ABSTRACT
To follow Robert Louis Stevenson's political imagination is to trace the complicated course of a foreigner's trajectory abroad. This chapter examines Stevenson's political role in Samoa. It describes his campaign against the Reverend Arthur E. Claxton, one of the prominent London Missionary Society figures in Apia, who was also the fractious Natives' Advocate on the Samoan Land Commission. The deteriorating state of affairs in Samoa compelled Stevenson to remain committed to his political activities, to attempt to take an influential role, and, of course, to begin work on his A Footnote to History that he completed in 1892 and that he hoped would better inform those abroad about the problems tormenting Samoa. For Stevenson, who ever since his arrival in the South Seas had thought about the dangers arising from what he called the race barrier, Claxton had opportunistically nicked the culture's Achilles heel.
