All that night we were in a great bustle getting things stowed in theirplace, and boatfuls of the squire's friends, Mr. Blandly and the like,coming off to wish him a good voyage and a safe return. We never had anight at the "Admiral Benbow" when I had half the work; and I wasdog-tired when, a little before dawn, the boatswain sounded his pipe,and the crew began to man the capstan bars. I might have been twice asweary, yet I would not have left the deck, all was so new andinteresting to me--the brief commands, the shrill notes of the whistle,the men bustling to their places in the glimmer of the ship's lanterns.

"Now, Barbecue, tip us a stave," cried one voice.

"The old one," cried another.

"Ay, ay, mates," said Long John, who was standing by, with his crutchunder his arm, and at once broke out in the air and words I knew sowell:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest"--

And then the whole crew bore chorus:

"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!"

And at the third "ho!" drove the bars before them with a will.

Even at that exciting moment it carried me back to the old "AdmiralBenbow" in a second, and I seemed to hear the voice of the captainpiping in the chorus. But soon the anchor was short up; soon it washanging dripping at the bows; soon the sails began to draw, and the landand shipping to flit by on either side, and before I could lie down tosnatch an hour of slumber the _Hispaniola_ had begun her voyage to theIsle of Treasure.

I am not going to relate the voyage in detail. It was fairly prosperous.The ship proved to be a good ship, the crew were capable seamen, and thecaptain thoroughly understood his business. But before we came thelength of Treasure Island, two or three things had happened whichrequire to be known.

Mr. Arrow, first of all, turned out even worse than the captain hadfeared. He had no command among the men, and people did what theypleased with him. But that was by no means the worst of it; for after aday or two at sea he began to appear on deck with hazy eye, red cheeks,stuttering tongue, and other marks of drunkenness. Time after time hewas ordered below in disgrace. Sometimes he fell and cut himself;sometimes he lay all day long in his little bunk at one side of thecompanion; sometimes for a day or two he would be almost sober andattend to his work at least passably.

In the meantime we could never make out where he got the drink. That wasthe ship's mystery. Watch him as we pleased, we could do nothing tosolve it, and when we asked him to his face, he would only laugh, if hewere drunk, and if he were sober, deny solemnly that he ever tastedanything but water.

He was not only useless as an officer, and a bad influence among themen, but it was plain that at this rate he must soon kill himselfoutright, so nobody was much surprised, nor very sorry, when one darknight, with a head sea, he disappeared entirely and was seen no more.

"Overboard!" said the captain. "Well, gentlemen, that saves the troubleof putting him in irons."

But there we were, without a mate, and it was necessary, of course, toadvance one of the men. The boatswain, Job Anderson, was the likeliestman aboard, and though he kept his old title, he served in a way asmate. Mr. Trelawney had followed the sea, and his knowledge made himvery useful, for he often took a watch himself in easy weather. And thecoxswain, Israel Hands, was a careful, wily, old, experienced seaman,who could be trusted at a pinch with almost anything.

He was a great confidant of Long John Silver, and so the mention of hisname leads me on to speak of our ship's cook, Barbecue, as the mencalled him.

[Illustration: _It was something to see him get on with his cooking likesomeone safe ashore_ (Page 71)]

Aboard ship he carried his crutch by a lanyard round his neck, to haveboth hands as free as possible. It was something to see him wedge thefoot of the crutch against a bulkhead, and, propped against it, yieldingto every movement of the ship, get on with his cooking like someone safeashore. Still more strange was it to see him in the heaviest of weathercross the deck. He had a line or two rigged up to help him across thewidest spaces--Long John's earrings, they were called--and he would handhimself from one place to another, now using the crutch, now trailing italongside by the lanyard, as quickly as another man could walk. Yet someof the men who had sailed with him before expressed their pity to seehim so reduced.

"He's no common man, Barbecue," said the coxswain to me. "He had goodschooling in his young days, and can speak like a book when so minded;and brave--a lion's nothing alongside of Long John! I seen him grapplefour and knock their heads together--him unarmed."

All the crew respected and even obeyed him. He had a way of talking toeach, and doing everybody some particular service. To me he wasunweariedly kind, and always glad to see me in the galley, which he keptas clean as a new pin; the dishes hanging up burnished, and his parrotin a cage in the corner.

"Come away, Hawkins," he would say; "come and have a yarn with John.Nobody more welcome than yourself, my son. Sit you down and hear thenews. Here's Cap'n Flint--I calls my parrot Cap'n Flint, after thefamous buccaneer--here's Cap'n Flint predicting success to our v'yage.Wasn't you, Cap'n?"

And the parrot would say, with great rapidity: "Pieces of eight! piecesof eight! pieces of eight!" till you wondered that it was not out ofbreath or till John threw his handkerchief over the cage.

"Now, that bird," he would say, "is, may be, two hundred years old,Hawkins--they live forever mostly, and if anybody's seen more wickednessit must be the devil himself. She's sailed with England--the great Cap'nEngland, the pirate. She's been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, andSurinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up ofthe wrecked plate ships. It's there she learned 'Pieces of eight,' andlittle wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of 'em, Hawkins! She wasat the boarding of the _Viceroy of the Indies_ out of Goa, she was, andto look at her you would think she was a babby. But you smeltpowder--didn't you, cap'n?"

"Stand by to go about," the parrot would scream.

"Ah, she's a handsome craft, she is," the cook would say, and give hersugar from his pocket, and then the bird would peck at the bars andswear straight on, passing belief for wickedness. "There," John wouldadd, "you can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad. Here's this poor oldinnocent bird of mine swearing blue fire and none the wiser, you may layto that. She would swear the same, in a manner of speaking, before thechaplain." And John would touch his forelock with a solemn way he had,that made me think he was the best of men.

In the meantime the squire and Captain Smollett were still on prettydistant terms with one another. The squire made no bones about thematter; he despised the captain. The captain, on his part, never spokebut when he was spoken to, and then sharp and short and dry, and not aword wasted. He owned, when driven into a corner, that he seemed to havebeen wrong about the crew; that some of them were as brisk as he wantedto see, and all had behaved fairly well. As for the ship, he had taken adownright fancy to her. "She'll lie a point nearer the wind than a manhas a right to expect of his own married wife, sir. But," he would add,"all I say is, we're not home again, and I don't like the cruise."

The squire, at this, would turn away and march up and down the deck,chin in air.

"A trifle more of that man," he would say, "and I should explode."

We had some heavy weather, which only proved the qualities of the_Hispaniola_. Every man on board seemed well content, and they must havebeen hard to please if they had been otherwise, for it is my beliefthere was never a ship's company so spoiled since Noah put to sea.Double grog was going on the least excuse; there was duff on odd days,as, for instance, if the squire heard it was any man's birthday; andalways a barrel of apples standing broached in the waist, for anyone tohelp himself that had a fancy.

"Never knew good to come of it yet," the captain said to Doctor Livesey."Spoil foc's'le hands, make devils. That's my belief."

But good did come of the apple barrel, as you shall hear, for if it hadnot been for that we should have had no note of warning and might allhave perished by the hand of treachery.

This is how it came about.

We had run up the trades to get the wind of the island we were after--Iam not allowed to be more plain--and now we were running down for itwith a bright lookout day and night. It was about the last day of ouroutward voyage, by the largest computation; some time that night, or, atlatest, before noon of the morrow, we should sight the Treasure Island.We were heading south-southwest, and had a steady breeze abeam and aquiet sea. The _Hispaniola_ rolled steadily, dipping her bowsprit nowand then with a whiff of spray. All was drawing alow and aloft; everyonewas in the bravest spirits, because we were now so near an end of thefirst part of our adventure.

Now, just after sundown, when all my work was over and I was on my wayto my berth, it occurred to me that I should like an apple. I ran ondeck. The watch was all forward looking out for the island. The man atthe helm was watching the luff of the sail and whistling away gently tohimself, and that was the only sound excepting the swish of the seaagainst the bows and around the sides of the ship.

In I got bodily into the apple barrel, and found there was scarce anapple left; but, sitting down there in the dark, what with the sound ofthe waters and the rocking movement of the ship, I had either fallenasleep, or was on the point of doing so, when a heavy man sat down withrather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leaned his shouldersagainst it, and I was just about to jump up when the man began to speak.It was Silver's voice, and, before I had heard a dozen words, I wouldnot have shown myself for all the world, but lay there, trembling andlistening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity; for from these dozenwords I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard dependedupon me alone.