David Balfour. Robert Louis Stevenson
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fell ill, the life of the city seeming to undo the good he had got at sea. This experience set him voyaging again, and determined him to make his home in the South Seas. In April 1890 a fresh start was made, this time on a trading steamer, the Janet Nicoll. Touching first at Samoa, where he had bought a property of about four hundred acres on the mountain above Apia, to which he gave the name Vailima (five rivers), he left instructions for clearing and building operations to be begun while he continued his voyage. The course of the Janet Nicoll took him during the summer to many remote islands, from Penhryn to the Marshalls, and landed him in September in New Caledonia. Returning the same month to Samoa, he found the small house already existing at Vailima to be roughly habitable, and installed himself there to superintend the further operations of clearing, planting, and building. The family belongings from Bournemouth were sent out, and his mother, who had left him at Honolulu, rejoined him at Vailima in the spring of 1891.
During these Pacific voyages he had finished the ‘Master of Ballantrae,’ besides writing many occasional verses, and two long, not very effective, ballads on themes of Polynesian legend, the ‘Song of Rahero’ and the ‘Feast of Famine.’ He had also planned and begun at sea, in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne, his one attempt at a long and sustained story of modern life, ‘The Wrecker.’ At Samoa he had written the first of his Pacific stories in prose, ‘The Bottle Imp.’ This little tale of morals and of magic appealed strongly to the native readers to whom (in a missionary translation) it was first addressed (published in English in ‘Black and White,’ 1891, and reprinted in ‘Island Nights' Entertainments’). At Sydney he had written in a heat of indignation, and published in pamphlet form, the striking ‘Letter to Dr. Hyde’ in vindication of the memory of Father Damien. Lastly, on board the Janet Nicoll, ‘under the most ungodly circumstances,’ he had begun the work of composing the letters relating his travels, which were due under the original contract to the Messrs. McClure. This and ‘The Wrecker’ were the two tasks unfinished on his hands when he entered (November 1890) on the four years' residence at Vailima which forms the closing period of his life.
In his new Samoan home Stevenson soon began to exercise a hospitality and an influence which increased with every year. Among the natives he was known by the name of Tusitala (teller of tales), and was supposed to be master of an inexhaustible store of wealth, perhaps even to be the holder of the magic bottle of his own tale. He gathered about him a kind of feudal clan of servants and retainers, whom he ruled in a spirit of affectionate kindness tempered with firm justice; and presently got drawn, as a man so forward in action and so impatient of injustice could not fail to do, into the entanglements of local politics and government. In health he seemed to have become a new man. Frail in comparison with the strong, he was yet able to ride and boat with little restriction, and to take part freely in local festivities, both white and native. The chief interruptions were an occasional trip to Sydney or Auckland, from which he generally came back the worse. From the middle of 1891 to the spring of 1893 his intromissions in politics embroiled him more or less seriously with most of the white officials in the island, especially the chief justice, Mr. Cedercrantz, and the president of the council, Baron Senfft von Pilsach. The proceedings of these gentlemen were exposed by him in a series of striking letters to the ‘Times,’ and the three treaty powers (Germany, Great Britain, and the United States) ultimately decided to dispense with their services. At one period of the struggle he believed himself threatened with deportation. Whether all his own steps on that petty but extremely complicated political scene were judicious is more than can be said; but impartial witnesses agree that he had a considerable moderating influence with the natives, and that his efforts were all in the direction of peace and concord.
His literary industry during these years was more strenuous than ever. His habit was to begin work at six in the morning or earlier, continue without interruption until the midday meal, and often to resume again until four or five in the afternoon. In addition to his literary labours he kept up an active correspondence both with old friends and new acquaintances, especially with writers of the younger generation in England, who had been drawn to him either by admiration for his work or by his ever ready and generous recognition of their own. He had suffered for some time from scrivener's cramp, and in the last three years of his life was much helped by the affectionate services as amanuensis of his stepdaughter, Mrs. Strong, who had become a member of the household since 1889. In 1894 the plan devised by his business adviser and lifelong friend, Mr. Charles Baxter, of a limited édition de luxe of his collected works, under the title of the ‘Edinburgh Edition,’ afforded him much pleasure, together with a prospect of considerable gain. This experiment, without precedent during the lifetime of an author, proved a great success, but Stevenson did not live long enough to enjoy the opportunity of rest which its results were calculated to bring him.
Of his writings during the Samoan period, ‘The Wrecker’ was finished in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne in the winter 1890–1. Throughout 1891 he had a heavy task with the promised letters relating his Pacific voyages. Work undertaken to order seldom prospered with him, and these ‘Letters,’ having cost him more labour than anything he ever wrote, have less of his characteristic charm, despite the interest and strangeness of the matters of which they tell. They were published periodically in the New York ‘Sun’ and in ‘Black and White,’ and have been in part reprinted in the ‘Edinburgh Edition.’ A far more effective result of his South Sea experiences is the tale of the ‘Beach of Falesà,’ written in the same year and first published under the title ‘Uma’ in the ‘Illustrated London News’ (reprinted in ‘Island Nights' Entertainments’). In 1892 he was much occupied with a task from which he could expect neither fame nor profit, but to which he was urged by a sense of duty and the hope of influencing the treaty powers in favour of what he thought a wiser policy in Samoa. This was the ‘Footnote to History,’ an account, composed with an intentional plainness of style, of the intricate local politics of the preceding years, including a description of the famous hurricane of 1888. The same spring (1892) he took up again, after six years, the unfinished history of David Balfour at the point where ill-health had compelled him to break it off in ‘Kidnapped.’ This sequel (published first in ‘Atalanta’ under the title ‘David Balfour,’ and then in book form as ‘Catriona’) contains some of the author's best work, especially in the closing scenes at Leyden and Dunkerque. The comedy of boy and girl passion has been hardly anywhere more glowingly or more delicately expressed. In the same year (1892) was published ‘Across the Plains,’ a volume of collected essays, to which was prefixed the account of his emigrant journey from New York to San Francisco, much revised and compressed from the original draft of 1879; and in the spring of 1893 ‘Island Nights' Entertainments,’ containing with ‘The Beach of Falesà,’ and ‘The Bottle Imp,’ a new tale of magic, ‘The Isle of Voices,’ first published in the ‘National Observer.’
In the same year (1892) Stevenson made beginnings on a great variety of new work, some of it inspired by his Pacific experiences, and some by the memories and associations of Scotland, the power of which on his mind seemed only to be intensified by exile. To the former class belonged ‘Sophia Scarlet,’ a sentimental novel of planters' life in the South Seas, and ‘The Ebb-Tide,’ a darker story of South Sea crime and adventure, planned some time before under the title of the ‘Pearl-Fisher’ in collaboration with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne. Of the latter class were ‘Heathercat,’ a tale of covenanting times and of the Darien adventure; ‘The Young Chevalier,’ an historical romance partly founded on facts supplied to him by Mr. Andrew Lang; ‘Weir of Hermiston,’ a tragic story of the Scottish border, in which the chief character was founded on that of the famous judge Lord Braxfield; and ‘A Family of Engineers,’ being an account of the lives and work of his grandfather, uncles, and father. Some progress had been made with all of these when a fit of influenza in January 1893 diverted him to a lighter task, that of dictating (partly, when forbidden to speak, in the deaf-and-dumb alphabet) a tale of manners and the road called ‘St. Ives,’ dealing with the escape from Edinburgh Castle and subsequent adventures of a French prisoner of war in 1814. Of these various writings, the ‘Ebb-Tide’ was alone completed; it was published in ‘To-day,’ November 1893 to January 1894, and in book form in September 1894. The family history was carried as far as the construction of the Bell Rock lighthouse. ‘Sophia Scarlet,’ ‘Heathercat,’ and the