Yo-Ho, and indeed, Ho
Sat 25 November 2006

Journalism is a noble calling, oh yeasss. Part of its nobleness is your surgeon-like sense of detachment. No matter how much you care about the state of the street-lighting or South Gloucestershire's new septic tanks, you do not get emotionally involved.

But there are times when you have to violate the code, which is how come you are now being addressed by someone who is an honorary member of the Long John Silver Trust. Arr! Yo-ho-ho! Avast behind! Etc.

How this came about is best glossed over. Let’s just say it involved an act of piracy on the high internet. But now I’m in, I’ve not washed for ten days and have budgie-crap all over my left shoulder (I’m still waiting for the proper parrot I ordered off Amazon … The Amazon jungle, that is, boom-boom-tish!) I’m sort of reluctant to saw my leg off for now, but we’ll see how it goes.

What do we want?

A statue of Silver in a prominent Bristol harbourside location, preferably outside the Hole in the Wall pub on the Grove.

An' when do we wannit?

As soon as the design is settled and enuff pieces of eight have been raised. The money’s to be raised by sales of books, limited edition prints, sponsorship and maybe a bit of tin-rattling. Then we shall fit out a fast sloop all Bristol-fashion and strike terror across the Kennet and Avon Canal Main, preying on helpless holiday-barges, plundering their credit-cards, portable televisions, toasted sandwich-makers and MP3 players and burying them in the Devizes islands, belike.

If you’ve never read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (first published in serial form in 1881-82), then do it now. It’s a lot more thrilling and subtle than any screen version.

We first encounter Silver running a dockside pub with his black wife. Many Bristolians believe that Silver's pub is the Hole in the Wall, or the Llandoger Trow. Indeed, many Bristolians probably believe that Silver was a real historical character, though in fact he was cooked up by a Scottish novelist who may well have never visited Bristol at all.

Brilliant storyteller that he was, Stevenson knew that to make the bad guy a bit more interesting, he had to make him a little bit good. It's only a pity that being a Victorian, he couldn't follow through and make the good guys a little bit bad. Dr Livesey, Squire Trelawney and Jim Hawkins are all insufferably dull compared to the charismatic and amoral Silver, who ends up genuinely disappointed that Jim won’t be the criminal son he never had.

In the city centre is a very fine statue of Edward Colston, a great benefactor who donated most of his immense personal fortune to Bristol. Thing is, much, if not all, of this wealth came from sugar and slaves. If civic Bristol can reverence a greedy, joyless old bastard who called himself a Christian yet traded human beings like cattle, it can certainly find room for one of the most fascinating fictional villains ever created.

Many years ago a friend and I were showing a visiting Czech schoolteacher around town; I casually pointed out the Llandoger, telling her of its possible Treasure Island connection. You wouldn’t expect a twentysomething woman from the Czech Republic to have even heard of the book, but it turned out to be her all-time favourite. Seeing this place was the best thing about her visit to Bristol, she said.

There’s a big chest of tourist gold in this, shipmates. If Copenhagen can trade on a statue of a naked chick with a fish-tail, Bristol can clean up with a statue of an unwashed one-legged criminal whose only real friend is a parrot.

# Sign yerself aboard Cap’n Silver’s scurvy crew, or find out more, by turning your spyglass thisaway.