Billy Bones

Billy Bones is a fictional character, a pirate in the first section of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel "Treasure Island".

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Billy Bones appears at the very outset of the story with a mysterious sea chest, looking for a wayside inn with a view of the sea but little traffic. Bones decides upon the Admiral Benbow Inn where he asks to be addressed merely as "Captain".

Though his down-payment for lodgings is adequate, even generous, he stays for many months and browbeats Jim Hawkins's father out of asking for more money even when his deposit has been spent. He does, however, pay Jim fourpence a month to keep watch for "a seafaring man with one leg". Though he seems sometimes on the verge of deciding this a waste of money, he invariably repents.

A habitual drunkard, the Captain terrorizes the customers of the Benbow with his swearing, singing and general bullying. Yet he begins to attract customers by his very notoriety and earns some admiration from locals who consider him a "real old salt".

The winter after his arrival the Captain is visited by a villainous-looking man with 2 fingers missing from a hand known as Black Dog. There is a noisy argument between the two which turns into a swordfight and the Captain drives off a wounded Black Dog. As soon as the unwelcome visitor is gone, the Captain suffers a stroke.

He is tended to by Dr. Livesey who discovers the real name of the Captain to be Billy Bones when his arm is bared as a prelude to a surgical bloodletting and finds the name tattooed there.

The doctor saves his life and warns him to lay off rum or it will be the death of him. Bones does not heed Livesey's warning over his excessive drinking. He is plainly weakened by his stroke and the shock of Black Dog's visit, and at one point Hawkins even hears him sing a country love-song, a gentle relic of his innocent days as a youth.

He admits to Jim Hawkins that he sailed with Captain Flint, the notorious pirate and was first mate on his ship. This explains much of the mysterious circumstances and solitary behaviour of the early part of the story.

A few days later, a blind pirate known only as Pew reaches the inn, and Bones is plainly terrified. Pew slips a "black spot" into Bones' hand and departs. Immediately, Bones suffers a second stroke and dies.

Bones was in possession of Flint's map showing the island and exact location on the island where his buried treasure would lie. Captain Flint gave it to Bones on his deathbed.

Billy Bones is also a young skeleton boy and the central character in Christopher Lincoln’s novel "Billy Bones: A Tale from the Secrets Closet". Lincoln’s first novel was published in the United States in August 2008 by Little Brown Books for Young Readers and before that in April 2008 by Macmillan Children’s Books in the UK. A sequel will be published in August of 2009.

Story

This imaginative story revolves around Billy, a young skeleton boy who lives in a secrets-closet with his parents, Lars and Decette Bones. It is the job of these secrets keepers to archive the Biglum family’s lies, fibs, and secrets. Not an easy task, as each family whopper is more despicable than the last.

Struggling against unearthly creatures and an unfriendly Afterlife government, Billy and an orphaned girl named Millicent must sort out a number of mysteries—the biggest being their own. Billy discovers that not all Biglums are horrible, because he happens to be one himself and that Millicent is his real life niece. The two supernatural sleuths also uncover the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Bones have a dark secret of their own. The two kindly skeletons broke Afterlife rules by adopting Billy. Billy’s skeleton uncle, the Grim Reaper, tries to straighten things out but only makes matters worse by un-murdering the boy, thereby breaking even more of the many Afterlife rules.

In an explosive conclusion, Billy and Millicent save the day by exposing the Biglum secrets to the Light of Truth, and then capture a particularly nasty Afterlife official, who wrongfully imprisoned Billy’s skeleton parents.