Have you stopped murdering your shipmates, John Silver?

I ges this is what happens when yu write your stories as a serial. I get the idea the author had forgotten about Tom (no last name given) shortly after chapter 14. Yu know, the one John Silver murders in cold blood for not joining his mutiny. Jim sees this murder, is properly shocked at first, but then seems to forget all about it. In the end they take John Silver along and he escapes and lives happily ever after.

I can’t stand that.

Minor points, you could call them gaffes, only, the gaffes you expect of a 18th century schooner are never mentiont.

• •I think sometimes the author just stuck a few nautical terms together without quite knowing what they meant. At one time Jim is hidden in a barrel near the foremast (he slips out and hides behind the foresail) and, looking up, sees the mizzen top. Erm, no. The mizzen top is two masts back.
  
• •In one sene the abandoned schooner is doing repeated accidental jibes, and that is not shown as the most terrifying thing that can happen on a ship. Jim just dodges the boom, twice, and keeps on doing what he was, instead of reeling in the sheet.
  
• •Near the beginning we get a position on the high seas with an accuracy of tens of seconds of arc, for longitude as well as latitude. That would be really hard to do at the time, and was completely pointless.
  

All in all the kind of shoddy research you expect for disposable fiction. It’s OK in general, but this has become Great Literature. The Big Example of Pirate Fiction. Something You Must Have Read.

The pictures in my version, by Louis Rhead, are worse.
The text has Jim climb up to the cross tree of the schooner. For that we get an illustration of him on a top above a yardarm. Schooners don’t have yardarms. (At least not at that level of the mast.) That is the point of a schooner.
The text has the tiller hit a mutineer in the chest. In illustrations we see has a steering wheel.

Another problem is of course the buried pirate treasure. Well, no. Pirates did not bury treasure on remote ilands and drew elaborate maps. (The Captain Kidd story is different in every important aspect.)

Most importantly, pirates didn’t keep tonnes of gold around. The £ 700 000 mentioned would be 5.6 tonnes of gold. “Spend like a sailor” surely held doubly true for pirates. Not to mention the cost of furnishing the ships for the next raids. They effing spend all their money. There was nothing left to bury.