Chapter 18: End of the First Day’s Fighting
Smollett, Livesey, Trelawney, and the rest make it ashore, but hear the pirates close by as they near the palisade, and ready a volley. Aided by the servants inside, they loose four shots as the pirates emerge from the treeline; one of them falls dead, and the rest retreat.
“Hold up,” says Skep, “I thought Livesey said they only had two muskets left. But now you’re firing four shots! Got you!” Then he remembers that Livesey left some guns behind on his first trip and begins to feel silly.
The victors then do something incredibly foolish: they leave the safety of the wall to go admire their kill. Predictably, a pistol shot from the woods barely misses Livesey and strikes the gamekeeper from Chapter 7, who has been present this entire time but who hasn’t done anything particularly noteworthy in the story other than being shot just now. It’s clear he’s a goner, and they take him inside the cabin and lay him out on a bed where he eventually passes. Captain Smollett takes a flag from his jacket pocket and drapes it over the man.
Then he takes a second flag from his jacket pocket and runs it up the flagpole on the roof. The story has so far not revealed just how many flags he’s packing in there, but I choose to infer that he’s dispensing the things like a tissue box.
As they take stock of their situation and decide that maybe having one less mouth to feed during a siege isn’t the worst thing, the ship’s cannon fires again, and they hear a cannonball whistle over the cabin. It seems convenient that now they can hear a cannonball flying—from inside the bunkhouse, even—when fifteen minutes ago in the rowboat they weren’t exactly certain whether or not one missed their heads by inches. No, I’m not willing to be shot at by a cannon to resolve this discrepancy.
After few more shots whiz by, Trelawney realizes, “Wait, you can’t even see this place from the ship. They must be seeing the flag the captain raised up the pole! Wouldn’t it be smarter to take it down?”
But everybody agrees that this would be unpatriotic, so they don’t.
(yes, Disney did make Livesey and Trelawney the same character. I already said I’m committing to this bit)
Instead, the men spend the entire evening hanging around as the pirates lob cannonballs in their general direction, largely unconcerned and in high spirits despite the text implying that one of the shots even crashes through the cabin roof at one point. Eventually, Smollett decides that the mutinous horde probably isn’t nearby since at this rate the cannonballs would be more likely to hit them then the patriots in the cabin (again, ignoring the one that came in through the ceiling I guess) and it’s worth seeing if they can recover some of the provisions from the rowboat. However, they discover that the pirates were bolder than they expected, having already procured the submerged food and delivered it to one of their own rowboats—helmed by Long John Silver, and with every pirate aboard now inexplicably armed with a musket.
(That’s not me pointing out an inconsistency; the book says they must have smuggled the guns somehow. Just giving credit in the rare instance it’s due.)
At least it’s not all doom and gloom. Jim shows up at the end of this chapter! Remember how this whole thing started when Livesey went out to make sure the child was still alive? Yeah, we all get sidetracked sometimes I guess.