Rating: 
Summary: Dead Man's Chest - AVOID IT!
Review: What a stinker !After a perfunctory `interview' with Royal Navy Lieutenant James Hawkins, it's off to the Caribbean with Long John Silver, who escapes the Hispaniola with not just a bag, as Stevenson told us, but a whole chest of specie.. Silver settles into a routine as a pub owner in a Caribbean port, gets married (his `woman of color' being somehow forgot) names his pub Silver Jack's, and takes a new name. Oh, and he has a brother and a young nephew, too. Skip nine years. Enter Captain John Paul, lately having skewered a locally-popular fellow who just happened to try to lead a mutiny on John Paul's late ship, moored, wouldn't you know it, on the same island where Silver lives. John Paul befriends Silver's nephew, and after lots of confusing dialogue (did you know Silver attended Oxford?) Silver, still burning for the remainder of the treasure (did I mention there was another whole untouched cache? What else didn't Stevenson tell us about?) but somehow unable in nine whole years to obtain passage to nearby Treasure Island, is somehow convinced that Captain Jones is just the ticket to get him, Silver, the treasure, with the help of his nephew David, against his brother's wishes, who doesn't want the boy to go to sea. Wouldn't you know there's a ship to be had, so John Paul, now Jones, sails off, nephew David in tow, for the Colonies, rumoured to be starting a Continental Navy, in 1774, long before any Declaration or anything. Confused? Just wait. Our hero Cap'n Jones goes to sea in a small schooner with only six crewmen, including David the nephew. They encounter some weather, crack a crosstree and split some sails, and are dead in the water when a known bloodthirsty pirate vessel, well-manned and captained by Joshua Smoot, Flint the pirate's bloodthirsty son, is sighted, and gives pursuit. So at this crucial juncture Captain Jones naturally goes below and falls asleep, apparently so he can have a meant-to-be-shocking blade-bared dream about Smoot, who he has never seen. Upon his waking, we hear that the pirate vessel is in cannon range. Rather than working like dogs to escape, we get a half-page of `salty' chest-beating dialogue between Jones and his men. Remember we're talking six men vs. 150, and I quote an excerpt: Crewman: "Our powder be dry an' the linstocks is burnin' bright, Cap'n Jones, jest like ye showed us!" Jones: "And those muskets, are they loaded also?" Crewman: "That they be, Cap'n! An' every jack man (sic) o' us be totin' a brace o' pistols, fer close-in fightin'!" Another crewman: "And we got our cutlasses an' daggers besides!" Arr. Matey. Arr. There's more, which I will spare you. Don't worry about me spoiling the `plot', all the just mentioned goings-on occur in the first 30 pages. For me, a Stevenson lover, and more recently a real fan of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, this age of sail novel has all the period authenticity we've come to expect from the Fenimore Cooper Deerslayer novels. Please see Mark Twain's "On Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses". Twain skewers his target far more effectively than I ever could, and every offense Cooper commits has its twin here in Johnson's "Dead Man's Chest". Avoid it at all costs.
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