Long John Silver, the enigmatic, treacherous and yet strangely attractive pirate whose exploits have been recounted by Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island lived out his twilight years on Madagascar, rich, one-legged, attended by a handful of devoted slaves whose freedom he had purchased in the West Indies after inciting them to rebellion. That he had a price on his head and the Navy out looking to bring him to justice bothered him less than the threat of posthumous obscurity. So he set down his memoirs. These are they.. "We read of his early years before the mast on board a merchantman, his shipwreck on the Irish coast, his life as a cross-Channel smuggler, and later his passage from West Africa to the Caribbean on a slave ship - John Silver himself a shackled slave in the hold, the price of insubordination. After escaping he took to piracy, first on his own account and eventually as Quartermaster to Captain Flint, a rum-soaked brute who was feared like the Devil himself. And why did a man as determined, brutal and, when the occasion served, devious as Long John Silver choose to go to sea as Quartermaster when he could perfectly well have been Captain? Because what he execrated above all else was established authority - he was always (so he liked to claim) with the crew and against the Captain. In no other way could he preserve his self-respect.. "In Long John Silver Bjorn Larsson has produced a witty, shrewd and well meditated account of a pirate's life that, in this seamless Stevensonian translation by Tom Geddes, will earn its place on the bookshelf of every prospective corsair.