Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, published in 1883, mentions Savannah three times, and each time it is where Captain Flint died. Billy Bones says Flint gave him the map at Savannah when he lay dying, Long John Silver says Flint died of rum at Savannah, and Jim Hawkins remembers the blue-faced buccaneer who died at Savannah singing and shouting for drink. The novel names no inn, no street and no house. Savannah has attached the story to the Pirates' House restaurant on East Broad Street, on part of the site of Oglethorpe's 1733 Trustees' Garden, and ghost tours tell that Flint spent his last days there and haunts it. The restaurant is 70 years younger than the book.
By its own account, Herb Traub and Jim Casey opened the Pirates' House in 1953 as a tea room, after Mary Hillyer, wife of the Savannah Gas Company's president, saved the buildings from the demolition the company planned on acquiring the site in 1945. Its timeline puts a sailors' inn on the site around 1753 and dates the small Herb House in the complex to 1734, which would make it Georgia's oldest building; Wikipedia's Herb House article gives 1853, the year it first appears on a map.
Ghost tours also tell of a tunnel from the rum cellar to the river, through which drunken sailors were carried off to wake at sea, shanghaied. The restaurant's own timeline repeats it, as something that is said, and one tour company that tells the Flint story points out that Flint never existed outside the book.
Getting there
32.0782, -81.0842
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop is an audio tour guide app that tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
