South Seas with Robert Louis Stevenson

In the depths of winter Narrated Archives is taking a trip to warmer climates with Robert Louis Stevenson.  We're heading to the South Seas with a selection from “In the South Seas”. 

The narrative describes arriving at the Marquesas, the stunning beauty of the islands and the excitement of encountering their inhabitants, which includes both initial trepidation and eventual camaraderie with the locals.

Then From “Essays of Travel:  Forest Notes” we have a description of idyllic relaxation in Idle Hours.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Narrated Archives. Thanks for joining me, Sally Barron, your host. Here at Narrated Archives we’re probing through the public domain to find entrancing thoughtful prose from history’s past generations.  

Since we are deep into winter here, Narrated Archives is taking a trip south with Robert Louis Stevenson with two of his descriptive expositions. 

Robert Louis Stevenson born in 1850 was a Scottish author known for classics like Treasure Island and  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  whose life was marked by chronic illness, leading him to travel extensively for health. Despite poor health, he became a prolific writer, producing poems, essays, and adventure stories, often set in exotic locales he visited, like the Pacific islands. His travels culminated in his settlement in Samoa, where he adopted the name Tusitala ("Story Writer") and wrote about local life.

His works explore themes of duality, adventure, and morality, cementing his legacy as a beloved storyteller who defied physical limitations to create enduring literature. 

Stevenson died young at the age of 44  in Samoa but left behind a significant body of work, celebrated for its narrative power and exploration of the human condition.

First up we have a selection from the beginning of “In the South Seas”. The narrative describes arriving at the Marquesas, the stunning beauty of the islands and the excitement of encountering their inhabitants, which includes both initial trepidation and eventual camaraderie with the locals.

Then From “Essays of Travel:  Forest Notes” we have a description of idyllic relaxation in Idle Hours.

From In The South Seas 

Part 1: The Marguesas
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 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 fan 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 Cæsars.

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 five before we could distinguish our expected islands from the clouds on the horizon.  Eight degrees south, and the day two hours a-coming.  The interval was passed on deck in the silence of expectation, the customary thrill of landfall heightened by the strangeness of the shores that we were then approaching.  

Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness.  Ua-huna, piling up to a truncated summit, appeared the first upon the starboard bow; almost abeam arose our destination, Nuka-hiva, whelmed in cloud; and betwixt and to the southward, the first rays of the sun displayed the needles of Ua-pu.  These pricked about the line of the horizon; like the pinnacles of some ornate and monstrous church, they stood there, in the sparkling brightness of the morning, the fit signboard of a world of wonders.

Not one soul aboard the Casco had set foot upon the islands, or knew, except by accident, one word of any of the island tongues; and it was with something perhaps of the same anxious pleasure as thrilled the bosom of discoverers that we drew near these problematic shores.  The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds.  The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountains; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.  

There was no beacon, no smoke of towns to be expected, no plying pilot.  Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it—the only sea-mark given—a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve, or Cape Jack and Jane, and distinguished by two colossal figures, the gross statuary of nature.  These we were to find; for these we craned and stared, focused glasses, and wrangled over charts; and the sun was overhead and the land close ahead before we found them.  

To a ship approaching, like the Casco, from the north, they proved indeed the least conspicuous features of a striking coast; the surf flying high above its base; strange, austere, and feathered mountains rising behind; and Jack and Jane, or Adam and Eve, impending like a pair of warts above the breakers.

Thence we bore away along shore.  On our port beam we might hear the explosions of the surf; a few birds flew fishing under the prow; there was no other sound or mark of life, whether of man or beast, in all that quarter of the island.  Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs,   bowing to the swell.  The trees, from our distance, might have been hazel; the beach might have been in Europe; the mountain forms behind modelled in little from the Alps, and the forest which clustered on their ramparts a growth no more considerable than our Scottish heath.  Again the cliff yawned, but now with a deeper entry; and the Casco, hauling her wind, began to slide into the bay of Anaho.  The cocoa-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains.  Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains.  In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nestling there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit.

Under the eastern shore, our schooner, now bereft of any breeze, continued to creep in: the smart creature, when once under way, appearing motive in herself.  From close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang in the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and, presently, a house or two appeared, standing high upon the ankles of the hills, and one of these surrounded with what seemed a garden.  

These conspicuous habitations, that patch of culture, had we but known it, were a mark of the passage of whites; and we might have approached a hundred islands and not found their parallel.  It was longer ere we spied the native village, standing (in the universal fashion) close upon a curve of beach, close under a grove of palms; the sea in front growling and whitening on a concave arc of reef.  For the cocoa-tree and the island man are both lovers and neighbours of the surf.  ‘The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs,’ says the sad Tahitian proverb; but they are all three, so long as they endure, co-haunters of the beach.  

The mark of anchorage was a blow-hole in the rocks, near the south-easterly corner of the bay.  Punctually to our use, the blow-hole spouted; the schooner turned upon her heel; the anchor plunged.  It was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up; and I, and some part of my ship’s company, were from that hour the bondslaves of the isles of Vivien.

Before yet the anchor plunged a canoe was already paddling from the hamlet.  It contained two men: one white, one brown and tattooed across the face with bands of blue, both in immaculate white European clothes: the resident trader, Mr. Regler, and the native chief, Taipi-Kikino.  ‘Captain, is it permitted to come on board?’ were the first words we heard among the islands.  Canoe followed canoe till the ship swarmed with stalwart, six-foot men in every stage of undress; some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief imperfectly adjusted; some, and these the more considerable, tattooed from head to foot in awful patterns; some barbarous and knived; one, who sticks in my memory as something bestial, squatted on his hams in a canoe, sucking an orange and spitting it out again to alternate sides with ape-like vivacity—all talking, and we could not understand one word; all trying to trade with us who had no thought of trading, or offering us island curios at prices palpably absurd.  There was no word of welcome; no show of civility; no hand extended save that of the chief and Mr. Regler.  As we still continued to refuse the proffered articles, complaint ran high and rude; and one, the jester of the party, railed upon our meanness amid jeering laughter.  

Amongst other angry pleasantries—‘Here is a mighty fine ship,’ said he, ‘to have no money on board!’  I own I was inspired with sensible repugnance; even with alarm.  The ship was manifestly in their power; we had women on board; I knew nothing of my guests beyond the fact that they were cannibals; the Directory (my only guide) was full of timid cautions; and as for the trader, whose presence might else have reassured me, were not whites in the Pacific the usual instigators and accomplices of native outrage?  When he reads this confession, our kind friend, Mr. Regler, can afford to smile.

Later in the day, as I sat writing up my journal, the cabin was filled from end to end with Marquesans: three brown-skinned generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with embarrassing eyes.  The eyes of all Polynesians are large, luminous, and melting; they are like the eyes of animals and some Italians.  A kind of despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in a corner of my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien planet.

To cross the Channel is, for a boy of twelve, to change heavens; to cross the Atlantic, for a man of twenty-four, is hardly to modify his diet.  But I was now escaped out of the shadow of the Roman empire, under whose toppling monuments we were all cradled, whose laws and letters are on every hand of us, constraining and preventing.  

I was now to see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Cæsar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian.  By the same step I had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images.  Methought, in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I should have but dipped into a picture-book without a text.  Nay, and I even questioned if my travels should be much prolonged; perhaps they were destined to a speedy end; perhaps my subsequent friend, Kauanui, whom I remarked there, sitting silent with the rest, for a man of some authority, might leap from his hams with an ear-splitting signal, the ship be carried at a rush, and the ship’s company butchered for the table.

There could be nothing more natural than these apprehensions, nor anything more groundless.  In my experience of the islands, I had never again so menacing a reception; were I to meet with such to-day, I should be more alarmed and tenfold more surprised.  The majority of Polynesians are easy folk to get in touch with, frank, fond of notice, greedy of the least affection, like amiable, fawning dogs; and even with the Marquesans, so recently and so imperfectly redeemed from a blood-boltered barbarism, all were to become our intimates, and one, at least, was to mourn sincerely our departure.

From Essays of Travel - Forest Notes: Idle Hours

The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day.  The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand,  these trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in the moving winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a foreland or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling, transitory surface of the sea.  And yet in itself, as I say, the strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt fully without the sense of contrast.  You must have risen in the morning and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the sun’s light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness of the groves.

On the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes.  If you have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your window—for there are no blind or shutters to keep him out—and the room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights.  You may doze a while longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the partitions: Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil.  Meanwhile artist after artist drops into the salle-à-manger for coffee, and then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets of for what he calls his ‘motive.’  

And artist after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a little following of dogs.  For the dogs, who belong only nominally to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day long, and whenever anyone goes by who hits their fancy, profit by his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at hunting.  They would like to be under the trees all day.  But they cannot go alone.  They require a pretext.  And so they take the passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe.  With quick ears, long spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with a bulldog’s head, this company of mongrels will trot by your side all day and come home with you at night, still showing white teeth and wagging stunted tail.  Their good humour is not to be exhausted.  You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all they will do is to give you a wider berth.  If once they come out with you, to you they will remain faithful, and with you return; although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.

The forest—a strange thing for an Englishman—is very destitute of birds.  This is no country where every patch of wood among the meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered through by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a profusion of clear notes.  And this rarity of birds is not to be regretted on its own account only.  For the insects prosper in their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt.  Ants swarm in the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays into the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things between the trees.  Nor are insects the only evil creatures that haunt the forest.  For you may plump into a cave among the rocks, and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked viper slither across the road.

Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a sudden by a friend: ‘I say, just keep where you are, will you?  You make the jolliest motive.’  And you reply: ‘Well, I don’t mind, if I may smoke.’  And thereafter the hours go idly by.  Your friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of another tree, and up to his waist in the asafern.  You cannot watch your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of light.  But you know it is going forward; and, out of emulation with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the colour for a woodland scene in words.

Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.  All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight.  Everything stands out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained into its highest key.  The boulders are some of them upright and dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping cattle.  The junipers—looking, in their soiled and ragged mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain—are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.  Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite minuteness.  And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun, like misbegotten yew-trees!  The scene is all pitched in a key of colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent sunlight, as a man might live fifty years in England and not see.

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land.  Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love; only to sit and remember loves that might have been.  There is a falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm bed at night, with something of a forest savour.

‘You can get up now,’ says the painter; ‘I’m at the background.’

And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows stretching farther into the open.  A cool air comes along the highways, and the scents awaken.  Fir-trees breathe abroad their ozone.  Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret, aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven, but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long gone by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds.  One side of the long avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other is plunged in transparent shadow.  Over the trees the west begins to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their chattels, and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.

Both of these scenes by Stevenson, especially “Idle Hours”, make me want to book a trip to somewhere warm.  Robert Louis Stevenson's detailed descriptions paint colorful vivid settings. 

Next week Narrated Archives brings you “The Scarlet Woman” by Louis Bromfield, the tragic tale of Vergie Winters, a small-town milliner who falls for a powerful Senator, a story so compelling it won an O. Henry Prize and was later adapted into a film. 

For more written selections from the public domain, be sure to follow Narrated Archives on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible or wherever you listen to podcasts. Your reviews and ratings are the best way to support the show and ensure we can continue to bring you these stories.

We are always looking for new tales to read. If there's a particular author or short story from the public domain you'd like to hear, please submit your suggestions through our website at narratedarchives.com or email sbnarration@sallybarronvoiceovers.com

Thank you for listening.