In the South Seas  

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The schooner Casco

 
        The Stevensons chartered this yacht in San Francisco in June 1888 from Dr. Samuel Merrit. A physician and native of Maine (the city of Portland is situated on Casco Bay), Merrit arrived in San Francisco just as the gold rush began, made a fortune in real estate, and eventually served as mayor of nearby Oakland in the late 1860's. Though he expected Stevenson would be "a kind of crank," Merrit was impressed when he met the author in person and agreed to a seven-month lease of the yacht at $500/month plus expenses.         Stevenson had visited the leper colony on Molokai in May 1889, shortly after Father Damien himself died of leprosy. In Samoa that December, he learnt that a Protestant missionary in Hawaii had attacked Damien's reputation; this outraged defense was first privately printed in Sydney, Australia, in March 1890, and subsequently published in Henley's Scots Observer.         This volume was originally published in a limited edition, for copyright purposes, in London in 1890, and then serialized in The Sun (New York) and Black and White (London). It collects Stevenson's account of his cruises on the Casco and Equator in 1888 and 1889-90; the later Scribner's reprint, displayed here, shows in its colored map the extraordinary distances Stevenson covered in his quest for a healthy climate.
   

Vailima

 
        The Stevensons built this house outside Apia on the island of Upolu, which today is part of Western Samoa, the first island nation of the South Pacific to have achieved independence. The Stevenson purchased a 300-acre tract in 1890 and began building soon thereafter. What at first was merely a house developed into an extensive estate with Stevenson playing the role of lord of the manor. It was at Vailima that Stevenson died, aged 44, on December 3, 1894, and on the hill above it that he was buried. On December 5, 1994, exactly one hundred years after Stevenson's funeral, Vailima was opened to the public as the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum.         During the 1890s, Stevenson became deeply involved in Samoan-European politics, and this book, in effect a short history of Samoa, traces the competing influence of German, British and American interests in the strategically-important islands. Stevenson romantically sided with the traditional ruler against the Great Powers' puppet-kings, and his letters back to The Times in London led to threats of deportation.
   

R.L.S. to J. M. Barrie, a Vailima Portrait San Francisco, The Book Club of California, 1962.

          This collection of South Sea stories includes an important novella, The Beach of Falesá, an ironic depiction of a white man imposing his culture on a more primitive civilization, an interesting anticipation of (and influence on) Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). It originally appeared as a serial in The Illustrated London News, where its frank depiction of sexuality was partially censored, leaving what Stevenson called "slashed and gaping ruins."         This thriller, written in a long-drawn-out collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne but finished by Stevenson alone, traces the adventures of a penniless man of letters hunting treasure among the Pacific Islands, reflecting Stevenson's own move to the South Pacific. It was originally serialized in To-day and McClure's magazine.
  Return   Updated 24 June 1999 by the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Copyright © 1999, the University of South Carolina URL: http://www.sc.edu/library/spcoll/britlit/rls/rls7.html