Writing on Literature: a Sample

An article about Stevenson and the sea, commissioned (and I’m happy to say paid for) by a glossy corporate journal that folded before my piece was published.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Schooners and Islands

By Roger Robinson

Robert Louis Stevenson was messing about in boats at Manasquan , New Jersey , when a telegram arrived from his wife in San Francisco :

“Can secure splendid sea-going schooner yacht Casco with most comfortable accommodation for six aft and six forward. Reply immediately. Fanny”

The Scottish author had asked his resourceful American wife to look for a yacht suitable for a Pacific cruise. As usual, his urge for adventure overcame concerns about his health. He replied, “Blessed girl, take the yacht and expect us in ten days. Louis”.

A month later, June 28, 1888 , they sailed from San Francisco Bay , setting course south-southwest for the Marquesas Islands , 3000 miles across the unpredictable and sketchily charted waters of the Pacific Ocean .

It was Stevenson’s first real voyage, apart from three Atlantic crossings as a passenger. But the sea had long surged in his writer’s imagination. The stories that by 1888 made him one of the world’s most successful writers almost all include powerful maritime scenes. Kidnapped comes to life with the fight for the roundhouse aboard the brig Covenant. In The Black Arrow, an adventure set in the Wars of the Roses, a band of outlaws commandeer The Good Hope. Both those ships are wrecked on rugged coasts. The Master of Ballantrae is part a downbeat pirate saga, part the story of a Scottish house on a wild shore where smugglers and exiles come and go and brothers fight vicious duels by night on the ocean’s edge.

Treasure Island , that masterpiece of adventure romance, never moves out of sight of the sea. In its first sentence, the fearsome old buccaneer Billy Bones arrives with his sea chest to prowl the coast at the Admiral Benbow inn. In the last, the nightmares of Jim Hawkins still echo with the booming surf and the sharp cry of Long John Silver’s parrot ringing across the deck: “Pieces of eight!”

That book’s seamen move and talk like incarnations of the ocean - Billy Bones, rolling along the cove with his telescope, calls himself “a poor old hulk on a lee shore.” And the schooner Hispaniola almost becomes a character in her own right. Adrift under sail, with one wounded pirate left aboard, she “sailed by swoops and dashes,” as Jim vainly tries to paddle his flimsy coracle towards her. Suddenly the unsteered ship comes “skimming like a swallow” straight at him, “the waves boiling white under her forefoot.” He clutches the jib-boom, she charges down the coracle, and he is back on board.

It is a marvelous sea action sequence, surpassed only by the next. As the boy dodges the murderous coxswain Israel Hands, it is again the ship that saves his life, by striking aground and canting over, “swift as a blow.” Jim “rattled up hand over hand” into the shrouds, and perches with his pistols in the cross-trees. No reader forgets the drama aloft that follows, or the last sight of Hands, sinking “in a lather of foam and blood” through the quivering water.

Though he brilliantly evokes the cluttered confinement of a sailing vessel, Stevenson was modest about his nautical knowledge:

“I was unable to manage a brig (which the Hispaniola should have been), but I thought I could make shift to sail her as a schooner without public shame.”

He did have real and intimate experience when it came to the sea shore. He was born into a family of coastal engineers, famous builders of lighthouses and harbors. As a boy he visited shoreline construction sites with his father, like the Dhu Hearteach lighthouse on the grim Isle of Erraid, where later he shipwrecked Davie Balfour in Kidnapped and set a terror tale of storm and madness, “The Merry Men.”

In life and imagination he was drawn to that point of encounter between land and sea, sometimes calm, sometimes terrible. Nowhere is that encounter more potent, he found in 1888, than in the surf of the Pacific. At his first island landfall, Anaho in the Marquesas, as the Casco’s anchor plunged down, “my soul went down with these moorings.”

He never left the Pacific. He never again lived more than walking distance from the ocean. “Never once did I lose my fidelity to blue water and a ship.” His frail health improved. At sea, “my bones were sweeter to me.” He made genuinely close friends among the islanders, studied their cultures and languages, and he and Fanny created a home that is still remembered with affection in Samoa , within sound of the sea.

Others mocked. When the irascible American skipper of the Casco first set eyes on his famous but cadaverous passenger, he is reputed to have stowed gear for burial at sea. And when questioned what he would do in an emergency such as the author’s elderly mother being swept overboard, he is said to have growled, “Put it in the log.”

Stevenson was unrepentant. “My exile to the place of schooners and islands can be in no sense regarded as a calamity,” he insisted to his disapproving literary friend Henry James. In the Casco he visited the Marquesas, the treacherous atolls of the Tuamotus, Tahiti and Hawaii . There he found the Equator, a trading schooner with no real passenger quarters, took his family aboard, and sailed to the Gilbert Islands . He became friends there with an island king whose tyranny, harem and gourmandizing make Henry VIII look understated.

In Sydney they joined the stifling and unstable iron-screw rigged steamer, Janet Nicholl. She was “the worst roller I was ever aboard of,” the normally seaworthy Stevenson remarked. In Auckland Harbor , a cargo of fireworks somehow ignited in “gorgeous flames and the most horrible chemical stench.” Fanny peremptorily stopped a crewman from tossing overboard a smouldering trunk filled with her husband’s manuscripts.

The steamer’s trading calls took them to numerous “low islands” (“hackney cabs have more variety,” Stevenson grumbled) and eventually to New Caledonia , where he stocked up with French wine for their new home. The depressing waterfront of the French penal colony at Noumea provided the bleak opening scene of The Ebb-Tide, one of the best of all sea novels.

These travels gave Stevenson the writer challenging new material. Rejecting the false “sugar candy” Pacific of popular fiction, he set himself to be the first to show the reality of people who for millennia had lived in hourly contact with such an ocean, and were now learning to live with a new flood tide, European colonization. In The Ebb-Tide, the stories in Island Nights’ Entertainments, the travel book In the South Seas and the “instant journalism” of A Footnote to History (with its powerful account of the 1889 hurricane that wrecked five American and German warships), in ballads, poems and letters, Stevenson produced books that stand high in nautical and Pacific literature.

He did it in six years. On December 3, 1894 , he died of a sudden brain hemorrhage. Samoan mourners carried his coffin to the top of Mount Vaea . The tomb overlooks his home and the ocean. The epitaph is his poem “Requiem.”

This be the verse you grave for me;

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Roger Robinson’s Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings was published in 2003 by Bess Press , Hawaii , USA , University of Queensland Press , Australia , and Streamline Creative, New Zealand .