Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

About Treasure Island
To encounter Treasure Island for the first time is a great and uncomplicated pleasure for a reader of any age. One of the classic adventure stories in English, published first in 1881, Stevenson's novel transcends its time and genre and remains today not only a page-turner but also an engaging portrayal of personality and conflict. Treasure Island, once described as a "boys' book," appeals now not to boys alone but to anyone who likes exciting, believable, non-stop action and colorful characters in an exotic setting.

Set in the mid 1700s, first along the coast of western England and then in the seaport of Bristol, the book takes readers quickly to the high seas and finally to a remote and secret island on a quest for pirate treasure. And although this premise may sound far-fetched, in reality it is anything but that, as a brief look at history shows.
In the early twentieth century, pirates still plundered shipping and private vessels on the world's seas, but they were relatively few and not newsworthy. Two hundred years earlier, however, they were big news. Between 1713 and about 1725, thousands of pirates prowled the Atlantic; in 1717 alone, American colonial officials put the number at approximately 1,500 waiting off the eastern coast of North America to take advantage of a rich commercial trade that included several European nations. Mercantile vessels were easy pickings for these pirates — partly because the crewmen on such ships were so badly treated and poorly paid that they often volunteered to join their captors. And, although many merchants and government officials, especially in the American colonies, turned a blind eye to piracy and often actually supported it, it was not always easy for the pirates to find ready markets for goods. Coins, precious metals, and other nonperishable items in particular were likely to be stored in safe places, awaiting the pirates' opportunity to dispose of them profitably — and what safer place than buried on one of the many small islands around the Caribbean Sea, with nothing to reveal the cache but a cryptic map secreted in an old man's sea chest? Certainly, believing in the existence of such a map and its discovery by someone willing and able to go in search of the riches, as in Treasure Island, does not require much stretch of the imagination.Read more: http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/Treasure-Island-About-Treasure-Island.id-175,pageNum-9.html#ixzz0bCDNPYR8