Bristol's Treasure Island Tales | How the city shaped this famous adventure
21 Nov 2025You may (or may not) know that Bristol was a hotbed of pirates, parrots and treasure back in the dim and distant past. In honour of our Christmas production Treasure Island - here are a few historic facts to amaze your family around the Christmas table!
Treasure Island was an adventure story written by Robert Louis Stevenson in the 1800s.
Stevenson was a Scottish novelist best known for his adventure novels like Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
He visited Bristol in the summer of 1872. Legend has it there are quite a few links between the story and Bristol.
It begins in the Admiral Benbow Inn, the home of young Jim Hawkins.
The actual Admiral John Benbow was a 17th century naval officer and privateer (pirate to you and me) who sailed from Bristol.
In the book Squire Trelawney comes to Bristol from Devon to find a ship to take him on the voyage to Treasure island.
A real Jonathan Trelawney from Cornwall became Bishop of Bristol in 1685.
There are even links to the most notorious pirate of them all - Blackbeard - who came from Bristol.
Israel Hands is a pirate in Treasure Island - Hands was a real pirate, and a shipmate of Blackbeard. He may have also come from Bristol.
Writer Charles Kingsley (the author of The Water Babies) inspired Stevenson to write the pirate song;
"fifteen men on a dead man's chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!"
The phrase "Dead Man's Chest" came from Kingsley's At Last- A Christmas in the West Indies"
Charles Kingsley, like Jim Hawkins, came from Devon and later moved to Bristol where he was educated at Bristol Grammar School.
Long John Silver was a Bristol man who kept an inn called The Spyglass, in the docks.
Stevenson is said to have based The Spyglass on The Hole in the Wall pub, which is still on Welshback today
The castaway Ben Gunn in Treasure Island is based on another famous fictional castaway - Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.
Crusoe was actually based on a real castaway called Alexander Selkirk, a marooned sailor rescued by a pirate who lived on Queen Square.
Legend has it, Daniel Defoe met Selkirk in the Llandoger Trow on King street where he told him his story.
