Customer Reviews

Dead Man's Chest : The Sequel to Treasure Island

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

Could it be that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote TREASURE ISLAND based on a true story, and the characters really existed? Is it true that an aging pirate, Long John Silver, manipulated John Paul Jones and other patriots of the American Revolution into recovering treasure from a small island in the Caribbean? These are but a few of the questions I was asking myself after I finished reading Commander Roger Johnson's well crafted adventure novel, DEAD MAN'S CHEST. As a writer, I know how tough it is to spin a yarn of factual fiction, and do it in a way that makes every page believable. Mr. Johnston has done it in spades - and everything rings true - from the sailing lore to the historical backdrop. It is a saga bigger than life and destined to be made into a major motion picture. Move over C. S. Forester, Patrick O'Brian and Dan Parkinson - there is a new author on the scene writing in the same tradition. We can only hope Commander Johnson will continue to tell us more about the characters he has so skillfully brought back to life in this truly entertaining novel. If you enjoy factual fiction with a nautical theme, you will not be able to put this one down.

I took Dead Man's Chest with me on vacation. Essentially, my planned vacation activities were put on hold until I completed reading the book. Roger Johnson related the characters' thoughts, actions, and words so clearly, and the story locations so realistically, that I truly suspect that he might really have found historical documentation of actual events. I hope Mr. Johnson will continue writing and publishing novels of this high caliber.

I just finished reading DEAD MAN'S CHEST, and I can honestly say it is one of the best two or three books I have ever read. It is the remarkable story of how one man, Long John Silver, was able to manipulate both pirates and patriots in order to aquire the Treasure of Dead Man's Chest; the other two-thirds of the treasure John Flint burried on Treasure Island. The action takes place between November 1773 and June 1775, the same twenty months in which the naval hero John Paul Jones disappeared from the history books. He was a foreigner and had a warrant on his head, yet he did something so remarkable for the American Colonies that he was awarded one of the first naval commissions in the Continental Navy. DEAD MAN'S CHEST reveals for the first time exactly what he did, woven together with other historical events and with just enough fiction to give this amazing novel a hook to keep my undivided interest. I give DEAD MAN'S CHEST five stars!

I just finished reading Dead Man's Chest by Commander Roger Johnson and was thrilled with each page. I'm not much of a fiction reader, but once I read the two page preface, I was hooked. Commander Johnson has put together a marvelous story of adventure, mixed with love, intrigue, and how Long John Silver manipulated hundreds of pirates and Colonial patriots into doing his bidding to find and take back the treasure of Dead Man's Chest. I was especially taken with the 1777 transcript of the Royal Navy Admiralty Court of Inquiry that formed the foundation of this amazing epic adventure. I recommend Dead Man's Chest to everyone who likes a great yarn, and truly hope this important literary work makes it to the big screen.

I don't know how he's accomplished it, but Commander Johnson's new novel, Dead Man's Chest, is written with the same rivetting plot and clarity as Patrick O'Brian and C.S, Forrester. By the time I was halfway through his most interesting preface, I was hooked, and couldn't put the book down until all was revealed about Long John Silver's involvement with the American Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War. An amazing tale of lust for treasure, sabotage, power, and how one man was able to manipulate both patriots and pirates to do his bidding. This is a must read for anyone who loves the sea, anyone who enjoys a plot full of twists and turns, and anyone who just loves a great yarn.

Dead Man's Chest: The Sequel To Treasure Island is a high seas pirate adventure, based on an infamous sailor's ballad, that begins with Long John Silver's daring escape and culminating with the American Revolution, more than ten years later. The deadly cutthroat must form an alliance with his teenage nephew and Captain John Paul Jones, who just might be more dangerous than any wanted criminal, to retrieve a staggering ransom of gold and jewels from the "Dead Man's Chest". Highly recommended for any with an interest in nautical myths or stories of pirate escapades!

While passing through Crescent City in early July 2001, I purchased a signed copy of Dead Man's Chest as a gift for my wife, since I'm not the reader in the family. As we stopped in Roseburg, Oregon, I decided as a fluke, that I would read just the preface. That was all it took because I was unforgivenly hooked. I began reading at 11:00 AM, and fourteen hours later I had read all but the last two chapters. I was so impressed that I insisted we drive our motorhome back to Crescent City to speak with Commander Johnson and to get a photo with him. I can tell other readers that this is by far the best book I have ever read, and am convinced that it must be made into a movie. Anyone who loves a great mystery, or an action/adventure story with strong characters and an intriguing plot must get a copy of Dead Man's Chest! And don't worry that it's a pirate novel. This is an instant classic that will be read for generations!