thread: 2008-09-22 : Treasure Island
On 2008-09-23, Vincent wrote:
Yep. That's Jim and Hands, five minutes after they were debating the afterlife (and yes, whether killing is wrong). It's a great scene.
I think at that point, it was only "killed" on the table. Hands didn't have it in him to torture Jim, I think - I mean, he had it in his personality, but circumstances were against it. Later on though, Jim falls in with the gang of pirates still led by Silver, and that's when torture becomes a thing.
I wouldn't say that the threat of rape specifically ever exists in Treasure Island, even between the lines, the way it does in The High King. Jim's going to be tortured cruelly, but there's a total zero of sex in the book. Whether that's realistic or not, Stevenson being target-audience-sensitive or true to his source material, I have no idea.
Oh, this is related, it's something I meant to touch on above, but missed. In Under the Black Flag, in the first-hand accounts of survivors of pirate attacks that Cordingly reports on, especially of people held captive on pirate ships, one of the things that comes up again and again is the pirates' "blasphemous orgies." It being the 18th Century, nobody commits to paper what a blasphemous orgy consists of - just like Stevenson doesn't tell us what "torture" is - so I have no idea what the pirates actually did.
But who even cares! "Blasphemous orgies" is just so evocative. I'm way more interested in how we interpret the phrase today for ourselves, to create dark fiction, than I am in what it described in historical fact.
