Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1082 page)

Nevertheless the vessel was chartered and all preparations were put in hand. The owner, Dr. Merritt, an eccentric Californian millionaire, was at first most backward about thQ whole affair, and, without having < seen him, displayed the greatest distrust of Stevenson. The latter was very unwell, and getting rapidly worse, for San Francisco disagreed with him. Matters hung fire, but at last his wife discovered that Dr. Merritt wanted to meet him. An interview took place and all difficulties vanished. “ 1 ‘II go ahead now with the yacht,” said the doctor: “I ‘d read things in the papers about Stevenson, and thought he was a kind of crank; but he’s a plain, sensible man that knows what he’s talking about just as well as I do.”

If any fears had existed in his mind about the solvency of his lessee they were unfounded. Under the terms of his father’s marriage settlement Stevenson had six months before received a sum of ^3000, and it was in the first instance upon the strength of this that he planned the voyage. As he wrote to Mr. Baxter, “If this business fails to set me up, well, £2000 is gone, and I know I can’t get better.” On the other hand, if it restored his health, he had received a most liberal offer from Messrs. M’Clure for a series of letters describing his experiences in the Pacific.

Along with the yacht, at the owner’s request, they gladly engaged his skipper, Captain Otis, who knew the Casco well, and the cook, a Chinaman, who passed himself off as a Japanese. The former choice they had no reason to regret, for the captain showed himself a bold and skilful seaman, who, beginning the voyage with a supreme contempt for his new employers, ended it as an intimate and valued friend, whose portrait for the rest may be found in the pages of The Wrecker. A crew of four deck-hands, “three Swedes and the inevitable Finn,” was engaged by the captain, and four “sea-lawyers” they proved to be; a reporter, trying to ship himself as a hand, was ejected, and a passage was with great difficulty refused to a Seventh- Day Adventist, who afterwards with a crew of his fellow-believers travelled over the whole of the South Seas.

The destination of the Casco was next to be settled. Stevenson himself was anxious to begin with a long voyage, “counting,” says his wife, “on the warm sea air as the strongest factor in his cure, if cure it was to be. If, on the other hand, it was to be death, he wished it to be so-far away from land that burial at sea should be certain. With this in view, the Galapagos and Marquesas were at the right distance. If he arrived alive at either of these places, then he must have recovered a certain amount of health, and would be able to go further to any place he chose. It turned out that he really knew a great deal about the islands. Before we started, he told me a lot about them all, their appearance, the names of places, habits of the natives, and other details. On visiting them I got no further general knowledge than Louis had already given me. He now preferred the Galapagos, but when he told me that we must pass through a belt of calms where we might knock about in the heat of the tropics for weeks, perhaps for months, before we could make land, and that the islands were barren of vegetation, I insisted on the Marquesas. So to the Marquesas we went.”

In the meantime they were living at the Occidental Hotel in San Francisco. Virgil Williams was now dead, but Mrs. Williams was indefatigable in their service, and other friends gathered round them, among whom Stevenson was especially drawn to Dr. George Chis- more, alike for his Scotch blood, his love of literature, and the force and tenderness of his character. But as he himself had known trouble in this city, here least of all was he likely to disregard the misfortunes of others. An Australian journalist seven years afterwards wrote to the Times: —

“Some years ago I lay ill in San Francisco, an obscure journalist, quite friendless. Stevenson, who knew me slightly, came to my bedside and said,’ I suppose you are like all of us, you don’t keep your money. Now, if a little loan, as between one man of letters and another — eh?’

“This to a lad writing rubbish for a vulgar sheet in California.”

At last, on June 26th, the party took up their quarters on the Casco, and at the dawn of the 28th she was towed outside the Golden Gate, and headed for the south across the long swell of the Pacific.

So with his household he sailed away beyond the sunset, and America, like Europe, was to see him no more.

CHAPTER XIII

SOUTH SEA CRUISES — THE EASTERN PACIFIC, JUNE, l888 — JUNE, 1889

“This climate; these voyagings; these landfalls at dawn; new Wands peeking from the morning bank; new forested harbours; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests of gentle natives — the whole tale of my life b better to me than any poem.”

Letters, ii. 160.

For nearly three years to come Stevenson wandered up and down the face of the Pacific, spending most of his time in the Hawaiian Islands and the Gilberts, in Tahiti, and in Samoa, his future home; during this period he visited, however cursorily, almost every group of importance in the Eastern and Central Pacific.

The delight these experiences kindled for him can never be expressed, since, apart from one or two phrases in his letters, he has failed to convey any image of it himself- It is hardly too much to say that nobody else in the world would have derived such keen or such varied enjoyment from cruising through these islands, so wild, so beautiful — among their inhabitants so attractive, so remote from experience — in these waters, so fascinating and so dangerous. The very romance that hangs about the South Seas is fatal to any attempt to sustain, among the mazes of detail and necessary explanation, the charm suggested by their name. Stevenson himself set out to write an account of his wanderings and adventures among the islands it had for years been the dream of his life to see, but as soon as he essayed the task, he was overwhelmed with a mass of legend and history and anthropology. It is hard for people at their own firesides to realise the differences between the islands visited in one cruise in the same ocean. Perhaps some vague and general conception of the diversity of Stevenson’s experiences might be formed by imagining a rapid visit to the islands of Sardinia, Sicily, Majorca, and Tenerife, a fresh departure for Jersey and the lies d’Or, ending with a passing glimpse at the West indies.

The point now to be considered is not, however, the customs and character of the natives whom Stevenson encountered, but rather how he was affected and influenced by what he saw, the characteristics which were called out in him during the course of his travel, and the impressions which he himself produced. His chapters In the South Seas have now been collected and published, and from them I shall only quote one or two of the most striking passages, relying rather on his original rough journal at the time, which naturally strikes a more personal note and deals to a greater extent with his individual experience.

The first point, as we have seen, was the Marquesas, a group of high1 islands of extreme beauty, occupied by the French and but seldom visited by travellers, 1 Islands in the Pacific are usually divided into “ high “ and “ low the former being, generally speaking, islands of volcanic origin, often rising several thousand feet above the sea, densely wooded and beau

tiful in the extreme. These frequently have a barrier reef of coral, protecting what would otherwise be an ironbound coast, but their main structure is igneous rock. “Low” islands arc atolls or mere remote from any other group and out of the track of ships and steamers. For these the Casco now steered a course of three thousand miles across the open sea. Fortunately the main object of the cruise seemed likely to be gained without delay; the warmer climate and the sea air suited Stevenson at once, and he grew stronger day by day. The voyage was pleasant but without event other than the passing squalls, and is thus recorded in his diary: —

“Since on the fifth day we were left ignominiously behind by a full-rigged English ship, our quondam comrade, bound round the Horn, we have not spied a sail, nor a land bird, nor a shred of seaweed. In impudent isolation, the toy-schooner has ploughed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help: now to the sound of slatting sails and stamping sheet-blocks, staggering in the turmoil of that business falsely called a calm, now, in the assault of squalls, burying her lee- rail in the sea. To the limit of the north-east trades we carried some attendant pilot birds, silent, brown-suited, quakerish fellows, infinitely graceful on the wing; dropping at times in comfortable sheltered hollows of the swell; running awhile in the snowy footmarks on the water before they rise again in flight. Scarce had these dropped us, ere the Boatswains took their place, birds of an ungainly shape, but beautiful against the heavens in their white plumage. Late upon a starry banks built by the coral insect, never more than twenty feet above water, and owing any beauty they possess to the sea, the sun, and the palm-tree. The Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, and the Hawaiian group are high islands; the Paumotus, the Gilberts, and the Marshalls are low. night, as they fly invisible overhead, the strange voices of these co-voyagers fall about us strangely. Flying- fish, a skimming silver rain on the blue sea; a turtle fast asleep in the early morning sunshine; the Southern Cross hung thwart in the fore-rigging like the frame of a wrecked kite — the pole star and the familiar Plough dropping ever lower in the wake: these build up thus far the history of our voyage. It is singular to come so far and to see so infinitely little.”

“July igtb. — The morning was hot, the wind steady, the sky filled with such clouds as, on a pleasant English day, might promise a cool rain. One of these had been visible for some time, a continental isle of sun and shadow, moving innocuously on the skyline far to windward; when upon a sudden this harmless-looking monster, seeming to smell a quarry, paused, hung awhile as if in stays, and breaking off five points,1 fell like an armed man upon the Casco. Next moment, the inhabitants of the cabin were piled one upon another, the sea was pouring into the cockpit and spouting in fountains through forgotten deadlights, and the steersman stood spinning the wheel for his life in a halo of tropical rain.

“I chronicle this squall, first, for the singularity and apparent malignancy of its behaviour, as though it had been sent express to cruise after the Casco; and, second, because of the nonsense people write upon the climate of these seas. Every day for a week or so, in defiance of authorities, we have had from three to four squalls; and as for this last, no one who saw it desires to see a worse. Sailing a ship, even in these so-called fine-

1 I.e. of the points of the compass, sixty-four in number. weather latitudes, may be compared to walking the tight-rope; so constant is the care required. On our heavenly nights, when we sit late on deck, the trade- wind still chariots overhead an endless company of attenuated clouds. These shine in the moonlight faintly bright, affect strange and semi-human forms like the more battered of the antique statues, blot out the smaller stars, and are themselves pierced by the radiance of the greater. ‘ Is there any wind in them?’ so goes the regular sea question. A capful at least, and even in the least substantial; but for the most part in these latitudes they fly far above man’s concerns, perhaps out of all reach, so that not even the lowest fringe of wind shall breathe upon the mainmasthead.”

After two-and-twenty days at sea they made their landfall. “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense. On the 28th of July, 1888, the moon was an hour down by four in the morning, . . . and it was half- past five before we could distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon. The interval was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then approaching. Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness. Uahuna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nukahiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt, and to the southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Uapu. These pricked about the line of the horizon, like the pinnacles of some ornate and mon- strous church; they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a world of wonders. . . . The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountain; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass. There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot. . . .

“We bore away along the shore. On our port- beam we might hear the explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that quarter of the island. Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell. . . . Again the cliff yawned, but now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to slide into the bay of Anaho. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nesting there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and ‘ roughened the razor edges of the summit.

“Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze, continued to creep in; the smart creature, when once under way, appearing motive in herself. From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a house or two appeared. . . . The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay. Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged. It was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from that hour the bond-slaves of the isles of Vivien.”1