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The Sea Cook, part IV

Thomas Stevenson, famous lighthouse builder and father of Robert Louis Stevenson, liked dogs. He was religious in a Presbyterian sense but believed, contrary to church doctrine, that dogs had souls, too, and when he made his rounds about town in Edinburgh, Scotland, he would fill his pockets with doggie treats to pass out to deserving souls along the way.

He also carried something else with him much of the time, and in 1917 this thing came to Saranac Lake to join the growing collection of RLS memorabilia at the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage.

In 1993, Ian Scott from Scotland visited the cottage and noticed this thing while he was looking around. Scott notified a friend about it, A.A. McMillan, of the British Geological Survey, Scotland and Northern England Group. McMillan was then revising an esoteric book entitled “Building Stones of Edinburgh,” first published by the Edinburgh Geological Society in 1987. What his friend had discovered at Baker’s was Thomas Stevenson’s personal engineer’s pocketbook and manual. Between its weathered leather cover is a section for the handwritten notes of the engineer himself, and another section is filled with technical and mathematical tables for his computations. To someone like McMillan, this was like striking gold. He wrote to Ian Scott’s brother-in-law, Thomas Dosch, of Orchard Park, New York, indicating, “I should be very interested to read Stevenson’s manual and wonder if you could obtain permission to make a photocopy of it.”

And so it was. In cooperation with the Stevenson Society of America, Dosch made 288 photos for McMillan, plus a set for the Stevenson Society and another for the National Library of Scotland, which isn’t far from the National Portrait Gallery, where hangs a rather large painting of Thomas Stevenson. The “Lighthouse Stevensons” are a cherished part of Scotland’s national heritage, but one question remains unanswered. Did Thomas Stevenson have his “Adcock’s Engineer’s Pocket Book” with him at Braemar in September 1881, when he was helping his not-yet-famous son with details in the writing of “Treasure Island,” which RLS was still calling “The Sea Cook?”

Thomas was taken with the story as it developed day to day. “My father caught fire at once with all the romance and childishness of his original nature,” wrote RLS in his essay, “My First Book.” “His own stories, that every night of his life he put himself to sleep with, dealt perpetually with ships, roadside inns, robbers, old sailors, and commercial travelers before the era of steam. He never finished one of these romances: the lucky man did not require to! But in ‘Treasure Island’ he recognized something kindred to his own imagination; it was his kind of picturesque; and he not only heard with delight the daily chapter, but set himself actively to collaborate.”

Besides providing the crucial apple barrel scene from his own youthful experience, Thomas also came up with the name Walrus for Flint’s old ship, and when it came to Billy Bones’s sea-chest, “he must have passed the better part of a day preparing, on the back of a legal envelope, an inventory of its contents, which I exactly followed.” Said contents included “a quadrant, a tin cannikin, several sticks of tobacco, two braces of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an old Spanish watch and some other trinkets … a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six curious West Indian shells … an old boat-cloak, whitened with sea salt … a bundle tied up in oilcloth and looking like papers, and a canvas bag, that gave forth, at a touch, the jingle of gold.”

Picturing the daily routine would have RLS fireside, in the mornings, writing another chapter of “The Sea Cook,” and “after lunch I read aloud my morning’s work to the family.” Sometimes company came by, and they heard it, too. One day, Dr. Alexander Japp showed up on a mission of business and pleasure. He already knew Louis, and he also was friends with James Henderson, the editor of Young Folks magazine, an English boys’ paper. Henderson was looking for fresh talent, so Japp persuaded Louis to make that afternoon’s reading, the whole tale from its start at the Admiral Benbow Inn to the current state of the plot.

Japp liked it and showed the manuscript to Henderson, who commissioned the work to appear in serial form beginning Oct. 1, 1881. The world can be thankful to Henderson for choosing “Treasure Island” as the obvious title for Stevenson’s first adventure novel — no more “Sea Cook.” “Treasure Island” first appeared on the stands as a story written by Captain George North, a pseudonym for the usual reasons. Henderson began running the serial when it was less than half-finished and might have had second thoughts had he known about his client’s reputation for incomplete projects that seem to just fizzle away. And it happened again. As Louis put it:

“Fifteen days I stuck to it and turned out fifteen chapters; and then, in the early paragraphs of the sixteenth, ignominiously lost hold. My mouth was empty; there was not one more word of ‘Island.'” Meanwhile, the proofs of the first chapters were arriving for corrections.

Something else was happening, called winter. It was time for RLS to flee his homeland again to save his life. He was about to spend his second winter at Davos, high up in the Swiss Alps. The invalid left a record of his thoughts on the way there. He was “a good deal pleased with what I had done and more appalled than I can depict to you in words at what remained for me to do. I was thirty-one; I was head of a family; I had lost my health; I had never yet paid my way … was this to be another and last fiasco? I was very close on despair; but I shut my mouth hard, and during the journey to Davos, where I was to pass the winter, had the resolution to think of other things.”

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