{"id":15043,"date":"2022-06-07T18:16:34","date_gmt":"2022-06-07T16:16:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=96482"},"modified":"2022-06-07T19:19:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T17:19:23","slug":"robert-louis-stevenson-novelist-playwright-poet-traveller","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/robert-louis-stevenson-novelist-playwright-poet-traveller\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert Louis Stevenson: novelist, playwright, poet, traveller"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Mark Gover\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Tuesday, 07 June 2022 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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Who was Robert Louis Stevenson?<\/h2>\n

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson (1850\u201394) was born in Edinburgh, son of a noted lighthouse designer. He suffered from respiratory illnesses from early childhood, and his schooling was intermittent. He didn\u2019t learn to read until he was eight \u2013 though by then he was already dictating stories to his mother and nurse.<\/p>\n

In 1867 Stevenson began studying engineering at Edinburgh University, but soon decided \u2013 to his father\u2019s disappointment \u2013 that literature was his only real passion. Encouraged by friends at university, he honed his writing craft; adopting Bohemian airs, he grew his hair long and began wearing a velvet jacket.<\/p>\n

In his twenties he travelled in France (where he met with Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American) and Belgium. In 1878 he walked through the C\u00e9vennes, a trip that inspired his third book, Travels with a Donkey<\/em>. In August 1879 he travelled to California to rejoin Fanny, and they married in May 1880.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, 1850 \u2013 1894. Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. From The Century Edition of Cassell\u2019s History of England, published c. 1900 (Photo by: Universal History Archive\/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

The Stevensons decamped to various locations in an attempt to remedy his health problems \u2013 Switzerland, the south of France, Bournemouth and, in 1887, New York State. Despite his illnesses, he completed Treasure Island<\/em>, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde<\/em> during this time.<\/p>\n

In June 1888, Stevenson, Fanny and her son travelled to San Francisco, where they boarded the Casco for a cruise of the Pacific islands. Departing Honolulu a year later, they settled in Samoa; here, Stevenson bought a plantation on the island of Upolu, where he lived \u2013 aside from visits to New Zealand, Australia and other Pacific islands \u2013 till his death on 3 December 1894, probably of a cerebral haemorrhage.<\/p>\n

In the Footsteps of: Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s first South Pacific voyage<\/h2>\n

Christina Thompson sails in the writer\u2019s wake from San Francisco to the Marquesas, the Tuamotus, Tahiti and Hawaii<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

In the summer of 1888, Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on a valedictory tour of the South Pacific. His health, never good, was in decline, and he believed, as he later recalled, that he \u201cwas come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect\u201d. He was not far wrong: he lived only another six years.<\/p>\n

His breakthrough novel, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde<\/em> (1886), had proved a literary sensation, bringing him both fame and fortune. Thanks to that success, in San Francisco he was able to charter a luxurious 94-foot schooner called the Casco<\/em>, on which he set sail with his mother, his wife, her stepson and their French maid, bound for Polynesia.<\/p>\n

The Casco<\/em> was at sea for almost a month before the first island appeared on the horizon. The moon had set over an hour earlier, wrote Stevenson, and in the east \u201ca radiating centre of brightness\u201d hinted at the coming day. Along the line of the horizon, a bank of morning cloud was building \u201cblack as ink\u201d. No one on board the Casco<\/em> had ever seen these islands, and all gathered on deck to watch as the brooding, beautiful Marquesas loomed into view.<\/p>\n

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The Marquesas are great masses of basalt that rise hundreds of metres above the surface of the sea <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>

\u201cSlowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness,\u201d Stevenson wrote. First the island of Ua Huka grew visible on the starboard bow, then Nuku Hiva, \u201cwhelmed in cloud\u201d; to the south, the first rays of dawn picked out the needles of Ua Pou.<\/p>\n

\"""\"<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>
Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.Nuku Hiva is the largest of the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, an overseas territory of France in the Pacific Ocean. It was formerly also known as \u00cele Marchand and Madison Island. Herman Melville wrote his book Typee based on his experiences in the Taipivai valley in the eastern part of Nuku Hiva. (photo by Stuart Freedman\/In Pictures via Getty Images Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n

Formed by ancient volcanoes, the Marquesas are what are known in the Pacific as \u2018high islands\u2019: 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 \u201cthe pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church\u201d.<\/p>\n

Rugged coastlines<\/h3>\n

The Casco\u2019s<\/em> 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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevenson loved the South Pacific. He loved the ragtag quality of the colonial settlements, and he loved the beauty and vitality \u2013 and, sometimes, the absurdity \u2013 of the islanders themselves. But there is something elegiac about his description of his first encounter with these islands.<\/p>\n

The Casco sailed for the Tuamotus, to scenes so different, wrote Stevenson, they might be ‘a new province of creation’ <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>

\u201cAt all hours of the day,\u201d he wrote, they \u201cstrike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cIci pas de Kanaques<\/em>,\u201d she said, using the colonial term for islanders derived from kanaka<\/em>, the Hawaiian word for \u2018man\u2019. \u201cTenez<\/em>,\u201d she said, holding out her child to Stevenson: \u201cHold.\u201d \u201cA little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then, no more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 whom the Marquesans dreaded \u2013 now vastly outnumbered the living. The whole picture prompted Stevenson to imagine a future global extinction: \u201cno more of any race whatever\u2026 death coming in like a tide\u201d.<\/p>\n

Castaways and vagabonds<\/h3>\n

From Anaho, the Casco<\/em> sailed round the island to the port of Taiohae, then, as now, the Marquesas\u2019 main colonial outpost. Here, Stevenson encountered a very different crowd: French officials, German clerks, the \u201cshrewd Scot\u201d who ran the local saloon, \u201cagents of the opium monopoly\u201d 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 \u201cone of the most agreeable verandahs in the tropics\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n