Formed by ancient volcanoes, the Marquesas are what are known in the Pacific as ‘high islands’: great masses of basalt that rise hundreds of metres above the surface of the sea. Over millions of years, these peaks have been eroded by wind and water to create a fantastic array of ridges, buttresses, pillars, and spires, which looked to Stevenson in the opalescent light like “the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church”.

Rugged coastlines

The Casco’s first port of call was a bay on the north side of Nuku Hiva. Marquesan coastlines are ferociously rugged, with great cliffs of reddish rock rising directly from the sea. The Casco slipped into Anaho, a rare sheltered cove tucked into the lee of a headland and protected from both wind and ocean surge, as the captain watched for the blowhole that marked the anchorage.

Of his arrival in the part of the world that, as it turned out, would be his home till the end of his life, Stevenson wrote: “The blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up.”

Stevenson loved the South Pacific. He loved the ragtag quality of the colonial settlements, and he loved the beauty and vitality – and, sometimes, the absurdity – of the islanders themselves. But there is something elegiac about his description of his first encounter with these islands.

“At all hours of the day,” he wrote, they “strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.” It is hard not to read in his account of the Marquesas some sense of his own mortality, and yet death and dying were subjects that no visitor to the islands in 1888 could easily have ignored.

Stevenson recorded a conversation he had with a girl of about 16 years old, a grave, gentle creature already nursing her own child. They spoke together about Britain, Stevenson trying to convey to her a sense of the houses, the crowds and, especially, the cold. This last idea struck her forcefully, and she observed that such a climate must be bad for the health. Then, as if by association, she began to talk about the decline of her own people. “Ici pas de Kanaques,” she said, using the colonial term for islanders derived from kanaka, the Hawaiian word for ‘man’. “Tenez,” she said, holding out her child to Stevenson: “Hold.” “A little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then, no more.”

Of all the Polynesian islands, the Marquesas had been among those hit hardest by the advent of imported disease. Smallpox, dysentery, influenza and measles had all arrived in the Marquesas on European and American ships, along with sexually transmitted diseases, which contributed to the islanders’ decline by destroying their fertility. Having experienced no previous exposure and thus having acquired no immunity, Marquesans died in the hundreds with every new epidemic. So fast did the population decline that, from a high of perhaps 50,000 at the end of the 18th century, by the time Stevenson arrived barely 4,000 Marquesans survived.

Stevenson was strangely fascinated by the omnipresence of death. Songs and dances, he reported, could no longer be performed because there was no one left who knew the words or movements. Gardens went untended; suicides increased; coffins, new arrivals in the islands, became objects of prestige. Fear, he wrote, was also a problem, because the spirits of the dead – whom the Marquesans dreaded – now vastly outnumbered the living. The whole picture prompted Stevenson to imagine a future global extinction: “no more of any race whatever… death coming in like a tide”.

Castaways and vagabonds

From Anaho, the Casco sailed round the island to the port of Taiohae, then, as now, the Marquesas’ main colonial outpost. Here, Stevenson encountered a very different crowd: French officials, German clerks, the “shrewd Scot” who ran the local saloon, “agents of the opium monopoly” and a scattering of castaways, runaways, vagabonds, and beachcombers. Together they shared the comforts of expatriates across the Pacific: a billiard table, absinthe, a map of the world and “one of the most agreeable verandahs in the tropics”. Stevenson toured the Residency, the church and the jail, where he learned that almost the only crime in the islands was theft, invariably the consequence of opium-eating.

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From there the ship continued to Hiva Oa in a “dead beat of ninety miles against a heavy sea”. It was a miserable 40 hours: the mate lost his footing and cut open his head, the captain was sick on deck, and the cook was sick in the galley. Sailing past the island of Ua Pou, Stevenson thought that under such conditions the soaring stone needles looked “like a piece of the scenery of nightmares”. Eventually, though, the Casco arrived at the second-largest of the Marquesas.

Hiva Oa is now famous as the last resting place of artist Paul Gauguin and Belgian singer Jacques Brel, but in those days the settlement of Atuona was just another bustling little Polynesian port. On arrival, Stevenson was greeted with a missive in laudatory verse sent to him by one Mr M’Callum, an American ship’s carpenter who had settled in the island and was known locally as something of a bard:

Sail, ho! Ahoy! Casco

First among the pleasure fleet

That came around to greet

These isles from San Francisco.

And first, too; only one

Among the literary men

That this way has ever been –

Welcome, then, to Stevenson.

In early September, the crew and passengers of the Casco said farewell to the Marquesas and sailed south and west for the Tuamotus, bound for scenes so different, wrote Stevenson, that they might be “a new province of creation”. The Tuamotu Archipelago is a labyrinthine trail of islands strung out in a long, broad line running north-west to south-east about halfway between the Marquesas and Tahiti. It comprises not ‘high islands’ like the Marquesas but ‘low islands’ – coral atolls.

An atoll is one of the wonders of the sea. The remnant of an ancient volcano, which has worn away and subsided below the waves, it consists of a ring of coral, rock and rubble, with occasional crescents of the most astonishingly white sand. Within the ring lies a lagoon, a comparatively quiet body of water often of a startling turquoise; outside, the reef is battered by the relentless, unforgiving sea. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about an atoll, however, is its lack of height – at most, three or four metres above sea level. Stevenson described the first atoll he saw as “an inconsiderable islet, flat as a plate upon the sea”.

Aiming for Takaroa, when the captain of the Casco eventually saw an atoll he concluded that he had missed his mark, and that the island in front them was actually Tikei. Next came Taiaroa, “lost in blue sea and sky: a ring of white beach, green underwood, and tossing palms, gem-like in colour; of a fairy, of a heavenly prettiness”. From there the party sailed on to Raraka and Kauehi, the low-slung shores of which seemed somehow to be facing from them at every turn. It was then, wrote Stevenson, “that I began to be sorry for cartographers” – and also for the Casco’s captain, who had agreed only with the greatest reluctance to make for the Tuamotus at all.