The Wrecker (1892) had been begun, in collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, a few months earlier. The Pearl Fisher was begun by Lloyd Osbourne in Honolulu the previous spring. The final version was written by Stevenson and published as The Ebb Tide (1893). The Beachcombers was never written.
1. Henry Moors was a trader in Apia who acted as agent for the building of Vailima. He was a close associate of Stevenson and wrote about their relationship in With Stevenson in Samoa (1910).
2. W.E. Clarke was from the London Missionary Society and a man for whom Stevenson, often critical of missionaries, had considerable regard. See the passage quoted in the Introduction.
3. The puppet king of Samoa, supported by the Germans.
1. The novelist and critic Henry James was a close friend of Stevenson, and had visited him often in Bournemouth. The Tragic Muse (1889) was his most recent novel.
2. The main town on the island of Upolu, and Samoa’s capital.
3. John La Farge was an American artist, and friend of another American artist Will Low, a companion of Stevenson in France in the 1870s.
4. American historian and friend of Henry James. He and La Farge were rather appalled at the Stevenson household. Adams described Stevenson as ‘a bundle of sticks in a bag, with dirty striped pyjamas’ and Fanny Stevenson as ‘an Apache squaw’.
5. Stevenson was intrigued by the theories of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was published in 1859.
1. An energetic dance, similar to a polka.
The following excerpts are from the book In the South Seas which Stevenson based on the journals he kept during his voyaging on the Casco and the Equator, and while visiting the Marquesas, the Paumotus (or Dangerous Archipelago, now Tuamotu) and the Gilbert Islands (now Kiribati). The Marquesas and Tuamotu are part of Polynesia, a collection of widely scattered volcanic islands and coral atolls. Culturally and historically the Polynesian islands have much in common, but, as Stevenson recorded, there are many differences in detail of character, belief and lifestyle. Kiribati belongs to the Micronesian group, although just next door, Tuvali (the old Ellice Islands) is in Polynesia.
The Casco’s first landfall was at Nukahiva in the Marquesas on 28 July 1888, where the Americans had established a whaling station early in the century. It was whaling that first drew Americans and Europeans in significant numbers to the Pacific. From the Marquesas the Casco sailed westward through the Dangerous Archipelago, an experience that proved as alarming as the name suggests, to Fakarava atoll, the administrative centre of this group of islands. In early October they carried on to Tahiti, where repairs to the Casco kept them until December. They left on Christmas Day 1888 to sail north, for Honolulu.
The Stevensons were six months in Hawaii where, amongst other activities including socializing with King Kalakaua, Stevenson finished The Master of Ballantrae, and revised The Wrong Box. In June 1889 they left on a trading schooner, the Equator, which took them to Butaritari and Apemama in the Gilbert Islands. The following pieces describe aspects of Stevenson’s experience in the Marquesas, at Fakarava, and in the Gilberts.
from The Marquesas
The impediment of tongues was one that I particularly over-estimated. The languages of Polynesia are easy to smatter, though hard to speak with elegance. And they are extremely similar, so that a person who has a tincture of one or two may risk, not without hope, an attempt upon the others.
And again, not only is Polynesian easy to smatter, but interpreters abound.
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