INTRODUCTION ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AND HAWAII he foreign author most beloved by the people of Hawaii first came to the islands in 1889. The graceful yacht Casco, with Robert Louis Bal- four Stevenson and his family aboard, had left Tahiti on Christmas Day, 1888, on a "most disastrous" pas- sage, with "calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about." 1 After almost a month, the vessel sighted the "Big Island" of Hawaii. A fair, strong wind blew, and the Casco, carrying jib, foresail, and mainsail—all single-reefed—flew along with her lee rail under. A heavy swell, the highest that Stevenson had ever seen, came tearing after them about a point and a half off the wind, but fortunately never crashed once upon the hull of the speeding Casco. The wind then died down, and for two days the anxious passengers lay becalmed off the Kona Coast NOTE : All the editor's notes for this introduction are numbered and appear at the end of this section. xi INTRODUCTION while their food supply, except for salt beef and biscuit, gave out. When the wind did come, it swept them past the islands of Maui and Molokai and into Honolulu Harbor at an alarming speed. Stevenson got his first view of the city, with its busy wharfs, low buildings, and background of swelling green mountains. At three o'clock on the afternoon of Fri- day, January 24, 1889, the Casco anchored. Even here, in mid-Pacific, reporters came out to interview the celebrated visitor, whose vessel had been so long overdue that it had been given up for lost. Robert Louis Stevenson was then at the height of his popularity. Born in Edinburgh in 1850, he had forsaken the family calling of lighthouse engineer to take a law degree, and then had found his true career in literature. Publication of books like Trea- sure Island, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped had brought him renown, and his industry with the pen had brought him a decent income as well. After broad travels, mainly in search of health—he had been frail in childhood and suffered all his life from tuberculosis—he had em- barked on the romantic cruise that was to lead him to spend his final years among the Pacific islands. S. S. McClure, head of a publishing syndicate, offered Stevenson a substantial sum if, during a pro- posed voyage for his health, he would write a series of travel sketches. Stevenson had wanted to cruise through the South Seas ever since his lonely stay in San Francisco late in 1879, when he had met Charles Warren Stoddard, writer of sketches and poems, in the "eyrie" on Rincon Hill. Stoddard, who along with Herman Melville was termed by R.L.S. as xii INTRODUCTION one of the two writers, both Americans, who had "touched the South Seas with any genius,"2 had made four trips to the Pacific islands, and his tales of Tahiti, Honolulu, and Molokai had aroused Stevenson's romantic yearning to range the latitudes of the noble brown races. Surely a proper yacht could be found that would carry the author and his family to the isles of summer! The Casco was chartered from her multimillion- aire owner, Dr. Samuel Merritt of Oakland, Cali- fornia, who was reluctant to entrust his jewel to any- one—especially to the slight Bohemian character who, at their first meeting, impressed the doctor as verging on insanity. Stevenson's bank account, fat- tened by a legacy from his father and an advance from McClure, prevailed. The charter gave Merritt the right to name as captain his old friend Albert H. Otis, who likewise was dubious. Stevenson looked to him much more aged than his thirty-nine years. R.L.S. was a stumbling skeleton, with a grotesquely gay air. Yet everyone was struck by his glowing brown eyes, which all his life had defied the hover- ing specter of death. Had Captain Otis been a lit- erary man—which he was not—he might have re- called the description of R.L.S. in the sonnet by William Ernest Henley: . Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist; A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all, And something of the Shorter-Catechist. Xlll INTRODUCTION Before the voyage was over, captain and charterer were to learn to respect each other's mettle. The Casco was a two-masted schooner with clean lines and spotless decks. Dr. Merritt had designed her to be one of the finest yachts afloat, with her cabin lined with mirrors and her salon chairs cush- ioned with velvet. Her graceful strength was to be tested to the limit in the forthcoming cruise on the ocean that is not always pacific. She glided through the Golden Gate on the afternoon of June 28, 1888; and Robert Louis Stevenson gazed for the last time on the American continent. The islands were to claim him for their own, and the Pacific would give him rich material to add splendor to the works of his final years. Accompanying "Louis"—as he was always called in the family—was an oddly assorted group of rela- tives. Most essential to his survival was his wife, Frances (Fanny) Matilda Van de Grift Osbourne, a divorcée with two children. Eleven years his elder, Fanny, reared in a rough Indiana town, had met him at an artists' colony near Paris when he was twenty-six, and they had fallen romantically in love. Stevenson had made his first trip to San Francisco, in fact, to help Fanny through the dangerous strain of divorce proceedings, and had himself become an invalid. They were married in that city on May 19, 1880, and then for eight years had seldom been separated. Fanny's son—(Samuel) Lloyd Osbourne, born in 1868—was also aboard, a gawky, bespectacled fellow just reaching his majority and dreaming of a writ- er's career. Stevenson's widowed mother, accom- xiv INTRODUCTION panied by a maid named Valentine Roch, was like- wise enjoying the cruise. Mrs. Thomas Stevenson, born Margaret Isabella Balfour and usually called Maggie, dressed as primly as Queen Victoria and wore similar starched widow's caps. She and the other ladies stood the rigors of the sea remarkably well. Stevenson's first Pacific island, touching "a vir- ginity of sense," 3 was Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, scene of Melville's Typee, a book that Louis had carried away after a visit to Stoddard's San Fran- cisco studio. For six happy months the party were guests of the people of the Marquesas. Then, thread- ing the low atolls of the Tuamotu or Dangerous Archipelago, the Casco took the voyagers to the famed pearl fisheries. In September, although his health had seemingly improved, Louis was stricken with a lung ailment and the Casco headed for Pa- peete, capital of French Oceania. Recovered, the author obtained much valuable information about Tahiti before embarking on the long traverse to Hawaii. Off Honolulu, Fanny's daughter Isobel, called "Belle," born in 1858, came out to the yacht with her husband, Joseph Dwight Strong, an artist who had come to Hawaii to paint for the royal court. At once the Stevensons were taken into the "royal crowd," the gay stratum of society that clustered around the palace built for His Hawaiian Majesty, David Kalakaua. King Kalakaua and his consort, Kapi'olani, had been on the throne since he won a stormy election in 1874. His attempts to restore personal rule to the xv INTRODUCTION monarchy were to end in its destruction, but while it lasted he was always the leading actor in a reign that sometimes resembled a Viennese operetta. The king could speak and write well both in Hawaiian and English. His court was a center of music and culture; he had composed the words to "Hawai'i Pono'i," the national anthem, and his name appeared as author of Legends and Myths of Hawaii, edited by R. M. Daggett, the first important book in Eng- lish to deal with the old tales. Of Kalakaua, Steven- son's friend Stoddard wrote: "Oh, what a king was he! Such a king as one reads of in nursery tales. He was all things to all men, a most companionable per- son. Possessed of rare refinement, he was as much at ease with a crew of 'rollicking rams' as in the throne room." 4 The first telephone to be installed on the capital island of Oahu was strung between Iolani Palace and the Royal Boathouse, setting for many a hilarious evening amid hula girls and poker tables. The king had won popularity by obtaining a long- desired reciprocity treaty which allowed sugar from Hawaii to enter the United States free of duty. He had toured the United States in 1874-1875, the first monarch ever to do so. He had toured the world in 1881, again setting a royal precedent. On his travels he had seen the crown jewels of several na- tions and, in 1883, on the ninth anniversary of his election, Kalakaua personally crowned himself and his queen within the bandstand in the palace grounds, before a crowd of eight thousand of his subjects. The king's fatal temptation to follow the advice of self-seeking adventurers like Celso Caesar Moreno and Walter Murray Gibson lost him much popular- xvi INTRODUCTION ity and aroused strong reform movements. Spurred on by Gibson, Kalakaua decided to make himself the primate of a Polynesian League comprising all the islands of the Pacific that had not been taken over by one or another European power.