R. L. Stevenson - In The South Seas

Mr Stevenson smiled humorously. Treasure Island, he said, is not in the Pacific.

(Sydney Morning Herald, 14 February 1890)

In the winter of 18878 Robert Louis Stevenson was at Saranac in the Adirondack Mountains with his mother and his American wife, Fanny, and stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. Lloyd had toothache, according to Stevensons mothers diary, and to amuse him Louis plans a yacht trip, and they discuss all the arrangements even to where the piano is to stand in the saloon. According to his Autobiography, McClure was reminded of Stevensons amusing travel books:

I thought at once of An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey, and told him that if he would write a series of articles describing his travels, I would syndicate them for enough money to pay the expenses of his trip. I think the South Seas must have been mentioned that evening, for I remember that after I returned to New York I sent him a number of books about the South Seas, including a South Pacific directory. The next time I went to Saranac, we actually planned out the South Pacific cruise, talking about it until late into the night.

Now these South Sea romances were to be transformed into Pacific reality. Lloyd Osbourne remembered how they wintered at Saranac with A. G. Findlays Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean:

Such was our reading, such the stuff our dreams were made of as the snow drove against our frozen windows; as the Arctic days closed in, gloomy and wild, and snow-shoes and buffalo coats were put by to steam in corners while we gathered round the lamp. Visions of palms while our ears were yet tingling from the snow we had rubbed on to save them from frost-bite; cascading streams in tropic Arcadies, with water as clear as crystal, while our own bedroom jugs upstairs were as solid as so much rock; undraped womanhood, bedecked with flowers, frisking in vales of Eden, while we were wooled to the neck like polar explorers, and dared not even thaw too quickly for fear of chilblains.

At 5 a.m. on 28 June 1888 the chartered yacht Casco passed from San Francisco through the Golden Gate into the Pacific. Captain Otis had read Treasure Island but no further in Stevensons works, as he informed the writers mother.prepared for the future with prayers. He was keeping a journal which is more a draft of his travel book than a personal journal.

On 12 August the Casco sailed round the island, past the valley described in Herman Melvilles Typee (1846), to the capital, Taiohae, another lovely bay which reminded Stevensons mother faintly of Rothesay, though without the lovely views outside.

They sailed from Taiohae on 22 August, with the missionary Frre Michel Blanc aboard, and anchored at Tahauku, Hiva Oa, on 23 August. Stevenson, whose health was always precarious, had a headache, but the others visited Atuona, two miles away in the next bay, where Lloyd took photographs and Frre Michel arranged the amusing adoption of Fanny, Lloyd and Margaret Stevenson by a Marquesan family. On Monday 27 August Stevenson rode up to the mountains with Frre Michel but caught a chill. A few days later, on 1 September, another yacht arrived, the Nyanza, with a Captain Dewar last encountered fifteen years previously on the French Riviera, and Stevenson caught a fresh chill at dinner on board.

Hoping a change would be good for him, they sailed from Hiva Oa on 4 September, and Stevenson wrote on the 6th to his old Edinburgh friend Charles Baxter: I shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done except Herman Melville

Stevenson had a cold, however, which worsened, and the Casco sailed for Tahiti, where there were doctors. The island was sighted at daybreak on 27 September, and Stevenson was taken ashore to a hotel at Papeete, the capital, where the doctor warned of the possibility of a fatal haemorrhage. Stevenson called for Captain Otis and calmly made arrangements for such a circumstance. His condition improved, however, and he moved with Fanny into a rented house, near the ruins of the prison where Melville had been confined in 1842. Meanwhile Lloyd and Stevensons mother made a typewritten copy of his journal, which he had suspended.