“My dear Colvin … I am outright ashamed of my news; which is that we are not coming home for another year. I cannot but hope it may continue the vast improvement of my health … we have all a taste for this wandering and dangerous life; my mother I send home to my relief, as this part of our cruise will be rather difficult in places.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, Honolulu, April 2, 1889

It had been a year to the week since the famous tenant of Andrew Baker, meaning Robert Louis Stevenson, made his way to the new Chateauguay Railroad station in Saranac Lake to go to New York City for a spell with the intention of returning here for some summertime camping in the pine-scented Adirondack wilderness–with professional guides, of course. That was the plan at the time. Traveling with the invalid author from Scotland on this escapade were his mother and their portable servant, Valentine Roch.

There are sayings about the best laid plans, but sometimes they change because better ones come along. What would you do if you had to make a choice between one, camping out in the great north woods for at least a month or two, going cross-country to San Francisco to hop aboard a slick, brand new luxury schooner-yacht with an experienced skipper and crew only to sail into the sunset without a schedule? If you don’t like to gamble, you’ll probably pick number one. When RLS was given the choice in Manasquan, New Jersey, he didn’t have to think about it. “Why go, of course,” said he, meaning number two.

Stevenson’s choice would have surprised no one who knew him. They already knew that their talented friend would someday be ranked among the greatest risk-takers of all time. Like he told Henry James in a letter from Manasquan at the very beginning of this grand new adventure: “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.”

Another saying has it that when the ’94 Casco, Capt. Otis, cast off her towline and spread all sail, with RLS and his family aboard, that she sailed into literary legend, which seems to be true. As the vehicle of Stevenson’s first great ocean experience under sail, the cruise of the Casco is to the worldwide community of Stevenson lovers, what “The Voyage of the Beagle” and Darwin is to naturalists. For one thing, Louis approached his Pacific material more like an anthropologist than a story-teller. The cruise of the Casco (June 1888 to January 1889) would furnish Louis with material for Parts I and II of “In the South Seas,” his first book of Pacific origin.

As for the Casco, her first and legendary voyage with Tusitala-to-be aboard, turned out to be the high point of her career from which there is no way but down. “The Fate of the Casco” by Francis Dickie, 1920, was not very pretty. “Sometimes she changed trade with surprising chances. So it was with the Casco–now a glittering pleasure yacht, whim of an old millionaire, now stripped of gaudy trappings and bent in the grim will of seal hunter and opium trader … because of her swiftness, quickness and ease of handling at the wheel, to be the best … in the extinction of the pelagic seal.” It gets worse. “Laden with illicit Oriental cargo and with Chinese immigrants” the Casco was being pursued by revenue cutters … “later it developed that while the revenue men were still far astern, the crew had weighted sixty Chinamen and dumped them overboard along with the opium.”

There’s more, but to get back to RLS, we know from his own words that he never felt better in his whole life since starting this voyage. His optimism had remained high even after another visit from “Bloody Jack” (his hemorrhagic lungs) in Tahiti. It was the first time since leaving England and nearly fatal according to his French doctor in Papeete. Having finally reached Honolulu, their last port of call, the members of the Stevenson expedition plus Ah Foo, the new Chinese cook, quickly adapted to beachcomber life on Waikiki Beach for the next five months, giving Stevenson plenty of space to finish “The Master of Ballantrae,” the novel he began in Saranac Lake.

When it was conceived the cruise of the Casco had been intended to satisfy Stevenson’s Pacific Ocean wanderlust which had been aroused in Saranac Lake. Returning to England had always been the plan but now that plan began to unravel, too. It had a lot to do with the three words “My good health” in a letter to Lady Taylor, a former neighbor in Bournemouth, England. Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, expanded on this theme later in life in his preface to “The Ebb Tide,” one of three novels he co-authored with RLS:

“The seven months’ cruise just concluded had had a marvelous effect on R.L.S. He had become almost well; could ride, take long walks, dine out, and in general lead the life of a man in ordinary health … his eyes, always his most salient feature and always brilliant, had no longer that strange fire of disease; he walked with a firm light step; and though to others, he must have appeared thin and fragile, to us the transformation in him was astounding.”

No one could have appreciated this more than the invalid himself which might explain his motive when he wrote that letter to Colvin in April 1889, “which is that we are not coming home for another year. I cannot but hope it may continue the vast improvement in my health … believe me, Colvin, when I look forward to this absence of another year, my conscience sinks at thought of the Monument; but I think you will pardon me if you consider how much this tropical weather mends my health. Remember me as I was at home, and think of me sea bathing and walking about, as jolly as a sand boy…it seems it would be madness to come home now … and perhaps fall sick again by autumn.”

Stevenson never loved his native Scotland and its “Hills of Home” more than when he was half a world away from it and down under, too. Literary experts say that his homesickness saturates his unfinished novels, Weir of Hermiston and St. Ives. Of course he wanted to go back there, but …

Tireless scholars claim to have discovered a possible pattern of behavior here because there were at least three occasions when Louis began a trip home only to abort each time. Sydney, Australia, was the closest he ever got. They look to the medical science branch of psychosomatics to explain this failure, caused in theory by complicated interrelationships between thinking or emotions and the body and especially with the relation of psychic conflicts to somatic symptomatology. Whatever that means, it could mean that Louis was afraid to go home; moreover, he didn’t know it yet, but when the trading schooner Equator, Capt. Reid, delivered him to their last port of call, Apin Harbor, Island of Upolu, Western Samoa, he had found a new home. “Here are no trains, only men pacing barefoot. No carts or carriages; at worst the rattle of a horse’s shoes among the rocks.” — RLS.