I'm currently reading Treasure Island to my son as a bedtime story. Before that, it was The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings back to back.
Since before we moved house when I was seven years old, i.e. in the mid/late 70s, I had an audio play cassette of a prequel story to Treasure Island. I loved it to death, literally. The cassette tape broke one day, but my young self loved it so much that I removed the short end and clipped it back together, losing only a few seconds at the start/end of the tape. At some point the tape was lost though, and I've been looking for it for decades.
Reading TI to my son somehow put that prequel back in my mind, and some internet research later I'm fairly confident that it was probably an audio version of the semi-official TI prequel Porto Bello Gold - I can only recall fragments of the story from the audio tape, but among what I can recall is that the whole treasure came from the capture of a single galleon (the Santisima Trinidad), that it was seized in not a chance encounter but a planned action, and that one of the protagonists' name was Ormerod. The latter is probably the most important hint. I also recall there was some sort of double-cross, a kidnapping/hostage situation, and that one other protagonist was dutch. (Weird how childhood memories seem to cling to completely random bits of information. I can't for the life of me remember the actual story.)
Now I'm hunting down that book. I want it sitting on my shelf, badly. And read it, of course - the online reviews are pretty glowing and suggest it is a very solid book on its own, and very respectful of TI.
