Friday, 25 December 2015

Does John Silver escape with *all* the gold at the end of the 1950 version of Treasure Island?

It's been a long time since I've seen the movie so there may be some inaccuracies about the way I remember things.



It did seem in the movie that Silver absconded with the entirety of the contents aboard the skiff. However, in the book (and the film as well it seems) Flint's treasure amounted to 700,000 pounds sterling. Using this inflation calculator that amount would have the equivalent buying power of a shade under 60 million pounds in today's money. That's a lot of dough, and almost certainly none of it was in banknotes or other forms of paper currency.



Using this calculator for gold prices I estimate the amount of gold that £700,000 could buy to be around 5 tons! In the books the repaired Hispanola carried the treasure back home so I doubt that tiny skiff would have carried the entire treasure cache, which makes it probable that a great deal of it was left in the island for pickup at a later date.



Then again, it's a Disney movie and they wanted to end in a somewhat uplifting note.

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