But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half castes of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got; I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find them whites?

Falesá was a kind of breakthrough for Stevenson. Most of his fiction had drawn back from the problems of the contemporary world by placing character and action in the past. But we know Stevenson was keen to take on the confusions and contradictions of late Victorian life. In Scotland all kinds of inhibitions stood in the way of his tackling these in fiction, not the least of which was the unacceptability of being honest about sex. In the South Seas these inhibitions dwindled. At the same time, the circumstances and environment heightened just those ambiguities and contradictions that so fascinated him.

In a letter to Colvin he claimed that Falesá was the first ever realistic story to be set in the South Seas.

Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost – there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and the look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.

Stevenson had begun both The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (serialised in 1893 but not published in book form until shortly before his death) before tackling The Beach of Falesá. The Wrecker was conceived as an adventure story, a ‘police’ tale, but nevertheless it, too, captures something of the flavour of moral and physical disintegration which features with particular power and subtlety in The Ebb-Tide. The Wrecker can be read as a kind of introduction to the latter novel, as it tells us a great deal about white activity in the Pacific islands. It is a story of the making and breaking of fortunes and reputations, of duplicity and desperation, of weakness and fear. Although slow to get started, once the action reaches San Francisco, which Stevenson describes as the city which ‘keeps the doors of the Pacific, and is the port of entry to another world and an earlier epoch in man’s history’, it moves into a higher gear. Through his hero, Loudon Dodd, Stevenson catches the tenor of his own excitement when he himself was in San Francisco longing to voyage westward.

Although The Wrecker was jointly written with Lloyd Osbourne, it draws directly on Stevenson’s own experience, his Edinburgh background and his spells in Paris as well as America’s Pacific coast and the islands. There are echoes of circumstances and phrases that appear in In the South Seas and the letters. The book was conceived on The Equator and writing began when Stevenson and his family were in the Gilbert Islands. The vigour and immediacy of the chapters that describe the voyages and crews of the Norah Creina, the Flying Scud and the Currency Lass are striking. The picture of San Francisco as the centre of a web of wheeling and dealing around the multiplicitous possibilities of the Pacific is also vivid. The view is very much from the ocean’s eastern rim and provides a different perspective from Stevenson’s other island writing.

The two main characters, Loudon Dodd and his friend and partner Jim Pinkerton (the Scottish flavour of both names is probably significant), exist in a kind of social and moral limbo, which again helps to prepare the way for The Ebb-Tide. They are both on the make. They are both ready to shut their eyes to irregularity and fraud. Yet they are both likeable, especially Pinkerton with his eager and almost innocent belief in each new enterprise. Dodd’s cool self-interest is unsettled as he gradually unravels the mystery of the Flying Scud, the wreck he and Pinkerton purchase as a speculative venture, but the moral ambivalence of the story is not fully explored. The strength of the book lies in its detailing of the Pacific ambience and the people who were part of the exploitative world of ships and trade and speculation.

It is The Ebb-Tide which picks up and pursues some of the implications of both Wiltshire’s story and the tale of the Flying Scud, and examines the theme of moral degeneration in uncompromising detail. If Falesá is a distillation of all that Stevenson experienced in the Pacific, The Ebb-Tide is a challenging exploration of moral and cultural assumptions about race and colonial intrusion.

It centres on four characters, all men: the novel is womanless – it is not sexual morality that is at issue here, although one of the characters agonises over his failure as husband and father. Like the characters in Jekyll and Hyde (and most of those in The Wrecker, although Pinkerton’s marriage is part of his salvation) these men are adrift from family and community. Stevenson himself described them in a letter to Henry James as ‘a troop of swine’ and worried about the grimness of the story, but in fact it is the different ways in which four individuals react to their particular circumstances that provide the novel’s crucial and provocative tension. Each is off-course in his own way. The three men ‘on the beach’ in Tahiti at the beginning of the story are desperately looking for any chance of pulling themselves out of a destitution that is the more intense because they are white. They consider themselves superior, yet in reality are more helpless than the native islanders. Huish is a Cockney, cunning and totally unprincipled.