"'Captain,' said the squire, 'the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?'
'Strike my colours!' cried the captain. 'No, sir, not I;' and, as soon as he had said the words, I think we all agreed with him. For it was not only a piece of stout, seamanly, good feeling; it was good policy besides, and showed our enemies that we despised their cannonade" (97, Treasure Island).
This passage demonstrates that sense of national identity by their need to raise their flag. It also shows how important that sense of identity was to them. They were willing to risk death in order to let the world see that they were under their national flag. You can see their disdain for the danger they were bringing upon themselves as a strange patriotism in which it was "us or them" and both "us" and "them" are clearly defined by the flags they fly. The fact that they are so confident about surviving "their cannonade" (in other words the pirates' weapons ) is ironic since those weapons had originally belonged to the "good" guys and now that those weapons were not in their hands they are somehow different.
Putting yourself in danger for your country is one thing, going so far as to put yourself and others in danger for having a flag flying seems like going a little too far. But dying for your country was an idealized concept in the Victorian age and in a sense the flag stands for the country. At first you can see that the squire had figured out why they were being fired at in a semi-accurate way and he is using reason to suggest the "wiser" choice. But as soon as the Captain denies this idea the others agree with them. If fact, the Doctor goes so far as to claim it was a "good policy" despite the danger it brought upon all of them. He may have been thinking of moral and bringing the group together and they valued those concepts more than they valued their lives.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. New York. Random House. 2001.
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