When you're a little kid, you live in Disneyland, and you go to Disneyland. And when you grow up, you're in the real world. And Robert Louis Stevenson is able to bring both of those two things together, which gives you a real sense of adventure. This is not just a fantasy. This is a real adventure that he's living. Now, the character I keep bringing up that we haven't talked about is the funniest character, probably, in the whole book, Ben Gunn. This poor guy. This poor guy. He was part of Captain Flint's, who passed away before the actual story begins, Captain Flint's original group of pirates. He was marooned on the island. They left him there the first time they were there, when Flint buried the treasure. Ben Gunn is marooned on the island. He's stuck there. He finds Jim, as in one of the adventures, when Jim is trying to escape. They stumble upon each other, and Ben Gunn proves to be a hero in this story. Because he looks kind of like an island cannibal or something. He's been here for a long time. His skin is dark. He's been living on salted goat that he's made himself. Kind of seems a little out of it. He makes a dilapidated boat that's not really a boat. Yeah, he's a little crazy. He asks for cheese right away. He says, do you have any cheese? He misses this comfort of home. It's kind of a silly thing. First, hi, nice to meet you. I'm Jim. Could you have any cheese? This brilliance of his, Captain Flint buries the treasure, kills the guys, skeletons galore, and Ben Gunn moves the treasure. He knows, well, this treasure is not safe here, so he moves the treasure beforehand. Pirates are all going. They've finally taken the map. They get the treasure. Everyone's kind of tricking each other. When they go, the treasure is not there. You get two real glimpses of reality, I think, in this moment, especially when the good guys with Long John Silver depart, and they leave the pirates stranded on the island. The first thing you get is the sense that there are always going to be pirates. There were pirates on this island before the story began. There were pirates after the story ends. This is just part of fallen human nature, that there is avarice, and there's greed, and that's just how it goes. You can choose to live that life, or you choose not to. Then the other, of course, is this Faustian bargain, which is all the lengths they've gone to, the deception, the treachery, the murder. They go to find the treasure, and guess what? The treasure's not even there. When I got to that part, I couldn't help but laugh, because it is a metaphor for life. It's always moving. They end up finding it, but the treasure was moved, and that's a metaphor for life. That's yet another lesson that Jim learns to come to his conclusion of, I don't ever want any part of that again, because it is too, for lack of a better word, it's too crazy. Yeah, and these echoes, the echoes of our actions throughout our lives. This is another part of a coming-of-age story. It sets you up for the rest of your life. These things stick with you. That's why the stories are recounted. Even down to, you have the captain, Captain Flint, who's long dead. One of the tricks to deceive the pirates is pretending to be Captain Flint, his voice echoing the lines that he said from the woods. It's as if it's his ghost, but we see this even more tangibly, because what's the parrot's name on Long John Silver? Flint. It's Flint. What does the parrot do? The parrot just echoes. The parrot just mimics. These actions, these events that might even seem accidental, might seem trivial, perhaps, these events echo throughout our lives. They keep coming back. They're never totally gone, so there's a real weight, a real significance, even to our childhood adventures. I also, in talking about all of this now, because of the age that we live in, I can't help but think, wow, okay, like you say, there are pirates that continue. There's pirates everywhere, on our phones, on social media. There are dangerous situations that we continue to have to learn how to navigate as young people. Now, granted, social media, arguably, is not as dangerous as perhaps what happened on this island. Some people say it could be. Maybe, yeah. Some people say it could be, but there's constantly a danger in what teaches young people how to think maturely. There's no other way to get to that other side, unless you go through these types of events. Yes. Some of the circumstances change. Today, of course, the pirates are more likely to be Somali than English. I am the captain now, sort of thing. The pirates, nevertheless, persist. One funny line, too, before I let you go, but it just shows you the ways in which it touches on everything. It's very funny. It's very scary. You really are on the edge of your seat for the book, but this line, when the poor squire is outfitting the ship, he says, oh, yes, well, we've got these guys, and they seem like really great chaps. This is Arrow. You say, well, hold on. Arrow? That doesn't sound like proper English name. That kind of sounds like a pirate, doesn't it? Long John Silver. I don't know. How could you possibly miss this? The ways in which deception, treachery, the brokenness of the world kind of play out. You don't necessarily just grow out of it right away. No, you don't. Sometimes you call the old guys, too. Yeah. Perhaps the squire never went through that type of experience to develop the discernment that he needed. That's what I thought. You know a great way to develop that discernment is to read this book. So if you haven't already, especially if you're 13, but if you're 30, if you're 90, go pick up Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I can't wait to read it to my children. See you next time.