Title page from the edition published by James Henderson solely for the purpose of copyright. The text included the first ten chapters of the novel.

      III

Since Kidnapped is marked with incidents of violence as well as danger, it is no surprise that fear and courage are among the most powerful recurrent emotions. Although the successive dangers contribute to the perception that the story is directed to boys, in reality those selfsame incidents highlight the central issue of manhood, which is what David must achieve. Early on he is exposed to his uncle Ebenezer, who responds viscerally to the bolt of lightning that saves David’s life: “Now whether my uncle thought the crash to be the sound of my fall, or whether he heard in it God’s voice denouncing murder … he was seized on by a kind of panic fear, and … ran into the house and left the door open behind him” (p. 39). As soon as he discovers that David is still alive, “there came into his eyes a terror that was not of this world” (p. 40). Although Ebenezer Balfour is often dismissed as an overdone villain, the staple of popular fiction, Stevenson etches him with an exactitude that belies that casual view. His miserliness is detailed with an engraver’s accuracy— measuring out the beer, husbanding the candles—while his negativity is enforced by his insistent repetition of no: “Na, na; na, na” (p. 32). What is more extraordinary is how the man has changed over his life, for the idea that he was once young, and in love with David’s mother, and courted her only to lose out to his brother and get Shaws instead, is a lesson that David has to absorb by the end of the novel, when he learns the full story of his family history from Rankeillor. But in the meantime, or in the novel’s real time, which is that of the sequence of actions as they were experienced, albeit narrated retrospectively, David is watching a man in the grip of an emotion that was well described by Seneca in Epistle XIII: “No fear is so ruinous and so uncontrollable as panic fear. For other fears are groundless, but this fear is witless.”12 The door left open behind him, the look in his eyes that was not of this world—these reveal a man incapable of confronting any kind of opposition without resort to “panic fear.” Ebenezer’s way of dealing with the world is with slyness and deceit, a type of negative behavior that conforms to the portrait Stevenson sketches of his house in near ruins, and is confirmed by his betrayal of David to Captain Hoseason. Although Stevenson never uses the word coward to describe Ebenezer, the idea is implicit in the action.

      David is beached on Earraid just past midnight. “To walk by the sea at that hour of the morning, and in a place so desert-like and lonesome, struck me with a kind of fear.” The dread of the night and the solitariness fill him with emotion: “I was afraid to think what had befallen my shipmates, and afraid to look longer at so empty a scene” (pp. 116–17). The desolation of the place, joined to the terror of the unknown, possibly more frightening than any real danger, forces David to think about what he should do to hold himself together. He instinctively realizes that the best thing he can do is avoid thinking about the things he fears: the death of his shipmates and the unforeseen dangers of the island. Why he should be afraid to think of the crew’s death might seem strange, since they had “stolen” him from his country, were complicit in the murder of Ransome, and twice attempted to kill him and Alan in the roundhouse. Yet David had learned while on the Covenant that “rough” though they were, sailors were not all that different from other men (“No class of man is altogether bad”) and had their own small virtues, “kind when it occurred to them, simple … [with] some glimmerings of honesty” (p. 62). Thus he feels bonded with them in shipwreck—he still thinks of them as shipmates— despite their battles in the roundhouse. David does not want to think of their fate because then he would have to reflect on his own. The fear of death is profound, and Stevenson presents it with a quiet yet emphatic simplicity: “‘He was a fine man too … but he’s dead’” (p. 47); “He gave the captain a glance that meant the boy was dead, as plain as speaking” (p. 68). Death is a leveler, and no man, however bad, deserves anything but pity at the final accounting. We know this to be one of Stevenson’s most profound convictions, one that runs through his fiction from “The Pavilion on the Links” (1878) to “The Beach of Falesá” (1892).

      For David to become a man he must first recognize fear, which could be overpowering in its physicality (“If I did not cry out, it was because fear had me by the throat” [p. 38]), and then strive to conquer it. When one of the sailors drops through the skylight during the battle in the roundhouse, David puts a pistol to his back: “only at the touch of him (and him alive) my whole flesh mis-gave me, and I could no more pull the trigger than I could have flown” (p. 87). The prospect of killing an actual man paralyzes David. But the sailor has no such qualms, and he roars out an oath: “and at that either my courage came again, or I grew so much afraid as came to the same thing; for I gave a shriek and shot him in the midst of the body.” It is nothing less than proverbial to say that courage is triggered by fear, and here Stevenson dramatizes that commonplace. This scene is a major one in David’s development, caught as he is between a boy’s and a man’s world. So when he reflects on the men he has killed it seems a “nightmare,” and he feels in effect the fear that follows upon crime and is its own punishment: “I began to sob and cry like any child” (p. 92).

      David is put in a crucible of dangers, and in order to survive he must learn not just to defend himself but to live with the actions of his defense. One of his great natural talents is his intelligence, and he is always trying to understand and adapt his behavior to his experiences. One discovery he makes is that men are afraid of different things. As the Covenant is in the midst of dangerous reefs, he comes to see that the captain and the ship’s officer, neither of whom had shown well in battle, were nonetheless “brave in their own trade,” whereas Alan, out of his element, was white with fright (p. 111). Stevenson here exhibits his habit of isolating the various abilities of a person and appraising them for their merits. Captain Hoseason, his portrait drawn in steel point, is far from attractive. Yet as the novelist reminds us repeatedly,