Six Questions with David Jacobsen: Creator of Treasure Island Armchair Treasure Hunt

David Jacobsen has released another exciting adventure for armchair treasure hunters: Treasure Island: Treasure Hunt Edition. It is available on Amazon for $19.99. David utilizes the classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson, but adds a tantalizing twist! An actual treasure for you to find! The book includes clues to claim a treasure valued at $10,000 dollars. It is hidden somewhere in the USA. If you can find the proxy item, you can claim the chest of jewels! Let’s learn more about it!

Six Questions with David:

1Q) Congrats on releasing another treasure hunt highlighting a classic story. Will you share more about this latest hunt: how it works and how to get involved?

Absolutely! The Treasure Island Treasure Hunt is a real-world treasure hunt based on the classic work of fiction, Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I thought it would be fun to create a unique edition of Treasure Island – which of course is a book about a Treasure Hunt – containing clues to a real-life treasure. What could be more fun than that? So I published a unique edition of the original classic, entitled Treasure Island Treasure Hunt Edition – which includes a unique introduction and some additional content not included in the original classic.

Inside my unique edit of the classic, there are clues to the location of a real-world treasure chest. If you can find the clues in the book and determine their meaning, they will lead you, like a map, to a real-world treasure. You don’t need a pirate ship to get there. You just need to pick up a copy of the book, Treasure Island Treasure Hunt Edition, and look for the clues and decipher their meaning. If you can figure out the clues, you can find the chest.

2Q) What is the prize for the Treasure Island treasure hunt? Please tell us more about the prize and how you choose items in the treasure chests.

The prize is a real-world treasure chest. It’s filled with gold, silver, diamonds, rubies, pearls, emeralds, sapphires, and more. It’s a beautiful site. I wanted the chest to be reminiscent of a real-world pirate treasure in keeping with the theme of the book. My main motivation was to create an adventure that anyone could participate in. I asked myself the question: what precious items would I want to see in the chest if I was the one who found it, and that was my method for selecting what to put in the chest. I wanted to make the chest visually spectacular and stunning to behold. When you open it up, I wanted you to feel like you were discovering part of the cache of Captain Flint himself. I also wanted the chest to have some history in it – there are old-world coins dating back to the Roman Empire in that chest. I’m not sure exactly how much it’s worth, and I try not to think about it – but there’s plenty of gold and diamonds and other valuable items in that chest, so I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed if you find it.

3Q) You mentioned one of your goals for creating your hunts is for readers to discover, or rediscover, the classic works involved. Are they your favorite books? If so, what do you find most enjoyable about them. If not, what are your favorite tales and why?

Thank you for asking that question. You definitely touch on an important point concerning my motivation for putting on these treasure hunts. People don’t read books anymore. Not like they used to anyway. The idea that a child might grow up today playing Minecraft for thousands of hours without ever bothering to read Treasure Island just eats me up inside. By centering my treasure hunts around classic works of fiction, I hope to inspire people to get away from the tech gadgets for long enough to rediscover the classics.

In terms of which specific classics I choose to focus on, my first few treasure hunts, as you know, centered around the theme of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Wonderland is a fundamental work in classic literature. To go through life without taking a trip down the rabbit hole would be a pity indeed in my opinion. So hopefully I have inspired at least a few people to pick up the original work and perhaps to enjoy the prequel I have written as well, entitled The Hatter’s Hat. That’s the book that holds the clues to the Wonderland Treasure location.

My new treasure hunt – the topic of this interview – centers around the seminal work Treasure Island. This pirate adventure classic is also a great work of literature, which, in my opinion, absolutely everyone should read at some point in their life. Unfortunately, it’s one of those books that escapes most people’s attention nowadays. But maybe, just maybe, my new treasure hunt will help change that.

If you’ve never read Treasure Island before, you really don’t know what you’re missing. I’m hoping my new treasure hunt will be the impetus to finally get you to pull the trigger and take a chance on a classic.

4Q) As with all active armchair treasure hunts, searchers are curious about the clues. I know you are familiar with Forrest Fenn’s treasure poem. In that hunt there were multiple interpretations for the clues leading to treasure, of which, only by finding the treasure could any be confirmed correct. Can you share if your clues are confirmed upon discovery, or are they interpretational? Will a searcher be 100% confident they have the correct location when leaving their house to retrieve the treasure?

I discovered from The Wonderland Treasure Hunt that there is no such thing as “100% confident.” Or, rather, there is no such thing as being 100% certain of your solution until you hold the chest in your hands. Everything is always open to interpretation, even if we don’t intend it to be.

With the Wonderland hunt, for example, many people have emailed me telling me their solves and they are very confident in their solutions when they leave their house. But no one has found the treasure yet. This is true despite the fact that I tried my hardest to make the clues as unambiguous as possible.

Everyone has a unique mind and a unique way of approaching a problem. That’s a good thing, in general. But in the context of a treasure hunt it means confirmation bias is real, and I’m not sure there is any way around it.

I can promise you one thing, however: I don’t believe in red herrings. I think they are cruel and unnecessary. I don’t put anything in my treasure hunts to purposely mislead searchers. Treasure hunts are hard enough to solve without deception involved.

The clues are there, and if you can discover them and interpret their meaning, you can find the treasure chest. It may not be easy, but it certainly isn’t impossible.

5Q) If searchers get stuck, do you have plans on releasing further clues? If so, would those clues be needed to find the treasure or is all needed already in the book? Can it be assumed the location of the hidden treasure is accessible 24/7 all year round?

For the Wonderland Treasure Hunt, I was surprised to learn that, after almost an entire year of searching, no one had figured out the meaning of a very important clue. In an effort to aid searchers, I decided to publish a map and a poem to help get people moving in the right direction. I was doing this to try to help searchers, but not everyone appreciated the added help. Some searchers, I’ve learned, find it frustrating when additional clues are published after the initial clues are released, while other searchers were begging for any help they can get, which means you can’t please everyone. For the Treasure Island Treasure Hunt I don’t plan on publishing any additional clues. There is enough information in the book to help you find the chest. But I also don’t want to make any promises. Time will tell.

If I do ever publish additional clues or hints, it won’t be because they are required to find the chest. Everything you need to find the treasure chest is in the book.

I won’t comment on the question about 24/7 accessibility, but you don’t have to break any rules or do anything dangerous to claim the treasure.

6Q) You mentioned in a previous Six Questions about the Treasure Island: Treasure Hunt Edition being part of a bigger project. Can you share more about that?

Sure. I started writing a sequel to Treasure Island about a year ago in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson. As a writer, I enjoy emulating the writing styles of classic authors and picking up where they left off. This allows me to further develop the imaginary worlds created by some of the greats, while forcing me to become a better writer by studying masterworks.

The working title of my prequel is Dead Man’s Chest, although that title may change in time. It’s a book about what happens to Jim Hawkins when he returns from Treasure Island and discovers additional treasure bearings in the account book of Billy Bones. My original intention was to publish this sequel with a real-world treasure hunt attached to it. But I soon realized that it might be more fun to start by reintroducing people to the original classic itself, Treasure Island. So I decided to put a hold on the sequel and to publish a unique edition of the original classic first.

I’m not sure what the future holds. The world is constantly changing, and so am I. But if I do ever get around to finishing my sequel to Treasure Island, there will be yet another treasure story for those who are interested in spending time in the imaginary world created by Stevenson.

The first chapter of my sequel is complete and is published in the back of Treasure Island Treasure Hunt Edition, as a teaser and preview of the upcoming work. If you read that preview, it will give you a clearer sense of what I am talking about. Who knows? – it may also give you clues and hints to the location of a real-world treasure chest.