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“Well, it’s to make or break; and there’s the end on’t.”

— RLS, Manasquan, N.J.

—

When Robert Louis Stevenson left Saranac Lake in the spring of 1888, he was with his mother, his stepson and their servant from Switzerland, Valentine. They had left most of their belongings at Baker’s, their temporary home, better known today as the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial cottage. The departure was sudden and explained by his mother, Margaret, to her sister Jane in Scotland: “Louis,” she said, “had been wearying for a change.” A trip by train to New York City would change things.

Stevenson had arrived in the Adirondacks as suddenly as he left them. Once again his observation had been confirmed that “By a curious irony of fate, the places we are sent when health deserts us are often singularly beautiful.” Many are surprised to learn that Stevenson did not have tuberculosis–TB–when he was here. His physician at the time, Dr. Trudeau, also believed it was likely that his new patient did have the disease before, that it went into remission but could return.

Bleeding, as in hemorrhaging in the lungs, sporadic, too often life-threatening, even lasting for days, leaving Louis incommunicado if without paper and pencil–that was “Bloody Jack” and ‘Jack’ stayed away from Saranac Lake. Trudeau’s treatment for his new friend was advice–quit smoking and stay in these mountains.

Today medical hindsight toys with the chances that RLS had a condition yet to be discovered when Dr. Trudeau made his calls at Baker’s in 1887-88. An article in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, 91: 62-65 (2000) is called “Did Robert Louis Stevenson Have Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT)?”

Whatever Stevenson had, to him, the Adirondack air was good. To Adelaide Boodle, his former neighbor in Bournemouth, England: “I am very well; better than for years.” That is why, according to his mother, “the doctor is anxious he should return here in July and camp out in the woods.”

That was still the plan when the Stevenson expedition (minus the author’s wife, Fanny, who was in California) left New York City on May 1, 1888, to migrate south under the leadership of Will Hickock Low, Stevenson’s best American friend, an artist. Manasquan, New Jersey, on the seashore was their destination. Low knew the area and secured lodging for his friends at the Union House, a seasonal hostelry for summer vacationers who had yet to arrive. The Stevenson party had the run of the place and the owners, Mr. and Mrs. Wainwright, made every provision for his comfort.

The Union House was situated next to the lagoon-like mouth of the Manasquan River so that the pleasantries of riverside and oceanside were both within easy reach. “The weather was only intermittently good from my point of view,” said Low in his book A Chronicle of Friendships, “but Stevenson found it to his liking, and was much out-of-doors.” A long dock on the river crammed with cat-boats had caught the attention of the author of An Inland Voyage and Stevenson’s eighteen year old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, saw them too. Several afternoons were thus spent by the trio “sailing up and down the river, Stevenson being greatly pleased … One afternoon we landed on an island a little way up the river, whose shore upon one side was protected by a bulkhead. As the island was nameless, we proceeded to repair the oversight and christened it Treasure Island, after which we fell to with our pocket-knives to carve the name upon the bulkhead, together with our initials and the date.”

Few people knew RLS better than Will Low to whom the poet in Louis had dedicated his poem Youth. In Manasquan, Low observed that his friend was “showing the arbitrary and whimsical fancies of a nervous invalid…Mrs. Low and I felt as never before, that, as to the members of his own family, he clung to us with a singular dependence that measured the depth of his depression more eloquently than words.”

Another American artist happened to be in the neighborhood, one who had once shared a peasant’s loft with Will Low in Barbizon, France, in 1874. When Wyatt Eaton returned from abroad he made a reputation by specializing in portraits before dying too young. Eaton’s wife, Charlotte, was a huge fan of Robert Louis Stevenson. She wrote a little book in 1921, called Stevenson at Manasquan, quite rare, a limited edition for a select audience:

“My husband, the late Wyatt Eaton, and Stevenson, were friends in their student days abroad, and it was in honor of those early days that I was to clasp the hand of my favorite author. It was, of course, the fanciful, adventure-loving Stevenson that I looked forward to seeing…the Stevenson who wrote the things over which I had burned the midnight oil … and I was not disappointed.”

“He came promptly at the hour fixed, appearing on the threshold as frail and distinguished-looking as a portrait by Velasquez…I shall never forget the sensation of delight that thrilled me, as he entered the room–tall, emaciated, yet radiant, his straight, glossy hair so long that it lay upon the collar of his coat, throwing into bold relief his long neck and keenly sensitive face.”

“His hands were of the psychic order, and were of marble whiteness, save the thumb and first finger of the right hand, that were stained from constant cigarette rolling–for he was an inveterate smoker–and he had the longest fingers I have ever seen on a human being…His voice, low in tone, had an endearing quality in it, that was almost like a caress. He never made use of vernacularism and was without the slightest Scotch accent; on the contrary, he spoke his English like a world citizen, speaking a universal tongue, and always looked directly at the person spoken to.”

” … He was consciously living in the past that day, and each face was like reseeing a milestone long passed, on some half-forgotten journey. It was this sense of detachment that, more than anything else, gave us the feeling that he was already beyond our mortal ken, that he was living at once in the visible and in the invisible, one to whom the passing of time had little significance. I think this is true, more or less, of all those marked for a brief earthly career.”

One sunny day in May, the boys of Barbizon were having lunch on a patio by the sea and a telegram came. It was from Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, in San Francisco. Low said, “He asked me to read it and I read:

“Can get the Casco for the South Seas cruise.”

“What will you do?” I asked. “Do?” he said, “Why go, of course!”

That was all it took. Preparations began immediately. On May 28, 1888, Louis wrote to his friend, Henry James, in England. “This, dear James, is a valedictory. On June 15th, the schooner yacht Casco will (weather and a jealous providence permitting) steam through the Golden Gates for Honolulu, Tahiti, the Galapagos, Guayaquil, and–I hope not the bottom of the Pacific. It will contain your ‘umble servant and party. It seems too good to be true … “

With the die cast, the new normal was to await the day of Stevenson’s departure for California on the first of June. Said Low, “Our quiet life, the open air and, above all, the glimmer of hope that the projected voyage inspired, had worked wonders with Stevenson’s physical condition … One evening, after an early dinner, he proposed an excursion to the sea, and the two of us set out…about two miles.”

As they walked, they talked about art and artists and poets and writers and how “Zola and his gang” had spoiled some kind of “game,” that Keats had a “single-purposed devotion to beauty” and that “Wordsworth was at the opposite pole from every intuition of Keats’ nature” and so on. After a while, they stopped walking and talking. Low remembered:

“We had not spoken for a moment, and alone, we two upon the beach, the world seemed very large, the sea boundless and the sky without limit, when Louis broke the silence:

“‘Low, I wish to live! Life is better than art, to do things is better than to imagine them, yes, or to describe them. And God knows, I have not lived all these last years. No one knows, no one can know the tedium of it. I’ve supported it as I could — I don’t think that I am apt to whimper – but to be, even as I am now, is not to live. Yes, that’s what art is good for, for without my work I suppose that I would have given up, long ago … There’s England over there,’ with a gesture seaward, ‘and I’ve left it — perhaps I may never go back–and there on the other side of this big continent there’s another sea rolling in. I loved the Pacific in the days when I was at Monterey, and perhaps now it will love me a little. I am going to meet it; ever since I was a boy the South Seas have laid a spell upon me and, though you have seen me all the weeks low enough in my mind, I begin to feel a dawn of hope …'”

The two friends returned to the inn where Stevenson’s mother met them at the door. “I was beginning to be anxious,” she said. “I’m not the least tired,” he told her, “but we’ve been quite far. Low and I have been looking out from the shores of the Pacific.”

And so it was Louis followed the sun while up north in the Adirondacks, some guides lost a good contract. Said Berthe Baker in 1899:

“The trip to the Pacific coast was never spoken of. They did not then intend going further than Manasquan. They intended on having to return to Floodwood Pond in the spring … Papa had gotten guides for them but in the next letter the author had decided to go to San Francisco.”