From the letters of Mrs. Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson, better known as “Maggie,” mother of Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous invalid author from Scotland who gave us “Treasure Island,” aboard the yacht Casco, Captain Otis, out of San Francisco:

July 1, 1888–“This is our fourth day at sea, and all goes well, I am thankful to say.”

July 3– “Sunday was cloudy and squally … We are nearing the tropics, and are beginning to feel it.”

July 15– “For a day or two we were in the doldrums … However, Captain Otis hopes that we may reach the Marquesas some day this week … We are reading Gibbons’ Decline and Fall and are now in the second volume. Most of it I have read aloud.”

Captain Albert Otis was chosen by Dr. Henry Merritt, owner of the Casco, to command his brand-new luxury schooner yacht on this, its first real ocean voyage. The Casco, named after Maine’s Casco Bay, was 94 feet overall, two masted and came with cabin and passenger spaces decked out in velvet with a brass accent, all reflected in rows of mirrors plus tasseled cushions and pillows, consistent with late Victorian taste and probably appreciated by Maggie.

When sizing up the members of the Stevenson expedition as a boat chartering party, the doctor was skeptical. They were an odd-looking assembly–three women, one old, and two men, one an emaciated invalid. Their collective inexperience was undeniable, which explains Dr. Merritt’s insistence on choosing the skipper, and he had to pressure Capt. Otis to do it. Otis was a hard-boiled seafarer who disliked what he called “fashionable yacht-sailing” and refused the berth; however, when he got wind of the Casco’s destination on this cruise, the South Seas, he changed his tune. Otis had only once gotten a glimpse of the islands in his line of business and had been intrigued; now they beckoned him and he decided to go there even if it meant doing it with a strange bunch of people.

July 20–“I cannot tell you how thrilling it was to hear Louis’s call of ‘Land!’ at five o’clock this morning. We fairly tumbled into our dressing gowns, and rushed on deck. We could see two islands, Hua-houna, which has no good anchorage, and Nuka-hiva, our destination. It was with trembling interest that we watched the lofty mountains, no more than a grey haze at first, gradually growing distinct as we drew nearer and nearer, till at last the green masses of foliage, the beach and the curving bay, came fully into sight. ‘An unknown land, to us at least; what shall we meet with?’ was I believe the unspoken question in all our minds.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, the adventurous but sickly leader of this questionable enterprise, had chosen the Marquesas to be his first landfall because of the natives’ reputation as “the most beastly population in the South Seas” as he put it in a letter to Sidney Colvin. The Marquesas Islanders had long lived up to that reputation. They promoted and excelled at intertribal warfare, the kind in which POWs are ritually eaten by the victors. Word had long ago gone out that they liked to eat ship-wrecked sailors, too, which is why the latter avoided them like the plague, preferring to try for more distant shores. A classic example is the survivors from the whaling ship Essex, broadsided and sunk by a justifiably enraged sperm whale, the true-life incident exploited by Herman Melville to give us Moby Dick. Captain Bligh of H.M.S. Bounty advised his little castaway crew in their jolly boat, to forget about the Marquesas, too. For all their ferocity, the Marquesans were singled out among South Seas Islanders for physical beauty. They are Polynesian with cousins in Hawaii, Tahiti, Samoa and New Zealand.

“In port at last!” continues Maggie. “We are in anchorage off the island of Nuka-hiva.” The Marquesas comprise two volcanic island groups in the eastern most part of Oceania, 740 miles NE of Tahiti. They were named to honor the Marquis de Mendoza, viceroy of Peru, by the explorer Mendano in 1595. The whole group was grabbed by France in 1842. Nuka-hiva was and still is the home of the governor’s residence.

By 1888, christianity and French intervention had supposedly modified the less attractive behavior of the indigenous population, among whom cannibalism was not the only vice, according to western beliefs. However, there are living historians who hold onto the opinion that it was only the intimidating presence of a French Man of War sharing the harbor with the Casco that, in all probability, prevented the Stevenson expedition, including captain and crew, from disappearing into thin air by digestion, never to be heard from again.

“This, at last, is my beau–ideal!” Maggie tells Jane. “The climate is simply perfect, much more delightful than I could have believed possible so near the Equator … the rainy season is just over, and everything is looking new-made and beautiful–how beautified it is hard to make you realize … even the captain, who was inclined to think the whole expedition quixotic, is charmed. We have an awning over the deck which shades us from the sun, and we spend our whole time when not on shore in the cockpit. At last I have open-air life enough to satisfy even me!”

The Casco remained at anchor in Nuka-hiva’s turquoise harbor for a month. A resident German cotton grower named Regler became the go-to guy for basic needs like food — in this case, coconut milk and chickens. Naturally, Maggie’s son, the author, would be writing extensively about the strange, new encounters they would soon be making among fellow homo sapiens in Oceania, the kind only seen in movies now. His book “In the South Seas” is crammed with Stevensonian observations, e.g. “The great majority of Polynesians are excellently mannered; but the Marquesan stands apart, annoying and attractive, wild, shy, and refined. If you make him a present, he effects to forget it and it must be offered him again at his going, a pretty formality I have found nowhere else.”

If Dr. Merritt, owner of the Casco, ever got around to reading “In the South Seas,” his jaw might have dropped occasionally, like when reading about the author’s guided tours of his expensive toy: “To begin with, I was the showman of the Casco,” writes RLS. “She, her fine lines, tall spars and snowy decks, the crimson fitting of the saloon, and the white, the gilt and the repeating mirrors of the cabin, brought us hundreds of visitors. The men fathomed out her dimensions with their arms as their fathers fathomed out the ships of Cook; The women declared the cabins more lovely than a church … and I have seen one lady strip up her dress and with cries of wonder and delight, rub herself bare-breached upon the velvet cushions … Biscuit, jam and syrup was the entertainment.”

Maggie mentioned one of the showman’s tours, to Jane: “Most of them were distinctly good-looking but there was one with a very strange, unpleasant face, and an immense mouth that at once suggested cannibalism to us all.” Lloyd Osbourne’s typewriter, the one he used in Saranac Lake, held a particular fascination among the tattooed crowd being led through the boat by “Le Ona,” the nickname the crowd applied to RLS, presuming he was the “owner.” Maggie says, “They followed him in Indian file, making strange sounds of satisfaction and pleasure all the time.”

Not surprisingly, Maggie adapted well to island life quickly. Her letters always include details of her culture assimilation. Mixing with the natives became routine, then dressing like them and learning how to cook from them. “It is a strange, irresponsible, half savage life,” Maggie confesses, “and I wonder if we shall be able to return to civilized habits again.”

The inevitable day came, Sept. 4, 1888, when the Casco weighed anchor to go in search of new adventure beneath the Southern Cross. On such occasions, “Le Ona” and his wife, Fanny, were seen each sporting a symbol of their “ona-ship,” that being a small shiny object hung around their necks by a long tartan ribbon. Today these ornaments can be seen behind glass at Baker’s on Stevenson Lane. The age-colored card placed next to them says:

Boats whistles–used by RLS and his wife in the South Seas–presented by Isobel Field (“Belle”–author of “This Life I’ve Loved.”)