Treasure Island Characters Guide: Who's Who at the Admiral Benbow and Beyond

Spoilers: a cast guide has to say how several of these people leave the story. Long John Silver’s entry deliberately does not.

Treasure Island has a small cast doing a great deal of work, and most readers arrive already holding somebody else’s version of it. The performances have been loud enough for long enough that the book’s own people can be a surprise: the squire is a liability, the doctor is the most dangerous man ashore, and the castaway is not comic relief.

Here is who is who, in the order the novel introduces them. All twenty-seven of them turn up in the playable Treasure Island, where you meet them in the same order.

🖋️ Jim Hawkins, and why the book is his handwriting

The narrator is a boy who works at his parents’ inn and is somewhere in his early teens; the novel never fixes his age. What it does fix, in its first sentence, is the reason the book exists: the gentlemen of the expedition have asked him to write the whole thing down, and he is doing it to order, with one geographical detail left out at the squire’s request.

That framing is worth holding on to, because Jim is not a reliable narrator in the usual sense. He is honest and frequently wrong. He admires people he should not, disobeys direct orders at the two most important moments in the plot, and is right both times by accident. The novel is built so that its hero’s recklessness saves everybody and is never quite endorsed.

'The Island Encounter' is a doorway in the playable Treasure Island: you are alone on the wrong side of the island and something that has not spoken to a person in three years is coming out of the trees towards you. You can run, stand still, offer him food, or ask him his name. Role-play Treasure Island →

🏚️ The three men who come to the inn

The first quarter of the novel is a siege story in which the besiegers arrive one at a time, each worse than the last.

• ✅Billy Bones. The old sailor who takes a room, pays badly, sings the shanty and pays Jim a retainer to watch the road for a seafaring man with one leg. He is a drunk being hunted by his old shipmates, and he dies of it: a doctor tells him twice what the rum is doing to him, and he is proved right.
• ✅Black Dog. Two fingers missing, pale and sly, the first of the old crew to find him. He turns up once at the inn, once at a dockside tavern much later, and disappears both times, which is his entire function: he is the proof that the crew is still looking.
• ✅Blind Pew.The most frightening figure in the book and the one with the least page time. He is the man who actually delivers the summons, he taps along the road in the dark, and he is trampled by riders he cannot see. The novel kills him in half a sentence: he “gently collapsed upon his face and moved no more.”

Between them they get the chart into Jim’s hands and out of the inn, and the novel never brings any of them back. The opening quarter is its own complete story, which is part of why it is the section every adaptation compresses hardest.

⚓ The men who pay for the voyage and the man who runs it

• ✅Dr. Livesey. Physician and magistrate, and the steadiest presence in the book. He faces down an armed drunk in chapter one by promising to have him hanged, treats wounded mutineers with the same care as his own men, and is the only character who can negotiate with the other side without losing his footing.
• ✅Squire Trelawney. Rich, generous, loud and catastrophically indiscreet. He funds the expedition and then tells half of Bristol what it is for, which is how the crew that sails with them comes to be the crew that sails with them. He is also a genuinely fine shot, which the story eventually needs.
• ✅Captain Smollett. Hired to command, disliked on sight by everyone, and correct about everything. He objects to the voyage before it starts on the grounds that the crew knows too much and the officers know too little. His competence is the reason there is anybody left at the end, and his reward is an early retirement.
• ✅Abraham Gray, and the servants.Gray is the carpenter’s mate who walks away from the mutineers when called on to choose, and he is the one person in the novel whose fortune is made by work: he studies, rises, and ends up part owner of a ship. Trelawney’s servants fare worse. Tom Redruth, the old gamekeeper, is shot as the party is still getting ashore, and Hunter dies of wounds taken defending the stockade.

The first mate deserves a line of his own because of what the book does with him. Mr. Arrow is a drunk from the opening week, somebody in the crew keeps supplying him, and one night he is simply not aboard any more. Stevenson never shows the death and never names a culprit, and the unexplained gap is more unsettling than a murder scene would be. Screen versions usually fill it in, as the adaptation comparison sets out.

🏴 The crew on the other side

• ✅Long John Silver.The ship’s cook: a broad, calm, unusually agile man who gets about on a crutch, keeps a clean house, talks better than anybody else aboard, and is the subject of the biggest argument this book produces. His own crew call him Barbecue.
• ✅Israel Hands.The coxswain, and the novel’s best hand-to-hand antagonist. He gets a whole chapter to himself, in which he and Jim are alone on the drifting schooner, he plays the wounded helper for as long as it is useful, and then he throws a dirk that pins the boy to the mast by the shoulder. Jim’s pistols discharge in the shock of it, without his deciding to fire, and Hands goes over the side. It is self-defence, it is accidental, and the narrator never quite recovers from it.
• ✅George Merry. The loudest of the discontented, the one who keeps pushing the crew towards a reckoning with its own leadership. He exists to show that the mutineers are no better at being governed than at governing.

The novel is careful not to make this side uniform. Some of them are vicious, one is a boy being ruined in front of the reader, and their leader is better company than anybody on the other deck.

🦜 The castaway, and the bird with a dead man’s name

Ben Gunn has been alone on the island for three years when Jim finds him, marooned by his own shipmates after a failed treasure hunt of his own. He is in goatskins, he has lost the rhythm of conversation, and the first thing he asks for is cheese. Several characters treat him as a joke.

“Marooned three years agone, and lived on goats since then, and berries, and oysters.”

He is nothing of the kind. He is the single most consequential character in the plot, for a reason the novel withholds until very late, and what becomes of his share afterwards is the grimmest small joke in the book. Both are in the ending explainer.

Finally, the parrot, which is a character and is treated as one. Her name is Cap’n Flint, and the sea-cook says he named her after the buccaneer whose treasure the whole expedition is chasing. That pirate is dead before page one and never appears alive in the novel; the bird is the only Flint any reader meets. She perches on her owner’s shoulder, screams the name of a coin, and more or less founded an entire genre’s idea of a pirate.

If your mental cast is louder and funnier than the one above, that is probably Tim Curry’s doing in the 1996 Muppet film, a performance SYFY WIRE rates as the best version of the character. The book’s cast is quieter, meaner and stranger, and the complete text is free at Project Gutenberg.