Beset by chronic ill health ano in perennial search of sunshine and clean air, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) spent the last seven years of his life travelling in North America and the South Seas He craved news of his native land, and his advisors in Britain encouraged him to produce more books and stories on Scottish themes. Indeed, Stevenson’s most famous later novels, The Master of Ballantrae (1888), Catriona (1893), and Weir of Hermiston (1896), were all produced during the Pacific years, or from what was to become his home when he settled at Vailima on the island of Upolu in Samoa.
Yet Stevenson had become increasingly aware of the white man’s failings and the colonial exploitation of the island peoples, and some of his finest writing relates to this issue. At a time when exiled Scots around the world were enjoying the fashion for a more homely ‘Kailyard’ fiction, Stevenson produced The Beach at Falesá and The Ebb Tide in imaginative response to the South Pacific experience. Jenni Calder’s selection from Stevenson’s creative prose, essays and letters will help to remind readers that he had a penetrating artistic and human interest in cultures far from the shores of Forth and the Weaver’s Stone.