Kidnapped

Alan is the novel’s most important secondary character and serves as a foil, mentor, and eventual equal to David as the two flee over the Scottish countryside. He is a static character, changing very little throughout the novel, and as such, he serves as a measure of David’s evolution. Though not a stock character, Alan has many qualities of the “lovable rogue” archetype that readers in the novel’s target audience would have recognized. Alan is an experienced soldier, a Jacobite agent and outlaw, a skilled swordsman, a cunning trickster, and a worldly traveler. He is loyal to his clan and to those that he comes to value and has both a high estimation of himself and a strong sense of pride. However, he is also full of contradictions. Alan is gentlemanly—taking his name, honor, and duties as David’s guide as a matter of utmost seriousness—while also being unforgiving, bloodthirsty, bad with money, and ready to duel at the least insult. Alan typifies the morally complex characters that Stevenson commonly explored.

Alan guides David, leading the young man through the Scottish countryside and the politics of the Highland clans. He also helps David navigate his transformation from a nearly helpless boy into a capable and experienced man. Though Alan and David have different ethical frameworks, they are united by a similar sense of honor that they come to value in one another. David notes admiringly, “Alan’s morals were all tail-first; but he was ready to give his life for them, such as they were” (97).

Ebenezer is David’s uncle, Lord of Shaws, and the primary antagonist of Kidnapped. Despite appearing only briefly at the novel’s start and conclusion, he looms over the plot. He is the most irredeemable character in the novel. While David often dwells on the positive characteristics of the people he encounters, Ebenezer gives him little to highlight. The kindest thing that David says about him is that he is so thoroughly committed to his miserliness that he “goes near to make the vice respectable” (18).

Ebenezer is painted as physically and morally weak: a selfish, greedy, cowardly, deceptive, backbiting, and cruel old man with a bad heart. His schemes to get rid of David and steal his birthright don’t even bear the hallmarks of cleverness or bravery. He hides behind more able and charismatic men whom he pays to do his dirty work.

The younger brother of David’s father, Ebenezer holds the lordship of Shaws due only to a thoughtless bargain the two young men made in their youth. Under his care, Shaws has fallen into ruin, and Ebenezer lives alone in a crumbling estate that could have been thrumming with servants and family. The closest thing the man seems to have to morality or family loyalty is revealed at the end when he insists Alan (pretending to be David’s captor) imprison his nephew rather than kill him. He is willing to sell David into slavery, but murder is a step too far.

A major character in the second episode of David’s journey, Captain Hoseason is the captain of the ship Covenant. He is, like many of his crew, a person of contradictions. He is villainous, self-serving, and treacherous but also cares greatly for those under his charge and is fastidious about following his own set of morals. Given neither to swearing nor drunkenness, David describes him as “a great church-goer while on shore” (46), yet he is also the architect behind David’s abduction.

Unlike the other morally complex people David meets, Hoseason’s main motivation is not a sense of honor or duty but merely the need for money. Whether it involves well-earned pay or treachery, his goal is consistently to find the shortest path to the highest payday. Yet David finds the captain “brave in his own trade” when Covenant navigates the Torran Rocks and remarks that he “admire[s] [him] all the more because [he finds] Alan very white” with fear (68). Though duplicitous and mercenary minded, the captain has the virtues of a seaman and a peculiar sort of morality.

The crew of the brig Covenant is a collection of minor characters that nevertheless have a major impact on David as he sails with them throughout the second episode of his journey. The first set of morally complicated people he encounters, they initially appear to him like “unclean beasts” (38). Ransome, the cabin boy whom David counts as “the least wicked of that gang” (32), is still characterized as cruel, crude, and dangerous, although more innocent than the rest due to his age, simplemindedness, and the abuse he’s suffered by his shipmate Mr. Shaun.

As David spends time with the crew, he recognizes their humanity in the small acts of kindness they do for one another. Mr. Riach brings David above deck to nurse him to health, and the crew returns the money they initially stole from him. While recognizing their faults and the harm they did him, David says, “Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues” (38).

In his trek across the Highlands, David learns about the Highlanders from various minor characters. Though their individual impacts on David are all small, they form the background of the novel’s action and help David understand and eventually sympathize with the Highlanders’ plight and resentment of King George’s rule.

Like the crew of the Covenant, these characters are neither purely good nor bad but have both virtues and faults. Cluny, a Jacobite chieftain, is a rabid gambler and given to irrational anger bouts of anger, yet he houses David while he recovers from poor health, and when David departs, Cluny insists he take back the money Alan lost to him at cards. Similarly, the fishermen who find David after the wreck of the Covenant laugh at him. Still, they return with a villager who speaks some English to tell him how to get to safety.

Though the Highlanders are poor and there is money on his head, David is unafraid of being given up to the redcoats: “Other folk keep a secret among two or three near friends, and somehow it leaks out; but among these clansmen, it is told to a whole countryside, and they will keep it for a century” (138). Despite being outlaws, rebels, and rough people leading rough lives, they are fiercely loyal to their own and have a nobility David comes to respect.