This is a blisteringly fierce novel, an intensely bitter and realistic depiction of the low-life criminality, desperate psychology and violence of white trash in the South Seas of the 1890s, which is also charged with a peculiarly epic and symbolic feel.
A relatively short novel in just 12 chapters, The Ebb-Tide is the third of Stevenson’s collaborations with his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne – although in a letter Stevenson made clear that everything after the champagne-tasting scene about a third through was entirely his. (This sheds light on The Wrecker, their previous collaboration, which is immensely long, wordy and slow. The Ebb-Tide starts in rather the same way before gathering real pace and intensity – from which we can deduce that Osbourne was Mr Slow and Wordy and Stevenson Mr Fast and Intense.)
The Ebb-Tide represents a departure from the romance and adolescent adventure of Stevenson’s previous books, towards a new anti-romantic bluntness and harshness, a tone which is established in the first sentence.
Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease.
And although the style still has vestiges of the wit and irony which characterised The Wrecker, the actual subject matter is grim and despairing, with suicide a repeated theme of a story which ends in a grotesquely sadistic death and an even weirder religious transformation.
Three beach bums
The first couple of chapters introduce us to three white men who have sunk to the very lowest level of South Sea society:
- Herrick, a well-educated well-meaning Englishman whose incompetence at everythijng he’s turned his hand to has reduced him to poverty and thoughts of suicide
- Davis, an American sea captain who was disgraced when his drunkenness while in charge of a ship led directly to the deaths of six crew
- Huish, a lazy dishonest Cockney with a vivid turn of phrase
They are ‘on the beach’ i.e. stranded without work or food, with no support or resources, almost like characters from a Beckett play, whining about being hungry and thirsty, at Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia on the island of Tahiti.
Their impoverishment is rammed home in a series of dispiriting scenes. Tramping the island’s paths, they are caught in a torrential downpour. They come across a schooner anchored near a waterside path, with a gangplank up to it and some natives having a fry-up on board. In a desperate attempt to curry favour the middle-aged captain Davis dances a jig, and on this humiliating basis the three losers are invited aboard and given the islanders’ leftovers.
Herrick, the most honest and educated of the trio, who carries a copy of Virgil with him everywhere, is in a state of permanent despair, with thoughts of suicide never far away.
The whole set-up is dark and grim and lacking any of the vim and playfulness of earlier Stevenson.
A ship
A day later, Captain Davis bursts into the disused prison, or ‘calaboose’, where the trio have been squatting, and announces that he’s been given captaincy of a vessel, the schooner Farallon. Apparently, the former captain, mate and able seaman who were crewing it all died of the smallpox on the journey from San Francisco, the ship being brought into harbour by its native deckhands.
The consul has offered the role to every other captain in Papeete and they’ve all turned it down. So it’s fallen to Captain Davis – who promptly suggested that Herrick be taken on as first mate (despite having no experience whatsoever) and Huish as able seaman (ditto).
But Davis then spoils the upbeat effect of this news by telling Herrick he has no intention of fulfilling the contract i.e. to sail the schooner with its cargo of champagne on to Sydney. Instead he plans to sail in the other direction, dock in Peru, sell off the cargo and the boat itself, take the cash as a stake and head off to the silver mines to try his luck. Honest Herrick is appalled.
‘Captain,’ said Herrick, with a quailing voice, ‘don’t do it!’
‘I’m desperate,’ returned Davis. ‘I’ve got a chance; I may never get another. Herrick, say the word; back me up; I think we’ve starved together long enough for that.’
‘I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I’ve not fallen as low as that,’ said Herrick, deadly pale.
It’s a measure of the despair of the characters that Herrick doesn’t just try to talk the captain out of committing a risky crime – he tries to persuade him to come and drown himself along with Herrick in the bay. What stays the captain is that he has three children, living with his mother, he hasn’t seen them for years but still feels a responsibility to earn what he can and remit it to them.
My folks are hard up, I belong to them, I’ll get them bread, or, by God! I’ll get them wealth, if I have to burn down London for it.
Reluctantly, Herrick throws in his lot with the captain’s plan and then they present it to ‘the bummer’ Huish, who, having no scruples, leaps at the chance. The trio are officially signed up and rowed out to the schooner next day, where the captain introduces himself to the native crew and they set sail. There is immediately trouble. While exiting the harbour one of the natives leaps overboard and swims to shore, leaving them short-handed. Herrick is fraught with anxiety at having to behave like a mate when he hasn’t got a clue how to address the native crew.
Drunks
But worst of all, at the first mealtime (prepared by the native cook) Huish comes into the cabin armed with some bottles of champagne, having rifled the precious cargo. Even Davis, who’s planning to steal the boat, is shocked at this breach of discipline – the champagne is the cargo they’re planning to sell; it is their investment – but then weakly gives in to Huish’s wheedling.
The Rubicon was crossed without another struggle. The captain filled a mug and drank.
This idea of crossing a line, a moral line, without even realising it, is very reminiscent of the flawed protagonists of Joseph Conrad’s early, tropical novels.
Watching all this, Herrick is plunged even deeper into despair. He realises ‘he is a thief among thieves’ and, with characteristic fatalism, fantasises about throwing himself overboard. And it turns out to be a real Rubicon because they hadn’t quite appreciated just how much of a hopeless alcoholic Captain Davis turns out to be – that one drink tips him over the edge and into a bottomless pit. Once re-acquainted with booze, and free booze at that, Davis from now on is rarely sober, and as soon as the sun sets, is drunk or unconscious till dawn.
The days pass as the schooner sails East over the empty ocean with little or no serious work required, and Herrick discovers himself to be conscientious and good at sailing, while the captain lies rolling drunk in the scuppers. And Herrick also discovers he’s won the respect of the native crew by his conscientiousness – when the captain is so drunk he can’t take his watch and Herrick says he’ll pull a double watch to cover, the islanders leap to his defence and volunteer to do it for him. He is touched.
It’s in this mood of camaraderie that one of the islanders tells Herrick that this was exactly the fate of the previous crew: the captain, mate and seaman were drunk all the time with only the islanders steering the ship. In this state it came by accident to a remote island which the white men rowed ashore to, ignoring the sound of keening and wailing coming from it. And it was there, drunkenly ’embracing’ the local girls, that the stupid white men contracted the virulent chicken pox which killed all three.
Barely has Herrick processed this revelation than an almighty storm strikes the schooner and captain Davis’s drunken incompetence almost sinks it. Herrick takes decisive action (bringing in the rigging to stop the ship being blown right over) and a now-sobered-up Davis swears never to touch another drop. Having weathered the storm, there’s a touching / scary moment when Davis finally admits to Herrick that the little daughter who he has made the pretext for their criminal scheme – is in fact dead and buried in Portland, Maine, of a bowel complaint. He had bought her a dolly on his last trip which he was going to give her and now keeps the dolly with him wherever he goes.
Very much as with Conrad, Stevenson is determined to take us to the lowest pitch of human degradation.
The fake champagne
But barely has the storm been weathered and the crew recovered from the near wreck – before Huish strolls in with yet another bottle of champagne, cracks it open and – discovers it contains water! What? Is their cargo fake?
In a mad panic the three white men scramble down into the hold and pull up on deck crate after crate of the champagne, smashing the necks off in an orgy of violence and discovering that, below a certain point in the loading, the bottles are all full of water. In fact in the lowest crates, the fraudsters haven’t even bothered to put fake labels and metal caps on them. The whole cargo is a fraud, a scam.
The owners’ plan must have been to ditch the ship somewhere and claim the insurance money – that would explain the semi-criminal officers and the disposable ‘Kanaka’ (or native) crew. Now Davis, Herrick and Huish conceive the same plan but with a twist; to ditch the schooner somewhere off Samoa and get extradited back to San Francisco to blackmail the owners.
Except Davis suddenly claps himself on the forehead, hurries below, and returns having made a further bad discovery. They don’t have enough supplies to make it to Samoa; not least because in the drunk twelve days of the cruise so far he has been fantastically lavish with supplies, insisting entire meals were thrown overboard if they didn’t please his drunken palate. Misery is piled upon misery.
The island
They are just pondering what to do when there is a cry of ‘land-ho’ from one of the natives. Sailing into the island’s lagoon, the three see a settlement of sorts, but oddly lifeless. A white man hails them from the shore and rows out. Six foot three and incredibly posh, he is Attwater, a Cambridge-educated pukka example of the Englishman abroad. He uses all his powers of condescension to patronise and insult Huish and Davis but automatically accepts Herrick – an Oxford man – as his equal.
Attwater spins a long yarn about this being a ‘secret’ island, barely referred to on the charts, because he has managed to deter visitors ever since he discovered it holds a fortune in shell and pearls.
It quickly emerges that Attwater is a man of iron and a devout Christian. He describes how, immediately upon arriving on the island, he imposed a fierce discipline on the inhabitants. He established an efficient pearl-fishing regime which he has been running for nigh on ten years, a trading schooner stopping by three times a year to drop supplies. Then the blasted smallpox arrived and killed off all but three of the native population of 33. Hence the sense of an abandoned settlement.
Attwater invites the trio for dinner at his house that evening, but makes it plain that Herrick must come at 4pm, the other two at 6.30pm. He obviously wants to have a private word. Then he gets back in his dinghy and rows ashore.
Davis is so infuriated by Attwater’s superior attitude that he tells Herrick he must use his early appointment with the big man to persuade him to return to the ship, along with his fortune of pearls, on any pretext he can think up – and then the trio can kidnap him, steal the pearls, either murder Attwater on the spot or maroon him on some atoll.
Thus briefed, Herrick – the one honest soul in the bunch – rows ashore later the same day to keep his 4pm appointment, tormented by the dilemma he’s been plunged into.
Attwater greets him and Herrick (and the reader) enters Attwater’s strange, fierce ambience. Attwater shows Herrick the modern diving suits, with metal helmets and boots, which he bought and got the villagers to wear to set about the pearl harvesting in a professional way – none of this inefficient native ‘diving’ nonsense. He goes into detail about the quick fierce smallpox epidemic. Somedays it was impossible to bury the dead. He shows him the pathetic graveyard.
The image of the tall white eerie white man dominating this island of the dead is eerie and compelling.
The dinner party
Davis and Huish arrive at 6.30 as planned, and there is an extremely fraught dinner party: Captain Davis stares nervously at Herrick wondering whether he’s sticking to the plan to betray Attwater; Herrick is in agonies because he suspects Davis is liable to make a rash move with his gun at any moment, whereas the two hours he’s just spent with Attwater have revealed him to be an extremely tough customer, with guns of his own. In fact, Attwater went out of his way to tell Herrick stories about his marksmanship: he particularly enjoys shooting round the edge of a target before finishing it off.
All this tension comes to a head when Attwater tells a prolonged yarn about his idea of ‘justice’ – how he hounded one of the islanders for disobedience and theft so harshly that the man eventually hanged himself. But at just that moment Attwater realised it that his other servant, a slimy obsequious native, was the guilty party all along. So when all the natives took him to see the hanged man, Attwater made the guilty one climb up into the tree alongside the corpse, and then shot him dead.
This brutal story brings to a head all the pressure on Herrick, who jumps to his feet decrying the host’s hypocrisy and brutality and storms out. Davis follows him out of the house and along the beach in a fret and tries – not for the first time – to calm the hysterical man down, but Herrick says it’s useless: Attwater is too strong, too powerful, he sees everything, he’s seen right through them. He explains how Herrick noticed immediately the drunken attempt Davis had made when they were at sea to paint over the Farallon‘s name; he knows he’s dealing with crooks; he tauntingly described Davis and Huish to Herrick as ‘wolves’ and asked what a little puppy like him was doing among them.
‘He knows all, he sees through all; we only make him laugh with our pretences — he looks at us and laughs like God!’
Eventually Davis talks Herrick out of his funk, and they walk back along the sand towards Attwater’s house. Davis is now plotting how he will take Attwater – coming up behind him and shooting him without warning; sitting down and shooting him in his chair?
He is in the middle of rehearsing these murderous choices when he is stopped in his tracks by Attwater’s voice. the big man has come out onto the sand and is pointing his Winchester rifle straight at Davis. He says that while the pair were away he’s got Huish blind drunk and extracted the whole secret of their plan to murder him and steal his pearls. Well well well. A nice bunch of people. He waves his gun over towards the beach and the pier and their rowboat. ‘Get in it and don’t come back.’
Back on the schooner
Humiliated, Herrick and Davis tip the catatonic Huish into the dinghy and row back out to the schooner. But here they are only confronted with the same plight again: they don’t have enough supplies to make any other port – certainly not sail all the way to South America – they would have little option except to return to Papeete, where they will have a lot of explaining to do to authorities – authorities who are already sick and tired of them. More likely than not they will be arrested and sent to the notorious French penal colony at Noumea in New Caledonia. It’s just not an option.
Suicide attempt
Humiliated by the failure of their squalid plan, humiliated at being associated with these two vile murderers, humiliated by comparing his own wretched fate with the superb Christian trimphalism of the virile Attwater, Herrick slips away from the depressed captain, lowers himself into the boat tied to the schooner and then into the sea, planning to swim a little away and commit suicide by drowning.
But finds he can’t, he can’t, he just can’t bring himself to. Instead he miserably drifts.
About three in the morning, chance, and the set of the current, and the bias of his own right-handed body, so decided it between them that he came to shore upon the beach in front of Attwater’s. There he sat down, and looked forth into a world without any of the lights of hope. The poor diving dress of self-conceit was sadly tattered! With the fairy tale of suicide, of a refuge always open to him, he had hitherto beguiled and supported himself in the trials of life; and behold! that also was only a fairy tale, that also was folk-lore. With the consequences of his acts he saw himself implacably confronted for the duration of life: stretched upon a cross, and nailed there with the iron bolts of his own cowardice. He had no tears; he told himself no stories. His disgust with himself was so complete that even the process of apologetic mythology had ceased. He was like a man cast down from a pillar, and every bone broken. He lay there, and admitted the facts, and did not attempt to rise.
On the shore the washed-up Herrick is inevitably discovered by Attwater with his Winchester and throws himself pitiably on his mercy.
‘Oh, what does it matter?’ cried Herrick. ‘Here I am. I am broken crockery; I am a burst drum; the whole of my life is gone to water; I have nothing left that I believe in, except my living horror of myself. Why do I come to you? I don’t know; you are cold, cruel, hateful; and I hate you, or I think I hate you. But you are an honest man, an honest gentleman. I put myself, helpless, in your hands. What must I do? If I can’t do anything, be merciful and put a bullet through me; it’s only a puppy with a broken leg!’
See what I mean by a story drenched in despair and self-loathing?
Huish’s horrible plan
Back aboard the Farallon next morning, the resilient Cockney criminal Huish comes up with a diabolical plan which he presents to Davis: they will lull Attwater into a false sense of security by handing him a wordy letter (which he now dictates to Davis) and then – Huish flourishes a bottle he’s brought out from his luggage. It is vitriol. Concentrated acid. Throw it in Attwater’s eyes, says Huish, and bob’s your uncle – we get pearls, money, supplies and are set up for life!
Davis is sickened, appalled, nauseated but – being the weakling he is – that they all are – he reluctantly goes along with Huish’s plan. So they get the native crew to row them ashore where Attwater and Herrick – now converted to the big man’s side – emerge from his beachfront house toting a Winchester rifle apiece and keeping them covered.
Huish gets Herrick to take and read the letter out – then advances towards Attwater asking to talk a bit more. But Attwater simply tells him to come no closer. Forty feet away; it’s too far to throw the acid. Huish keeps up his yacking, designed to distract Attwater while he takes mini steps forward – until Attwater realises something is up – and realises it must be something in Huish’s fists. He tells Huish to unclench his fists (including the one holding the vitriol) so the plot comes to a sudden head.
Simultaneously, Huish goes to throw the acid at Attwater and Attwater fires his gun, shattering the vitriol jar in Huish’s hand which spills down into the little cockney’s face, burning it away. Huish screams and dances in agony as the acid eats into his eyes and face, and then Attwater finishes him off like an agonised animal with another brutal shot.
Attwater turns to Captain Davis, who is standing stricken in front of the huge ship’s figurehead which dominates the beach like the statue of a pagan goddess. In his best muscular Christian triumphalism Attwater commands Davis to make his peace with his Maker, to ask God’s forgiveness for his sins, to say his prayers – and the trembling Davis makes a short prayer for the life and health of his children, then says he’s ready.
The captain shut his eyes tight like a child: he held his hands up at last with a tragic and ridiculous gesture.
‘My God, for Christ’s sake, look after my two kids,’ he said; and then, after a pause and a falter, ‘for Christ’s sake, Amen.’
And he opened his eyes and looked down the rifle with a quivering mouth.
‘But don’t keep fooling me long!’ he pleaded.
‘That’s all your prayer?’ asked Attwater, with a singular ring in his voice.
‘Guess so,’ said Davis.
‘So?’ said Attwater, resting the butt of his rifle on the ground, ‘is that done? Is your peace made with Heaven? Because it is with me. Go, and sin no more, sinful father. And remember that whatever you do to others, God shall visit it again a thousand-fold upon your innocents.’
The wretched Davis came staggering forward from his place against the figure-head, fell upon his knees, and waved his hands, and fainted. When he came to himself again, his head was on Attwater’s arm, and close by stood one of the men in divers’ helmets, holding a bucket of water, from which his late executioner now laved his face. The memory of that dreadful passage returned upon him in a clap; again he saw Huish lying dead, again he seemed to himself to totter on the brink of an unplumbed eternity. With trembling hands he seized hold of the man whom he had come to slay; and his voice broke from him like that of a child among the nightmares of fever: ‘O! isn’t there no mercy? O! what must I do to be saved?’
‘Ah!’ thought Attwater, ‘here’s the true penitent.’
And that is the end of the main narrative. Attwater has triumphed over the ineffective ‘wolves’ but more – he has converted one of them to the true religion.
In the brief epilogue, Herrick is seen setting fire to the Farallon because Attwater’s regular supply ship, The Trinity Hall, has been sighted and they need to dispose of the evidence of their crime. When he goes to tell Davis that they are ‘saved’, that the supply ship will take them back to civilisation, no questions asked, Davis says he is going to remain on the island. Because, Davis says, his eyes blazing, he is truly saved, his soul has been redeemed. He has found peace in believing in the blood of the Redeemer – and he asks Herrick to join him.
It is a really bizarre and unexpected ending to a strange, powerful and haunting narrative.
Thoughts
This short book is stuffed with so many themes and ideas that it’s hard to know where to start.
1. Conrad
How did my tutors at university ever let me ‘study’ Joseph Conrad, without reading Stevenson’s Pacific fictions first? The despair reeking off this story – like the desperate events at the climax of The Wrecker – strongly anticipate the nihilism of Joseph Conrad’s sea stories, in all of which white men marooned in the Tropics go to pieces, commit suicide, murder each other or go mad – Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim. The agèd captain Davis, forced to his desperate actions by misplaced devotion to his children, reminds me powerfully of Captain Whalley in The End of The Tether.
Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895) was published only months after this book (1894). There is a direct link and lineage of location, themes and treatment between the two.
2. White and black
In his letters Stevenson made it crystal clear that four or five years cruising round the Pacific islands had given him a strong impression of the greed and stupidity of white men, and the rapacity and folly of the various imperial authorities. He published such excoriating criticisms of the colonial authorities’ small-minded, inept and corrupt administrations that he and his wife seriously worried that they would be expelled from the region.
In his fiction, the native peoples are shown as varied and flawed but by and large tower over the horrible, selfish, greedy, violent stupidity of all the white characters.
3. D.H. Lawrence
Attwater is the strange, powerful figure towering over the second half of the book. He strikes me as an archetypal fin-de-siècle figure, channeling Nietszchean ideas of the Superman who supersedes feeble bourgeois morality – but also looks forward to D.H. Lawrence’s emphasis on the uncontrollable power of the pagan life force.
I wonder whether Stevenson had read Nietzsche and heard the notion of the Übermensch. I wonder what Lawrence made of Stevenson’s Pacific fiction; it was after all, only fifteen or sixteen years after this book was published, that Lawrence’s first novel came out.
Attwater is presented as huge, strong, fierce and vital, both physically and metaphysically.
The boat was by that time forging alongside, and they were able at last to see what manner of man they had to do with. He was a huge fellow, six feet four in height, and of a build proportionately strong, but his sinews seemed to be dissolved in a listlessness that was more than languor. It was only the eye that corrected this impression; an eye of an unusual mingled brilliancy and softness, sombre as coal and with lights that outshone the topaz; an eye of unimpaired health and virility; an eye that bid you beware of the man’s devastating anger. A complexion, naturally dark, had been tanned in the island to a hue hardly distinguishable from that of a Tahitian; only his manners and movements, and the living force that dwelt in him, like fire in flint, betrayed the European.
‘The living force that dwelt in him, like fire in flint’ sounds like Lawrence. But beyond his physical fire is the unstoppable force of his bizarrely violent and apocalyptic Christian belief.
‘What brought you here to the South Seas?’ he asked presently.
‘Many things,’ said Attwater. ‘Youth, curiosity, romance, the love of the sea, and (it will surprise you to hear) an interest in missions. That has a good deal declined, which will surprise you less. They go the wrong way to work; they are too parsonish, too much of the old wife, and even the old apple wife. CLOTHES, CLOTHES, are their idea; but clothes are not Christianity, any more than they are the sun in heaven, or could take the place of it! They think a parsonage with roses, and church bells, and nice old women bobbing in the lanes, are part and parcel of religion. But religion is a savage thing, like the universe it illuminates; savage, cold, and bare, but infinitely strong.’
It sounds like Lawrence speaking of the Life Force, and the way the Lawrentian vision is channeled into the figure of the Savage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).
The introduction to the OUP edition of The Ebb-Tide goes long on Stevenson’s critique of Western Imperialism, emphasising the striking contrast between honest and reliable ‘natives’ and the deplorably unreliable criminal, morally bankrupt whites.
But the figure of Attwater lifts the second half of the story onto a new level of intensity and weirdness and the element of critique is far broader than complaints about colonial incompetence.
Attwater’s omnipotence over the natives, who he rules with a rod of iron, combining harsh justice with blistering Christian evangelism, is matched by the ease with which he handles and outwits the three losers.
If the basic story critiques Imperialism, the demonic figure of Attwater is a challenge to all Western values. He scorns them and rises above them; he is a terrifying Overman. Far from being a handy stick to beat now-vanished Imperial values with from a left-wing academic perspective, Attwater strikes me as being, like some of D.H. Lawrence’s figures, a proto-fascist figure, a dark shadow whose ‘triumph of the will’ prefigures dark twentieth century monsters.
Phraseology
As if the dark story with its themes of suicide, despair and colonial violence weren’t enough to grip the reader, I also found a strand of pleasure in the endlessly inventive turn of phrase of these rough beach-combers, crooks and bums. Seems to me Stevenson has gone to great lengths to study and record the actual speech of the Pacific types he travelled among. The familiar-yet-strange, late-19th century lexicon is by turns striking, challenging, mind-expanding, puzzling.
He broke off. ‘I don’t often rip out about the kids,’ he said; ‘but when I do, there’s something fetches loose.’
‘I’ll trouble you not to come the dude over me… He thinks I don’t understand when he comes the heavy swell…’
‘The old game was a risky game. The new game’s as safe as running a Vienna Bakery.’
‘Blow me, if it ain’t enough to make a man write an insultin’ letter to Gawd!’
‘If there’s any boy playing funny dog with me, I’ll teach him skylarking!’
‘But put me down on this blame’ beach alone, with nothing but a whip and a mouthful of bad words, and ask me to… no, SIR! it’s not good enough! I haven’t got the sand for that!’
William Blake wrote that ‘Energy is Eternal Delight’, and the expressiveness of Stevenson’s characters – their strange and teasing turns of phrase – is a central pleasure of reading his books.
Related links
- The Ebb-Tide on Project Gutenberg
- The Ebb-Tide Wikipedia article
- Robert Louise Stevenson website
- Robert Louis Stevenson titles available online
A Stevenson bibliography
1878
An Inland Voyage – An immensely entertaining, witty and thoughtful account of Stevenson’s trip by canoe, with a friend, along the canals of Belgium and south into France, observing rural life and types along the way.
1879
Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes – More gritty than the Voyage, the Travels record 12 days walking with a recalcitrant donkey through south-central France in a book which has moments of freewheeling nature worship but comes to be dominated by Stevenson’s interest in the bloody Protestant revolt which took place in the region a century earlier.
1881
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers – Essays including: Virginibus Puerisque i-iv including ‘On Falling in Love’, Crabbed Age and Youth, An Apology for Idlers, Ordered South, Aes Triplex, El Dorado, The English Admirals, Some Portraits by Raeburn, Child’s Play, Walking Tours, Pan’s Pipes, A Plea for Gas Lamp.
1882
The Old and New Pacific Capitals – Essays on the climate and history of Monterey and San Francisco.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books – Essays on: Victor Hugo’s Romances, Some Aspects of Robert Burns, The Gospel According to Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions, Yoshida-Torajiro, François Villon, Student, Poet, Housebreaker, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, John Knox and his Relations to Women.
New Arabian Nights – A sequence of thinly-linked and not too impressive short stories.
1883
Treasure Island – One of the most famous adventure stories of all time. Andrew Lang says it single-handedly established the financial viability of a new type of short, action-packed story and inaugurated a golden age of adventure yarns from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry Rider Haggard.
The Silverado Squatters – Another travel book, following immediately after the Atlantic crossing described in An Amateur Emigrant and the trans-America train journey described in The Open Plains, this one describes Stevenson and new wife Fanny’s honeymoon in an abandoned mining camp high on the flanks of Mount St Helena, north of San Francisco.
1885
Prince Otto – An action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald.
More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter – co-written with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson
A Child’s Garden of Verses Classic volume of children’s poetry.
1886
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – One of the most famous fictions of all time about an Edinburgh scientist who devises a potion which releases his unconscious urges, his animal self, an alter ego which threatens to take over his personality.
Kidnapped – Gripping historical novel about young David Balfour plunged into a series of adventures in the aftermath of the Jacobite Rising of 1745.
1887
The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables – Six short stories: The Merry Men, Will O’ the Mill, Markheim, Thrawn Janet, Olalla, The Treasure of Franchard.
On the Choice of a Profession – An essay.
Underwoods (poetry)
Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands (poetry)
1888
The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses – Historical adventure novel set during the Wars of the Roses as young Master Richard Shelton escapes from his wicked ‘uncle’ and rescues the girl he loves, young Joanna Sedley.
1889
The Master of Ballantrae – Two brothers end up on opposite sides of Bonny Prince Charlie’s rebellion of 1745, the Master being the one who goes into exile and adventures in America and India before returning to haunt the stay-at-home brother, until both are driven to a macabre and gruesome fate in the New World.
The Wrong Box – Comic novel mostly written by his step-son Lloyd Osbourne, but revised by Stevenson.
1890
Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu Stevenson’s angry defence of Father Damien, Catholic priest to the leper colony on the island of Molokai, against a detractor.
1891
The Bottle Imp – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a magic bottle and the love of two South Sea island natives.
Ballads – poems
1892
The Wrecker (co-written with Lloyd Osbourne) – An immensely long rambling narrative telling the life story of American Loudon Dodds, from his days as a failed art student in Paris, to his business ventures with brash Jim Pinkerton in San Francisco, to the long puzzling case of the shipwrecked Flying Scud whose mystery dominates the second half of the book and, in the final pages, reveals a gruesome and bloody tragedy at sea.
The Beach of Falesá – (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) A powerful short story about a rough white trader and the harsh revenge he takes on the fellow trader who tries to get him expelled from the island.
A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa – factual history
Across the Plains – Travelogue following straight on from The Amateur Emigrant (which describes RLS’s 1879 journey by steamship from Glasgow to New York) and describes his ongoing journey by train from New York to California.
1893
The Isle of Voices – Short story (collected in Island Nights’ Entertainments) about a lazy South Sea islander who falls foul of his father-in-law who is a warlock with magic powers.
Catriona, aka David Balfour – A sequel to Kidnapped.
Island Nights’ Entertainments (aka South Sea Tales) – Contains the three stories referred to above.
1894
The Ebb-Tide – A novella, the third collaboration with Lloyd Osbourne, describing the ill-fated trip of three beach bums at the ends of their tethers, who unexpectedly get the opportunity to crew a schooner, plan to steal and sell it, but then meet their nemesis in the shape of a supernaturally powerful white trader.
—-December 1894 Stevenson dies, aged 44, on the South Sea Island of Vailima—-
1895
Vailima Letters – 44 letters Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin, who published them with a preface and epilogue.
The Amateur Emigrant – A short intense account of Stevenson’s journey across the Atlantic in 1879, with descriptions of the squalid conditions of ‘steerage’ class passengers and reflections on the condition and character of the British working classes.
1896
Weir of Hermiston – Unfinished at Stevenson’s death, this fragment of nine chapters describes the childhood and young manhood of Archie Weir, sensitive son of the hanging judge old Adam Weir, how his father removes him from Edinburgh University for his subversive views and exiles him to the country estate of Hermiston where he falls in love with a local beauty, Christina Elliott – at which point a student acquaintance comes to stay, who it is hinted will become Archie’s bitter love rival – and the manuscript breaks off. Contains much mature and insightful portrayal of its characters especially, for the first time in Stevenson’s fiction, of its women characters.
In the South Seas – A collection of articles and essays describing Stevenson’s travels in the Pacific islands.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses – Poetry.
Records of A Family of Engineers – A personal history of his own family of lighthouse-building engineers, unfinished at his death.
1897
St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England – A long novel which Stevenson had almost completed and was finished after his death by Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Books & Boots 