Afterword
Treasure and Treasure
Afterword
Treasure and Treasure
In the story of the Island of the Blue Dolphins, island adventure had come
full circle from its nineteenth century beginnings. What had been a boy's story
had become a girl's story; what had been a story of imperial adventure had
become the story of its indigenous victims, people and animals; and what had
been the means of inculcating children with conservative adult values had
become an incitement to change.
But, if this summary suggests a process of enlightenment, it has to be
remembered that, in 1960, O'Dell's was but a single voice. In that year, a child
reader could find all the books that we have discussed on library shelves, as
well as the classics of imperial adventure, Robinson Crusoe, Coral Island and
The Swiss Family Robinson, complete with their unreconstructed attitudes to
savagery and wild animals.
It was also the norm for a white child to grow up in Britain and the United
States without any first hand experience of people from other ethnic
backgrounds, and to rely on adult attitudes as expressed at home or in books,
films and television for their impressions of other cultures. Twenty years after
Island of the Blue Dolphins, children could still read the unexpurgated version
of The Island of Adventure, complete with Jo-Jo the black bogey-man. They
also had an even wider choice of Willard Price's animal adventures, with their
essentially exploitative attitudes to the environment.
It has to be acknowledged, too, that all the authors, including O'Dell,
however enlightened their attitude, write from a position that regards
indigenous peoples and animals, for better or worse, as wild and savage, as
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Treasure and Treasure
'other' than civilised. They are all, in that sense, colonial rather than
postcolonial writers. Imperialist and masculinist values could be said to be
inscribed in the narrative shape of the island adventure itself, so that attempts
to change it, short of complete transformation, are going against the grain.
Blyton and Price, the two writers who were most aware of the market for their
books, believed that writing for children was, in its nature, conservative: a
matter of providing a familiar form of entertainment. Price was accompanied
on some of his most dangerous travels by his second wife, Mary.
Nevertheless, he created a fictional children's world of adventure that was
exclusively male.
Yet all these writers changed the shape of children's island adventure.
Some did so by drawing on religious, spiritual and primitivist elements in
island adventure that provided new viewpoints from within the tradition itself.
But, for all of them, the most important lever for change was the idea of the
island as a place of empowerment for children: a place from which, to a
greater or lesser degree, to question adult attitudes. This is true of all the
writers except Sperry, where the island, although a place of empowerment,
allows Mafatu to grow into his expected adult role rather than to question it.
An illustration of this common ground, and of the exceptional status of Call it
Courage, is the way that the novels treat the notion of treasure.
Each of these stories includes the discovery of an item or items of great
value on the island which have some of the literary marks of treasure. In
Swallows and Amazons there is Captain Flint's trunk; and in The Island of
Adventure there is the counterfeiters' hoard. In South Sea Adventure it is the
pearl fishery; in Call it Courage, the savage's spearhead; and in Island of the
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Treasure and Treasure
Blue Dolphins, the chest of trinkets abandoned by Captain Orlov on the beach
with the dead. In two of the stories the treasure is in a chest; in four stories it
is hidden beneath the earth or sea; in every story it is the subject of secrecy or
deception or both, and in three stories it is associated with death or madness.
In each of the stories the treasure is associated with adult behaviour and
is a source of curiousity and, often, anxiety to the children who find it. When
Jack finds the piles of notes in the mine tunnels in The Island of Adventure, he
immediately compares it to the treasure found in folk tales. But, in contrast, in
most of these island stories, as in Jack's, the treasure is either not what it
seems or is a source of disappointment to the children. In Swallows and
Amazons, Captain Flint has to explain about the difference between the
treasure of a lived life and the treasure of gold and jewels. The Hunt brothers
and Omo find possession of the pearls 'uncomfortable' in South Sea
Adventure.
In Island of the Blue Dolphins, when Karana uncovers the
abandoned chest on the beach, she, at first, walks about the beach 'like the
bride of a chief', wearing the beads, bracelets and earrings. But then,
remembering 'those who had died there and the men who had brought the
jewels', she takes off the jewels and flings them into the sea. Only in the
discovery of the spearhead in Call it Courage, is the discovery of treasure a
source of strength. For Mafatu, it is the means of him proving his courage and
establishing himself as a warrior.
If treasure in these stories can be regarded as an adult legacy to the
children, then their attitude to it (or in Swallows and Amazons, the attitude
they are advised to take to it) is a questioning one. It is metonymic of their
relationship with the adult world and with the past. Only in Call it Courage is
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there a complete fit between the adult's and the children's world, between the
present and the past. In all of the others, even in Swallows and Amazons,
there is a gap: perhaps doubt or anxiety, perhaps disillusionment, perhaps a
mismatch of fantasy and reality; and the recognition of the need for change.
Within the world of these fictional islands hints at new aspirations appear:
a greater recognition of children; greater opportunities for girls and women;
and greater appreciation of cultural and ecological diversity. The realisations
of these aspirations may be short-lived or distanced: a matter of holiday time,
temporary and enforced isolation, or a lost past. They may be hedged about
and contained by all manner of attitudes and assumptions that keep the
author and reader firmly within the world as it is, rather than how it might be.
Nevertheless, they provide a new form of island treasure for child explorers to
seek and, perhaps, eventually discover.
Illustration by Arthur Ransome from Swallows and Amazons