Davis is an American sea captain who lost his ship through drunken inadequacy. Herrick is an educated Englishman with pretensions to respectability. In the early scenes of the book Stevenson skilfully reveals the different threads of weakness, self-deception and self-interest in the three men, against a background of social and cultural fragmentation. The environment is all-important, for they are not only without money, possessions and prospects in a place where white men expect to succeed; they are deprived of all the props and supports on which men and women in a conventionally structured society depend.

To draw the most out of a clash of character and cultures, Stevenson employs a technique he had used successfully before. He confines his characters first on a schooner, which they take over with bogus credentials when smallpox kills the captain and the mate, then on an island. The schooner provides an opportunity for crime, in which all three men collude, but their own little world also begins to fragment as anger and guilt come to the surface. When they come upon an uncharted island presided over by Attwater, they are ripe to succumb to his gentlemanly certainties. But the island is not the tropical paradise that it might seem, and there is almost no escape.

The psychological and symbolic resonances of the story are extensive. Three men who are outcasts from the conventional, western, ‘civilised’ world, first seek restitution through crime, then find the possibility of refuge on an idyllic island under the control of an upper-class, Cambridge-educated dictator. In fact, Stevenson is describing environments which are built on exploitation and composed of layer upon layer of illusion and deceit. Assumed names and assumed histories (an integral part of The Wrecker, where some characters have several identities), the schooner’s cargo of champagne which proves to be water, the imposed regime of white superiority founded on violence and trickery, and – perhaps most striking of all – the island itself, which features on no chart and rises mysteriously out of the sea, ‘the undiscovered, the scarce-believed in’, all challenge the reader’s preconceptions. Herrick, the most sympathetic of the characters and most subject to conscience, gazes at the island as the schooner approaches.

The isle was like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood: so slender it seemed amidst the outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty, he would scarce have wondered to see it sink and disappear without a sound, and the waves close smoothly over its descent.

The fragile beauty has a sinister quality which grows stronger as Herrick encounters Attwater and explores the island. Attwater has built his pearl-fishing kingdom on savage exploitation of the islanders, but he offers all the certainties and comforts of control. The responses of Herrick, Davis and Huish to what they find, and the physical and psychological struggles involved, bring the story to its conclusion.

The climate, the ocean, the seductive environment of the tropical island, all play their part in this parable of moral breakdown. The examination of four men removed from accustomed codes and constraints and ignorant of social and cultural mores of the people they exploit is inseparable from the environment. There is no ‘sugar candy’ here, or at least only in the sense that candy can be corrupting. Of the four characters, Attwater is wholly corrupted by power though his sophisticated veneer is flawless. Huish, who in spite of a kind of impudent courage is evil (‘the devil … looked out of his face’), is shot by Attwater. Davis, the weakest of the four, becomes Attwater’s puppet: absolute power requires puppets. Only Herrick, perhaps, escapes, and he is deeply compromised.

The Ebb-Tide continues Stevenson’s fascinated exploration of humanity’s tenuous hold on right and wrong, which had begun in his earliest work. He began to write in the context of mid-Victorian Scotland, where moral absolutes were fiercely delineated. The Ebb-Tide, his last complete novel and undoubtedly one of his best, is informed by the other side of the Victorian coin, the imperialist intrusions on which Britain’s and Scotland’s nineteenth-century success depended. It delivers a message about ambivalence, reminding us that the codes on which we depend are flawed, while sailing on a chartless ocean is dangerous. He had long since questioned the Calvinist determinism of his upbringing. The Ebb-Tide shows him probing aspects and implications of human behaviour which were normally disguised. like The Beach of Falesá, it is a remarkably radical book and strikingly modern in tone. In his short life Stevenson travelled a long way, both in miles and in understanding of the human predicament.

This collection of Stevenson’s South Sea writings enables the reader to trace part of this journey and to see some of the ways in which the writer about Scotland’s contentious past became also an investigator of Britain’s imperialist present. It shows Stevenson in all his moods, boyishly enthusiastic, keenly appreciative of the absurd, nostalgic, uncertain, deeply serious – all the qualities that have attracted readers to Stevenson for more than a hundred years.

   

Jenni Calder

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1. Letter to James Payne, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (London 1911), vol.