Books Like Treasure Island: 16 Free Sea Adventures and Desert-Island Classics
Treasure Island is a strange book to have become the standard boys' adventure, because it is largely about how untrustworthy adults are. Long John Silver is the most likeable character in it and he is a murderer; Jim's problem is not the pirates but that he cannot tell which grown men to believe. Stevenson wrote it in 1883 from a map he drew to amuse a stepson, and it fixed the whole iconography of piracy — the black spot, the one-legged cook, the parrot, the X — none of which was standard before him.
If you have just finished it, the honest problem is that nothing is quite like it. But there are sixteen books in the free library that scratch one part of it each, and it helps to know which part you want.
If what you liked was Stevenson
- Kidnapped — his other adventure novel, and by some measures the better one. Scotland after the 1745 rising, a boy sold to a ship, then a long flight across the Highlands with Alan Breck Stewart, who is a much more interesting companion than Silver because his loyalties are real and still dangerous. If you only read one book off this page, read this.
If what you liked was the desert island
The island-survival novel predates Stevenson by a century and a half and is arguably the more durable form.
- The Coral Island — R. M. Ballantyne, 1858, three boys shipwrecked on a Pacific reef. The most influential book on this list after Treasure Island itself: Golding wrote Lord of the Flies as a direct rebuttal, and the names Ralph and Jack come straight from here. Ballantyne had never seen a coral island when he wrote it, which mortified him later and made him insist on first-hand research forever after.
- The Castaways — Mayne Reid, and the naturalist's version: the interest is in what the survivors eat and build rather than in adventure.
- Adrift in the Wilds — Edward S. Ellis, two boys wrecked on the California coast, and more chase than survival.
- Blown to Bits; or, The Lonely Man of Rakata — Ballantyne again, and the oddest premise here: an adventure novel built around the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa, written from newspaper accounts within a few years of it. Half disaster documentary.
- The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Islands — the 1910s series version, in which the castaways essentially reinvent industrial technology. For a child who liked the making-things parts.
If what you liked was the pirates
- Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts — Frank Stockton, and the one non-fiction book on this page. Real pirates: Morgan, Blackbeard, Kidd, and Anne Bonny and Mary Read. Stockton is a novelist writing history, so it reads like adventure, and it is the best thing to hand a child who has just decided pirates are the most interesting subject in the world. It also quietly demolishes the romance, which is a service.
- Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader — Ballantyne, and the closest thing here to Treasure Island's moral shape: a pirate captain who is genuinely ambiguous rather than simply wicked.
- Among Malay Pirates — G. A. Henty, short and fast. Henty's imperial attitudes are on the surface throughout; his other books are surveyed in G. A. Henty books by period.
- Plotting in Pirate Seas — 1911, Caribbean, and interesting for being modern piracy rather than historical: gun-running and revolutions rather than doubloons.
- The pirate shark — a small pulp adventure, South Seas, and exactly as ridiculous as the title promises.
If what you liked was the buried treasure
- The Treasure of the Incas — Henty in Peru, and a proper treasure hunt with maps and false leads.
- The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle — the syndicate-series treatment, formulaic and readable.
- The Coming Wave; Or, The Hidden Treasure of High Rock — Oliver Optic, New England coast, and treasure much closer to home.
- The Count of Monte Cristo — the buried-treasure plot taken entirely seriously by an adult novelist, and then used as the engine for twelve hundred pages of revenge. Not a children's book and one of the most propulsive novels ever written. Read it at fourteen and lose a fortnight.
If what you liked was the sea itself
- The World of Ice — Ballantyne on Arctic whaling, and the best writing about ice on this page. He had been in the north and it shows.
- Swept Out to Sea; Or, Clint Webb Among the Whalers — the American whaling version, first person, brisk.
- As We Sweep Through The Deep — Gordon Stables, Royal Navy in the Napoleonic wars, for a reader who wants the rigging and the gun drill.
- Moby Dick — the end of the road for this whole genre, and the book that turns a whaling voyage into a metaphysical argument. Do not read it because you liked Treasure Island; read it when you want to find out what a novel can do.
The short answer
Kidnapped, then The Coral Island, then Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts. That sequence gives you Stevenson again, the island novel Stevenson's readers actually read next, and the real history underneath both.
One caveat across the whole shelf: these are Victorian and Edwardian adventure novels set in colonised places, and the attitudes to the people who lived there range from patronising to considerably worse. Ballantyne and Henty are both worth reading and both want a conversation alongside.
For younger readers, read-aloud chapter books free online covers which of these survive being read out loud, and the whole adventure shelf is browsable in one place.