Thus ‘The Bottle Imp’ is an ancient tale with a contemporary feel, and it provides an interesting glimpse of some of the incidentals of the Polynesian encounter with whites. The scene and the viewpoint are Polynesian, and the white presence is not conspicuous. If readers are inclined to question the success of Stevenson’s attempt at getting under the skin of his Polynesian characters, it is worth noting that the fable itself has an impulsion that overrides this. ‘The Isle of Voices’ has a more specifically Polynesian reference, and Stevenson’s grasp on the tale is less confident. But there is an ambience, a personalised environment, that still remains powerful.

Stevenson was acutely aware of the kinship between traditional story-telling in the Pacific and in Scotland. He continually drew parallels between Scottish and Polynesian customs, traditions and tribes. He recognized that this was a useful way of gaining the confidence of the islanders from whom he sought acceptance. As an amateur anthropologist he was unusual for that time, since he looked at alien cultures as much in terms of their similarities with his own as of their differences. At the same time he seems to have shared the belief held by even the most enlightened investigators that tribal societies represented a primitive stage in human evolution which would inevitably give way to ‘civilisation’. What was less usual was his regret at the loss this would entail, and his indignation at what he described as ‘… the unjust (yet I can see the inevitable) extinction of Polynesian Islanders by our shabby civilisation’.

There is no doubt that his sensitivity towards this loss was a direct result of his engagement with his own cultural origins. There was mutual nourishment. As his writing responded to the challenge of the Pacific he was also probing and examining the Scottish past and the Scottish character. The traditions of Border reiving and rivalry which play so important a part in Weir of Hermiston, his last substantial piece of fiction, have their parallels in Pacific life. The authoritarian attitudes of the novel’s Lord Braxfield towards human frailty were not dissimilar to those of the imperialist powers towards the native populations. The harsh landscapes and harsher actions of Scotland might have seemed very different from the sun-dazzled, easy-going South Seas, yet the roots of human behaviour were sustained by the same kind of needs and feelings.

In the South Seas is not a continuous record of Stevenson’s travels. It is a series of worked up, almost self-contained pieces. His letters, some of them written over several days, convey a sense of day-to-day living, of a continuum, a pattern of progress and setbacks, of events not just following upon each other but entangled with each other. Life is tidier in the book version of these events. Hindsight and the literary imagination lend shape and meaning. I am not suggesting that reality is being tampered with, but literary skills are at work and an inevitable process of selection and reordering is going on. Stevenson was a conscious and deliberate craftsman, and this process was part of his commitment, of his sense of responsibility as a writer. The directness of his style can be pleasantly informal, yet at the same time there is a literary, almost an ornate quality. Stevenson combines close observation, an awareness of language as well as of sensation, sympathetic humour, and a strong feeling for the potential absurdity that lies in the clash of mutual ignorance. Here is an example, taken from ‘The Maroon’, one of the pieces included here.

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove with Mrs Stevenson and the ship’s cook. Except for the Casco lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stockstill, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the tradewind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and twice, when the Casco appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was amusing to observe that man’s alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach.