Treasure Island

Name: Treasure Island
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Die Schatzinsel

Original author

Robert Louis Stevenson

Adapted by

Line by Line Publishing,

Read Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson in German and English, a parallel text graded reader with audio. Available in CEFR levels A2, B1, B2, and C2.

About this book

It begins at a seaside inn called the Admiral Benbow, where a nut-brown old seaman with a sabre scar and a sea-chest takes lodging, pays in gold, and posts a boy to watch for a one-legged sailor. His drunken songs, "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest," terrify the household for months. But it is what waits inside that chest, once he dies, that sets everything after in motion: a packet of papers, an account book, and a map marked with red crosses. On it, an island shaped like a fat dragon standing up, and the place where a dead pirate named Flint buried his gold.

The boy is Jim Hawkins, the innkeeper's son, and when a bluff squire and a steady doctor decide to sail for the treasure, Jim goes with them. The story is his to tell, remembered years on. Aboard the Hispaniola he meets the ship's cook, Long John Silver, hopping nimbly on his crutch "like a bird," his broad face pale and smiling. Everyone takes to him. Jim most of all.

Then, one still evening as the island comes into view, Jim climbs into an apple barrel for a snack, grows drowsy, and hears Silver settle down nearby to talk. Within a dozen words he understands that the lives of every honest man aboard now rest on him alone.

Stevenson wrote a sea adventure that has never stopped feeling like one — the tar and salt of a crowded dock, a blind beggar tapping toward the door, the long menace hidden inside easy warmth. It is a book about a boy learning what men are, out where no one can protect him, and the door it opens is the oldest one there is: a map, a ship, and the question of who can be trusted.

Available editions

Short, concrete sentences for early learners.

3,588 sentences

Longer sentences and a wider vocabulary.

3,588 sentences

Complex sentences and a fuller vocabulary, close to everyday native reading.

3,588 sentences

Original English — The most complex prose — long, intricate sentences, and advanced vocabulary.

3,588 sentences

Read a sample

1. Der alte Seebär im Admiral Benbow

1. The Old Sea-Dog At The Admiral Benbow

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey und die anderen Herren haben mich gebeten, alles über Die Schatzinsel aufzuschreiben.

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the other gentlemen asked me to write down everything about Treasure Island.

Sie wollen die ganze Geschichte, vom Anfang bis zum Ende.

They want the whole story, from the beginning to the end.

Ich werde nur eine Sache nicht sagen: wo genau die Insel liegt.

I will keep back only one thing: where exactly the island is.

Ich muss das verstecken, weil dort immer noch ein Schatz vergraben ist.

I must hide that because there is still treasure buried there.

Also nehme ich jetzt meinen Stift in die Hand, im Jahr 17__.

So now I take up my pen in the year 17__.

Ich gehe zurück zu der Zeit, als meinem Vater das Gasthaus Admiral Benbow gehörte.

I will go back to the time when my father owned the Admiral Benbow inn.

Damals kam der alte, braune Seemann mit der großen Narbe im Gesicht zum ersten Mal zu uns.

That was when the old brown sailor with a big scar on his face first came to stay under our roof.

History

Written by Robert Louis Stevenson in English
Adapted by Line by Line Publishing in 2026

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