It is one thing to draw a map at
random, set a scale in one corner of it at a venture, and write up
a story to the measurements. It is quite another to have to
examine a whole book, make an inventory of all the allusions
contained in it, and with a pair of compasses, painfully design a
map to suit the data. I did it; and the map was drawn again in my
father's office, with embellishments of blowing whales and sailing
ships, and my father himself brought into service a knack he had of
various writing, and elaborately FORGED the signature of Captain
Flint, and the sailing directions of Billy Bones. But somehow it
was never Treasure Island to me.
I have said the map was the most of the plot. I might almost say
it was the whole. A few reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and
Washington Irving, a copy of Johnson's Buccaneers, the name of the
Dead Man's Chest from Kingsley's At Last, some recollections of
canoeing on the high seas, and the map itself, with its infinite,
eloquent suggestion, made up the whole of my materials. It is,
perhaps, not often that a map figures so largely in a tale, yet it
is always important. The author must know his countryside, whether
real or imaginary, like his hand; the distances, the points of the
compass, the place of the sun's rising, the behaviour of the moon,
should all be beyond cavil.
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