Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  Stevenson had left Bournemouth expecting to return for the summers at least, but now was in no mood to do so, even without Fanny at his side swearing never to set foot again in ‘perfidious Albion’. An alternative to Saranac was desperately needed, however, and Margaret Stevenson’s suggestion that they should all go on an extended yacht-cruise (she offered to pay half) suddenly seemed the ideal solution to the problem. The Indian Ocean, the eastern seaboard of North America and the Greek Islands were all mooted – with a view to writing a book, as planned earlier in Hyères – but the eventual destination was chosen almost by chance. Fanny, out in California, had been scouting round for somewhere to live, and also (presumably) trying to sort out the implications of her ex-husband’s disappearance. She was even thinking of buying Sam’s own ranch from his unfortunate wife Paulie, who could not keep it up and whose case ‘might have been mine – but for you’, as she wrote to her husband.50 Joe Strong’s father, who had been a missionary in Hawaii for a number of years, highly recommended a summer cruise to ‘the Gallivantings’ (Fanny’s joke generic name for Pacific island groups), as ‘they are really pastures new, and very little is known about them’, and the choice of the Pacific was clinched when she heard of a luxury schooner for hire in San Francisco which it would be possible to have complete with a captain and crew for an extensive Pacific island tour. The trip would take about seven months and would cost a fortune: £2000 – that is, about £100,000 in current money (Bob’s allowance, deemed by Louis to be enough for comfort, was £10 a quarter). Fanny telegrammed the news that the boat could be ready in ten days: ‘Reply immediately’. The drama of the quick decision was just what Stevenson needed to lift him soaringly out of his troubles on a wave of adrenalin. He cabled back by return, ‘Blessed girl, take the yacht and expect us in ten days.’

  ‘My dear Charles,’ he wrote to Baxter,

  I have found a yacht and we are going the full pitch for seven months. If I cannot get my health back (more or less) ’tis madness; but of course, there is the hope, and I will play big. We telegraph to you today not to invest £2,000; and now I write to ask you to send same sum quam celerrimum to our account at Messrs John Paton & Co., 52 William Street, New York.

  [ … ] If this business fails to set me up, well, 2,000 is gone, and I know I can’t get better. We sail from San Francisco, June 15th, for the South Seas in the yacht Casco.

  * * *

  *Saint-Gaudens made a small bas-relief medallion of the writer, later used as the model for the memorial to RLS in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh. It is notable for an instance of concrete Bowdlerism, as it were, with the genteel substitution of a pen for the cigarette in the author’s hand, and a couch for the pillow-crowded bed of the original.

  *The authors note that there was a five-month gap in Margaret Stevenson’s diary in the winter of 1867–68, followed by a resumption of entries in a deteriorated hand and reporting periods of impaired lucidity: ‘The brain is also weak so I often talk nonsense not being able to remember the words I want.’19

  *Ernest Mehew assumes that McClure’s visit to London – undated in his Autobiography – followed his last to Saranac Lake on 19 March 1888.28 But by 19 March ‘The Nixie’ was in print and Henley’s fateful letter about it to RLS was already on its way across the Atlantic. It is less likely that McClure got to England quicker than RLS’s response, posted on 22 or 23 March, than that the date of his trip to England was towards the end of February, at which time RLS was mentioning him in a letter to Henley (letter 2016) as ‘the American Tillotson’ – exactly the same description RLS gave of McClure in his (undated) letters of introduction. In that case, when McClure went to Saranac on 19 March, it would have been after his excursion.

  12

  ONA

  Favourite pursuits, and interests, are facts useful to record as being definite expressions of character and temperament.

  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  THE CASCO WAS A luxury yacht, ninety-four feet long, seventy-four tons weight, beautifully rigged and sparred and as elegant as a swan. Her owner, a Dr Merritt of Oakland, was rightly proud of the boat and her fittings; Casco combined all the comforts of the high-Victorian parlour with the ability to get away from it all. Everything about her was trim, clean and rich: cushioned seats round the cockpit, velvet-covered sofas in the main cabin, brass curtain rods, crimson carpets, white and gold panelling and bevelled mirrors. Merritt was not at all sure he wanted to hire this beauty to a man as unfastidious about dress and person as Stevenson, and he insisted on vetting the whole party – especially the old lady – before agreeing to let the Casco go for $500 a month basic rent, with all repairs, provisioning and wages to be paid by the lessee.

  Stevenson had arrived in San Francisco in a state of high excitement, but was not pleased to find his rooms at the Occidental Hotel full of flowers from admirers and the by-now-usual gaggle of newspaper reporters on his tail. He and Lloyd decamped early and lived on the Casco in Oakland Creek until departure, stocking up for the long voyage. There were to be eleven people on board – Fanny, Louis, Margaret, Lloyd, Valentine, the captain, four hands and a cook – and they would be continuously at sea for about a month on the first run of the journey, to Nukahiva in the Marquesas, about ten degrees south of the Equator. From there they would travel further south, to the Society Islands, then back north again in a sharp inverted triangle to Hawaii. From Hawaii, Casco would return to San Francisco and her anxious owner, who expressed the fear to Margaret Stevenson that the party might love the boat too much ever to come back.

  As usual, Stevenson planned to cover his expenses by producing a travel book, but this time the expenses were so huge that the book had to be suitably ambitious too. It was going to be one of the first books about the South Seas to be illustrated with photographs – a brilliant idea to bring high-tech and primitivism together, almost certainly conceived for Lloyd’s benefit, since it meant lots of lovely gadgets needed to be purchased: cameras, a tripod, glass plates and a typewriter. All this was loaded onto the Casco, along with tinned food, dried meat, champagne and tobacco for eleven. Margaret Stevenson had brought with her from Edinburgh several bandboxes full of the starched white organdie widow’s caps that were her constant wear, so she would never be without a fresh one, and there were also, hidden forward, the necessary items for a burial at sea, for the captain had taken note of Stevenson’s ‘startling physical weakness’1 and wanted to be prepared.

  Belle was in San Francisco and helped see the party off. She had become something of an old ‘island hand’ from living in Honolulu for the previous six years with Joe, where they hobnobbed with the Hawaiian royal family and lived the strange life of the Pacific whites – at once trashy and exalted – that Stevenson was about to join. The fact that indolent, drunken, sparsely-talented Joe could pass as an ‘official artist’ in Hawaii was evidence of the credit whites had there, and of how quickly they were using it up. Joe had even been part of a Hawaiian embassy to Samoa in recent years – or perhaps it was more a spying mission – to evaluate the influence of the ‘Powers’, Britain, Germany, France and the United States, who between them were busily carving up the Pacific. King Kalakaua of Hawaii, Joe’s patron, was naturally concerned at the speed with which neighbouring island groups were being taken over. He liked to think of himself as the most influential ruler in the Pacific, and the leader to whom all Polynesians should look in the struggle (weak enough) against Western colonialism, but of course his own group, the Sandwich Islands, so much the nearest to America, and so much influenced by Western culture already, would be the first to go.

  Joe and Belle had become sponsors of Stevenson’s Pacific holiday (as he still thought of it) and were going to introduce him to Kalakaua when the Casco landed at Hawaii, some time the following year. Belle encouraged all the women on the voyage to revise their wardrobes drastically to cope with the tropical heat, and among the many items being stowed in the Casco’s mahogany cupboards were a number of volumino
us holokus and mumus, the shapeless, sack-like ‘missionary dresses’ that were worn all over the Pacific, by whites and native women alike. It was easy to see that they had been designed by missionaries: every inch of flesh from the epiglottis to the toe was covered, and the material hung loosely from a gathered yoke above the breast. They were not as cool as the light cotton trousers and collarless shirts that men wore in the tropics, but at least they kept the sun off delicate northern skin and made the corset redundant. Margaret had some of these dresses made, but was ‘putting off as long as I can’ the moment when she would have to appear in them;2 Fanny, on the other hand, saw nothing but liberation in their massy folds, and hardly wore any other kind of garment ever again.

  If Merritt had been chary of his floating tenants’ suitability, his – chosen master of the Casco, Captain A.H. Otis, was more so. Otis, who disliked tourists, began the voyage in sullen withdrawal from his passengers, none of whom (three women!) looked as if they would be any use in an emergency, and all of whom, except the maid and perhaps the old lady, were highly-strung and talkative. The writer himself was childishly delighted with the boat, and pranced from bowsprit to helm like an intoxicated water-sprite; the writer’s mother wanted to take walks along the narrowest part of the deck; the writer’s wife insisted on chatting to the man at the wheel and the man at the compass, both located just by the benches in the open-air cockpit they used as a sitting room. This indiscipline aggravated the captain considerably, but he was yet too scornful of the party to use anything but sarcasm on them. ‘Please don’t talk to [the steersman] today, Mrs Stevenson,’ he said to Fanny. ‘Today I want him to steer.’ And when she retaliated by asking what he would do if her mother-in-law fell overboard, Otis replied dryly, ‘Put it in the log.’3

  How much idea did Stevenson have of what awaited them in the Pacific? The physical and practical demands of life at sea for such a long, uninterrupted period were unknown to him; his Atlantic crossings had all been in steamships and liners, whereas the Casco, a mere ninety-foot wand of wood bobbing up and down on an ocean half the size of the globe, would need excellent seamanship, good luck and good weather in order to reach Nukahiva intact. The risks were to be borne home to them later on their three-thousand-mile voyage, but when they sailed across San Francisco Bay on 28 June 1888, and out through the Golden Gate (which had no bridge across it yet), the Stevensons were, for the most part, ignorant of any danger but sea-sickness.

  Stevenson’s concept of ‘the South Seas’ had been long forming. A visitor to Heriot Row in 1875 (during Louis’s days as a law student) had first told him of the wonderful climate of the Pacific, particularly the Navigator Islands (Samoa), and how beneficial it was to sufferers from respiratory diseases. Louis became ‘sick with desire to go there; beautiful places, green forever; perfect shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their hair; and nothing to do but study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they fall’.4 This paradisal notion must have been in his mind when he located his ideal commonwealth in Samoa in the unfinished novel ‘The Hair Trunk’. During his residence in San Francisco in 1879–80, Stevenson’s interest in the South Seas was fed by Charles Warren Stoddard, whose bachelor digs on Rincon Hill were full of Polynesian artefacts collected during his many visits to the Sandwich Islands. Stoddard had lent Stevenson Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo, works which fascinated the Scot, who was – perhaps consciously – reproducing exactly in the Casco’s itinerary Melville’s first journey into the Pacific, to the Marquesas, Tahiti and then Hawaii.

  Mark Twain had also lived in the Sandwich Islands and very probably talked about the Pacific with Stevenson – who was, after all, on his way there – when they met in New York that summer.* Then there were the encouragement and example of Joe and Belle Strong, who knew Stoddard well (he found them their house in Hawaii), and Joe’s parents, former missionaries, all of whom had managed to live well in the Pacific on relatively little money. Books of history and science, such as the voyages of Captain Cook and Darwin’s accounts of the Galapagos Islands (which Stevenson wanted to see), had contributed to Stevenson’s preconception, as had contemporary books of leisure travel – a recent innovation – including Stoddard’s own South Sea Idylls and Summer Cruising in the South Seas, with its swooning descriptions of native boys’ beauty. The other strong tradition of Pacific travel writing emphasised the perils to the white man of entering the territory of ‘the other’, a brutal, primitive world of cannibals, black magic and bestial sex, inhospitable islands ‘peopled with lascivious monkeys’,6 where civilisation would meet its doom.

  As Point Reyes and Mount Tamalpais receded to specks behind them, all that the passengers on the Casco thought of was the exoticism of their adventure. None more so perhaps than Margaret Stevenson, fifty-nine-year-old widow and late invalid of Edinburgh: ‘Isn’t it wonderful that I am going to see all these strange, out-of-the-way places?’ she wrote excitedly to her sister Jane. ‘I always longed so much to see them, and I can hardly believe that all those childish longings are to come true.’7 The early days on the boat were very pleasant for those who got over their sea-sickness quickly (Fanny didn’t, but her lack of complaint about her poor sea-legs was one of her noblest sacrifices for love). ‘There is upon the whole no better life,’ Stevenson wrote to Colvin. ‘Fine, clean emotions, a world all and always beautiful; air better than wine; interest unflagging.’8 Louis had the ‘stateroom’ to himself, where he could work, and Lloyd had the other bedroom, while all three women slept in the drawing room on shelves that were hidden during the day with little lace curtains. In the mornings, Stevenson would write before breakfast, and dictate to Lloyd at the typewriter in the latter part of the morning. The women passed the time reading, playing cards, sewing and knitting, and Fanny made some attempts to improve the truly awful efforts of the cook. Other than that, there was the sea to watch and the night sky to marvel at and the sound of Louis’s flageolet (‘in which he was persistent’, Otis remarked9) to try to ignore.

  Otis was relieved to find that his employer, though an author, did not want to talk about his books. The captain had read only one of them. Treasure Island, and knew there were others that he might be challenged to remark on. The fact that this gruff bibliophobe had read any of Stevenson’s works at all is another indication of how widespread the writer’s fame had become. Gradually, Otis came to admire the thin man’s unflappability; though the women all screeched when the Casco, going at remarkable speed, first put her rail under water, Stevenson said nothing, and he proved just as cool during the storm they approached on the tenth day out, which necessitated three days of anxious confinement below deck. It became apparent to the captain at this point that the boat was significantly undermanned; he was the only navigator on board and had to stay at the wheel without respite during bad weather. If anything happened to him, the whole ship would be imperilled. That possibility came horribly close when a freak squall, ‘black as a black cat’, as the captain later described it, hit the Casco as they neared the Marquesas.10 The ship was knocked down so that the edge of the cabin was under water and water was pouring in through the deadlights below that the women had failed to close (against Otis’s repeated advice, as he was keen to point out in his reminiscences).

  Towards dawn on 28 July, the magical moment arrived when land was sighted: the distant volcanic peak of Ua-huna. ‘The first experience can never be repeated,’ Stevenson wrote in In the South Seas; ‘the first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart and touched [by] a virginity of sense’:11

  Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the bosoms of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores. The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above
by opalescent clouds.12

  They bore along the shore, looking without success for signs of life, and eventually reached Anaho Bay, where no sooner had they anchored than a canoe was spotted on its way out from the shore. On board were the local chief and a white trader called Regler, the advance party for dozens of small boats that followed. Soon the Casco was swarming with natives, ‘stalwart, six-foot men in every state of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief, improperly adjusted’.13 Here was a ‘strange, and to us, rather alarming’ sight for Margaret Stevenson to report home. ‘The display of legs was something we were not accustomed to; but as they were all tattooed in most wonderful patterns, it really looked quite as if they were wearing open-work silk tights,’ she wrote to her sister.14 One can imagine the whoops around the Edinburgh tea-tables when this was read aloud to Jane’s cronies.

  The Marquesans had brought with them quantities of fruit and curios, but as trade, not gifts, and they seemed distinctly displeased when no one on Casco showed any sign of wanting to buy. Many of them carried knives, and their aspect seemed threatening; one in particular repelled Louis ‘as something bestial, squatting on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity’.15 Louis began to feel apprehensive; the Marquesans were rumoured still to practise cannibalism; He showed them round the boat, to murmurs of amazement and appreciation. The men measured up dimensions against their fine brown arms and the women went from chair to chair, trying them all for comfort. One was so excited by the softness of the Casco’s red velvet that she hoisted up her skirt and rubbed her bare bottom along it ‘with cries of wonder and delight’.16