Dead Man's Chest : The Sequel to Treasure Island [Paperback]

Roger L. Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2001

Dead Man's Chest is a classic pirate yarn that begins with long John Silver's escape from the merchantman Hispaniola at Peurta Plata and culminates with the American Revolution more than a decade later. It describes in rich detail the unholy alliance formed between this soft-hearted cut-throut, his teenage nephew, David Noble, and the slaver-turned-merchant captain, John Paul Jones to retrieve a king's ransom of Spanish gold and jewels from Dead Man's Chest; the other two-thirds of the treasure described in Stevenson's novel, and the inspiration for the sailor's ballad by the same name. Dead Man's Chest explains how the Scottish fugitive John Paul Jones earned a naval commission. More importantly, the novel illuminates a hitherto unknown thirty-month period in John Paul's career. From November 1773 when he killed a mutineer to June 1775 when he received his naval commission in Philadelphia from Thomas Jefferson. Learn how the contract that he and John Silver made with the American founding fathers impacted the lives of the Colonists and ultimately helped win America's freedom from Mother England.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...Well done, Commander Johnson." -- Gabriel Grunfeld - Hollywood Producer, G&G Entertainment

About the Author

Commander Johnson retired from the United States Navy in 1985 after a 21-year career as a Naval Aviator, which took him to Vietnam on three separate aircraft carriers. He has recently completed a second career as a Fire Captain with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection in Northern California. Along with his writing endeavors, Roger has been a published cartoonist and illustrator for twelve years, working for three publishing companies and drawing gag cartoons for two magazines. He and his wife, Elizabeth, live in Hiouchi, a small hamlet on the outskirts of Crescent City, California where he continues to write and paint.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 316 pages
• Publisher: Paradise Cay Publications (April 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0939837455
• ISBN-13: 978-0939837458
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #222,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Commander Roger L. Johnson lives in Gig Harbor, WA with his high school sweetheart, Elizabeth. He is now busy writing a new Christian Adventure series titled, THE LAZARUS CHRONICLES. Watch for REUNION, COOKIES FOR BOBO, OMAK'S ROCK, REDWOOD $EARCH AND RE$CUE, LAST TIME MACHINE, CARBOARD KID, and three more titles that are still being written.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dead Man's Chest - AVOID IT!, July 30, 2001

By 

Karl Moeller (Sonora Desert USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dead Man's Chest : The Sequel to Treasure Island (Paperback)

What a stinker !

After a perfunctory `interview' with Royal Navy Lieutenant James Hawkins, it's off to the Caribbean with Long John Silver, who escapes the Hispaniola with not just a bag, as Stevenson told us, but a whole chest of specie.. Silver settles into a routine as a pub owner in a Caribbean port, gets married (his `woman of color' being somehow forgot) names his pub Silver Jack's, and takes a new name. Oh, and he has a brother and a young nephew, too.

Skip nine years. Enter Captain John Paul, lately having skewered a locally-popular fellow who just happened to try to lead a mutiny on John Paul's late ship, moored, wouldn't you know it, on the same island where Silver lives. John Paul befriends Silver's nephew, and after lots of confusing dialogue (did you know Silver attended Oxford?) Silver, still burning for the remainder of the treasure (did I mention there was another whole untouched cache? What else didn't Stevenson tell us about?) but somehow unable in nine whole years to obtain passage to nearby Treasure Island, is somehow convinced that Captain Jones is just the ticket to get him, Silver, the treasure, with the help of his nephew David, against his brother's wishes, who doesn't want the boy to go to sea. Wouldn't you know there's a ship to be had, so John Paul, now Jones, sails off, nephew David in tow, for the Colonies, rumoured to be starting a Continental Navy, in 1774, long before any Declaration or anything.

Confused? Just wait.

Our hero Cap'n Jones goes to sea in a small schooner with only six crewmen, including David the nephew. They encounter some weather, crack a crosstree and split some sails, and are dead in the water when a known bloodthirsty pirate vessel, well-manned and captained by Joshua Smoot, Flint the pirate's bloodthirsty son, is sighted, and gives pursuit. So at this crucial juncture Captain Jones naturally goes below and falls asleep, apparently so he can have a meant-to-be-shocking blade-bared dream about Smoot, who he has never seen. Upon his waking, we hear that the pirate vessel is in cannon range. Rather than working like dogs to escape, we get a half-page of `salty' chest-beating dialogue between Jones and his men. Remember we're talking six men vs. 150, and I quote an excerpt:

Crewman: "Our powder be dry an' the linstocks is burnin' bright, Cap'n Jones, jest like ye showed us!"

Jones: "And those muskets, are they loaded also?"

Crewman: "That they be, Cap'n! An' every jack man (sic) o' us be totin' a brace o' pistols, fer close-in fightin'!"

Another crewman: "And we got our cutlasses an' daggers besides!"

Arr. Matey. Arr.

There's more, which I will spare you. Don't worry about me spoiling the `plot', all the just mentioned goings-on occur in the first 30 pages.

For me, a Stevenson lover, and more recently a real fan of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, this age of sail novel has all the period authenticity we've come to expect from the Fenimore Cooper Deerslayer novels. Please see Mark Twain's "On Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". Twain skewers his target far more effectively than I ever could, and every offense Cooper commits has its twin here in Johnson's "Dead Man's Chest". Avoid it at all costs.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinarily Ambitious Sequel, December 12, 2005

By 

fredtownward "The Analytical Mind; Have Brain... (Mocksville, North Carolina, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dead Man's Chest : The Sequel to Treasure Island (Paperback)

Commander Johnson deserves 5 stars just for ambition. He has not merely written a sequel to Treasure Island BUT ALSO a sequel to A. D. Howden Smith's excellent but mostly forgotten Porto Bello Gold : A Prequel to Treasure Island AND offered an explanation for a 20 month gap in John Paul Jones' history AND for how he overcame several obstacles to obtain one of the very first Colonial Navy commissions AND cleared up another mystery involving another historical figure or two AND produced several coincidental meetings of old acquaintances AND suggested that it is all based on a true story AND ... well, perhaps that is the problem. That's quite a lot for just over 300 pages, which all too often breaks through the most sincerely attempted suspension of disbelief.

Which is a shame because Johnson has put together a pretty rousing adventure overall. His Long John Silver may be the most Machiavellian of all, spinning a scheme that would cause Andrew Murray to blanch, carrying it out mostly from offstage like a spider tending a monstrous web (though when he finally takes a hand, it tends to be decisive). I hesitate to describe his scheme both because I don't want to give too much away and because it is so damn complicated!

Briefly, having failed disastrously at convincing Robert Ormerod to reveal where the larger portion of the treasure was buried in Porto Bello Gold, Silver has an epiphany (so to speak), what Ormerod won't do for money or in response to threats he MIGHT do for a higher cause: The Revolution. Silver's adopted brother, a comparatively honest merchant, has come into possession of a shipload of the finest cannon, disguised as ballast, in a ship he obtained from the notorious pirate, Joshua Smoot, Flint's illegitimate son, who was unaware of their presence in the bowels of his prize. Silver's idea is to get John Paul Jones, currently in town and on the run for killing a mutineer, to convince the American would-be revolutionaries, to convince Ormerod to dig up the treasure and trade it for the cannons, without anyone realizing that he is the author of the scheme because who would ever trust Long John Silver?

That's just the beginning; now things start to get complicated. JPJ picks a bad time to fall in love; the Revolutionary leaders figure out where the cannon originally came from; detouring to the original Treasure Island to pick up the silver bars left behind by the Hispaniola is suggested; Smoot gets wind of the scheme; a certain Lieutenant James (Jim) Hawkins, RN, shows up; etc.; etc.; etc.

As tends to be the pattern in Treasure Island versions, prequels, and sequels, one of the most interesting relationships is between a naive young boy and a Machiavellian old man. The man of course is LJS, and the boy is David Noble, the son of LJS' adoptive brother. David is easily the least naive (and most conflicted) of these potential proteges because he knows exactly who his uncle is and is willingly helping LJS to succeed with his scheme (well, the part of it he knows about, anyway). When he's lying through his teeth trying to con JPJ, you know he's a long way from Jim Hawkins or Robert Ormerod for that matter.

Faults other than a plot that makes an Indiana Jones movie look like a PBS documentary and a crappy job of editing? I can think of two that really bothered me. First, by far the most boring, tiresome character in the book is John Paul Jones. Maybe the retired USN officer author didn't feel comfortable messing around with one of our greatest naval heroes, or maybe JPJ just wasn't that interesting a person at this stage in his life, but the result is that whenever JPJ takes the stage, the reader will be impatiently waiting for him to leave it. Not what I've come to expect from reading about the later man, that's for sure.

Second, Johnson really treats A. D. Howden Smith's characters rather shabbily, spoiling the ending of Porto Bello Gold, which came as a surprise because with the increasingly wild revelations as the novel hurtles toward its end, I was sure that he was going pull a rabbit out of the hat for them, too, and I could even see how he was going to do it. Instead we get the craziest revelation of all, and Smith's characters get zilch.

It says on the back of this edition of Dead Man's Chest that this book is being developed into a major motion picture. I'm sorry, I just can't see it. Besides the problem of having crammed in more plot twists than could be handled in a mini-series, such a movie REQUIRES a movie version of Porto Bello Gold and a remake of Treasure Island just to set it up! The only hope would be if all three books could somehow be slipped onto Peter Jackson's reading list! Still, I'd love to see it happen, if only Commander Johnson would agree to fix the problems with the ending!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dead Man's Chest - Live Man's Pleasure, June 27, 2003

By 

Frank A. Jones Jr. (Yarmouth, ME United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dead Man's Chest : The Sequel to Treasure Island (Paperback)

I obtained this book in 2001 but emerging family caregiving situations kept me from reading it. Once I started I could barely put it down. I am a retired professional mariner,having grown up by the sea and spending my life at sea.This is a tale of the sea at its best, splicing together history and adventure.Dead Man's Chest Should be in the library of anyone who loves the sea,or loves a great adventure.