Chapter 20: Silver’s Embassy
Looking down at the two pirates by their lonesome, Smollett suspects a trick, and orders lookouts posted before calling down “What do you want?”
“Cap’n Silver is here to make an agreement,” calls the flag-bearer. The honorific doesn’t escape Smollett’s notice—he’s the captain, after all—and he replies with contempt, “Captain Silver? Never heard of the guy.” Long John (hilariously) claims that Smollett deserted the ship, and that the boys elected to make him the acting captain instead. His tone makes it sound like he humbly accepted this honor, despite the fact that he’s somehow acquired a long blue coat and a hat with a big colorful feather from an uninhabited island sometime in the past twelve hours. I guess he must have smuggled it in with the muskets.
Smollett says, “Fine, you want to talk? You can come up here alone.” This Silver does in spite of the difficulty involved, for he has to climb over the palisade wall and traverse terrain that is not ADA-compliant. When he reaches the cabin, Smollett directs him to sit on the ground by the fire.
“What, you won’t invite me inside? It’s cold out here,” complains Silver.
“If you hadn’t decided to mutiny, you could be sitting cozy in the ship’s galley right now,” Smollett replies bitterly.
Since Smollett isn’t in the mood for small talk, Silver says the reason he’s here is to talk terms, since he and the boys are pretty shaken up after one of their number had their throat slit in the middle of the night. Of course, our protagonists didn’t do this—Jim suspects it was Ben—but Smollett is too clever to act like he doesn’t know what Silver is talking about.
Silver then gets to his point and makes his offer: give us the treasure map, and maybe stop gutting us while we sleep, and scout’s honor, we’ll either take you somewhere safe, or we’ll leave you here with half our rations and send a ship to come get you, whichever you’re more comfortable with. If they refuse, it’ll come to blows.
But Smollett believes Silver is bluffing a bad hand: “You don’t know where the treasure is, the wind's trapped the ship in the bay, none of you can navigate the open seas anyway, and y’all are dogshit in a straight fight. So either you submit to me and I’ll take you back to England for trial, or I’ll put you all in the ground now.”
Silver loses his cool and commands one of them to help him up to his feet; but nobody is willing, and he’s forced to crawl to the cabin porch and pull himself upright in humiliation. He avows that they’ll all be dead or worse within the hour, and he marches back down and over the stockade wall.
Really missed out on another good opportunity to just shoot him.