Of knights, a parrot, piracy, and the list as treasure chest

by Martha Rust

In his essay “A College Magazine,” Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) reminisces about his boyhood strategies for accomplishing a cherished goal: becoming a writer. These self-assigned exercises included describing the world around him, copying down remembered conversations, and, what he found most profitable to his growth– imitating works he admired.

“Whenever I read a passage that particularly pleased me,” he recalls, “I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.”1 A list of the authors to whom he “played the sedulous ape” follows: “to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann….Keats, Chaucer and Morris.”2 In his Treasure Island (1883), we suspect that Stevenson is continuing this practice, in the form of the curriculum vitae he ascribes to Captain Flint, Long John Silver’s inimitable parrot, which very much resembles Chaucer’s portrait of the Knight in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, for both are structured by a list of place names and battles. In the context of Stevenson’s tale of pirates and buried treasure, his imitation of Chaucer has a whiff of piracy even as it figures a list as a treasure chest.Let us first consider  the passage in Chaucer that may have have inspired Stevenson (place names are in bold). 

A KNYGHT ther was, and that a worthy man,

That fro the tyme that he first bigan

To riden out, he loved chivalrie, 

…

Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,

And therto hadde he riden, no man ferre,

As wel in cristendom as in hethenesse,

And evere honoured for his worthynesse.

      At Alisaundre he was whan it was wonne;

Ful ofte tyme he hadde the bord bigonne

Aboven alle nacïons in Pruce;

In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce,—

No cristen man so ofte of his degree.

In Gernade at the seege eek hadde he be

Of Algezir, and riden in Belmarye.

At Lyeys was he and at Satalye,

Whan they were wonne; and in the Grete See

At many a noble armee hadde he be.

      At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene,

And foughten for oure feith at Tramyssene

In lystes thries, and ay slayn his foo.

This ilke worthy knyght hadde been also

Somtyme with the lord of Palatye

Agayn another hethen in Turkye;

And everemoore he hadde a sovereyn prys.1

As Jill Mann notes, the list of place names in this passage has led many scholars on a futile search for a real, historical knight who served as Chaucer’s model when, as Mann shows us, his model was literary.2 Indeed, we might characterize the Knight’s portrait as a case of Chaucer’s own “aping,” employing  a list-based method of valorizing a knight that he could have found in the works of several of his French contemporaries: for example, the following passage from Guillaume Machaut’s Dit du Lyon (1342), that depicts a group of ladies listing the places whence their knights are returning:

… “il revient de Damas,
D’Antioche, de Damiette,
D’Acre, de Baruch, de Sajette,
De Sardinay, de Siloë,
De la monteigne Gelboë,
De Sion, dou mont de Liban
De Nazareth, de Taraban,
De Josaphat, de Champ Flori,
Ed d’Escauvaire ou dieu mori ….”
“Aussi fu il en Alixandre,”
Dit l’autre, “et en mont Synaī.”
[He is coming back from Damascus, from Antioch, from Tamiathis, from Acre, Beirut, Sidon, from Sardinia, the river of Shiloah and mount Gliboa, from Sion and the mount of Lebanon, Nazareth and Ceylon (?), the vale of Jehosaphat and Paradise, and Calvary where God died …” “He was also in Alexandria,” says the other, “and on mount Sinai.”]3

Where Chaucer’s narrator links places to military campaigns, thus attesting to his Knight’s fighting prowess, Machaut’s lady enumerates only place names, thus highlighting, as Mann puts it, “the exotic aspects of foreign travel.”4 Whether of battles or of travel, the way both lists run on strains credulity, lending them a ludic quality that rubs off on knights and speakers alike, inviting playful mimicry.

Stevenson accepts that invitation and all the license it implies. The passage in question appears in Treasure Island’s chapter “The Voyage,” in which the narrator Jim Hawkins recalls the way Silver used to carry on about Captain Flint:

“Now, that bird,” he would say,“ is, maybe, two hundred years old, Hawkins–they live forevermostly; and if anybody’s seen more wickedness, it must be the devil himself. She’s sailed with England, the great Cap’n England, the pirate. She’s been at Madagascar, and at Malabar, and Surinam, and Providence, and Portobello. She was at the fishing up of the wrecked plate ships. It’s there she learned ‘Pieces of eight,’ and little wonder; three hundred and fifty thousand of ’em, Hawkins! She was at the boarding of the viceroy of the Indies out of Goa, she was; and to look at her you would think she was a babby.”5

Here, in the form of the well-traveled parrot Captain Flint, Stevenson replaces Chaucer’s “verray, parfit knyght” with a comic character who at once embodies the exotic aspect of his and Machaut’s lists of place names and, given parrots’ fame for imitating what they hear, allegorizes the very parroting–what Stevenson called aping–going on in this passage.6 Moreover, given that Stevenson’s pirate, Long John Silver, stands in for Chaucer’s pilgrim narrator, the scene subtly figures both authors as pirates plundering other authors’ stores.

In Stevenson’s case, the piracy is self-avowed, even something to be proud of, according to scholar Monica F. Cohen, who argues that in his essay “My First Book” (1894), Stevenson confesses “triumphantly” to his literary theft while pointing to the locations of numerous “stolen” narrative objects in Treasure Island specifically.7 “No doubt,” Stevenson writes, “the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe”; further, he writes,“Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour” and much more of the “material detail” of the opening chapters “were once the property of Washington Irving.”8 Especially in the context of Stevenson’s “taste for the picturesque and piratical in apparel,” these admissions of literary theft should be recognized, Cohen argues, as “piratical boasts.”9

Stevenson does not boast about stealing anything from Chaucer in Treasure Island however. Perhaps he simply omitted revealing it, or perhaps the resemblance between the portraits of the Knight and Captain are coincidental. Then again, perhaps this particular parroting qualifies less as plagiarism than as parody, a creative play with an original that results in a new work.10 With the figure of Stevenson as pirate in view, however, we can see that in the very form of his biography of a parrot, Stevenson has set his allegory of copying within a piratical accoutrement conjured by the list form: a treasure chest. The chest itself is supplied by the “containing” function of a list while the treasure it holds consists of the list’s “contents”: the place-names and associated events that describe Captain Flint’s life at sea, which Stevenson had collected in pursuing what G. K. Chesterton called his “private mania” for pirates and pirate lore.11 Buried in plain sight, this formal treasure chest safely stores Stevenson’s own pieces of eight. 

Image from Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (New York: Scribner’s, 1911), between pp. 76 and 77.

  1. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, I.43-67. Ed. F. N. Robinson in The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 24. ↩︎
  2. Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 113. ↩︎
  3. ill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 112. Chaucer may even have translated the Dit du Lyon, for he claims a “book of the Leon” among his works in his “Retractions,” X.1085, Riverside, 328. ↩︎
  4. Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 111. ↩︎
  5. Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (New York: Scribner’s, 1911), 76-77. ↩︎
  6. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, I.72. Ed Robinson, The Riverside, 24. ↩︎
  7. Monica F. Cohen, “Imitation Fiction: Pirate Citings in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Victorian Literature and Culture 41,1 (2013): 153-73, at 154. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My First Book,” Essays on the Art of Writing (London: Chatto and Windus, 1905), 111-181, at 121. See also Monica F. Cohen, Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 180-212. ↩︎
  8. Stevenson, “My First Book,” 120-21. ↩︎
  9. Cohen, “Imitation Fiction,” 154. The quotation on Stevenson’s taste is from the recollections of his friend Sidney Colvin (1845-1927). Stevenson’s piratical self fashioning is ironic given, as Cohen notes, that along with his contemporaries, he “suffered significantly at the hands of literary pirates in America (“Imitation Fiction,” 154). ↩︎
  10. The matter of parody’s originality came before the US Supreme court in the 1994 case Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. In its opinion in favor of the parodying defendant, the court opined, “Parody needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim’s (or collective victims’) imagination.” Quoted in “Why is Parody Considered Fair Use but Satire Isn’t?,” The Copyright Alliance, https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/parody-considered-fair-use-satire-isnt/https://copyrightalliance.org/faqs/parody-considered-fair-use-satire-isnt/. ↩︎
  11. Quoted in John Robert Moore, “Defoe, Stevenson, and the Pirates,” English Literary History 10.1 (1943), 35-60, at 46. Moore enumerates many of Stevenson’s sources of pirate lore, focusing on Defoe. For an additional trove of sources, see “Treasure Island,” Wikipedia. For the containing function of a list, see our blog post, “What is a List?” Listology, 6 May 2018. ↩︎

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