to Sidney Colvin

Schooner ‘Equator,’ Apaiang Lagoon, August 22nd, 1889.

MY DEAR COLVIN,—The missionary ship is outside the reef trying (vainly) to get in; so I may have a chance to get a line off.  I am glad to say I shall be home by June next for the summer, or we shall know the reason why.  For God’s sake be well and jolly for the meeting.  I shall be, I believe, a different character from what you have seen this long while.  This cruise is up to now a huge success, being interesting, pleasant, and profitable.  The beachcomber is perhaps the most interesting character here; the natives are very different, on the whole, from Polynesians: they are moral, stand-offish (for good reasons), and protected by a dark tongue.  It is delightful to meet the few Hawaiians (mostly missionaries) that are dotted about, with their Italian brio and their ready friendliness.  The whites are a strange lot, many of them good, kind, pleasant fellows; others quite the lowest I have ever seen even in the slums of cities.  I wish I had time to narrate to you the doings and character of three white murderers (more or less proven) I have met.  One, the only undoubted assassin of the lot, quite gained my affection in his big home out of a wreck, with his New Hebrides wife in her savage turban of hair and yet a perfect lady, and his three adorable little girls in Rob Roy Macgregor dresses, dancing to the hand organ, performing circus on the floor with startling effects of nudity, and curling up together on a mat to sleep, three sizes, three attitudes, three Rob Roy dresses, and six little clenched fists: the murderer meanwhile brooding and gloating over his chicks, till your whole heart went out to him; and yet his crime on the face of it was dark: disembowelling, in his own house, an old man of seventy, and him drunk.

It is lunch-time, I see, and I must close up with my warmest love to you.  I wish you were here to sit upon me when required.  Ah! if you were but a good sailor!  I will never leave the sea, I think; it is only there that a Briton lives: my poor grandfather, it is from him I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded.  Would you be surprised to learn that I contemplate becoming a shipowner?  I do, but it is a secret.  Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney stacks and telegraph wires.

Love to Henry James and others near.—Ever yours, my dear fellow,

Robert Louis Stevenson.

Equator Town, Apemama, October 1889.

No Morning Star came, however; and so now I try to send this to you by the schooner J. L. Tiernan.  We have been about a month ashore, camping out in a kind of town the king set up for us: on the idea that I was really a ‘big chief’ in England.  He dines with us sometimes, and sends up a cook for a share of our meals when he does not come himself.  This sounds like high living! alas, undeceive yourself.  Salt junk is the mainstay; a low island, except for cocoanuts, is just the same as a ship at sea: brackish water, no supplies, and very little shelter.  The king is a great character—a thorough tyrant, very much of a gentleman, a poet, a musician, a historian, or perhaps rather more a genealogist—it is strange to see him lying in his house among a lot of wives (nominal wives) writing the History of Apemama in an account-book; his description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as ‘about sweethearts, and trees, and the sea—and no true, all-the-same lie,’ seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask.  Tembinoka is here the great attraction: all the rest is heat and tedium and villainous dazzle, and yet more villainous mosquitoes.  We are like to be here, however, many a long week before we get away, and then whither?  A strange trade this voyaging: so vague, so bound-down, so helpless.  Fanny has been planting some vegetables, and we have actually onions and radishes coming up: ah, onion-despiser, were you but awhile in a low island, how your heart would leap at sight of a coster’s barrow!  I think I could shed tears over a dish of turnips.  No doubt we shall all be glad to say farewell to low islands—I had near said for ever.  They are very tame; and I begin to read up the directory, and pine for an island with a profile, a running brook, or were it only a well among the rocks.  The thought of a mango came to me early this morning and set my greed on edge; but you do not know what a mango is, so—.

I have been thinking a great deal of you and the Monument of late, and even tried to get my thoughts into a poem, hitherto without success.  God knows how you are: I begin to weary dreadfully to see you—well, in nine months, I hope; but that seems a long time.  I wonder what has befallen me too, that flimsy part of me that lives (or dwindles) in the public mind; and what has befallen The Master, and what kind of a Box the Merry Box has been found.  It is odd to know nothing of all this.  We had an old woman to do devil-work for you about a month ago, in a Chinaman’s house on Apaiang (August 23rd or 24th).  You should have seen the crone with a noble masculine face, like that of an old crone [sic], a body like a man’s (naked all but the feathery female girdle), knotting cocoanut leaves and muttering spells: Fanny and I, and the good captain of the Equator, and the Chinaman and his native wife and sister-in-law, all squatting on the floor about the sibyl; and a crowd of dark faces watching from behind her shoulder (she sat right in the doorway) and tittering aloud with strange, appalled, embarrassed laughter at each fresh adjuration.  She informed us you were in England, not travelling and now no longer sick; she promised us a fair wind the next day, and we had it, so I cherish the hope she was as right about Sidney Colvin.  The shipownering has rather petered out since I last wrote, and a good many other plans beside.

Health?  Fanny very so-so; I pretty right upon the whole, and getting through plenty work: I know not quite how, but it seems to me not bad and in places funny.

South Sea Yarns:

1. The Wrecker

2. The Pearl Fisher

3. The Beachcombers

by R. L. S. and Lloyd O.

The Pearl Fisher, part done, lies in Sydney.  It is The Wrecker we are now engaged upon: strange ways of life, I think, they set forth: things that I can scarce touch upon, or even not at all, in my travel book; and the yarns are good, I do believe.  The Pearl Fisher is for the New York Ledger: the yarn is a kind of Monte Cristo one.  The Wrecker is the least good as a story, I think; but the characters seem to me good.  The Beachcombers is more sentimental.  These three scarce touch the outskirts of the life we have been viewing; a hot-bed of strange characters and incidents: Lord, how different from Europe or the Pallid States!  Farewell.  Heaven knows when this will get to you.  I burn to be in Sydney and have news.

R. L. S.