When Robert Louis Stevenson was a boy, a man came to see his father, Thomas, in their home at 17 Heriot Row, New Town, Edinburgh, Scotland. R.M. Ballantyne was an author of books for boys and he was popular throughout the empire. Ballantyne was after authentic background information about lighthouses and Thomas Stevenson was an ideal source since he built them for a living. He was so good at it that a grateful nation provided a space for him to look down at them from inside the National Portrait Gallery. Louis got a chance to converse with this guest whose personality reinforced the boy’s desire to write books, too, something he had willed from the age of six, much to the consternation of Thomas. In particular, Ballantyne’s hit adventure story, Coral Island, starring a bunch of boys stuck on a remote South Pacific atoll, may have been the source of an ongoing sub-conscious daydream featuring warm tropical islands of adventure, just the opposite of the boy’s reality of spending too much time at home, sick in bed, in a harsh, northern climate. Like Louis told his friend, Will Low, many years later when they were standing on the beach in Manasquan, New Jersey, “ever since I was a boy, the South Seas have laid a spell on me.”

In 1875, when RLS was 24, the spell was given a booster by another visitor to see his father, this time in his role as an inventor. J. Seed was a New Zealand government official and he liked to talk. He kept Louis up till 4 a.m., telling him stories from Oceania and giving him advice, advice that Louis would later pass on to his rich American friends in Boston, the Fairchilds:

“He told me that I had no business to stay in Europe; that I should find all I cared for and all that was good for me in the Navigator Islands (a previous name for Samoa) … beautiful places, green forever; perfect shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their hair; and nothing to do, but study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they fall. Navigator’s Island is the place; absolute balm for the weary.”

Five years later, in 1880, the dream floated up again in San Francisco, California, when he met and befriended Charles Warren Stoddard, “Charley,” an American travel writer, poet and musician. Stoddard gave Louis a copy of his latest book, “Summer Cruising in the South Seas,” and lent him his copies of “Moby Dick” and “Typee” by Melville. It was from Stoddard that Louis learned about the Catholic priest called Father Damien and about the personal sacrifice he was making to try to give life meaning to the walking dead inside the leper prison on the island of Molokai, in the Hawaiian Group. Stoddard and the Stevensons kept in touch. A long, handwritten letter to Stoddard from the widow of RLS is one of the curiosities in the Saranac Lake collection, believed to be the “world’s finest collection of Stevenson lore.”

The last time it happened was in 1887, in Saranac Lake. This time it was Sam McClure, a New York City businessman who stirred things up with talk of warm, tropical, colorful places. This time Stevenson would graduate from dreaming to actually doing it. He was enabled to do this by the much improved conditions in his life that had beset him while he was living with the Baker family on present day Stevenson Lane. In later years, McClure always enjoyed recalling those winter evenings he spent talking with RLS in front of the famous fireplace, e.g.:

“Then he (RLS) explained to me that he was always better at sea than anywhere else, and he wanted to fit up a yacht and take long cruises and make his home at sea for a while. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s easy. If you get a yacht and take long sea voyages … I will pay all the expenses of the yacht.’ … I think the South Seas must have been mentioned that evening for I remember that after I returned to New York. I sent him a number of books about the South Seas including a South Pacific directory. The next time I came to Saranac, we actually planned out the South Pacific cruise, talking until late into the night. That was one of the most extraordinary evenings of my life. Mr. Stevenson walked up and down that room with the fireplace, or stopped occasionally to lean his elbow on the mantelpiece and we made the most splendid plans and arrangements … We planned the yacht and the provisioning of the yacht–and a good deal that man could never accomplish, but it was all real that night. And out of that talk came the South Seas cruise.”

Now jump ahead about two years to Dec. 7, 1889, the day the trading schooner Equator, Capt. Reid, could be seen carefully making its way between coral formations into Apia Harbor, island of Upolu, Western Samoa. She carried five paying passengers, meaning Robert Louis Stevenson and three members of his family, plus Ah Foo, Chinese cook and handyman (very handy–in a violent squall, Ah Foo saved everyone by his quick action to cut loose a sail in the water pulling her down). Apia was the last port of call for the Equator and she would soon be Honolulu-bound, possibly never knowing that the strange people she just dropped off would immortalize her name and image, even on stamps.

Now that Stevenson was finally there, where J. Seed had told him to go, so long ago, he didn’t have much of a plan except to stay put about a month until the next steamer came bound for Sydney, Australia and then points way beyond until they were all back again in the U.K. In the meantime, Louis could gather more materials for his prose epic project. That was the plan, believing their adventures in Oceania were coming to an end.

Before their first day ashore came to an end, Stevenson had met two men who would play important roles in getting him squared away in Samoa, namely, the Rev. Mr. Clarke and Harry Moors.

Rev. Clarke of the London Missionary Society was the first to greet the new arrivals whom he mistook at first for a traveling group of entertainers, only because they were dressed like gypsies with musical instruments like a ukulele, a guitar and an accordion. These were irreplaceable and could have been too tempting to curious crew members if left aboard the schooner. RLS liked to carry a concealed instrument in his pocket, his silver penny whistle. It too, is in the Saranac Lake collection.

American born Harry J. Moors from Michigan could add his name to the list of people who would tell you “to know RLS, is to write about him.” His book, “With Stevenson in Samoa” (1910), is rich in details but there are mistakes like where he says that Sam McClure went to San Francisco to make the author an offer for his next book, something that actually happened here in Saranac Lake. Harry Moors would become Stevenson’s most important connection in this strange new, mountainous island, about the size of Staten Island. One of the first things Harry says about Stevenson in his book has a familiar ring: “He was not a handsome man and yet there was something irresistibly attractive about him. The genius that was in him seemed to shine out in his face … We introduced ourselves and became friendly at once.”

Together, Rev. Clarke and Harry Moors found a nice cottage for the Stevenson expedition to rent until the next ship for Sydney arrived. With plenty of time to kill, Louis accepted an invitation from Clarke to make a boat trip down the coast to Malua, a village where the London Mission ran a training college for native students. Without warning, the head of the school, Rev. J.E. Newell, introduced his very thin guest to the student body with a strange new name — “Tusitala,” the “Teller-of-Tales,” a name with staying power.