In the South Seas

In the South Seas

The Project Gutenberg EBook of In the South Seas, by Robert Louis
Stevenson (#20 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
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Title: In the South Seas
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: March, 1996 [EBook #464] [This file was first posted on
January 23, 1996] [Most recently updated: August 18, 2002]
Edition: 10

Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, IN THE
SOUTH SEAS ***

Transcribed from the 1908 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

IN THE SOUTH SEAS

PART 1: THE MARQUESAS

CHAPTER I
--AN ISLAND LANDFALL

For nearly ten years my health had been declining; and for some while
before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the
afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and undertaker to expect. It
was suggested that I should try the South Seas; and I was not unwilling
to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale, among scenes that had
attracted me in youth and health. I chartered accordingly Dr. Merrit's
schooner yacht, the Casco, seventy-four tons register; sailed from San
Francisco towards the end of June 1888, visited the eastern islands, and
was left early the next year at Honolulu. Hence, lacking courage to
return to my old life of the house and sick-room, I set forth to leeward
in a trading schooner, the Equator, of a little over seventy tons, spent
four months among the atolls (low coral islands) of the Gilbert group,
and reached Samoa towards the close of '89. By that time gratitude and
habit were beginning to attach me to the islands; I had gained a
competency of strength; I had made friends; I had learned new interests;
the time of my voyages had passed like days in fairyland; and I decided
to remain. I began to prepare these pages at sea, on a third cruise, in the
trading steamer Janet Nicoll. If more days are granted me, they shall be

passed where I have found life most pleasant and man most interesting;
the axes of my black boys are already clearing the foundations of my
future house; and I must learn to address readers from the uttermost
parts of the sea.
That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson's hero is
less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave
them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the
trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the
fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and
yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive
power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to
fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life,
at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own
blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in
thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the
Caesars.
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. In the east a radiating centre of brightness
told of the day; and beneath, on the skyline, the morning bank was
already building, black as ink. We have all read of the swiftness of the
day's coming and departure in low latitudes; it is a point on which the
scientific and sentimental tourist are at one, and has inspired some
tasteful poetry. The period certainly varies with the season; but here is
one case exactly noted. Although the dawn was thus preparing by four,
the sun was not up till six; and it was half-past