Mataafa was the main rival to the German-backed puppet chief Malietoa. The British, while recognizing privately Mataafa’s claims, disliked him because he was a Catholic, and were anyway reluctant to disturb a situation that suited them quite well. Stevenson was regarded as an interfering innocent, causing trouble through his naive idealism – words often used to dismiss the awkwardly honest. The situation erupted into war in July 1883, much of the conflict enacted literally in the Stevensons’ back yard. Not content with sending lengthy correspondence to The Times Stevenson produced his own account of the situation and the background to the conflict in a book which he called A Footnote to History.

We do not usually think of Stevenson as being either a ‘straight’ historian or a political commentator, but there is clear evidence of his attraction to historical fact. An interest in Scottish history was reflected in more than his fiction and essays: he had applied for the Chair of History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University, a post for which he was academically ill-qualified and didn’t get. Nevertheless, the intellectual and psychological challenge of Scotland’s past always appealed to him, and more significant, perhaps, was his project to write a history of Scotland.

In Samoa Stevenson’s involvement in events and his determination to set the record straight was as much the result of his highly developed sense of justice as of the magnetism of historical fact. He was witness to words and actions that were hypocritical, deceitful, and manipulative. He could not stand back from such a state of affairs. He felt a moral obligation to commit to paper – his only effective weapon – his understanding of events. But amongst his friends and associates at home there was alarm. At an early stage in his career Stevenson had been identified as a torch-carrier for a revitalised fiction. In 1878 Leslie Stephen, a highly respected member of the literary establishment, had written to Stevenson saying that he was on the lookout for a new novelist, a Scott or a Dickens or a George Eliot, suggesting that perhaps Stevenson could be the answer. It was an extraordinary profession of faith in a young man who was in the early stages of his literary career, and that aura, the feeling that he was destined for great things, clung to him. From the other side of the world it looked as if Stevenson was spending his time in wild and ill-conceived political adventures with a gang of savages. It did not conform with an image of him as not merely a serious novelist, but as the saviour of English literature at a time when it was judged to be in the doldrums.

What Stevenson realized was that such adventures were not only the stuff of history, they were the stuff of fiction. Although he had gained a reputation as a fine weaver of imaginative tales he was no ivory-tower fabulist. To write he had to live, and for the first time in his life he was well and strong enough to throw himself into the thick of things, whether it was the struggle against the jungle growth on his Vailima land, or riding secretly across the island to consort with the rebels, or tending the wounded in the aftermath of battle, or the emotional conflicts that were a part of daily life amongst the Vailima extended family.

Stevenson’s refusal to withdraw was partly the result of his unending enthusiasm for life, partly of moral conviction. Both these aspects of his mind and personality are evident in his writing. They were if anything heightened by his South Seas experience, and certainly reflected in the material brought together in this volume. In it we can see three levels of response, in the letters, in the extracts from his book In the South Seas, and in the fiction. In the letters, with which the selection begins, there is all the lively immediacy of instant communication. From them we get a vivid picture of the activities that filled his days, the demanding physical work, the even more intense demands of writing, and the serendipity for which he had a particular talent. These were years in which, in some respects, Stevenson tasted a freedom from conventional restrictions which previously had been overshadowed by parental and social authority. One of those parents, his mother, had travelled with him and was as aware as anyone of the lack of restraint. ‘It is a strange, irresponsible, half-savage life,’ she wrote, ‘& I sometimes wonder if we shall ever be able to return to civilised habits again.’3

The absence of civilisation suited Stevenson wonderfully. He would have loved this description, written after his death, and would have recognised himself immediately.

… I met a little group of three European strangers – two men and a woman. The latter wore a print gown, large gold crescent earrings, a Gilbert-Island hat of plaited straw, encircled by a wreath of small shells, a scarlet silk scarf round her neck, and a brilliant plaid shawl across her shoulders; her bare feet were encased in white canvas shoes, and across her back was slung a guitar. … The younger of her two companions was dressed in a striped pyjama suit – the undress costume of most European traders in these seas – a slouch hat of native make, dark blue sun-spectacles, and over his shoulders a banjo. The other man was dressed in a shabby suit of white flannels that had seen many better days, a white drill yachting cap with a prominent peak, a cigarette in his mouth, a photographic camera in his hand.