What a wonderful title for a timeless tale of adventure that has never gone out of print since it first hit the stands as a serial in Young Folks Magazine on Oct. 1, 1881. Too bad the title “Treasure Island” wasn’t Stevenson’s idea. Louis wanted to call his first novel “The Sea Cook,” which sounds like something belonging in the culinary section of a bookstore. But the two words actually apply to one of the most popular and ambivalent villains in literature. Who hasn’t heard of Long John Silver?

One of the first things 12-year-old Lloyd Osbourne had learned as the new sidekick of Robert Louis Stevenson was that everyday life was a stage for make-believe. “Ordinarily a walk with him was a great treat and a richly imaginative affair, for at a moment’s notice I might find myself a pirate, or a redskin, or a young Naval officer with secret dispatches for a famous spy or some other similar and tingling masquerade.”

Real people were mined by RLS for character traits to use in his fictional people, so it is really Lloyd Osbourne inside the young Jim Hawkins who narrates the tale, having been asked “to write 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.”

It was inside a rented cottage in Braemar, Scotland, on a rainy September day in 1881 that Robert Louis Stevenson began pushing his pen around to get started on “The Sea Cook.” According to his wife, Fanny, it “had been thought of simply as an amusement for a small boy condemned to the inaction of indoor life by the inclement weather.”

But as Louis got to work, all his years of self-taught writing through trial and rejection — “playing the sedulous ape,” as he called his deliberate imitation of other writers, plus a determination to reach the unreachable in his art–perfection — were paying off. Instead of the usual hack mediocrity cramming the universe of cheap contemporary pulp fiction, Louis turned out a classic for the ages. Andrew Lang, a writer friend, told him that, as a romance, the story had only “The Odyssey” and “Tom Sawyer” for competition. J.C. Furnas in his definitive biography “Voyage to Windward,” said of it: “I know of no more striking example of an artist’s taking a cheap, artificial set of commercialized values which is fair enough to the Victorian ‘boys’ story and doing work of everlasting quality by changing nothing, transmuting everything, as if Jane Austen had ennobled soap-opera.”

But the ingredients aren’t even original and when RLS finally realized it, he was the first to admit it.

“But I had no guess of it as I sat writing by the fireside … It seemed to me original as sin; it seemed to belong to me like my right eye.” And then, sometime later, “I chanced to pick up the ‘Tales of a Traveller’ … and the book flew up and struck me; Billy Bones, his chest, the company in the parlour, the whole inner spirit and a good deal of the material detail of my first chapter all were there, all were the property of Washington Irving …

“It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. … No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe. I think little of these, they are trifles and details; and no man can hope to have a monopoly of skeletons or make a corner in talking birds. The stockade, I am told, is from ‘Ready.’ It may be, I care not a jot. These useful writers had fulfilled the poet’s saying; departing, they had left behind them ‘Footprints on the sands of Time; Footprints that perhaps another…’ And I was the other!”

That settles that. So who was Long John Silver?