Kidnapped: can we draw a plan of the roundhouse?
There’s no real need to imagine the plan of the roundhouse in Kidnapped: you understand that it’s a single structure on the top deck of the Covenant with doors, windows and a skylight and understand their relative positions. If you can’t work out how the dangerous openings relate to fore and aft, port and starboard, it doesn’t really matter: in a way, it helps contribute to the sense of a confused and rapid action.
However, if you were to prepare an annotated edition of the novel you might want to see if the narrative actually supplies a coherent picture of spaces and their relative positions, and this would help translators, illustrators and authors of other derived works.
The roundhouse is not round. First of all, let’s clear up the name. It is not, as a naive reader might imagine, circular. It’s a cabin, certainly rectangular in plan, built across the afterdeck where the captain and officers eat and sleep. In ch. 9 Stevenson also refers to it as a deck-house.
The name ’roundhouse’ was first used for an aft cabin with curved windows, so originally ’round’ had a meaning; then the word was applied, as here, to a structure of similar function at the aft end of the ship providing accommodation for captain and officers. It’s the same as ‘the raised cabin on the quarter-deck’ in an earlier American pirate novel:
Going aft to the raised cabin on the quarter-deck, the Captain softly opened the weather door, and looking in, said, in a kindly tone … (H. A. Wise, ‘Captain Brand of the Schooner “Centipede” ‘, ch. 1, Harper’s Weekly, Apr. 1, 1860, p. 209)
It has two doors, two windows and a skylight. In ch. 8 we learn that the roundhouse has a skylight in the roof and ‘a small window with a shutter on each side’ — i.e. on each side, on two opposite sides, of the cabin. At this point we don’t know which of the two opposite sides are intended, nor do we learn about the doors.
Later in the chapter Mr Riach seizes the bottle from the table of the inebriated Mr Shuan:
crying out, with an oath, that there had been too much of this work altogether […]. And as he spoke (the weather sliding-doors standing open) he tossed the bottle into the sea.
‘Weather sliding-doors’ is a bit strange (but that’s not unusual for Stevenson): we’d normally say ‘sliding weather-doors’, i.e. solid timber doors protecting the cabin from the weather. (Some readers might think that ‘weather sliding doors’ are doors on the ‘weather side’ of the ship, i.e. the side on which the wind is blowing, but as we’ll see, the two doors are on opposite sides of the cabin.)
In ch. 9 we get the fullest description of the roundhouse:
The round-house was built very strong, to support the breaching of the seas. Of its five apertures, only the skylight and the two doors were large enough for the passage of a man. The doors, besides, could be drawn close: they were of stout oak, and ran in grooves, and were fitted with hooks to keep them either shut or open, as the need arose.
The two doors are on opposite sides of the cabin, as we seen from the following exchange:
[Alan said,] ‘It is my part to keep this door, where I look for the main battle […]’
‘But then, sir’ said I, ‘there is the door behind you, which they may perhaps break in.’
‘Ay,’ said he, ‘and that is a part of your work. No sooner the pistols charged, than ye must climb up into yon bed where ye’re handy at the window; and if they lift hand against the door, ye’re to shoot.’
Are the doors port and starboard or fore and aft? As the open doors in ch. 8 allow Mr Riach to toss Mr Shuan’s bottle into the sea, they must be at the sides, port and starboard.
However, in the preparations for the siege of the roundhouse in ch. 9, it looks as if the doors are fore and aft: the Captain and his followers are in the waist of the ship, i.e.amidships, when Davie hears of their plan to kill Alan and is told to get some firearms for them from the roundhouse without being observed. Davie tells Alan and they prepare for battle. Meanwhile ‘those on deck’, not knowing what is going on, are getting impatient and finally ‘the captain showed face in the open door’.
We might think that the door that Alan defends faces the mid and fore part of the deck, with a secondary door giving access to the extreme aft part of the deck. But the door could be lateral if we imagine the captain and others gathered on one side of the ship and so Alan chooses the door on that side to defend, or perhaps the lateral door chosen by Alan is the main door and the other is only secondary — it’s the obvious door to choose. The Captain shows himself in the doorway with no idea yet of what’s going on; as the door appears to be open, this again makes a lateral position more likely.
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The window that Davie has to guard to have warning of an attack at the opposite door must be on that same side of the cabin. Since the two windows are ‘on each side’, then the other window is on the side of the door defended by Alan, and the other two sides of the cabin have no openings.
The photo of the Cutty Sark (above) shows a deck-house with doors at the side, but other images found on the internet show that there was no design obligation to place them laterally, as is show in the photo on the right.
As a reader I don’t find any difficulty in imagining an indefinite configuration to the roundhouse, with doors certainly port and starboard in ch. 8 and possibly fore and aft in ch. 9 and 10—they could still be port and starboard, but I feel the simple schematic position of Alan’s door is facing forwards, opposed to the captain and his men. The five men with a ‘spare yard’ for a battering ram attacking the other door makes me instinctively think of the aft part of the ship with more space for manoeuvre than a passage running alongside the roundhouse.
So in the end I can’t confidently draw a plan—yet I don’t think it matters. But those are my ideas, if you differ you please leave a comment.
EdRLS 
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