The Treasure in the Forest by HG Wells Summary |Class 12 English Book

The Treasure in the Forest by HG Wells Summary

Chapter 4 |Class 12 English Book

-HG Wells 

About Author

Herbert George Wells, (1866-1946) was an English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, best 2 “I known for such science fiction novels. His first novel, The Time Machine (1895) was immediately successful, and so he added a series of science fiction novels that revealed him as a writer of marked originality and immense richness of ideas. His science fiction novels include The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds(1898), The First Men in the Moon (1901), and The Food of the Gods (1904). He also wrote many short stories, which were collected in The Stolen Bacillus (1895), The Plattner Story (1897), and Tales of Space and Time (1899). This story is taken from the collection The Country of the Blind and other Short Stories.

Characters 

• Evans and Hooker: two friends who make an adventurous journey to a Tropical island for hunting treasures. 

• Chang-hi- a Chinese man who has a map of the treasures. 

• Two other Chinese men- Chang-hi’s co-workers 

Short Summary: 

“The Treasure in the Forest” is an ominous adventure story in which two men search for Spanish  treasure, letting greed get the better of their awareness. As the story moves ahead to show how power  and greed corrupt human beings. 
The fundamental message of The Treasure in the Forest is to not take risks when we are unprepared.  The two Englishmen took risks in an unfamiliar wilderness and were killed soon. This story was about  two Englishmen who heard about gold on an island and obtained a map from a Chinese. So they paddled  a canoe to the island, having fallen asleep aboard the boat. They drove their boat into a lagoon and up a  river in the forest, following the chart and successfully arriving at their destination. When they  discovered the death of the Chinese they had spoken with, they were terrified and began to worry  about their safety, but nothing occurred. They were packing the gold when Evans received a puncture  from the gold. Evans tried to forget about it, but the deadly puncture caused him to die for a short time.  Evans urged the other man, Hooker, to discard the bad gold. Hooker, on the other hand, was afraid and  didn’t even understand what his friend told him, and Hooker accidentally touched the gold. Finally, both  of the men died. 
This storey succeeds in depicting the dreadful scenario when they confronted the danger, and the  outcome of taking the risk will draw attention to others. 

Main Summary: 

The Treasure in the Forest is a suspense story, depicted as a third-person narrative, relating the fate of  two treasure hunters, Evans and Hooker who murder a Chinese man and steal his treasure map, which  locates a buried stash of gold ingots (blocks of several valuable things). 

The story begins with two characters Evans and Hooker who were heading towards a coral island in the  heat of the noon sun, after having paddled all night from the mainland through the sea in a canoe in  search of Spanish treasure.  

Hooker is studying a map of the treasures, which the narrator reveals they have stolen from a  Chinaman, Chang-hi, whom they murdered during the theft. Chang-hi had by chance discovered the  treasure left behind by a shipwrecked A Spanish galleon (ship), and had decided to rebury it elsewhere,  at a location revealed by his map. They are very much tired and hungry as if they had no food to eat.  They see the map and gets puzzled by the dashes shown on the map. Evans and Hooker identify the spot  indicated on the map, and after beaching their canoe they strike into the interior of the island, through  the forest. 

As Hooker is sailing the boat, Evans falls asleep and sees a little fire with three Chinese people sitting  around it in his dream. They were talking about the Spanish treasure which a Chinese man Chang-hi had  got on an Island after being shipwrecked and he wanted to take those treasures away from there. They  murder Chang-hi, a Chinese man, brutally and steal the treasure map. When Chang-hi gets murdered he  grins at them. They travel by canoe sailing towards the coral island. However, neither of them  understands the intention behind it. They follow the map and soon discover a forest, then a pile of  stones just like the map. But then they find a man corpse full of bruises laid beside the purple and  swollen body, which they assume is Chang-hi’s worker who decided to take advantage by himself seeing  the dug hole and some gold.  

The two men load as much of the gold as they can drag back to the canoe in Evans’s jacket and set off,  but after about a hundred yards Evans’’s arms start to ache and eventually faints. Hooker, in rearranging  the ingots on the jacket after Evans’’s collapse, himself feels a thorn prick, and at last, Hooker then  realizes the true meaning that Chang-hi had behind his grin. Chang-hi had covered his treasure with  thorns “similar to those the Dyaks poison (native groups of Borneo-blow pipe with lethal poison at its  tip) and use in their blowing tubes. The story ends as Hooker lies dying alongside the “still quivering”  body of his companion.