Robert Louis Stevenson - Dreams of Elsewhere

THE SELECTED TRAVEL WRITINGS OF

R OBERT L OUIS S TEVENSON

DREAMS of ELSEWHERE

C OMPILED AND EDITED BY J UNE S KINNER S AWYERS

The In Pinn

Published by The In Pinn

The In Pinn is an imprint of
Neil Wilson Publishing
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Introduction, chronology and introductory passages to each chapter
June Skinner Sawyers, 2011 First published in 2002.
Foreword Gavin Bell, 2002
Cover image by John Beatty, www.wild-vision.com

June Skinner Sawyers has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
E-book ISBN: 978-1-906476-23-6
Print edition ISBN: 978-1-903238-62-2 (hbk), 978-1-903238-69-1 (pbk).
This eBook was produced by Thomas Whitehead
E:

For my aunt,
Catherine Harvey Mason Keiller Porter Campbell
of Glasgow

The Vagabond

TO AN AIR BY SHUBERT

Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And in the byway night me.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life for ever.
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around
And the road before me.
Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I seek, the heaven above
And the road below me.
Or let autumn fall on me
Where afield I linger,
Silencing the bird on tree,
Biting the blue finger;
White as meal the frosty field
Warm the fireside haven
Not to autumn will I yield,
Not to winter even!
Let the blow fall soon or late,
Let what will be o'er me;
Give the face of earth around,
And the road before me.
Wealth I ask not, hope, nor love,
Nor a friend to know me.
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.

RLS

from Songs of Travel (1895)

ASSEMBLING this collection has been a labour of love. I wish here to thank all Stevenson scholars - past and present. In addition I am indebted to George Cohen for bringing to my attention several years ago a copy of Stevenson's Travelsin Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1973), edited by A Grove Day at a time when I had still to fathom the extent of RLS's vast travel itinerary.

My neighbours Rick and Ann Selin offered plenty of jokes, smiles, cups of coffee, and lots of support - especially of the computer kind - along the way. I thank Neil Wilson for his encouragement and for giving me the opportunity to be published, once again, in my native Scotland. While doing additional research in northern California, I and a friend had the pleasure of staying at the lovely Santa Rosa home of Bill Thompson and Bob Sigman, who good naturedly put up with my ongoing Stevenson obsessions. As always, I thank Theresa Albini simply for being there.

On a high plateau overlooking a broad sweep of the Pacific in Samoa, there is a place that a traveller once described as beautiful beyond dreams. To a friend, he wrote: 'The morning is such a morning as you have never seen; heaven upon earth for sweetness, freshness, depth upon depth of unimaginable colour and a huge silence broken at this moment only by the far-away murmur of the Pacific and the rich piping of a single bird.' After a life of travelling hopefully, Robert Louis Stevenson had arrived at his final destination.

Along the way he had become a celebrated novelist, but also a keen observer of people and places he encountered in a kaleidoscope of travels off the beaten track. He belonged to a generation of writers who did not jet around the world, recording fleeting impressions and drawing superficial conclusions. He took the time to stand and stare, and muse eloquently on his experiences. The result is a set of travel essays as vivid and compelling in their own way as his romantic fiction.

Stevenson was always dreaming of elsewhere. As a young man, he wrote a children's poem:
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie.
So he did. Blithely ignoring Victorian conventions and the perils of uncharted seas, off he went. And happily for us, he left detailed accounts of his adventures in Europe, America and the South Seas.

The travel genre is attractive to writers for the freedom it affords to be whatever they wish to be - explorer, historian, geographer, philosopher, story-teller - and RLS was all of them. In the tranquillity of a French pine forest by moonlight he considers the importance of friendship; in a leper colony on Hawaii he reflects on physical horror and moral beauty; in all of his writing there is humanity and compassion.

A measure of his talent is the esteem in which he was held wherever he travelled. In an age when Pacific islanders were considered little better than savages, Stevenson found complex societies with strict codes of honour that had much in common with 17th century Scottish clans. He respected and admired his hosts, and at night they would sit in thatched huts by lagoons swapping tales of their respective homelands. In Samoa, where he spent the last years of his life, he was known affectionately as Tusitala - teller of tales. The essence of good travel writing is simple. It is the facility to take readers in their imagination to wherever the author is - to feel the salt spray of an ocean, to hear the voices of characters met on a country lane - and Stevenson was a master of the art.

Admirers of his work will welcome this judicious selection of sketches from an itinerant life. Those less familiar with his blithe spirit are in for a rare treat, a voyage of discovery with the teller of tales to where the surf murmurs on Parrot islands.

Gavin Bell

1850 Born on November 13 at 8 Howard Place in Edinburgh.
1857 The Stevensons move to 17 Heriot Row in the New Town.
1862 Family holiday in London and Hamburg.
1863 Continental trip with family to France, Italy, and Switzerland.
1867 Enrolls at Edinburgh University to study civil engineering.
1868 Summer vacation in the northeast of Scotland, including stopover in Wick, Caithness to learn family lighthouse building trade.
1869 RLS and father to Orkney and the Outer Hebrides.
1870 Visits Mull on another lighthouse building tour.
1871 Switches from studying civil engineering to law.
1872 Three weeks in Germany during summer with friend Walter Simpson.
1873 Meets Frances Sitwell, an important influence in his life. 'Roads' published in. Portfolio Magazine in December. To the south of France at the end of the year.
1874 Menton, France. Returns to Edinburgh in May. 'Ordered South' published in Macmillan's Magazine. Cruises the Inner Hebrides with Walter Simpson from July-August.
1875 Qualifies as an advocate. Visits his cousin, Bob Stevenson, at the artists' colony at Barbizon, Fontainebleau, France, in March and April.
1876 Winter walking tour in Galloway and Carrick. Begins canoe trip through the canals of northern France in September. Meets Fanny Osbourne, an American from Indiana. 'Forest Notes' published in May, 'Walking Tours' in June, both in Cornhill Magazine