William Ernest Henley was a rough, hard-driving poet and editor. (Provided image)

William Ernest Henley, British poet, critic and editor, was about a year older than his friend Robert Louis Stevenson. As a child Henley had contracted a tubercular disease that necessitated the partial amputation of a leg. After more surgery to save the other leg, Henley was recovering in the old Edinburgh Infirmary when Mr. Leslie Stephen, editor of Cornhill, dragged RLS there to meet him. That was in February of 1874. They were both in their mid-20s with similar aspirations and became great friends — that is until Stevenson was paying rent to Andrew Baker in Saranac Lake.

Seven years into their friendship, Henley received a letter at his London flat from RLS at a rented cottage in Braemar, Scotland. They were great pen pals, and Louis had news about a new project: “I am now on another lay for the moment, purely owing to Lloyd, this one; but I believe there’s more coin in it than in any amount of crawlers. Now see here. ‘Sea Cook or Treasure Island: A Story for Boys.’ If this don’t fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it began in the Benbow public house on the Devon Coast, that it’s all about a map and a treasure and a mutiny and a derelict ship and a current … and a Sea Cook with one leg, and a sea-song, with the chorus ‘Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Rum (at the third HO, you heave at the capstan bars) which is a real Buccaneer’s song, only known to the crew of the late Captain Flint (died of rum at Key West). … Two chapters are written and have been tried out on Lloyd with great success; the trouble is to work it off without oaths (But youth and the fond parent have to be considered). Buccaneers without oaths bricks without straw!”

As in the later “Kidnapped,” the main character in “Treasure Island” is not the narrator; he is the picaresque John Silver, the sea cook of high intelligence, equivocal character, minus a leg replaced with a crutch and a parrot borrowed from Robinson Crusoe. The individual within Stevenson’s orbit who had personality traits suitable for Silver was Henley himself. Wrote Louis, “It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in ‘Treasure Island.'” With his great red beard and tangled hair, he fit the role of a belligerent warrior. Word had spread fast around the British Isles after he had knocked down Oscar Wilde with his crutch.

Embittered with life and jealous of his friend’s success, Henley turned against Stevenson in March of 1888. Someone had put into his hands Scribner’s magazine of that month, containing Louis’ essay “Beggars and the Nixie,” by his wife, Mrs. Fanny Stevenson, her third published short story. Soon a letter arrived at Baker’s from Henley marked “Private and Confidential.” In it he accused Fanny of plagiarism. The charge was demonstrably false, but the damage was permanent. Louis replied: “My dear Henley, I write with indescribable difficulty; and if not with perfect temper, you are to remember how very rarely a husband is expected to receive accusations against his wife … it is hard to think that anyone and least of all my friend should have been so careless of dealing agony. … You will pardon me if I can find no form of signature.” The end. Until he died, Henley would be heard saying, “For me there were two Stevensons: the Stevenson who went to America in ’87, and the Stevenson who never came back.”

By 1894, Louis had relocated to tropical Samoa beneath the Southern Cross, and his days were numbered when he wrote about the writing of “Treasure Island” in a piece called “My First Book.” Henley was still back in London, still twisting his knife in his old friend’s back while Stevenson was thinking about him. “And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment; to take an admired friend of mine, to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin.”

Stevenson forgave Henley but could not forget. From his winter quarters in Saranac Lake, he confided to Charles Baxter, writing, “I have not changed my thoughts of him, not even, I believe, my heart. Last winter, my illness was largely the work of his persistent unkindness: I thought it was over; it begins again in this staggering attack; and the bottom of my thoughts is that we shall be better apart.” Their break made 19th century literary news.

So Henley had a dark side, and he had a daughter, too, who died tragically young. His friend J.M. Barrie would turn her into Wendy in “Peter Pan.” W.E. Henley would outlive RLS considerably, but he would never come close to achieving recognition on the scale his former fellow playwright would experience, and it seemed to condition his thinking all the way to the grave. Of all the people who might have shined a light on the memory of William Ernest Henley, fate chose a homegrown terrorist. When Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was undergoing execution by lethal injection in 2001, he chose Henley’s most famous and longest poem, “Invictus,” to recite word by word for his last words, the very last of which being:

“It matters not how

straight the gate, how

charged with punishments

the scroll,

“I am the master of my fate

“I am the captain of my soul.”

So much for Henley. But there was another lesser known soul with a stake in the Sea Cook — Captain Soutar.