‘Glad did I live and gladly die’
The global celebrity author of Treasure Island and other famous titles, Robert Louis Stevenson, made his final home in Samoa and survived an explosive visit to New Zealand.
When Robert Louis Stevenson slipped into Auckland one Friday night in 1890 – lankhaired and incognito – he was already a global literary celebrity, the JK Rowling of his day. The author of Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped was in the middle of another long and languid Pacific cruise. He and his American wife, Fanny, had just bought land for a house on the earthly paradise of Samoa, on the island of Upolu.
But rather than doze under a palm tree, Stevenson threw himself into island politics, buying into a newspaper, and agitating against what he saw as incompetent British, German and American control of the big Samoa archipelago.
He’d come to Auckland keen to talk politics with, and in search of direction and support from, seasoned colonist and former New Zealand Premier Sir George Grey, then elderly and retired in leafy Parnell.
Unlikely as it may seem, it was a Wellington civil servant who’d first alerted Stevenson to the wonders of the South Pacific. In 1875, as he prepared for his final law exams in Edinburgh, Stevenson met senior public servant (and distant relative) William Seed, who had visited Samoa, at his parents’ house.
His journal recalled how the pair talked until 4am: “Awfully nice man here tonight … telling us all about the South Sea islands till I was sick with desire to go there: beautiful places, green for ever; perfect climate; perfect shapes of men and women, with red flowers in their hair; and nothing to do but to study oratory and etiquette, sit in the sun, and pick up the fruits as they fall.”
The 24-year-old graduate soon fled the professional career his respectable parents always expected. Instead, he became a bohemian writer and global wanderer. By 1876, he was involved with divorcee Fanny Osbourne, whom he later married in San Francisco. He would write Treasure Island for her son, Lloyd.
A Wellington civil servant first alerted Stevenson to the wonders of the South Pacific.
Stevenson’s fragile health stymied his first attempt to meet Grey. On April 19, 1890, he steamed into the Waitematā on board the trader Janet
Nicoll and checked anonymously into the Star Hotel on Albert St. A receptionist recognised the guest with the long hair and magnetic eyes from a newspaper drawing.