Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  He wrote a couple of travel books, An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey in Cevennes, which were modestly successful, though neither has aged well. Bruce Chatwin, a travel writer with many uncanny similarities to Robert Louis Stevenson, dismissed Travels as “the prototype of the incompetent undergraduate voyage.” Other books followed: Once he moved to the United States, pursuing the American divorcée Fanny Osbourne, he penned The Amateur Emigrant and The Silverado Squatters, both works of nonfiction.

  In the first, he wrote of America as “a sort of promised land” as he’d joined the hordes of emigrants—Jews, Scots, Italians decamping from their old, troubled countries with their hungers and pogroms—and settled among them in steerage class. “We were a shipful of failures, the broken of England.” He’d see the best and worst of humanity on board the ship, the men so sick they slept on pools of vomit, the Scot who played a sonorous fiddle for the frightened women, the soot-stained children running amuck, creating games and levity wherever their spirits took them. On board, he was known as “Shakespeare,” the lone passenger to carve out a space to write. He’d lose another fourteen pounds on the voyage.

  New York greeted him with sheets of rain. He slept on the floor of a boardinghouse and soon joined the stampede to the trains in New Jersey. Lost children wailed but no one paid them any heed as hopeful passengers rushed to westward trains. He was drenched for days, acquired scabies, and was delirious with hunger. In a letter, he marveled at the simplicity of suicide. In Chicago, he switched trains and again in Council Bluffs, Iowa, where he was sorted according to compartments—families in one car, single men in another, and Chinese coolies in the last. He was struck by the “uncivil kindness” of Americans. He itched ferociously. He no longer slept. Hunger was his companion. “My illness is a subject of great mirth,” he wrote in a letter, “and I smile rather sickly at their jests.” He envied the Chinese for their superior hygiene, and began to despise his fellow compatriots for mocking and jeering the Native Americans who stood alongside the stations. The train followed tracks across a barren desert and soon began the ascent up the Sierras, and here finally Stevenson could feel the imminence of relief. The air turned cooler, cleaner, and soon they were descending through forests and rivers and mountains, into the clarity of the California sun and the first scent of the ocean. He departed in Oakland, crossed a San Francisco Bay as smooth as a pane of glass.

  He’d come for Fanny. Read enough biographies about Robert Louis Stevenson and you discover that Fanny, what you make of her, is like a Rorschach test. Many found her moody, impulsive, prone to the vicissitudes of extreme emotions, a woman who accepted Stevenson as a hen would an errant chick, a nitpicker who inhibited Stevenson’s claim to greatness. Others were more kind, recognizing that few women, then or now, could long endure Stevenson, the swirl of drama he created wherever he went, the extreme impulsivity, the long demands for silence as he worked, and the never-ending sickness, the “Bluidy Jack” as Stevenson referred to it, which required ceaseless nursing. His prospects, as a writer, were poor. His life span questionable. No great catch he.

  They’d first met in France, where Fanny had fled to escape a philandering husband with her two children: Lloyd, who’d come to be a constant presence in her life with Stevenson, and Belle, who’d marry a ne’er-do-well alcoholic named Joe Strong, who floated from Hawaii to Australia, claiming to be an artist but eventually surviving as a parasite on the author’s generosity. From France, Fanny returned to the United States and Stevenson, as was his wont, followed in pursuit, despite protestations from family and friends who all counseled that she was an inappropriate match—she was forty, a decade older than RLS; had kids (always a complicating factor); uncertain finances of her own; and was known to be temperamental. It was this trip that was the source material for The Amateur Emigrant.

  But what did he see in her? In photographs, Fanny has a strong, lively face with expressive eyes that seem, even in a photographer’s studio, a moment away from expressing mirth or a malevolent glare. She does not seem like the docile, accommodating type. Here was a woman of opinions, firmly stated, which made her, in these corseted Victorian times, an anomaly. Perhaps, then, this was what Stevenson was looking for: a strong woman who would take no guff, a woman who, when needed, could mother him through sickness and black moods, a woman who when reading a draft of his prose would call it like it is—sentimental gibberish—and who, perhaps most importantly, felt as untethered from the conventions of the day as Stevenson did.

  His arrival in Monterey, where Fanny resided, was unwelcome. Her divorce had yet to come through and she could not afford the appearance of impropriety. And of course, when Stevenson entered the doorway, cosseted in rags and fleas, and looking like Skeletor after a really bad night, he hardly set Fanny’s heart aflutter. Dejected, he walked eighteen miles into the hills beyond Carmel, and were it not for the frontiersmen who found him delirious and hallucinating, it is likely that there his cross would lie. Fanny had meanwhile moved on to Oakland, while Stevenson remained in Monterey, which he’d found agreeable, going on long walks along the bluffs, awestruck at the pounding waves, and settling into a town that remained largely Mexican in character. He made friends—as was his gift—and wrote freelance articles for the Monterey Californian for two dollars a week as he healed from malaria and pleurisy. And still, he got sicker. He’d cough and rooms would tremble. His lungs bled; blood seeped from his mouth.

  It was Fanny, dismissing the inevitable gossip, who swooped down and finally rescued him, moving him into her cottage in Oakland as doctors hastened for the death knells. He recovered—he miraculously always did—and they moved on to San Francisco, where he received astonishing news. His father, aghast at the stories of penury and misery that had befallen his son, sent word that Stevenson could count on an annual stipend of 250 pounds, and even more remarkably, this woman would be welcomed into the family. Fanny’s long-sought divorce had finally come through.

  The marriage occurred in 1880, in a vicar’s garden, with the solemn exchange of silver rings, and they decamped for Napa, settling for their honeymoon in a squalid abandoned silver mine, spending their time hammering and chiseling, seeking to create a homespun hearth before abandoning it to its inevitable ruin. Then they made haste for Scotland and the British Isles. They’d settle for a spell here, and a spell there—they were always moving somewhere, elsewhere—and in the meantime Stevenson’s work began to find an audience. His essays appeared in the more illustrious journals. His stories found readers. And yet he remained poor as a church rat, surviving largely through the grace of his father’s allowance.

  It had begun with a map. It would be Stevenson’s first novel, something that had long eluded him, despite numerous attempts. “It is the length that kills,” he’d written. Few endeavors require the depth of concentration and imagination that a novel requires. (Even Jonathan Franzen, I’d bet, spends a month on the couch, a bag of pork rinds next to him, his hand on the remote as he lies in a catatonic stupor, watching a marathon session of South Park as he recuperates from a just-written novel. No wonder it takes him a decade.) Stevenson, for a long while, would look “upon every three-volume novel with a sort of veneration.” And then he’d shuffle off, dejected, back to penning his little essays.

  It was the appearance of children in his home life that would serve as a catalyst for his great adventure yarn. With Lloyd at his side, he sketched the contours of his island, mapping the coves, inserting the treasure chest, his febrile imagination conjuring young Jim Hawkins and a one-legged pirate named Long John Silver. The book was all action and suspense. “If this don’t fetch the kids, why they have gone rotten in my day,” he noted. Every night, he read chapters to his family. His literary friends—you know the kind, the ones with the MFAs, the ones working on experimental fiction, where the words story and character are dismissed as the affections of the lowbrow—were dismissive and snooty. But Stevenson had seized on something. He could te
ll a rousing, good yarn.

  And yet, he still felt abashed. He had ambitions of being the Dickens of his age, and now here he was, crafting a boy’s tale, playing pirate with his father and stepson, and submitting the tale to a magazine called Young Folks, which serialized Treasure Island while Stevenson hid behind a pen name, Captain George North. No matter. Stevenson was now, at the very least, a solvent writer. To his critics: “I will swallow no more of that gruel. Let them write their masterpieces for themselves and let me alone.”

  In the meantime, Stevenson’s sickness would ebb and flow. He quarreled with Fanny. He fell into a funk. He continued to write, including a collaboration with his wife that almost sank the marriage. Fanny, as she wrote to her mother-in-law, had resented being “treated like a comma.” And yet, as always he worked, dancing among projects and half-finished stories.

  One night, he had a dream, a nightmare presumably, from which he dared not wake. When he did, he ate a brief lunch, and retired to his room, took a large draft of laudanum, and, presumably high as a kite, spent the next three days and nights penning what would become The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, finishing it in a state of exhausted triumph.

  Here, the author—this one, me—would like to interject. Sixty thousand words in three days! Good God. Where, exactly, does one procure this laudanum? It sounds like a downer, and yet . . . did I read that cocaine was involved? So it’s an upper, mellowed by morphine? Can it be synthesized? Is it smokeable? Injected? Why aren’t we making this stuff now?

  . . . Ahem. What’s really remarkable is what happened afterward. Stevenson gathered Fanny and Lloyd around him and proceeded to read his tale about the duality of human nature, the transfiguration of good into evil, the intoxication of living without moral constraints and its toll on the soul. Lloyd sat enthralled. “I don’t believe there was ever such a literary feat before as the writing of Dr. Jekyll,” he later recalled. Fanny, however, insisted that Stevenson had missed the mark entirely, that he’d failed to see the essential allegory of the tale. Furious, Stevenson tossed the manuscript into the fireplace. He raged at her myopic imbecility. They had a colossal argument, and then, pointing to the ashes of his work, he conceded that, well, perhaps on second thought, she’d been right after all, and he returned to his room, to his laudanum, and wrote a new draft, again in three days.

  I have a special affection for Dr. Jekyll, of course. I think anyone who has engaged in a course of action that violated their moral code, and did so not with remorse but rather great enthusiasm, will empathize with the tale. That it was written during the height of the Victorian era, with its buoyant belief in the inevitability of progress and rectitude, makes it all the more remarkable. Stevenson, clearly, had a dark side, and perhaps this too explains his wandering ways. The contented stay put. The disaffected always have one foot out the door.

  Stevenson’s father died in 1887, and now, suddenly, the last bridge that compelled him to stay in the British Isles crumbled. He was left an inheritance, his books were generating a tidy cash flow, he’d married an American, and much to everyone’s surprise, his mother, Maggie, was soon too afflicted with the wandering impulse. They set sail again for America, this time on a ship of animals—apes, baboons, cows, horses—a veritable Noah’s Ark, all setting forth for the New Land, where, to his astonishment, he was now received as a star. He found it all rather bizarre—the reporters, the fawning attention. “If Jesus Christ came they would make less fuss.” And yet, as always, the Everyman pose had a discordant note. He liked the grand hotels. And his ego was now honed and chiseled. “[Rudyard] Kipling is by far the most promising young man to have appeared since—ahem—I appeared,” he’d write.

  They intended to move to Colorado, but it was deemed too far, too high up for Stevenson’s lungs, and so they settled in a cottage in the Adirondacks, the rustic simplicity as appealing to the author as a suite at the Ritz. Soon, of course, the harsh winter descended. The snowshoes were brought out, so too the earmuffs, the fur coats, and layers of mittens. And still they froze. It was into this wintery scene that Sam McClure, a fellow Scotsman and publisher of the New York World, appeared. They got to chatting. The South Pacific was mentioned. Hmm . . . What if . . . ? Finally McClure declared: “If you get a yacht and take long sea voyages and write about them, stories of adventure and so forth, I’ll pay all expenses.” Not long thereafter, Fanny found her way to California. Soon, a telegram was sent: “Can secure splendid sea-going schooner yacht for seven hundred and fifty a month with most comfortable accommodation for six aft and six forward. Can be ready for sea in ten days. Reply immediately. Fanny.”

  “Blessed girl,” Stevenson wrote back, “take the yacht and expect us in ten days.”

  Let’s ponder this for a moment . . . Are you done? Would you get on that boat? We’re talking six–seven months minimum. No Coast Guard, of course. No GPS, no radios, no studly dudes dropping out of helicopters to save your ass during a force-ten gale. We’re looking at a month, perhaps two of straight blue-water sailing—storms, cyclones, sharks, unrelenting sun, the tedium of the doldrums—and nothing between you and the vast, desolate depths except a sliver of timber. And your destination? An island where there are still many who know what you taste like—and I don’t mean that in a sexy way. Think femur bones. Cannibalism. Long Pig. The Special Menu.

  Would you go?

  What if you had an upper respiratory system that from time to time hacked up great globs of blood? And let’s say recent illnesses had left you the proverbial ninety-eight-pound weakling? Would you still go? If you are Robert Louis Stevenson you don’t betray even a hint of hesitation. Of course, it’s unclear what he’d have done if he’d had the option of flying, while being attended to by Hotette, but I imagine he’d still have chosen the schooner for the adventure, the romance, the accomplishment, and the peculiar adrenaline rush that accompanies crossing an ocean slowly. Few things, of course, stir the imagination quite like a cruise to the South Pacific—the swaying palm fronds, the warm ocean dappled with sunlight, the steep crests of volcanic islands, the friendly chitchats with man-eaters. Of course you go.

  It was an odd party that’d boarded the Casco: There was Stevenson, of course; his wife, Fanny; his mother too; his stepson, Lloyd; and a maid, Valentine. Among the crew was a Russian, a Finn, two Swedes, and a Chinese cook who preferred to be thought of as Japanese. The boat was captained by A. H. Otis, who’d read Treasure Island and thought little of Stevenson’s knowledge of seafaring ways. He also didn’t think it likely that the author, thin and emaciated as usual, would survive the voyage, and accordingly he’d stowed what he’d need to bury him at sea. And this business of bringing his elderly mother along? Pure madness. When asked what he’d do if Maggie, who had more than a passing resemblance to Queen Victoria, should also find herself deceased, as seemed probable, the captain said he’d “put it in the log.”

  But he was wrong. He’d misread his passengers. The Stevenson clan was born for the sea. This, after all, was a family of lighthouse builders. They knew of the elements, its dangers and furies. Prim, proper, delicate Maggie Stevenson—she would, a few months hence, write: “It is a strange, irresponsible, half-savage life & I sometimes wonder if we shall ever be able to return to civilized habits again.” They were mutating chameleons, adapting and assimilating no matter the environment, whether a Paris salon or a storm-tossed sea.

  Stevenson claimed a large stateroom for himself. Young Lloyd was berthed in a small compartment, while Fanny and the other two women shared a cabin with a skylight. (See? Kind of odd, no?) He’d read and write, but mostly he’d spend his time on deck, barefoot, his health and mind aglow at this wonderful change in circumstances. They tumbled down the latitudes, celebrated each sunset, and soon the cold waters of the north Pacific gave way to the temperate South Seas.

  Fanny was a mess, however. She’d never adjust to the sea. And you can hardly blame her. They skirted the edges of a hurricane,
endured sudden squalls, the boat heeling to such an extent that water flooded the cockpit and the cabins. It is no wonder that Fanny spent many of her days hurling over the side. The captain, who didn’t exactly exude sunshine and butterflies, was often irritated with her. For once, it was Louis who was the hale and hardy one.

  For more than a month they sailed. Land was becoming but a distant memory, their only company the occasional seabird seeking a handout, until early one morning, on July 20, 1888, Stevenson arose in the predawn darkness, awaiting the sunrise and its promise of an island. “The interval was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then approaching.” And then, as the sun crested the horizon, there lay the Marquesas: “like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit sign-board of a world of wonders.”

  And this, of course, is why we always get on the boat.

  Chapter Ten

  And yet, as I watched the Aranui sail past the headlands of Nuku Hiva, its familiar, comforting shape tumbling over the horizon, I couldn’t help but feel happy to be back on terra firma, even upon a small island in the vast remoteness of the Pacific. I had jumped ship, deserted, and like a runaway from a naval vessel of yore, I had leapt in a quest for freedom. I was never very good with itineraries. I have nothing to say about the passenger fashion show. I could set my watch to the smoky waft of the Swiss banker’s Cohiba. The rhythm of life at sea had begun to be set in stone. But I liked to move according to my own clock. And now I was free. But to do what? What hills were there to climb? What roads to run? What valleys to explore? What ruins to investigate? And how would I get along with the inhabitants of Nuku Hiva?