Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Kidd (ca. 1654-1701), a Scottish seaman and privateer, sailed the waters of Britain, the Bay
of Fundy, New England, New York, the Caribbean, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and Mada-
gascar. He was eventually tried in London for piracy on the high seas, convicted and hanged.
His body was gibbeted—left to hang and decompose in an iron cage—over the River Thames
for three years as a warning to other pirates and ne'er-do-wells.
“Treasure Island”—Takarajima?
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson's (1850-94)
Treasure Island
was first published in 1883. It quickly be-
came one of the most popular topics for young people ever writen. Its depicions of pirates and ad-
venture, tales of buried gold, treasure maps marked with an X, and peg-legged, bloodthirsty seamen
with parrots on their shoulders soon became archetypes of what it means to be a pirate. Stevenson
was 30 years old when he started wriing the topic in the summer of 1881 while in the Scotish High-
lands. Staring at an early age, and although sickly (he was believed to have sufered from tubercu-
losis), he traveled widely, including journeys to Europe, North America, Hawaii and many islands of
the South Pacific. At the age of 44 he died and was buried in Samoa. There is no evidence to suggest
that he ever visited, or indeed ever heard of, Takarajima. Rather, the most widely speculated upon
contenders for his Treasure Island are Unst in Scotland's Shetland Islands, Norman Island or Dead-
Man's Chest Island in the Briish Virgin Islands of the Caribbean, or Osborn, a small islet in Brielle,
New Jersey's Manasquan River, where Stevenson once spent a month. Most scholars agree that it's
probably Unst. The drawing of Treasure Island at right resembles that island and is thought to have
been penned by Stevenson's own hand. It was published in an early ediion of the topic.
