Treasure-hunt

The treasure-hunt is the expedition that carries the mutineers and their hostage, Jim Hawkins, inland across Treasure Island in search of the seven hundred thousand pounds that Captain Flint buried. It is the final, desperate gamble of Long John Silver's rebellion, the moment when the pirates' hopes of wealth are concentrated into a single march—and the moment when those hopes are shattered. The hunt begins in the aftermath of the failed attack on the stockade, with Silver having bargained away the block house and stores to Dr. Livesey in exchange for the chart, and it ends not with the discovery of gold but with the discovery of an empty pit, the ambush of the surviving mutineers, and the revelation that Ben Gunn had already carried the treasure away. It is the pivot on which the entire adventure turns, converting the pirates' last chance into their ruin and handing the victory to the loyal party.

The March Inland

The hunt begins on the morning after Silver's deposition and reinstatement, when the mutineers, now reduced to six men, set out from the beach in two gigs, carrying picks and shovels that had been brought ashore from the Hispaniola. Jim Hawkins, tethered by a rope about his waist, is led like a dancing bear behind Silver, who holds the loose end in his free hand or between his teeth. The party lands at the mouth of the second river, which runs down a woody cleft of the Spy-glass, and begins to ascend the slope toward the plateau. The ground is heavy and miry at first, but as the hill steepens the wood opens, and the men spread out in a fan shape, shouting and leaping to and fro, while Silver and Jim follow behind, the cook ploughing through sliding gravel on his crutch. The pirates are in high spirits, restored by Silver's talk of the treasure and by the prospect of wealth, though Jim, who knows the doctor's warning to "look out for squalls when you find it," is horribly cast down.

Flint's Pointer

The march is interrupted by a discovery that chills every heart. One of the men, crying aloud in terror, leads the party to the foot of a pretty big pine, where a human skeleton lies, involved in a green creeper that has partly lifted some of the smaller bones. The body is dressed in sea-cloth, and its position is unnatural: the man lies perfectly straight, his feet pointing in one direction, his hands raised above his head like a diver's, pointing directly in the opposite. Silver, taking a bearing with his compass along the line of the bones, finds that the body points straight toward Skeleton Island, reading E.S.E. and by E.—exactly the bearing given on the back of the chart. He identifies the skeleton as Allardyce, one of the six men Flint had killed and buried with him, and explains that Flint "hauled here and laid down by compass" as a pointer to the treasure. The discovery, and the talk of Flint's cruelty, casts a gloom over the pirates, who begin to speak in whispers and keep side by side.

The Voice Among the Trees

As the party rests on the brow of the ascent, a thin, high, trembling voice strikes up the well-known air and words: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest—Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!" The pirates are dreadfully affected; the colour goes from their faces, some leap to their feet, and Morgan grovels on the ground. The song breaks off suddenly, and then the voice wails, "Darby M'Graw! Darby M'Graw!" and, with an oath, "Fetch aft the rum, Darby!" The buccaneers are rooted to the ground, believing it is Flint's ghost, for these were his last words. Silver, though his teeth rattle, refuses to surrender, arguing that no spirit has an echo, and eventually the men realize the voice is Ben Gunn's, who is "dead or alive, nobody minds." The terror passes, and the party sets forth again, though Dick, who has been praying with his Bible, is falling sick with the fever Dr. Livesey predicted.

The Empty Pit

The hunt reaches its climax when the party approaches the third tall tree, a giant of a vegetable rising nearly two hundred feet into the air, with a red column as big as a cottage. The men, their eyes burning with greed, break into a run, but suddenly stop with a low cry. Before them is a great excavation, not very recent, with the sides fallen in and grass sprouting on the bottom. In it lie the shaft of a pick broken in two and the boards of several packing-cases, one branded with the name WALRUS—Flint's ship. The cache has been found and rifled; the seven hundred thousand pounds are gone. The discovery is an overturn that strikes each man as though he had been physically struck, but Silver recovers almost instantly, passing Jim a double-barrelled pistol and quietly moving northward to put the hollow between them and the other five. The mutineers, led by George Merry, leap into the pit and dig with their fingers, finding only a two-guinea piece, and turn on Silver, accusing him of knowing all along. Merry raises his arm to lead a charge, but at that moment three musket-shots flash out of the thicket, killing Merry and the man with the bandage, and the other three turn and run. The doctor, Gray, and Ben Gunn emerge from among the nutmeg-trees, having ambushed the treasure-hunters, and the hunt ends with the loyal party in possession of the field.

Aftermath and Revelation

In the aftermath, the doctor reveals the full story: Ben Gunn, in his long wanderings, had found the skeleton, rifled it, discovered the treasure, dug it up with the very pick-axe whose haft lay broken in the pit, and carried it on his back in many weary journeys to a cave on the two-pointed hill at the north-east angle of the island, where it had lain stored in safety for two months before the Hispaniola arrived. The doctor, having wormed this secret from Ben Gunn on the afternoon of the attack, had given Silver the now-useless chart and the stores, and had moved the loyal party to the two-pointed hill to guard the money and escape the malaria of the anchorage. The hunt, which the pirates had hoped would make them rich, instead delivered them into the ambush that destroyed them, and the treasure, already safe in Ben Gunn's cave, was recovered by the loyal party without a single further loss. The hunt thus stands as the final, ironic reversal of the mutiny: the pirates' greed led them to their doom, while the treasure they sought had been taken by the very man they had marooned, and the victory belonged to those who had never lost faith in duty.