In the Admiral Benbow Inn Jim promises the salty sea dog Billy Bones he will keep his weather eye open for ‘a seafaring man with one leg’. Poor Jim. “How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares.”

Little did Jim know this was not the worst devil to be faced in an adventure full of murder and mutiny, devils and drunkenness, cutlasses and cut-throats, duty and despair… in the wretched quest for Captain Flint’s buried treasure.