“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest—
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
Is
this a pirate song courtesy of Walt Disney?
Oh,
no, long before the fine people of Disneyland “cute-ified” the
violence and squalor of piracy, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote these
words as the pirates' song in his book Treasure
Island.
Born
on this date in 1850, Stevenson was a Scottish writer. He became
famous during his life, and at least three of his novels remain well
known: Treasure
Island,
of course, and Kidnapped,
and Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
He also wrote beloved poems gathered in A
Child's Garden of Verses.
Growing
up in Scotland, Stevenson couldn't help but notice that the family
business was lighthouse engineering and design. His father,
great-grandfather, and uncles were all in the business of designing
and building lighthouses, and his grandfather (also named Robert
Stevenson) was famous for his lighthouse designs.
Stevenson
learned to read late, but even before he learned to read, he'd been
dictating stories to his mother and nurse. Once he learned to write
on his own, he compulsively wrote stories. He was lucky because his
dad was proud of his writing, and supportive. Stevenson's dad had
loved to write, himself, when he
was a kid, but he'd
been told by his father to “give up such nonsense.” Luckily for
the world, Stevenson's dad didn't make the same mistake.
His
dad even paid for the printing of Stevenson's first publication, when
he was just 16 years old.
Still,
Stevenson went to Edinburgh University to study engineering, as if he
were going to go into the family business. When he wrote to his
parents to tell them that he was going to be a writer instead of an
engineer, they were not surprised.
Celebrate
RLS today!
- Here is the Robert Louis Stevenson website.
Read
RLS, or watch a movie based on one of his books. Or both! It's
always fun to read, watch, and compare the two... Here
is a sample of one of the film versions of Treasure
Island.
- Read A Child's Garden of Verses. These poems are also featured on Lit2Go; you can read them while listening to them being read aloud.
- Garden of Praise has some links for Stevenson's three famous books, including online games, lesson plans, and radio dramatizations.
- Here is a quote fromTreasure Island that I love: “Sir, with no intention to take offense, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.”
Also
on this date:
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