To The Hesitating Purchaser:
If sailor tales to sailor tunes, Storm and adventure, heat and cold, If schooners, islands, and maroons and Buccaneers and buried Gold, and all the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way, can please, as me they pleased of old, the wiser youngsters of today:
So be it, and fall on! If not, if studious youth no longer crave, his ancient appetites forgot, Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave, or Cooper of the wood and wave: So be it, also! And may I and all my pirates share the grave where these and their creations lie !

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17 , and go back to the time when my father kept the "Admiral Benbow" inn, and the brown old seaman, with the sabre cut, first took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cove and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards." [...]

This wonderful historic book is a special reprint of the original published in 1883.