ABSTRACT
Stevenson left Britain in 1887, never to return; his father had died the previous year, and it was felt that he needed warmer climes for the sake of his ever-frail health. With Fanny and his mother, he would set sail for America, travel across the continent and head into the Pacic. He would arrive in Hawaii in January 1889, where he would later complete The Master of Ballantrae, then travel onto Sydney, and nally settle in Samoa, where he would construct his home of Vailima. Several scholars have written on this passage of his life and his creative work from the Pacic, including Vanessa Smith, Oliver Buckton, Ann Colley and most recently Roslyn Jolly, who has convincingly argued that 1887 was a pivotal year in Stevenson’s creative imagination. As he moved further from Britain, the European Continent and mainland America, Stevenson also moved further away from his markets and readerships, who loved him as the heir to Walter Scott’s romances and the author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson immersed himself in the peoples and societies he encountered in the Pacic island chains, hoping to record these ancient cultures and oral traditions before they were spoiled forever by the encroaching imperial and commercial forces of Europe and America. As Jenni Calder has pointed out, Stevenson wrote some of his most potent Scottish ction from the Pacic, including The Master of Ballantrae, Catriona and the unnished Weir of Hermiston.1
However, he also wrote ction set in the Pacic, and about the Pacic, subjects from which audiences in the nineteenth-century were far removed. Part of Stevenson’s Pacic project, even in his ction, was to educate his European and American audiences about these cultures, and to overcome the many stereotypes, often crude and almost always offensive, of their peoples and their customs. Perhaps the most pertinent example of white European views of Stevenson’s Polynesia is provided by no less than Sidney Colvin in a letter to Stevenson of 21 March 1894, in which he refers to the Samoans, Hawaiians and Micronesians that Stevenson wrote to him about as “your beloved blacks-or chocolates-confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested…”.2 This grating comment reveals much about European attitudes towards conquered peoples, and neatly demonstrates the ingrained nature of the stereotypes Stevenson was attempting
