Lloyd Osborne

A boy was born in Oakland, California, on April 28, 1868. Samuel Lloyd Osbourne was named after his father “Sam” Osbourne and his father’s mining partner from failed operations in Nevada, John Lloyd. The boy grew up going by Sam but switched to using Lloyd about the time his mother married Robert Louis Stevenson in San Francisco in the spring of 1880.

Lloyd was only 8 the first time he saw RLS in 1876. He was with his mother and his older sister Isobel, or “Belle.” It was evening in the garden of Chevillon’s inn beside the Loing River next to the picturesque little village of Grez, near the southern entrance to the forest of Fontainebleau, about an hour’s drive southeast from Paris, France.

Many years later, when Lloyd found himself as duly elected president of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake, he could be found working on a project of value to the worldwide community of Stevenson lovers, past and present. He was writing biographical papers about RLS to flesh out the still-sought-after Tusitala Edition of his works, published in 1924. Of that first meeting in France, Lloyd writes in his introduction that he was next to his mother when she was introduced to RLS by her new friend, Bob Stevenson, cousin to Louis. Cousin Bob and Louis were called the “two Stevensons” and the apparent ringleaders of the Anglo-Saxon contingent of bohemian painters who inhabited Chevillon’s inn.

Lloyd vividly recalls how “I wriggled on my chair and shyly stole peeps at the stranger. He was tall, straight and well-formed … with extraordinary, brilliant brown eyes. … How incredible it would have seemed to me then had some prophetic voice told me that this stranger’s life and mine were to run together for nineteen years to come; that I was destined to become his stepson, his comrade, the sharer of all his wanderings; that we were to write books together; that we were to sail far-off seas; that we were to hew a home out of the tropic wilderness; and that at the end, while the whole world mourned, I was to lay his body at rest on a mountain peak in Oceana.”

Lloyd was 19 the first time he came to Saranac Lake in the fall of 1887. By then his stepfather had delivered his greatest hits to the world and become famous. How much had Stevenson’s new situation (wife and stepson) contributed to his success, if at all? Some writers, trying to sound original, argue that Stevenson’s unusual marriage was catastrophic to his career, which somehow would have been better without “her” and that brat kid dragging him down. Most scholars agree that without Lloyd, there is no “Treasure Island” and without that, then no endless stream of spin-offs to the present day, like Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean.” In simple fact, the team of Lloyd and Louis would be a gift to English literature, and the magic would begin at Braemar, in Scotland, in September of 1881. The weather had been unusually wet that summer.

Lloyd said about his stepfather that “A more delightful playfellow never lived.” The happy pair had come to Braemar well equipped for forced indoor recreation. While passing the previous winter in the Swiss Alps, Lloyd had come into possession of a toy theater — “a superb affair costing upwards of twenty pounds that had been given me on the death of the poor lad who had whiled away his dying hours with it at the Belvedere,” a hotel in the health resort town of Davos. People with tuberculosis went there as a last hope, but for many, like Lloyd’s poor lad, it was too late. Saranac Lake was like that until the end of World War II.

Robert Louis Stevenson was an expert when it came to toy theater. He and cousin Bob had mastered the art in their boyhood, and this unexpected windfall of Lloyd’s had a revival effect on the author’s old hobby. “He painted scenery for my toy theatre,” wrote Lloyd, “and helped me to give performances and slide the actors in and out of their tin stands, as well as imitating galloping horses, or screaming screams for the heroine in distress. My mother, usually the sole audience, would laugh till she had to be patted on the back, while I held back the play with much impatience for her recovery.”

Watercolors were part of the survival kit for stuck-inside raining days at the Stevenson’s Braemar cottage, where today yet another RLS plaque is displayed over the front door. “And here,” said Lloyd, “one rainy morning, busy with a box of paints, I happened to be tinting the map of an island I had drawn. Stevenson came in as I was finishing it, and with his affectionate interest in everything I was doing, leaned over my shoulder, and was soon elaborating the map, and naming it. I shall never forget the thrill of Skeleton Island, Spy-Glass Hill … the pirates, the buried treasure, the man who had been marooned on the island. ‘Oh, for a story about it,’ I exclaimed, in a heaven of enchantment.” After writing some notes on Lloyd’s map, Louis took it with him and left Lloyd with “the feeling of disappointment I had at losing it. After all, it was my map!”

The next morning, “I was called up mysteriously to his bedroom (he always spent his mornings writing in bed). … I was told to sit down while my step-father took up some sheets of manuscript, and began to read aloud the first chapters of ‘Island.'” The finished product to this day bears these words on the title page:

TO

Lloyd Osbourne

An American Gentleman

In accordance with whose classic taste

The following narrative has been designed

It is now, in return for numerous delightful hours

And with the kindest wishes, dedicated

by his affectionate friend

THE AUTHOR

“Thus one of the greatest, the most universal of all romances came to be written and that I should have had a share in its inception had always been to me a source of inexpressible pleasure. Had it not been for me, and my childish box of paints, there would have been no such book as Treasure Island.”

— Lloyd Osbourne