Four months had passed since the Stevenson expedition came ashore on Oahu, bringing closure to their difficult voyage from Tahiti. Winds of change were blowing through the comfortable house they were using on their beautiful, unspoiled Waikiki Beach as the Arcadian lifestyle in which they excelled entered transition. The author’s mother, Margaret, had news that her sister was ill, so in May she departed on the Oceanic Line steamship Umatilla to start the long haul back to Scotland. Also on board was the young Hawaiian Princess Victoria Kaiulani, traveling with the wife of the British Consul in Hawaii. Their purpose was to give the heiress-apparent to the Hawaiian throne an English education and exposure to the far more complicated existence of human beings far beyond the horizon of her Islands home. The second wave of European and American colonists were already in Hawaii and it is suspected that this education was conditioned with brain-washing to facilitate the culture conquest which, in the case of Hawaii, began with Captain James Cook in 1778.

To a man like Robert Louis Stevenson, this was an unfortunate situation. It might have embarrassed him, too, as a subject of Queen Victoria’s still expanding British Empire. RLS was too much of a thinker to ever believe that might makes right as he watched the Americans do it in Hawaii and then watched the British do it to his final home in Samoa. Just like he once spontaneously said of himself before Andrew Baker’s fireplace in Saranac Lake, while re-reading Don Quixote by Cervantes — “That’s what I am — just another Don Quixote” — just like that, Louis became a defender and sponsor for the weak and exploited people of British Samoa. Behind glass at Baker’s on Stevenson Lane is an example of this behavior in the form of an official court document providing bail for a Samoan chief for $100, payable to the Treasury of the Samoan Government, dated July 7, 1894. It is signed by RLS and his cousin, Graham Balfour, as witness.

This ongoing eyewitness to history experience for Stevenson in the tropical paradise he had so longed to see, seemed to put his writing on a new tack. He was thinking big and the still largely unknown islands and their inhabitants throughout Oceania would be his material. He was thinking more like an anthropologist now and he called his new project a “prose epic” to consider “the unjust but inevitable extinction of the Polynesian Islanders.” Of his subject matter, he said, “At least nobody has had such stuff; such wild stories, such beautiful scenes, such singular intimacies, such manners and traditions, so incredible a mixture of the beautiful and horrible, the savage and the civilized.” The finished product if he lived long enough to finish it, would comprise the totality of his Pacific writings, meaning those yet to be.

To Stevenson’s practical minded wife, Fanny, this wasn’t good and she fretted about it to their mutual friend, Sidney Colvin: “I am very much exercised by one thing. Louis has the most enchanting material that anyone ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid that he is going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch Stevenson head, that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing, comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different peoples, the object being to settle the question as to whether they are of common Malay origin or not. Also to compare the Protestant and Catholic Missions, etc. In fact, to bring to the front all the prejudices, and all the mistakes and all the ignorance concerning the subject that he can get together; and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves. And I believe there is no one living, who has got so near to them, or who understands them as he does…Louis says it is a stern sense of duty that is at the bottom of it, which is more alarming than anything else…I am going to ask you to throw the weight of your influence as heavily as possible in the scales with me…”

Stevenson’s dubious sense of duty won the day and he would go on to write 39 articles for the New York World, exploring his new theme.

They later morphed into two books: “In the South Seas” and “A Footnote to History–Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa.” For what they are, they are good and people still read them for the quality of the writing and the historical window they provide.

It was in the spring of 1889, after several months of beach living in Waikiki, when Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson went shopping for their next temporary home at sea, one that could take them to the remotest places to find indigenous populations not yet contaminated by the white man, not the kind of thing normal people did! That’s how they heard about the Morning Star, a Catholic missionary auxiliary barkentine that pedaled its product on native people in Micronesia.

This scattered group of mostly atolls lay north of the equator and west of the Date Line and came with names that would make bloody news in the not-so-distant future — Gilberts, Carolines, Marshalls, Marianas, Makin, Tarawa, Pelelieu, etc. With the exception of Melanesia, Micronesia promised the best that pre-literate society had to offer in these least accessible of South Seas islands.

Unfortunately, passage on the Morning Star came with rules that would not appeal to the members of Stevenson’s quasi-scientific expedition; things like no smoking, no drinking, no gambling, no swearing, no fun of any kind plus mandatory attendance at scheduled religious exercises.

It was a dim prospect for the voyagers-to-be, namely, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson; also Joe Strong, the artist and husband of Belle, Stevenson’s stepdaughter. Then there was Belle’s younger brother, Lloyd Osbourne, to whom Treasure Island is dedicated and last but not least, Ah Fu, the Chinese cook and all around handyman. Belle would not be going on account of her son, Austin, like she said in her book, “This Life I’ve Loved”: “When they first spoke of taking another cruise, there must have been some mention of my going with them, for I remember declaring that I would not leave Austin in a boarding school under any circumstances…”

Then came good news out of the blue. Lloyd Osbourne described it many years later in his preface to “The Ebb Tide,” one of three novels he co-authored with his stepfather: “One noonday R.L.S. came driving in from Honolulu, his horse in a lather, and it needed but a single look at his face to see that he was wildly excited. ‘Have chartered a schooner!’ he shouted out before he even jumped down … ‘The Equator, 62 tons, and due back from San Francisco in a month to pick us up for the Gilbert Islands. Finest little craft you ever saw in your life, and I have the right to take her anywhere at so much a day!’ … Champagne was opened and we drank to the Equator in foaming bumpers … ‘And we can smoke on that blessed ship’ cried Stevenson with uplifted glass. ‘And drink!’ cried another. ‘Hurrah for the Equator!’ ‘And swear!’ … then someone threw open the blinds on the seaward side, we looked out on one of the most inspiriting sights I have ever seen in my life — the Equator herself under a towering spread of canvas, and as close in as her captain dared to put her, parting the blue water in flashes of spray on the way to San Francisco. We were still watching when she broke out her ensign, and dipped it to us in farewell. Our ship!”