PIRATES AND NAPA
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Northern California hangouts
Sheltering in place this spring to hide out from the coronavirus, I’ve been keeping busy by reading escapist literature. A younger version of myself might have curled up with a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island.” And in a less scary time, I might have driven down the coast to explore the forested hills and rocky outcroppings of Point Lobos State Natural Reserve, just south of Carmel, to see if I could detect any similarities to the topography of Stevenson’s perennially popular adventure book.
Why would anyone look for Treasure Island at Point Lobos? Because Edinburgh-born Stevenson, one of the most beloved authors in the history of English letters, spent some quality time in Northern California — and fans have long speculated that the wave-swept coastline of Point Lobos, with its lonely trails and hidden coves, might have been the inspiration for his fictional pirates’ lair.
The author came to California in 1879 in pursuit of Fanny Osbourne, the independently minded American woman, 11 years his senior and already married with two children, whom he had met and fallen in love with in France years earlier. The couple married the following year in San Francisco. They honeymooned for two months in an abandoned mine bunkhouse on the side of Mount St. Helena in northern Napa County. Stevenson documented those happy days in his memoir “The Silverado Squatters.”
The area is now part of the Robert Louis Stevenson State Park. A stone memorial near the park entrance marks the place where the bunkhouse once stood, and a five-mile trail through dense evergreen forest and chaparral leads to the summit of Mount St. Helena and its panoramic views of the Bay Area and much of Northern California. Reading the books offers some ideal escapism. In less viral times, you can also visit
This photograph, circa 1890, of Scottish novelist Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was taken about 10 years after his Napa Valley honeymoon. Stevenson is the author of such beloved works as “Treasure Island” and “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
a scale model of the bunkhouse at the Robert Louis Stevenson museum in St. Helena. Inside this unassuming building, you’ll find a wealth of information and artifacts relating to the author’s life, as well as a 6,000-volume library of books by and about him and books and other items from his personal collection.
You’ll also find a small section on him at the Sharpsteen Museum in downtown Calistoga. A small cottage adjoining the museum is one of two buildings that date back to 1862, when journalist Sam Brannan founded the resort town with his Hot Springs Hotel. The locals will tell you that Stevenson and Fanny “might have” once stayed in the cottage, but nobody knows for sure.
What they do know is that the couple enjoyed tastings at two Napa Valley wineries that still welcome the public today: Beringer in St. Helena and Schramsberg in Calistoga.
They also enjoyed visiting with “Petrified Charlie,” a Swedish homesteader and local character — Charles Evans — who discovered an ancient fossilized redwood forest on his land in 1870. The Petrified Forest is now a privately owned park, open to visitors who enjoy its picturesque hiking trails and guides who explain how the forest became petrified as it lay buried under ash from an eruption of Mount St. Helena more than three million years ago.
“The Silverado Squatters” isn’t the only work Stevenson penned about his stay in California. Before marrying Fanny, he lived in Monterey and wrote an appreciation of “The Old Pacific Capital” that became a chapter in his book “Across the Plains,” which documents his overland journey from the East Coast to California.
Haunted throughout his life by ill health, Stevenson spent most of his time in Monterey recuperating from the arduous journey west. He lived at Girardin’s French House for three months in 1879. The two-story adobe building, which sits on a quiet street in downtown Monterey, dates back to the era when California was part of Mexico and Monterey was its capital. Now fully restored and rechristened the Stevenson House State Historical Museum, the house contains exhibits and artifacts from the era, including several rooms devoted to Stevensonia.
From the French House, you can walk the few short blocks that would have brought him to the shore of Monterey Bay, where he might have gazed down the coast and seen a landscape much like the description he later wrote of the fictional Treasure Island:
“Grey-coloured woods covered a large part of the surface. This even tint was indeed broken up by streaks of yellow sand-break in the lower lands, and by many tall trees of the pine family, out-topping the others.”
Stevenson was flat broke and completely unknown when he lived in Northern California. He was yet to become the revered author of “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “A Child’s Garden of Verses.” Nine years later, his fame and fortune assured, Stevenson returned to the Bay Area one last time and chartered a yacht from Oakland millionaire Sam Merritt for a journey to the South Seas, where he spent his final years.
Three years after Stevenson’s death in 1894, his fans in San Francisco erected a stone monument in his honor, topped with a sculpture of a sailing ship, like the schooner Hispaniola that took Long John Silver and his pirate crew to Treasure Island along with the young stowaway, Jim Hawkins.
The “Stevenson Galleon,” as it’s called, was still standing in Portsmouth Square in San Francisco’s Chinatown when, according to legend, two young poets, out on the town, filled it with violets in honor of their literary forebear. George Sterling famously went on to christen San Francisco the “cool, grey city of love.” And his date, Ina Coolbrith, became California’s first poet laureate. As Oakland’s city librarian some years later, she mentored young readers, among them Jack London and Isadora Duncan.
And the beat goes on. The Stevenson Galleon still stands in Portsmouth Square, near the spot where Commodore John B. Montgomery of the USS Portsmouth raised the first American flag in California in 1846. But it’s been a while since anyone filled the old schooner with violets.