It was ill health that drove Robert Louis Stevenson away from Scotland. It was an urge for new and adventurous places and experiences that drew him to the Pacific. In June 1888 he and members of his family sailed out of San Francisco Bay on the schooner yacht Casco. For the next six and a half years, until his death on 3 December 1894, Stevenson was never out of Pacific regions.

For the first two of those years he wandered from island to island, on the Casco, the Equator and the Janet Nichol, and spent some time in Australia. It was hopeful voyaging, relished for its own sake, and most of the time with the bonus of good health. Sometimes there were pauses of weeks or months, stays occasioned by personal inclination, or the exigencies of Pacific trade, Pacific weather or Pacific ships. Wherever he was, and for whatever reason, Stevenson was continually alert to sights, sounds and happenings that were new, fresh and vivid. Many of his letters catch the exoticism and excitement of it all.

This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new forested harbours; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives, – the whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem.1

But Stevenson was not carried away by the romance and adventure of the Pacific, although some of his published work up until that time might have suggested such a response. Another letter, written within days of the one above, suggests his awareness of some of the contradictions and difficulties of the islands.

The Pacific is a strange place; the 19th century only exists there in spots: all round, it is a no man’s land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes.2

The Pacific was a challenge because it not only lived up to his most extravagant ideas of adventure, the ideas that had flowered in Treasure Island, but it also presented him with realities that were tantalising and instructive. His understanding of human nature and human history, which is so apparent in Kidnapped, in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in stories such as ‘Thrawn Janet’ and ‘The Merry Men’, was sharpened and extended.

By the end of 1890 Stevenson, his wife Fanny, and a fluctuating entourage were more or less settled in Vailima, the home he built near Apia on the Samoan island of Upolu. Throughout these years, whether at sea, or encamped in a palm-thatched hut, or living in squalor or in splendour – he sampled both extremes – at Vailima, he was writing. Both the world that he had left and the world in which he was now living were the subject of his pen.

The content of his writing was more diverse and wide-ranging than at any other time of his life. In the early months of his travels he was working on The Master of Ballantrae, which he had begun in a sub-arctic winter spent in the Adirondacks in New York State, and finished in a beach house at Waikiki. But although at this distance he could recreate Scotland and Scots, Scottish habits and Scottish speech, the Pacific environment equally commanded his attention. He kept a journal, and when he could he wrote letters. The opportunities to send them were irregular, so there were necessarily long silences. Stories began to suggest themselves, plots and people unfolded from the endless fascination of the Pacific. Yet all the time Scotland was never very far from his mind.

Soon he found himself concerned with much more than simply recording impressions. His interest in the peoples and cultures he encountered became involvement, both personal and, after a while, political. This is reflected in his writing, and worried greatly those at home who would have been happier to see him as a spinner of the picturesque, making delightful capital out of exotic sensations, than as an investigator of colonialism and its impact. But Stevenson could not close his eyes to what he saw going on around him, especially as it provided him with such rich material for continuing an exploration of moral ambiguity that was already a primary current in his work.

He began to write fiction directly inspired by his South Sea experience: The Wrecker, in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, The Ebb-Tide, begun as The Pearl Fisher with Lloyd, set aside and later worked over again by Stevenson alone, the short stories ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’ aimed at a Polynesian audience, and the masterly novella The Beach of Falesá. At the same time his growing understanding of expansionist politics and of the native Polynesians led him to engage with the warring interests of the colonial powers in the Pacific. Inevitably, he wrote about that too.

Stevenson’s interest in Samoa and the political situation there had been aroused during a six month stay in Hawaii. There he spent many enjoyable and interesting hours in the company of King Kalakaua, a convivial, extravagant and plausible figure who consumed quantities of champagne and had serious if ambivalent convictions about traditional Polynesian values. Kalakaua had an interest in Samoa, for he felt that a possible solution to colonial squabbling could be that he should take the islands under his wing. At this time Samoa was uneasily supervised by a trio of powers – Germany, Britain and the United States – a situation created by the 1868 Treaty of Berlin, the great nineteenth-century colonial carve-up. Of the three, Germany dominated, both politically and economically, the political influence owing a great deal to Germany’s long-established economic presence.

Stevenson was outraged by the political manoeuvrings and manipulations of all three powers, none of which showed much regard for the needs or traditions of the Samoans. His indignation was sharply expressed in a series of letters to The Times which rehearsed, with an ironic wit that surely owed something to his Edinburgh legal training, a tale of imperialist treachery and doublethink. Once in Samoa Stevenson openly allied himself with the chief Mataafa, a man for whom he had great personal regard and political respect. Mataafa was the main rival to the German-backed puppet chief Malietoa. The British, while recognizing privately Mataafa’s claims, disliked him because he was a Catholic, and were anyway reluctant to disturb a situation that suited them quite well. Stevenson was regarded as an interfering innocent, causing trouble through his naive idealism – words often used to dismiss the awkwardly honest. The situation erupted into war in July 1883, much of the conflict enacted literally in the Stevensons’ back yard. Not content with sending lengthy correspondence to The Times Stevenson produced his own account of the situation and the background to the conflict in a book which he called A Footnote to History.

We do not usually think of Stevenson as being either a ‘straight’ historian or a political commentator, but there is clear evidence of his attraction to historical fact. An interest in Scottish history was reflected in more than his fiction and essays: he had applied for the Chair of History and Constitutional Law at Edinburgh University, a post for which he was academically ill-qualified and didn’t get. Nevertheless, the intellectual and psychological challenge of Scotland’s past always appealed to him, and more significant, perhaps, was his project to write a history of Scotland.

In Samoa Stevenson’s involvement in events and his determination to set the record straight was as much the result of his highly developed sense of justice as of the magnetism of historical fact. He was witness to words and actions that were hypocritical, deceitful, and manipulative. He could not stand back from such a state of affairs. He felt a moral obligation to commit to paper – his only effective weapon – his understanding of events. But amongst his friends and associates at home there was alarm. At an early stage in his career Stevenson had been identified as a torch-carrier for a revitalised fiction. In 1878 Leslie Stephen, a highly respected member of the literary establishment, had written to Stevenson saying that he was on the lookout for a new novelist, a Scott or a Dickens or a George Eliot, suggesting that perhaps Stevenson could be the answer. It was an extraordinary profession of faith in a young man who was in the early stages of his literary career, and that aura, the feeling that he was destined for great things, clung to him. From the other side of the world it looked as if Stevenson was spending his time in wild and ill-conceived political adventures with a gang of savages. It did not conform with an image of him as not merely a serious novelist, but as the saviour of English literature at a time when it was judged to be in the doldrums.

What Stevenson realized was that such adventures were not only the stuff of history, they were the stuff of fiction. Although he had gained a reputation as a fine weaver of imaginative tales he was no ivory-tower fabulist. To write he had to live, and for the first time in his life he was well and strong enough to throw himself into the thick of things, whether it was the struggle against the jungle growth on his Vailima land, or riding secretly across the island to consort with the rebels, or tending the wounded in the aftermath of battle, or the emotional conflicts that were a part of daily life amongst the Vailima extended family.

Stevenson’s refusal to withdraw was partly the result of his unending enthusiasm for life, partly of moral conviction. Both these aspects of his mind and personality are evident in his writing. They were if anything heightened by his South Seas experience, and certainly reflected in the material brought together in this volume. In it we can see three levels of response, in the letters, in the extracts from his book In the South Seas, and in the fiction. In the letters, with which the selection begins, there is all the lively immediacy of instant communication. From them we get a vivid picture of the activities that filled his days, the demanding physical work, the even more intense demands of writing, and the serendipity for which he had a particular talent. These were years in which, in some respects, Stevenson tasted a freedom from conventional restrictions which previously had been overshadowed by parental and social authority. One of those parents, his mother, had travelled with him and was as aware as anyone of the lack of restraint. ‘It is a strange, irresponsible, half-savage life,’ she wrote, ‘& I sometimes wonder if we shall ever be able to return to civilised habits again.’3

The absence of civilisation suited Stevenson wonderfully. He would have loved this description, written after his death, and would have recognised himself immediately.

They were not, of course, wandering players, but Stevenson, his wife, and Lloyd Osbourne. This was written by W.E. Clarke, missionary on Upolu, subsequently a respected friend of Stevenson who had no great sympathy for the missionary breed on the whole, and mentioned in one of the letters included here.

It was in many ways a delightful existence, but Stevenson had to work, especially once the bills for Vailima started coming in. There was a large and proliferating household to maintain, which was not only a financial burden but often an emotional and psychological one too. There were extreme pressures and profound anxieties, money problems, illness and unhappiness amongst the members of the household, worries over work in hand that foundered. Indeed, all of this almost certainly contributed to his death, brought by a sudden brain haemorrhage. These pressures hardly surface in his letters, for he did not like to dwell on his difficulties and was concerned that the folk at home should not worry. Nor do we detect them in his more literary writing during this period.

In the South Seas represents another level of response to the Pacific, considered, ordered, and crafted. If the writing here is without the spontaneity of the letters, it still has sparkle and humour, and Stevenson’s avid interest in all he encountered is apparent. The scenery was intoxicating; the expanses of ocean, the islands taking shape as they approached, the mountains, streams and forests, the stretches of sand and shore – all these he found irresistible. The people were equally a temptation. He became absorbed by island customs and behaviour, by beliefs and folklore, and comparisons with Scotland came readily. It wasn’t just homesickness that kept Scotland in the forefront of his mind throughout his time in the Pacific, but the chords that were struck by anything from a mountainside to a myth. Sometimes it was the very unlikeliness of similarity that made the discovery such a delight. Most striking of all is Stevenson’s sense of a common humanity. He recognized that the fears and vulnerabilities of the South Sea islanders were little different from those of men and women everywhere.

From time to time the modern reader may be brought up sharply by words or phrases that suggest a colonialist condescension. Stevenson, for example, refers to the adult Samoan workers on his Vailima land as ‘boys’. ‘Nigger’ appears to describe blacks of African origin. And the paternalism of some of his attitudes at times reads uncomfortably. But it would be ungenerous and misleading to be overcritical. This was the language of the times, and he was in fact far ahead of his time in his respect for the islanders and his interest in them as individuals with a culture of their own. There is no doubt that he enjoyed being gaffer at Vailima, but he shared in their work and although he was of course in a position of power (even if he didn’t have the political influence he would have liked) he was very aware that he was also in a position of responsibility. He was disgusted by white exploitation of the islanders, angry at the way many missionaries totally disregarded Samoan traditions, and saddened at the erosion of human spirit, in victims and perpetrators alike, that followed from the diminishment of a people.

Always uncompromisingly himself Stevenson was at the same time genuinely internationalist and sought out common ground with whomever he encountered. During an enforced stay at Tautira on Tahiti while the Casco’s masts were being repaired, he established a flourishing relationship with the local chieftain, Ori a Ori. They feasted each other, and swapped songs and stories. When on Christmas Day 1888 the Casco pointed north for Hawaii the handsome Ori and another local dignitary, the aristocratic Princess Moë, wept; Louis and Fanny Stevenson wept also. They left behind them not only good friends, but a wonderful source of story and fable.

This and other meetings inspired the stories ‘The Bottle Imp’ and ‘The Isle of Voices’. Stevenson readily adapted to the resonance and cadences of myth, for legendary tales had suffused his own upbringing. If he had absorbed such sources into his Scottish fiction, he was equally primed to make something of the Polynesian story-telling to which he was now exposed. Thus ‘The Bottle Imp’ is an ancient tale with a contemporary feel, and it provides an interesting glimpse of some of the incidentals of the Polynesian encounter with whites. The scene and the viewpoint are Polynesian, and the white presence is not conspicuous. If readers are inclined to question the success of Stevenson’s attempt at getting under the skin of his Polynesian characters, it is worth noting that the fable itself has an impulsion that overrides this. ‘The Isle of Voices’ has a more specifically Polynesian reference, and Stevenson’s grasp on the tale is less confident. But there is an ambience, a personalised environment, that still remains powerful.

Stevenson was acutely aware of the kinship between traditional story-telling in the Pacific and in Scotland. He continually drew parallels between Scottish and Polynesian customs, traditions and tribes. He recognized that this was a useful way of gaining the confidence of the islanders from whom he sought acceptance. As an amateur anthropologist he was unusual for that time, since he looked at alien cultures as much in terms of their similarities with his own as of their differences. At the same time he seems to have shared the belief held by even the most enlightened investigators that tribal societies represented a primitive stage in human evolution which would inevitably give way to ‘civilisation’. What was less usual was his regret at the loss this would entail, and his indignation at what he described as ‘… the unjust (yet I can see the inevitable) extinction of Polynesian Islanders by our shabby civilisation’.

There is no doubt that his sensitivity towards this loss was a direct result of his engagement with his own cultural origins. There was mutual nourishment. As his writing responded to the challenge of the Pacific he was also probing and examining the Scottish past and the Scottish character. The traditions of Border reiving and rivalry which play so important a part in Weir of Hermiston, his last substantial piece of fiction, have their parallels in Pacific life. The authoritarian attitudes of the novel’s Lord Braxfield towards human frailty were not dissimilar to those of the imperialist powers towards the native populations. The harsh landscapes and harsher actions of Scotland might have seemed very different from the sun-dazzled, easy-going South Seas, yet the roots of human behaviour were sustained by the same kind of needs and feelings.

In the South Seas is not a continuous record of Stevenson’s travels. It is a series of worked up, almost self-contained pieces. His letters, some of them written over several days, convey a sense of day-to-day living, of a continuum, a pattern of progress and setbacks, of events not just following upon each other but entangled with each other. Life is tidier in the book version of these events. Hindsight and the literary imagination lend shape and meaning. I am not suggesting that reality is being tampered with, but literary skills are at work and an inevitable process of selection and reordering is going on. Stevenson was a conscious and deliberate craftsman, and this process was part of his commitment, of his sense of responsibility as a writer. The directness of his style can be pleasantly informal, yet at the same time there is a literary, almost an ornate quality. Stevenson combines close observation, an awareness of language as well as of sensation, sympathetic humour, and a strong feeling for the potential absurdity that lies in the clash of mutual ignorance. Here is an example, taken from ‘The Maroon’, one of the pieces included here.

It chanced one day that I was ashore in the cove with Mrs Stevenson and the ship’s cook. Except for the Casco lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stockstill, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the tradewind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! in two of the tops there sat a native, motionless as an idol and watching us, you would have said, without a wink. The next moment the tree closed, and the glimpse was gone. This discovery of human presences latent overhead in a place where we had supposed ourselves alone, the immobility of our tree-top spies, and the thought that perhaps at all hours we were similarly supervised, struck us with a chill. Talk languished on the beach. As for the cook (whose conscience was not clear), he never afterwards set foot on shore, and twice, when the Casco appeared to be driving on the rocks, it was amusing to observe that man’s alacrity; death, he was persuaded, awaiting him upon the beach. It was more than a year later, in the Gilberts, that the explanation dawned upon myself. The natives were drawing palm-tree wine, a thing forbidden by law; and when the wind thus suddenly revealed them, they were doubtless more troubled than ourselves.

Here is an incident contained in a paragraph. Hindsight rounds the story off. The visual context, the island ambience, the culture clash are all there. And so is the author, taking a step back, looking at himself and his companions. The writer of first person documentary has to be observer, participant and artist. Stevenson highlights these roles by adopting a tone of mild irony, which also softens the nuts and bolts of his style, and maintains the distance between observer and actor. Twentieth-century writers would probably feel it was not so important to be scrupulous about distinguishing these roles, yet Stevenson’s control of tone gives a true modernity to his prose.

It is now around one hundred years since Stevenson was in the Pacific. From this distance we can see that he was engaged in one of the most important arenas of nineteenth-century history, both geographically and psychologically. We are now aware of the long-term effects of imperialism and are living with their consequences. What Stevenson witnessed, and what he recorded with considerable acuity, was colonialism in action in the Pacific one hundred years after the voyages of Captain Cook in the 1770s and 80s, a convenient date for locating the origins of imperialism in that part of the world.

Literary convention associates one great novelist in particular with the exploration and exposure of the tensions and conflicts inherent not just in the confrontation between imperialist powers and native populations, but in the sensations of the representatives of imperialism. This writer is Joseph Conrad, and his Heart of Darkness has become an emblem of the rotten core of exploitation. But a parallel and a companion to Conrad’s great novella can be found in the earlier and equally impressive story by Stevenson, The Beach of Falesá.

Stevenson saw the Pacific as a huge melting-pot, or perhaps ‘stew’ is a more appropriate word, remembering that he wrote about the islands as ‘a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes’. He did not mean that these attributes belonged to one race or another. What his fiction tells us is that this ‘stir-about’ was a melange of peoples, none of which had any special claim to virtue or criminality. His particular interest, as it was Conrad’s later, was in the moral and psychological effects of an environment of exoticism and exploitation on people with differing backgrounds and assumptions.

All Stevenson’s fiction reveals a pre-eminent concern with the moral dimensions of man – of man in particular, rather than woman. Before coming to the Pacific he had examined moral ambivalence in the context mainly of Scotland’s past, although his most famous venture into this territory, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, was ostensibly set in London. Scottish history offered event after event, situation after situation, which seemed to demonstrate and confirm what Stevenson saw as fundamental divisions within humankind, between emotional life and the instinct for survival – sometimes an instinct for evil – and the need for controlled social relations. Towards the end of his life he wrote to his cousin Bob, who had been a close companion of his experimental youth, ‘The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic – or maenadic – foundation, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.’6 He did not have to search far in Scotland’s past to find extremes of feeling and belief, extremes that led to violence of action and language.

In spite of Jekyll and Hyde, where in fact the extremes of behaviour are not entirely convincing, Stevenson has not had the reputation of a writer engaged with violence. Yet we need look no further than Treasure Island or Kidnapped to find naked conflict starkly expressed. The adventure story genre of course accommodates violence quite comfortably. In The Master of Ballantrae it is rather more sinister. But physical violence is only one aspect of confrontation. In the unfinished Weir of Hermiston there is an attempt to illuminate the whole spectrum of division and extremity through one powerfully knotted plot. The bold language of the elder Kirstie warning the hero Archie about the dangers of his relationship with a young and vulnerable girl catches the essence of at least part of Stevenson’s concern. Kirstie’s words echo those of Stevenson’s to Bob.

Man, do ye no’ comprehend that it’s God’s wull we should be blendit and glamoured, and have nae command over our ain members at a time like that? My bairn … think o’ the puir lass! have pity upon her, Erchie! and O, be wise for twa! Think o’ the risk she rins! I have seen ye, and what’s to prevent ithers? I saw ye once in the Hags, in my ain howf, and I was wae to see ye there – in pairt for the omen, for I think there’s a weird on the place – and in pairt for puir nakit envy and bitterness o’ hairt. It’s strange ye should forgather there tae! God, but yon puir, thrawn, auld Covenanter’s seen a heap o’ human natur since he lookit his last on the musket-barrels, if he never saw nane afore …

Even without specific knowledge of the references here, to the Covenanting conflicts and martyrdoms for example, the vibrance of Kirstie’s language alerts us to many of the aspects of human feelings and behaviour that were a preoccupation during Stevenson’s years at Vailima. On the one hand there was human nature, willed by God, as the Calvinists believed, to lead to sin unless kept in check. On the other hand were the rules and rigid structures imposed to keep humanity under control, but which themselves were dangerous in their capacity to distort.

Weir of Hermiston is set in eighteenth-century Scotland. Stevenson was living in late nineteenth-century Samoa. The wayward Archie is fenced in with social, moral and judicial rules. What was the situation in the Pacific? There was certainly plenty of opportunity to witness human nature in the raw. Traditional tribal life was breaking down. It had once been firmly stratified and organised, contrary to how it seemed to white incomers who were only too ready to exploit economic innocence and an apparently easy-going sexuality. There was a system of morality that was as strong, however different, as anything devised in the Christian world. To the whites, tribal life looked like moral anarchy while they themselves were a long way from the accustomed boundaries of behaviour – indeed that was part of the place’s attraction. The result was a breeding ground of moral ambivalence which fascinated Stevenson.

The novelist could no longer write about human nature in terms of a contest between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or a balance between prim, whiggish, sensible David Balfour and flamboyant, self-conceited, courageous Alan Breck. The edges of moral responsibility and the margins of moral judgment were too blurred. All around him were people whose customary moral and social structures were destroyed or left behind. This is the territory he explores in the novel The Ebb-Tide (1893) where he looks at the varieties of disintegration exhibited in three individuals who find themselves ‘on the beach’ in Tahiti, a form of destitution that was common in the islands. One of The Ebb-Tide’s characters shows himself to be totally evil. Another is desperately weak and when a figure of authority appears, he submits thankfully to that dubious power. The third, the central character, struggles to maintain his self-respect by seeking resources within himself.

The Beach of Falesá is equally a moral tale. Wiltshire, the hero, is a small-time trader. By the end of the nineteenth Century the focus of white trading in the Pacific was copra, dried coconut meat valuable for its oil. Coconuts were plentiful, native labour to collect them not difficult to harness. Stevenson himself had taken a close look at the copra trade as the Equator had made her way from island to island. ‘The mystery of the copra trade tormented me,’ he wrote in ‘Around Our House’ (In the South Seas), ‘as I sat and watched the profits drip on the stair and sands.’ Traders like Wiltshire, established on island stations, had come to expect an easy time. They offered cheap trade goods in exchange for the copra the islanders brought in, cheated the islanders whenever they could – everyone, it seemed, cheerfully watered the copra to bump up the weight, hence the dripping profits – and assumed there would be no lack of bodily comforts. Women were available, liquor was cheap, and sunshine inexhaustible.

Stevenson’s Wiltshire is no different from any other trader, and in many respects this is still true at the end of the story. He does not change, and his identity as hero does not blot out his shortcomings. He retains the prejudices and limitations with which he started out. We are in no doubt that he is in the business of exploitation, and although there is a certain charm in his frankness the reader quickly recognises him as an ordinary and unremarkable sort of man. The tone and rhythm of his thought and speech tell us this. But they also tell us that, plain man though he is, he is not unresponsive to his surroundings. He appreciates the setting moon, the scent of the mountains, the prospect of fresh experience.

Stevenson’s portrayal through the first person of a character who gives away more about himself than he states is a fine achievement. As the oblique unfolding of personality is continued, deeper levels of moral ambivalence are revealed. Wiltshire has no scruples about cheating the natives, yet he is troubled, not so much by exploitation itself as by the hypocrisy that surrounds it. His feelings about the marriage to Uma, the island girl who is acquired for him, demonstrate this. He does not object to being provided with a woman. That he sees as an unexceptionable part of the life of the white man in the islands. But he is unhappy about the phony marriage, although he rationalises and in the course of rationalizing unwraps a whole nexus of ambivalence and double Standards. ‘A man might easily feel cheap for less,’ is his comment on the worthless marriage certificate. ‘But it was the practice in these parts, and (as I told myself) not the least the fault of us White Men but of the missionaries. If they had let the natives be, I had never needed this deception, but taken all the wives I wished, and left them when I pleased, with a clear conscience.’

By any standards Wiltshire’s morality is dubious. He is ready to exploit the islanders both economically and sexually. When Uma first appears he and his supposed ally Case size her up like a marketable object, an impression confirmed by Case’s ‘That’s pretty’ – not ‘she’s pretty’. The image modulates from object to animal to child. Wiltshire describes her as having ‘a sly, strange, blindish look between a cat’s and a baby’s’ and then, ‘she looked up at men quick and timid like a child dodging a blow’. It is only later and, significantly, away from Case, that he sees her differently. ‘She showed the best bearing for a bride conceivable, serious and still; and I thought shame to stand up with her in that mean house and before that grinning negro’ (the latter not an islander but an associate of the degenerate Randall). Wiltshire has not only become aware of Uma as an individual; that awareness has implications for his sense of himself.

The two strands of the story are closely interwoven, with Uma providing the binding force. One strand follows Wiltshire’s discovery of his love and respect for Uma, and his wish to do the decent thing by her. The other is the story of how he destroys Case, more out of self-preservation than a sense of public duty. He has considerable courage, but he does not see himself as champion of the native.

The story that Wiltshire tells proceeds like the peeling of an onion. With each episode, in themselves inexplicable and incomplete, he reveals more of himself and adds to his own understanding. He makes it quite clear that he acts throughout largely through self-interest, although concern for another, Uma, has translated self-interest onto a more heroic level. Yet he emerges as a decent and relatively honourable man, if not honest with the islanders at least honest with himself, and not attempting to disguise his prejudices.

The most striking feature of The Beach of Falesá, and the feature that disturbed some contemporary readers, is its frankness. Its frankness about sex distressed its first editor. Readers one hundred years later probably feel that the story’s frankness about exploitation and deceit is more significant. In many ways it is more direct than anything Conrad was to write later, and this is largely because Stevenson’s vehicle is a man of limited understanding and imagination. He is not preoccupied with his own soul or a struggle to come to terms with guilt or collusion. Wiltshire has no problems of that kind. He adjusts cheerfully. When his modest ambition of returning to England and running a pub fades, because of his commitment to his family, he accepts it. He lives comfortably with his own prejudices, assuming, probably rightly, that they are the norm. All this is clear in the final paragraph. But much more than that is clear. Stevenson, through his inadvertent hero, precisely exposes an ambivalence that is at the heart of imperialism.

My public house? Not a bit of it, nor ever likely; I’m stuck here, I fancy: I don’t like to leave the kids, you see; and there’s no use talking – they’re better here than what they would be in a white man’s country. Though Ben took the eldest up to Auckland, where he’s been schooled with the best. But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half castes of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half castes than I do; but they’re mine, and about all I’ve got; I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find them whites?

Falesá was a kind of breakthrough for Stevenson. Most of his fiction had drawn back from the problems of the contemporary world by placing character and action in the past. But we know Stevenson was keen to take on the confusions and contradictions of late Victorian life. In Scotland all kinds of inhibitions stood in the way of his tackling these in fiction, not the least of which was the unacceptability of being honest about sex. In the South Seas these inhibitions dwindled. At the same time, the circumstances and environment heightened just those ambiguities and contradictions that so fascinated him.

In a letter to Colvin he claimed that Falesá was the first ever realistic story to be set in the South Seas.

Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost – there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and the look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.

Stevenson had begun both The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (serialised in 1893 but not published in book form until shortly before his death) before tackling The Beach of Falesá. The Wrecker was conceived as an adventure story, a ‘police’ tale, but nevertheless it, too, captures something of the flavour of moral and physical disintegration which features with particular power and subtlety in The Ebb-Tide. The Wrecker can be read as a kind of introduction to the latter novel, as it tells us a great deal about white activity in the Pacific islands. It is a story of the making and breaking of fortunes and reputations, of duplicity and desperation, of weakness and fear. Although slow to get started, once the action reaches San Francisco, which Stevenson describes as the city which ‘keeps the doors of the Pacific, and is the port of entry to another world and an earlier epoch in man’s history’, it moves into a higher gear. Through his hero, Loudon Dodd, Stevenson catches the tenor of his own excitement when he himself was in San Francisco longing to voyage westward.

Although The Wrecker was jointly written with Lloyd Osbourne, it draws directly on Stevenson’s own experience, his Edinburgh background and his spells in Paris as well as America’s Pacific coast and the islands. There are echoes of circumstances and phrases that appear in In the South Seas and the letters. The book was conceived on The Equator and writing began when Stevenson and his family were in the Gilbert Islands. The vigour and immediacy of the chapters that describe the voyages and crews of the Norah Creina, the Flying Scud and the Currency Lass are striking. The picture of San Francisco as the centre of a web of wheeling and dealing around the multiplicitous possibilities of the Pacific is also vivid. The view is very much from the ocean’s eastern rim and provides a different perspective from Stevenson’s other island writing.

The two main characters, Loudon Dodd and his friend and partner Jim Pinkerton (the Scottish flavour of both names is probably significant), exist in a kind of social and moral limbo, which again helps to prepare the way for The Ebb-Tide. They are both on the make. They are both ready to shut their eyes to irregularity and fraud. Yet they are both likeable, especially Pinkerton with his eager and almost innocent belief in each new enterprise. Dodd’s cool self-interest is unsettled as he gradually unravels the mystery of the Flying Scud, the wreck he and Pinkerton purchase as a speculative venture, but the moral ambivalence of the story is not fully explored. The strength of the book lies in its detailing of the Pacific ambience and the people who were part of the exploitative world of ships and trade and speculation.

It is The Ebb-Tide which picks up and pursues some of the implications of both Wiltshire’s story and the tale of the Flying Scud, and examines the theme of moral degeneration in uncompromising detail. If Falesá is a distillation of all that Stevenson experienced in the Pacific, The Ebb-Tide is a challenging exploration of moral and cultural assumptions about race and colonial intrusion.

It centres on four characters, all men: the novel is womanless – it is not sexual morality that is at issue here, although one of the characters agonises over his failure as husband and father. Like the characters in Jekyll and Hyde (and most of those in The Wrecker, although Pinkerton’s marriage is part of his salvation) these men are adrift from family and community. Stevenson himself described them in a letter to Henry James as ‘a troop of swine’ and worried about the grimness of the story, but in fact it is the different ways in which four individuals react to their particular circumstances that provide the novel’s crucial and provocative tension. Each is off-course in his own way. The three men ‘on the beach’ in Tahiti at the beginning of the story are desperately looking for any chance of pulling themselves out of a destitution that is the more intense because they are white. They consider themselves superior, yet in reality are more helpless than the native islanders. Huish is a Cockney, cunning and totally unprincipled. Davis is an American sea captain who lost his ship through drunken inadequacy. Herrick is an educated Englishman with pretensions to respectability. In the early scenes of the book Stevenson skilfully reveals the different threads of weakness, self-deception and self-interest in the three men, against a background of social and cultural fragmentation. The environment is all-important, for they are not only without money, possessions and prospects in a place where white men expect to succeed; they are deprived of all the props and supports on which men and women in a conventionally structured society depend.

To draw the most out of a clash of character and cultures, Stevenson employs a technique he had used successfully before. He confines his characters first on a schooner, which they take over with bogus credentials when smallpox kills the captain and the mate, then on an island. The schooner provides an opportunity for crime, in which all three men collude, but their own little world also begins to fragment as anger and guilt come to the surface. When they come upon an uncharted island presided over by Attwater, they are ripe to succumb to his gentlemanly certainties. But the island is not the tropical paradise that it might seem, and there is almost no escape.

The psychological and symbolic resonances of the story are extensive. Three men who are outcasts from the conventional, western, ‘civilised’ world, first seek restitution through crime, then find the possibility of refuge on an idyllic island under the control of an upper-class, Cambridge-educated dictator. In fact, Stevenson is describing environments which are built on exploitation and composed of layer upon layer of illusion and deceit. Assumed names and assumed histories (an integral part of The Wrecker, where some characters have several identities), the schooner’s cargo of champagne which proves to be water, the imposed regime of white superiority founded on violence and trickery, and – perhaps most striking of all – the island itself, which features on no chart and rises mysteriously out of the sea, ‘the undiscovered, the scarce-believed in’, all challenge the reader’s preconceptions. Herrick, the most sympathetic of the characters and most subject to conscience, gazes at the island as the schooner approaches.

The isle was like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood: so slender it seemed amidst the outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty, he would scarce have wondered to see it sink and disappear without a sound, and the waves close smoothly over its descent.

The fragile beauty has a sinister quality which grows stronger as Herrick encounters Attwater and explores the island. Attwater has built his pearl-fishing kingdom on savage exploitation of the islanders, but he offers all the certainties and comforts of control. The responses of Herrick, Davis and Huish to what they find, and the physical and psychological struggles involved, bring the story to its conclusion.

The climate, the ocean, the seductive environment of the tropical island, all play their part in this parable of moral breakdown. The examination of four men removed from accustomed codes and constraints and ignorant of social and cultural mores of the people they exploit is inseparable from the environment. There is no ‘sugar candy’ here, or at least only in the sense that candy can be corrupting. Of the four characters, Attwater is wholly corrupted by power though his sophisticated veneer is flawless. Huish, who in spite of a kind of impudent courage is evil (‘the devil … looked out of his face’), is shot by Attwater. Davis, the weakest of the four, becomes Attwater’s puppet: absolute power requires puppets. Only Herrick, perhaps, escapes, and he is deeply compromised.

The Ebb-Tide continues Stevenson’s fascinated exploration of humanity’s tenuous hold on right and wrong, which had begun in his earliest work. He began to write in the context of mid-Victorian Scotland, where moral absolutes were fiercely delineated. The Ebb-Tide, his last complete novel and undoubtedly one of his best, is informed by the other side of the Victorian coin, the imperialist intrusions on which Britain’s and Scotland’s nineteenth-century success depended. It delivers a message about ambivalence, reminding us that the codes on which we depend are flawed, while sailing on a chartless ocean is dangerous. He had long since questioned the Calvinist determinism of his upbringing. The Ebb-Tide shows him probing aspects and implications of human behaviour which were normally disguised. like The Beach of Falesá, it is a remarkably radical book and strikingly modern in tone. In his short life Stevenson travelled a long way, both in miles and in understanding of the human predicament.

This collection of Stevenson’s South Sea writings enables the reader to trace part of this journey and to see some of the ways in which the writer about Scotland’s contentious past became also an investigator of Britain’s imperialist present. It shows Stevenson in all his moods, boyishly enthusiastic, keenly appreciative of the absurd, nostalgic, uncertain, deeply serious – all the qualities that have attracted readers to Stevenson for more than a hundred years.

   

Jenni Calder

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1. Letter to James Payne, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (London 1911), vol. iii, p.131.

2. Letter to Sidney Colvin, ibid., p. 134.

3. Margaret Stevenson, From Saranac to the Marquesas and Beyond (London 1903), p.63.

4. W.E. Clarke, Reminiscences of Robert Louis Stevenson, n.d., no page numbers.

5. In Arthur Johnstone, Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (London 1905), p.103.

6. Letter to R.A.M. Stevenson, Letters, vol. iv, p.303.

7. Robert Louis Stevenson, Weir of Hermiston, Skerryvore Edition (London 1925), p. 129.

8. Letter to Sidney Colvin, Letters, vol. iii, p.292.