Treasure Island musings

[Eldberg]

Hello all!

I was going through some boxes with old books when I came across my nearly complete collection of the Famous Five (Swedish translation). So for the first time in about 50 years I picked up Five on a Treasure Island and read it.

It occurred to me that there are some ”holes in the script” in this book which I never noticed as a child. At least things that do not immediately make sense. Here they are:

The legend says that the sunken ship had all that gold aboard. It was wrecked at the island, in a storm, killing the captain who was George’s ancestor. But the gold is not on the wreck; it has been moved to a room in the dungeons. This must have been done before the ship sank.

One possibility is that the ship anchored outside the island in calm weather (it could hardly have made it to the shore because of the underwater rocks) and the gold was taken ashore in a smaller boat. Then a sudden storm came and sank the ship.

But why on earth did the captain make a treasure map marking the position of the gold, and hide it on board the ship? The only way I can get this to make sense is to assume that the castle was already a ruin (and uninhabited) at the time of the shipwreck. For some reason the ancestor captain wanted to hide the gold in the ruin. So he had the heavy dungeon door installed, put the gold in and then tried to sail away -- which was when he and all his crew drowned. So everyone who knew of the gold’s location was now dead.

This might explain why the gold was never found until the Five got there with the map. It does not explain why the treasure map contains a plan of the upper floor in the castle; if it was already a ruin, that floor would not be there, nor would it be relevant to the hiding place of the gold. Also, it does not explain why the door to the treasure room was never found; the legend of the gold was widely known and lots of people would have been looking for it.

What do you think?

[Katharine]

That's a really good observation, I'd certainly never thought about it before.

[pete9012S]

Most interesting!

I re-read the parts of the book that mentioned the gold:

This time the children really could hardly believe George. But she nodded her head firmly.
"Yes," she said, "it was a ship belonging to one of my great-great-great-grandfathers, or someone like that. He was bringing gold— big bars of gold— back in his ship—and it got wrecked off Kirrin Island."
"Oooh— what happened to the gold?" asked Anne, her eyes round and big.
"Nobody knows," said George. "I expect it was stolen out of the ship. Divers have been down to see, of course, but they couldn't find any gold."

"Well, this box may contain something important," he said, and he took it from Dick's hands. "You've no right to go prying about in that old wreck. You might take something that mattered."
"Well, it's my wreck," said George, in a defiant tone. "Please, Father, let us have the box.
We'd just got it opened. We thought it might hold— a gold bar— or something like that!"

"A gold bar!" said her father, with a snort. "What a baby you are! This small box would never hold a thing like that! It's much more likely to contain particulars of what happened to the bars! I have always thought that the gold was safely delivered somewhere— and that the ship, empty of its valuable cargo, got wrecked as it left the bay!"

[timv]

I didn't notice the problems over this matter when I first read the book aged seven or eight, only much later. I assumed that Uncle Quentin had heard or read some story based on family information from his ancestors about the ship being wrecked as it left the bay, and that this was correct. The treasure map reference to the plan of the castle showed that George's ancestor the captain - presumably either a pirate or a treasure-hunter, who had got hold of some gold 'bullion' from the gold mines in Spanish-ruled Mexico or South America - had intended to store the loot there(in the upstairs room as it had better security ie strong doors?). He offloaded the gold at Kirrin Island as planned, but for some reason the upstairs room was unuseable - had extra damage occurred since he sailed for South America, eg in a storm? Had he lived abroad for years and was not in touch with how poor the castle's state was? So he dumped it in the dungeons instead and he and all his crew were drowned in a sudden storm as they sailed off.

MInd you, I think it more likely that Enid did not have any precise explanation in mind when she wrote the details, and may have originally intended the gold to be found upstairs in the castle - then deciding that a dungeon sounded more exciting. She forgot that she had mentioned a 'treasure room' earlier in the text, and the anomaly in the details of the castle was not noticed by her or her editors. I have come across plenty of examples of 'holes' in exciting children's stories' logic of how events turn out or how people behave / Probably in the mid-C20th (with no internet fan clubs) readers rarely discussed stories with each other or wrote to the author or publisher about plot difficulties, most critics looked down on children's literature and didn't think it worth analysing, and editors were a bit careless about plots.

The school and adventure stories of many 1920s-40s authors which I have looked at are full of plot holes, though some authors like Arthur Ransome and Malcolm Saville were more careful to 'line things up' logically! I have seen a few books about 'great mysteries ' of plot or character implausibilities or contradictions for adult novels, eg in the Sherlock Holmes stories and in Dickens, but none for children.

[Eldberg]

Thanks for interesting comments. A further question I asked myself when reading this book was when the castle was abandoned and when the shipwreck happened. The captain was George's great-great-great-grandfather "or something". If we count this as four or five generations back, he should have lived around the mid 19th century, right? This would indicate that it was a wooden sailing ship. Yet (at least in my Swedish translation) the Five climb down an "iron ladder" in the ship. This sounds like an anachronism. At least it indicates that the ship was not pre-1800.

If the castle was inhabited at the time of the wreck, there would have been people living there who survived the disaster. When abandoning it, they would have cleared out the building, emptyoing every room. And taking the gold. Hence my theory that the gold was hidden there after it became a ruin, otherwise the gold would have been found.

[timv]

Only when I knew enough science to think in detail about the liklihood of a fully wooden ship surviving intact underwater for several hundred years without rotting (in stormy seas too, close to rocks so likely to have swirling water rushing about in bad weather) did I think about the implications of the ship coming up from the seabed in one piece. I do not know if Enid did this or was just making up a thrilling story without too much thought of practicality - I certainly found this one of the most memorable scenes of the book, especially as I read the latter soon after a holiday on the Devon coast!

Wood usually rots underwater unless covered or held together - hence the number of shipwreck exploration programmed that you see on TV nowadays where the contents of a ship (eg an open Mediterranean Roman or Greek galley) are spilled over the seabed with the nails that used to hold planks together. Even the wooden ships that have been buried in earth on dry land tend to rot, as seen by the loss of the wood on the Sutton Hoo ship-burial (seventh century AD) in Suffolk, UK. The 'Mary Rose' (sunk 1542 off Portsmouth, UK) and I think the Swedish warship 'Vasa' (sunk 1620s? off Stockholm) were buried in think mud that preserved most of the wood; I went round the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth in about 2002 and most of one side of the wooden ship is intact. I also went round the huge preserved wood/iron 'clipper' the 'Cutty Sark' at Greenwich, London when I was quite small which gives a good idea of what one of these ships musty have been like (though the CS would have been much bigger than the Kirrin ship).

Iron survives much better than wood, so the fact that the ship came up intact in the storm and was flung on the rocks without breaking up (though it seems to have done so later , referred to in a subsequent book) would suggest that it was 'iron-bound', that is an iron structure built around the wooden planks. From the time when this method was invented, I assume the ship would be post-1800 in date, or even mid-century; so George's ancestor is less likely to have been a pirate than a treasure-hunter or someone who had bought up a derelict South American mine and found a cache of gold there. (A nice subject for a fanfic Famous Five prequel?)

Another intriguing question is whether Enid had had her imagination sparked off by a real life shipwreck of a similar, impressive-looking iron-bound ship off the SW coast of England which she had seen on a holiday visit or read about in a newspaper. I can't prove anything on this, but I have looked through the official British shipwrecks register for the 1920s and 1930s and there were at least two strandings of restored C19th iron-bound ships on beaches in South Devon in the 1930s - one , the 'Herzogen (ie Lady/ Honourable in German) Cecilie', a large 'clipper-style' ship, at Hope Cove E of Plymouth in 1939, three years before Treasure Island was published. (The other, earlier, was near Burgh Island up the coast.) I have known about the Hope Cove episode since a holiday there in 1966 when I saw the site of the wreck, but never connected it to Enid - who apparently used to have golfing holidays nearby at Thurlestone, but the date and exact source/reliability of this story is unclear. The ship was stuck on rocks off the beach for weeks before being refloated and towed off to Salcombe Harbour, and the story would have got into the press with photos. But did Enid read this...?

[Anita Bensoussane]

Interesting musings, though I must say these discrepancies passed me by as a child. I was much more intrigued by the fact that Julian, Dick and Anne had an 11-year-old cousin they'd never seen, and that they didn't even appear to know how old she was or that her name was Georgina - yet their father mentioned quite casually that he had to see Georgina's mother (his brother's wife) "in town the other day, about a business matter."

As a youngster I didn't question the notion of a wreck being thrown up in one piece either. Even as an adult, it doesn't concern me too much as the episode is so tremendously thrilling!

I visited the Vasa Museum in Stockholm in 1990 and went round the Cutty Sark in Greenwich in 1991, Tim. The Vasa is truly magnificent and I also found the history of the Cutty Sark very interesting. Even if the Kirrin ship had been preserved underwater in some way and had been iron-bound, it would surely have been in a fragile state and wouldn't have fared well being flung up by a storm rather than being raised with great care.

George's ancestor is less likely to have been a pirate than a treasure-hunter or someone who had bought up a derelict South American mine and found a cache of gold there. (A nice subject for a fanfic Famous Five prequel?)

Ilsa (Daisy) touched on that in 'Anne Kirrin's Diary' (Journals 62 and 63).

I have known about the Hope Cove episode since a holiday there in 1966 when I saw the site of the wreck, but never connected it to Enid - who apparently used to have golfing holidays nearby at Thurlestone, but the date and exact source/reliability of this story is unclear.

Where is it mentioned that Enid Blyton used to have golfing holidays at Thurlestone, Tim?

[timv]

The connection of Enid to Thurlestone is one of those interesting but infuriating stories that you can't quite pin down to an exact source, though I suspect that it came verbally from locals in the village or at the hotel there. When we went on holidays in the area in the mid-late 1960s, usually at Easter and in July/August, my parents were told that Enid had visited Thurlestone Bay Golf Course, presumably staying at the hotel there or nearby in Salcombe or Kingsbridge. My mother had corresponded with Enid about writing children's fiction short stories for magazines - some of her work appeared in the Mabel Lucy Attwell fairy-story annuals for small children and we used to have copies of the ones in question, which she showed me in the late 1960s, so possibly she had been talking about this to someone at our caravan site or a shop or restaurant. The unknown person would then have said about Enid's visit(s). The likeliest origin in my memories would have been someone at one of the three caravan sites we used - one farm (which in my mind looked like a place for Shadow the Sheepdog, as they had collies there, so I had read that book by then), one a riding-stables at Soar Mill Cove near Salcombe, and one a country House - White Hall at Churchstow close to Thurlestone.

I may have read the first couple of Famous Five books by then, as I had read Shadow and the Brer Rabbit books. I link the Thurlestone story in my memory to visiting Burgh Island near Thurlestone with my parents, which would have been on our 1966 holiday, and thinking 'This must be Kirrin island - it's about the right size and it's in a stormy bay!' I associated the Bay at Thurlestone with Kirrin Bay. But did I think that because I had already read 'Treasure Island', which was either 1966 or 1967, and thought of Kirrin because they looked similar or because I had been told the Thurlestone golfing holiday story too ? I cannot remember but it was over 50 years ago and I did not attach great importance to it at the time. I had definitely read the first Five series books before the 'Adventurous Four' books and the Galliano's Circus books , which I read by early summer 1967.

I did not think to ask when Enid was supposed to have been staying in South Devon then or later, and did not get interested in researching this matter until well into the 2000s by which time my parents had died. Independently of this, in the late 1980s when I was working on a historical project on biographies of the landowning gentry families of Devon - which was of interest to me as my father's family came from Plymouth and had moved there from Launceston, Cornwall in the later C18th - I came across a reference to Thurlestone Bay Hotel's famous guests that said they were supposed to include Enid Blyton. Again, precise origin and date unclear. That is all I know; it is one of those things that you can't quite pin down and which can't be given a clear line of evidence. I wonder if there are other oral stories about Enid's holiday trips still existing among people who met her or served at her hotels, which might make up for the loss of her relevant diaries?

[Anita Bensoussane]

Thanks for sharing that with us, Tim, even though the details are hazy.

[Bertie]

Some very interesting points made on here. Some I'd considered myself over the years, others had never dawned on me before.
One other small thing that I always think whenever I re-read it (which I've very recently done again), is that I wish Enid had left Timmy up with Dick and Anne when the two men lock up George and Julian and put heavy stones over the entrance. As having him go back underground means she has to completely gloss over how on earth they manage to get Timmy all the way up the well with them - especially the part where the ladder was broke and they have to use both hands for the rope.

[dsr]

Most interesting!

I re-read the parts of the book that mentioned the gold:

"Well, this box may contain something important," he said, and he took it from Dick's hands. "You've no right to go prying about in that old wreck. You might take something that mattered."
"Well, it's my wreck," said George, in a defiant tone. "Please, Father, let us have the box.
We'd just got it opened. We thought it might hold— a gold bar— or something like that!"

"A gold bar!" said her father, with a snort. "What a baby you are! This small box would never hold a thing like that! It's much more likely to contain particulars of what happened to the bars! I have always thought that the gold was safely delivered somewhere— and that the ship, empty of its valuable cargo, got wrecked as it left the bay!"

This is another goof, I'm afraid. Though possibly it's Uncle Quentin who doesn't know what he's talking about!

Gold is very heavy. The world's largest gold bar (according to Wikipedia) is 18 x 9 inches at the base and 6 and a half inches high. It weighs 40 stone. (round numbers.)

A 2 inch x 2 inch by 1 inch gold bar - about the size of a bar of soap - would weigh 2.32 pounds and be worth (today's prices) about $40,000. If that box was too small to hold a significant gold bar, then it must have been tiny indeed!

[Stephen]

Reading this thread now, it's just occurred to me that Enid Blyton may have inadvertently ruined a historical moment for me! I was actually in school at the time, watching live footage of the Mary Rose being raised in that yellow metal cage, and I remember being disappointed that it appeared to be little more than some planks of wood. I was expecting a recognisable ship shaped object with masts and everything. And I think this stemmed from the fact it was probably only a few months earlier that I had been utterly enthralled by reading Treasure Island for the first time. The idea of this waterlogged ship coming up out of the sea after all this time on the bed was amazing!

[Katharine]

Maybe the Mary Rose was a lot older than the Kirrin wreck, which is why there wasn't as much left of it, or perhaps the tidal flow was such that erosion happened quicker?

[dsr]

In Clive Cussler's book "Raise the Titanic", the Titanic turned out to have been wonderfully preserved by unusual sea conditions and was able to be raised in one piece. So Enid Blyton isn't the only one to stretch the bounds of probability in pursuit of a good story!

[Wolfgang]

The Vasa (Swedish galeon) was in good condition when it was raised, but special care had to be taken to preserve it after its exposure to air.