Scottish Literature of the South Seas: Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific 9004682163, 9789004682160

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Brill_SCRL35.qxp_SPINE=20mm 12-12-2024 18:05 Pagina 1

Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature

While Robert Louis Stevenson was the principal Scottish author who shaped these early discussions, other prominent Scottish authors are also analyzed. Several chapters examine Scottish engagement with the South Seas, before and after Stevenson’s involvement with Pacific cultural and political affairs. The book lends weight and understanding as to why Pacific Islanders – both immigrant and indigenous – often claim affiliations with Scotland, and in the case of Hawaii and Samoa, to Stevenson in particular.

richard j. hill received his Ph.D. in English from Edinburgh University and is Professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu. He is the author of Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels (Routledge, 2010), and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text (Routledge, 2017). allison e. francis received her Ph.D. in English from Washington University in St. Louis, and is a Professor of English, Theater and Performing Arts at Chaminade University of Honolulu. She co-edited South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America (Routledge, 2018), and co-authored a poetry collection, Mulatta – Not So Tragic (Dodsworth Books, 2022).

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ISBN 978-90-04-68216-0 ISSN 1571-0734 brill.com/scrl

Scottish Literature of the South Seas Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis (Eds.)

This volume, edited by Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis, explores literary connections between Scotland and the Pacific. The contributors, including some of the world’s foremost scholars in Scottish and Pacific studies, examine how Scottish writing about the Pacific, and Pacific engagement with Scottish culture, generates a cultural examination of Scotland’s place in the British colonizing hierarchy.

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Scottish Literature of the South Seas Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific

Edited by Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis

BRILL

BRILL

Scottish Literature of the South Seas

Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature Series Editors Rhona Brown (University of Glasgow) John Corbett (BNU-HKBU United International College) Sarah Dunnigan (University of Edinburgh) Anne Stapleton (University of Iowa) Ronnie Young (University of Glasgow) Associate Editor James McGonigal (University of Glasgow)

volume 35

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scrl

Scottish Literature of the South Seas Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific Edited by

Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis

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Cover illustration: “The Bottle Imp,” Island Nights’ Entertainments. Artist: William Hatherell. Cassell & Company; London, Paris & Melbourne; 1893. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024059985

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill.” See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1571-0734 isbn 978-90-04-68216-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-68217-7 (e-book) doi 10.1163/9789004682177 Copyright 2025 by Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis. Published by Koninklijke Brill BV, Plantijnstraat 2, 2321 JC Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill BV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Brill Wageningen Academic, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill BV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill BV via brill.com or copyright.com. For more information: [email protected]. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Dedicated with love to Anne Elisabeth Hill, Phillip Andrew Francis, and Joyce Weathersby

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Notes on Contributors x



Introduction 1 Richard J. Hill

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Dia-Colonialism in Scotland and Aotearoa 16 Sarah Paterson-Hamlin

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Literary Perils of Piracy: the Strange Case of Alexander Selkirk 31 Allison E. Francis

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Omai the Traveller Meets George the Tourist: a Pacific Voyager at the King’s Visit to Edinburgh, 1822 45 Caroline McCracken-Flesher

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Sovereignty and the Shadows of Indigeneity: Stevenson’s Remediations of Scott in The Master of Ballantrae 58 Yoon Sun Lee

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“Where will all come home?”: Global Stevenson 72 Penny Fielding

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Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Footnote as a Sāmoan Microhistory 92 Lucio De Capitani

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Turning The Ebb-Tide: Ghosts in the Machine 107 Roslyn Jolly

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Inter-Racial Intimacies: Stevenson’s Late Pacific Tales 128 Mandy Treagus

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“‘The world was Like all New Painted’: Correspondences in Stevenson’s Rhetoric of Landscape in Kidnapped and The Beach of Falesá” 142 Nathalie Jaëck

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Blackbirding, Cannibalism, and the Demands of Appetite in John Cameron’s Odyssey 154 Audrey Murfin



Index 169

Illustrations Figures 2.1 2.2

7.1 7.2

“Selkirk left on island by Captain Thomas Stradling.” From The Story of Alexander Selkirk,. Samuel G. Goodrich (1867) 32 “Selkirk amusing himself with his Cats.” From The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe, a Narrative founded on Facts… (1850) 39 from Quarles’s Emblems (1812), Book 5, “Emblem 8,” p. 289 121 from Quarles’s Emblems (1812), Book 3, “Emblem 10,” p. 137 125

Notes on Contributors Lucio De Capitani is a postdoctoral researcher in English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research interests include colonial and postcolonial literatures (especially Indian writing in English, the work of Amitav Ghosh and of Robert Louis Stevenson), the theories of world literature, the connections between anthropology and literary studies, and (postcolonial) ecocriticism. Most recently, he has co-edited the volume Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide (Wetlands, 2022). Penny Fielding is Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her books include Writing and Orality, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography, The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Louis Stevenson and (with Andrew Taylor) Literature in Transition: the 1880s. She is a General Editor of the New Edinburgh Edition of Robert Louis Stevenson. She is currently writing a book about fiction and espionage in Scotland from Scott to Spark. Allison E. Francis is a poet, playwright, and Professor of English and Theatre at Chaminade University of Honolulu, and publishes scholarship on a range of topics which include Victorian literature, Scottish literature, theatre and poetry, Vodou in Haiti, 19th-Century African American and Caribbean women’s literature, and women’s literature with a focus on science fiction and fantasy. She is coauthor of Mulatta—Not so Tragic (2022), and co-editor of South Sea Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain and America (2018), which includes her chapter, “Ernest Hogan’s Colored All-Stars Minstrel Show: A Case of Racial Discrimination in the Republic of Hawai‘i.” Richard Hill is Professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu. He received his Ph.D. from Edinburgh University, and is author of Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels: Walter Scott and the Origins of the Victorian Illustrated Novel (2010), and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text: A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel (2017). He is also editor of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Great Affair: Movement, Memory, and Modernity (2017).

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Nathalie Jaëck is professor of nineteenth-century British literature at Bordeaux Montaigne University, France, and she is currently Vice-President for Research. She specializes in narratology and fin-de-siècle adventure. She wrote two books, Charles Dickens: l’écriture comme pouvoir, l’écriture comme resistance (2008) and Les histoires de Sherlock Holmes : une affaire d’identité (2008), as well as numerous articles on Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells. Roslyn Jolly is Associate Professor and Honorary Research Associate in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. She edited Stevenson’s South Sea Tales (1996), and is the author of Henry James: History, Narrative, Fiction (1993), and Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession (2009). She is currently producing an edition of Henry James’s Daisy Miller and Other Tales for Cambridge University Press. Yoon Sun Lee’s most recent book is The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (2023). She is also the author of Nationalism and Irony (2004), and Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (2013). Her writing can be found in MLQ, PMLA, Representations, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel, and other journals and collections. She is currently coediting with Kent Puckett an issue of Representations on “Proxy Wars” (August 2023), and beginning a larger project on structuralism. Caroline McCracken-Flesher is Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Her publications include Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow and The Doctor Dissected: A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke and Hare Murders (Oxford, 2005, 2012). She co-edited The International Companion to Nineteenth-Century Scottish Literature, (ASLS, 2022), and Walter Scott at 250: Looking Forward (Edinburgh, 2022). She also edited Approaches to Teaching the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (MLA, 2013); Scotland As Science Fiction (Bucknell, 2011); and Culture, Nation, and the New Scottish Parliament (Bucknell, 2007). She is co-editing The Edinburgh Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Writers. She is an Honorary Fellow, Association for Scottish Literature; on the Board of Trustees for the National Trust for Scotland Foundation USA.

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Audrey Murfin is Associate Professor of English at Sam Houston State University, specializing in Victorian literature. She is the author of Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration (2021), and articles on Arthur Morrison, Stevenson, Elizabeth, Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and Gothic realism. Sarah Paterson-Hamlin received her Ph.D. in Scottish literature from Glasgow University. She subsequently returned to her native New Zealand, where she worked as operations manager at the UpsideDowns Education Trust, which aims to provide speech therapy for Downs Syndrome children. She is co-editor of Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry (2016). Mandy Treagus is of Welsh, Scottish and Cornish descent, and lives on the unceded lands of the Peramangk and Kaurna peoples in South Australia. She is Associate Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where she teaches literature, culture, and visual studies, with interests in critical race and whiteness, gender and sexuality. She researches Pacific, Victorian and Australian literature and culture and her publications include Empire Girls: The Colonial Heroine Comes of Age, and the co-edited collections Changing the Victorian Subject and Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific: Discourses of Encounter.

Introduction Richard J. Hill Scots encountered Pacific people and communities from the early voyages of Captain James Cook, himself half-Scottish. Recent scholarship of the Scottish diaspora has been exhaustive in tracing Scots across the globe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including to the Pacific (especially the West Coast of America, Australia, New Zealand, and China). What is more difficult to trace or quantify is the settlement of Scots in the Pacific; that is, those who settled in Pacific Island communities. This is not surprising given the vast spread and sheer number of the island chains, but as this collection demonstrates, their footprints are discernible in the cultural life of the Pacific. As the nineteenth century progressed, Scots settled, married into, and contributed to indigenous Pacific communities in a way that was peculiar to Scots. For example, as some of the contributors to this volume will argue, in the nineteenth century some Scots came to identify with the plight of Pacific nations whose sovereignty was constantly threatened by imperial powers competing for land, resources, and military settlements. However, Scots were also part of that colonising project, and this contradiction is more difficult to untangle. During the seventeenth and eighteenth-century expansion of the British Empire throughout the Atlantic, Scots were disproportionally represented in the cruel trades of the plantations, specifically slavery and slave-trading. Recently, contemporary world events, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, have forced a racial, cultural, and historical reckoning in many countries, not least in Scotland. Scotland’s complicity in the Atlantic slave trade is being explored by contemporary novelists like James Robertson, and filmmakers like Moyo Akandé, who co-wrote and starred in the startling short film 1745. Moreover, recent scholarship from the Scottish diaspora, including work by T. M. Devine, Tanja Bueltmann, Angela McCarthy, John M. MacKenzie, and Duncan Sim, provides detailed and complex analysis of the movement of Scots throughout the world, and their varying roles in the mechanics of empire-building and colonialism. In fact, Devine (2011) points out that Scottish involvement in the slave trade of the Caribbean (and all its affiliated trades) was over-representative of their population within the British Isles. In June 2020, Irvine Welsh, the Scottish novelist and playwright, stood beneath the statue of Henry Dundas, British Home Secretary from 1791–1794, to decry Dundas’s role in the prolongation of the efforts to abolish slavery (Brown, 2020). There has since been fierce debate in Edinburgh, and Scotland

© Richard J. Hill, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_002

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more broadly, about the Edinburgh City Council’s decision to place a placard at the foot of Dundas’s statue in 2021, which, in the opinion of some scholars and commentators, greatly simplifies a complex and controversial historical episode.1 Nonetheless, this statue of Dundas, which stands over St Andrews Square in Edinburgh, is a testament to Scotland’s complicity in, and profit from, the eighteenth-century slave trade in the Atlantic, thus laying bare a darker side of Scottish participation in British imperial expansion. Importantly, however, Scotland’s violent exploitation of the Atlantic trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including the failed Darien scheme to colonize a part of what is now modern-day Panama, contrasts sharply with a different form of colonialism in the Pacific in the nineteenth century. Scotland’s interactions in the Pacific could be construed as less destructive—a Pacific Jekyll to the Atlantic’s Hyde. Of course, this is not to say there were not appalling encounters of cruelty by Scottish slaveowners, and exploitative forms of human trafficking such as “blackbirding,” when British nationals forced Pacific Islanders into involuntary labour on islands other than their own. In fact, Audrey Murfin’s chapter discusses one such famous example, that of Captain John Cameron, whose memoirs both admit to his crimes against Polynesians in kidnapping and selling them, while attempting to explain his actions within the context of an imperial system which encouraged them. Cameron’s memoirs are an important record of the late nineteenth-century realities of Pacific trade and exploitation; Cameron is also a significant figure in Scottish fiction, being the model for a character in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel The Wrecker (1892). Cameron was a survivor of the real-life wrecking of The Wandering Minstrel on Midway Island, a mysterious event that inspired Stevenson’s novel (co-authored with Lloyd Osborne). Therefore, Murfin argues that in Cameron we can identify both the romance and the unsettling realism of Scottish influence in the Pacific. Nevertheless, examples abound of more constructive interactions between Scots and Pacific Islanders. For example, the influence of ministers and missionaries like Robert Crichton Wylie (1798–1865) in Hawaiʻi contributed to philosophical movements that helped establish a thriving modern society with the potential to form international alliances. Wylie was the advisor to several Hawaiian kings, drafting versions of the Hawaiian constitutions that empowered the kingdom and its people, predicated on Enlightenment principles learned as a student in Scotland (see Bud Clark in Fulton et al., 2018; Alexander Pratt in Hackler, 2000). Wylie was just one of many Scots who served the Kingdom 1 For a nuanced discussion of both sides of this debate, see McCarthy (2022).

Introduction

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of Hawaiʻi. Scots often settled, and were adopted into, the Pacific communities they encountered. Miscegenation was common at this time, and a way for outsiders – haoles – to establish themselves socially and financially in the Pacific. Scottish men married into Hawaiian families, even Hawaiian royalty, producing mixed-race (or hapa) heirs to the throne. One example was the Scots-Irish James Campbell, an industrialist who settled on Maui and established a sugar-processing plant in 1860, at the start of the boom of the international sugar industry, becoming one of the wealthiest landowners in Hawaiʻi. He married Abigail Kuaihelani Maipinepine Bright, an Hawaiian hapa 19-year-old of aristocratic blood (Estate of James Campbell, 2003).2 A more important example, however, was Archibald Scott Cleghorn, an Edinburgh-born entrepreneur who married the Hawaiian Princess Likelike (sister of King David Kalākaua), whose hapa daughter was the princess Kaʻiulani, the tragic heir to Queen Liliʻuokalani. Kaʻiulani would be immortalized by Stevenson; the two became friends, and Stevenson penned the poem “To Princess Kaiulani” to keep her company on her journey to England to attend school (she would visit Scotland during her stay) (Zambucka, 2005). Mandy Treagus examines issues of miscegenation in her discussion of Stevenson’s story “The Beach of Falesá,” wherein Wiltshire, an Englishman, is coerced into a sham marriage with Uma, an indigenous Polynesian. Marriage here is being used by Case as a political weapon to disenfranchise Wiltshire on the island, but Wiltshire’s wife Uma ultimately becomes his saviour, as she surprises both Case and the average nineteenth-century Caucasian reader by being intelligent, loyal, and courageous. There is little doubt that the women of the Pacific impressed Stevenson, as his female characters take on a new agency once he begins writing from his new home. Whether it’s Uma in “The Beach of Falesá,” Kokua of “The Bottle Imp,” Lehua of “The Isle of Voices,” or even Catriona from the sequel to Kidnapped, David Balfour, the women in Stevenson’s stories take on a dimensionality, agency, even heroism, they perhaps lacked (often even lacking a presence at all) in earlier stories (think Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde). One model for Stevenson was clearly the princess of Hawaiʻi, sister to King David Kalākaua, Liliʻuokalani, with whom he spent time on his first visit to the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1889. Liliʻuokalani would become queen on her brother’s death in 1891, and was overthrown in a coup perpetrated by a group of white, Hawaiʻi-born businessmen affiliated with the United States. Liliʻuokalani demonstrated considerable personal and 2 Not widely known outside Hawaiʻi, James Campbell left a legacy in Hawaiʻi, including the Pioneer Sugar Mill on Maui, the James Campbell Company, and a high school named after him on the island of Oahu.

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political resilience in the face of misogynist and racist attacks to her character, and helped Hawaiian culture to survive the overthrow and endure the subsequent 80 years of American capitalism and commercialism through her actions and decisions, until the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s (Liliʻuokalani, 1990). Stevenson visited the imprisoned and deposed queen on his return visit to Hawaiʻi in 1893, in spite of the fact he was a guest of the Provisional Government who had imprisoned her.3 Not surprisingly, the powerlessness of colonised indigenous cultures is an experience shared between Scotland and Pacific nations, and this collection explores ways in which engagement with the Pacific leads Scotland – through literature – to a certain assessment of its own complicity in this colonial project, and also its own marginalization with the power structures of empire. Hawaiians were familiar with Scottish fiction and Scotland’s cultural survival and integration into larger national frameworks. For example, Kalãkaua was presented with a music box by the king of Italy, which played four musical adaptations of Robert Burns’s poems, when Kalãkaua passed through on his world tour in 1881. Sir Walter Scott’s novels also reached the Pacific, gaining as much popularity in Hawaiʻi as they did everywhere else; we know this because of an anecdote pertaining to Kalākaua’s 1881 trip to Edinburgh, when he was presented the opportunity to examine the manuscript of Waverley at the Advocate’s Library, which had been “one of the first novels he had read in English as a young man” (Pratt, in Hackler, 2000, 90). More significantly, Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) was translated into “66 serialised installments in the Hawaiian-language newspaper Ke Au Okoa (The New Era) between February 9, 1871 and May 9, 1872 under the title He Moolelo No Ivanaho (The Story of Ivanhoe)” (Hessell, 2018, 94). Nikki Hessell explains how the themes of colonization, the survival of indigenous cultures in the face of imposed ones, and the power of naming, spoke in complex ways to the socio-political climate of Hawaiʻi and the challenges facing Native Hawaiian culture. This complex position of the Scot as coloniser is given a new term here by Sarah Paterson-Hamlin: “dia-colonialism.” Scots were colonisers, but later in 3 When Stevenson first visited Hawaiʻi, it was still a sovereign kingdom, under the rule of Kalãkaua; the king passed away in 1891, while Stevenson was traveling in the Pacific and settling in Sāmoa, and the throne passed to the king’s sister Liliʻuokalani. In January 1893, Liluoʻkalani was illegally overthrown and supplanted by the “Provisional Government” which sought to annex Hawaiʻi to the United States (achieved finally in 1898 with the blessing of President McKinley). Stevenson returned to Hawaiʻi for a brief stay. He describes in a letter to Sidney Colvin how, having visited Liliʻuokalani in her prison-home, he endured a lunch “with a member of the P.G. (provisional government); and a good deal of anti-royalist talk” (Stevenson, 1994–95, 8:178).

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the nineteenth century often not in the traditional sense, being capable of separating themselves from colonial mechanics to settle themselves within these colonized spaces. Scottish writers – especially, but not only, Stevenson – who experienced the Pacific, directly or otherwise, were quick to recognize the similarities of cultural experience, as well as the obvious differences, especially racial differences, between them. An obvious point of sympathy between the two cultures is the loss of indigenous land, and subsequent displacement: for Scots like Stevenson, the Highland Clearances stood as a model for the displacement of Polynesian peoples, their loss of sovereignty, and the cultivation of their land for foreign peoples. Yoon Sun Lee’s chapter explores this problematic concept of sovereignty as presented in Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae, a novel that was finished during Stevenson’s 1889 stay in Honolulu. Lee suggests that such uncertainty, and shifting borders of sovereign nations, is represented by liquifying landscapes, like quicksands, calling to mind Walter Scott’s use of the Solway Firth in Redgauntlet (1824), a border landscape that almost drowns the protagonist Darsie Latimer in the opening chapters. In the Pacific, such landscapes abound, as do such political landscapes. For example, Stevenson was quickly made aware of the threats to Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty by external and internal forces. The external forces were nation states such as Germany, America, and Great Britain, all of whom were looking for trade and military footholds in the Pacific. The internal forces were racially charged. Racism, as it pertains to socio-political struggles in the Pacific, must never be overlooked. Albert Wendt, the Sāmoan writer, puts it like this: “For me, the most evil [aitu, or spirit] is racism: it is the symbol of all repression” (1976, 50). Racial theory underpinned Scottish participation in the Pacific, even in marriage. As a Scot, you could be an obedient subject of a Polynesian monarch, while carrying the weight of racial “superiority,” making it easy for you to marry into royalty. In fact, Stevenson was greeted by Kalākaua himself as he arrived in Honolulu harbour. Also, Stevenson was welcomed by Archibald Cleghorn, brother-in-law to the king, and befriended Cleghorn’s daughter, the heir to the throne, Kaʻiulani. Yes, Stevenson was a famous visitor, but this by itself did not warrant such welcome; it was also his Scottishness and his whiteness that afforded him this distinction. As several chapters by Roslyn Jolly, Lucio de Capitani, Treagus, and Murfin reveal in this volume, Stevenson was not immune to such hierarchies. While recognizing, and to an extent, deconstructing racial hierarchy in the Pacific in a manner that is astounding for his time, Stevenson also benefitted from it, even recreating it while building his home, Vailima, in Sāmoa. Recent work by Carla Manfredi is particularly astute in assessing Stevenson’s participation in what Jolly here calls “settler colonialism” (2018). Unfortunately, racism is a scourge

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to this day in the Pacific, shaping the literature of identity and resistance of indigenous writers, as articulated by Wendt, and a host of Pacific Island artists and writers (see Keown, 2018). However, racism allows the astute reader of Scottish writing in, and about, the Pacific to understand how Scots could both identify with, and simultaneously distance themselves from, the Polynesian. As Caroline McCracken-Flesher points out in her chapter on the Blackwood’s Magazine article “A Visit to the Great Island of Edinburgh, called Britain. By Eree Omai” (1822), possibly by John Galt, the fictional Omai is a figure whose gaze is adopted by Scots, while he is also othered. In this fictional account of the factual visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, Omai is an observer of both the king and the crowds, being mistaken himself as Scottish. Thus, he is both viewer and viewed. As McCracken-Flesher points out, Scots identified early with the Pacific Islander; the portrait of the original (very real) Mai, who came to England in 1774 on the return of Cook’s second voyage, was painted in heroic posture by the great portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds. Mai’s pose recalls that of the Chief of MacLeod, painted by Allan Ramsay. Mai is therefore recognized as a “chief,” a title that is loaded for Scots. Therefore, Reynolds’s portrait is an act of respect and recognition; in this portrait, he is (to use McCracken-Flesher’s phrase) mapping Mai onto a Scottish model of distinction and authority. Omai’s fictional experience clearly foreshadows the experience of settled Scots in the Pacific, who transitioned from colonisers to settlers. An early, albeit accidental, settler was Alexander Selkirk. Selkirk was the historical model for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As Allison Francis points out in her chapter, Selkirk represents a very early iconic Scottish presence in the Pacific, with his island off the coast of Chile forming a tourist attraction as the site of the “original Robinson Crusoe.” More pertinently for this volume, Scottish historians and authors have insisted on reclaiming Selkirk’s historical experiences in the Pacific from Crusoe’s imaginary ones. Such reclamation of an island adventure is in keeping with a broader tradition within Scottish fiction predicated on islands: while Scottish literature certainly does not own the market for island narratives, it has nonetheless contributed some of its greatest landmarks, including Walter Scott’s The Pirate, R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped (specifically the Isle of Earraid), J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, and more recently the works of George Mackay Brown. It’s little wonder, then, that an author like Stevenson found so much opportunity to re-visit some of his earlier work when encountering Pacific Islands. Island nations, in particular, afford an author like Stevenson so much scope for creative interpretation and expression, as demonstrated by the fictional island of Falesá, loosely based on Stevenson’s home of Sāmoa.

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By making Sāmoa his home, Stevenson positioned himself as an intermediary between chiefs, between Sāmoan and imperial interests, and between the worlds of the westerner and the Polynesian (Farrell, 2017). As a way to understand such a literary and historical juxtaposition, De Capitani’s chapter discusses how Stevenson’s historical and political tract A Footnote to History forms a new way of analysing historical moments through the local. This technique would be formalized by Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi as “micro-history.” An island, especially in the Pacific in the nineteenth century, was both separate from, and subject to, the vast historical changes underway throughout the world. By narrating local competition between chiefs and their followers, representing different external interests (Germany, America, and Great Britain), Stevenson could present a case-study that was simultaneously anthropological, historical, and political. Such micro-histories, predicated on the local (micro) as a reflection of the global (macro), had been practiced by other Scottish authors earlier in the century, most notably Scott, James Hogg and Galt. Galt, in particular, is significant as the putative author of the Blackwood’s essay on Omai, discussed here by McCracken-Flesher. Stevenson is employing a traditionally Scottish literary trope in his defence of Sāmoa’s sovereignty. Island literature also encompasses other narrative tropes that are rife in both Pacific and Scottish fiction, such as magic and mysticism. Shakespeare could arguably be credited with creating the island narrative, since The Tempest clearly forms a model for so many different types of island stories. In the Pacific isles, however, Scots found other similarities to their culture, notably in the depth and breadth of the superstitions they encountered. Again, Stevenson found rich material here as a prime exponent of the local and national ghost story (“Thrawn Janet,” “The Body Snatcher,” and “Markheim” to name just three). His work in this genre blended his old world (European) with his new (Pacific), to create something he felt – with justification – was new in fiction. He writes to Sidney Colvin in defence of his Hawai‘i-set story, “The Bottle Imp,” that “[y]ou always had an idea that I depreciated the B.I.; I can’t think wherefore; I always particularly liked it – one of my best works, and ill to equal” (Stevenson, 1994–94, 7:461). “The Bottle Imp” blends realities of economics, politics, and racial hierarchies of Hawaiʻi in the late nineteenth century with a magic that could be – but also resists – a Christian trope: an “aitu” (“spirit”) in a bottle. This short story serves as an example of how Stevenson sought out fresh literary ground, drawing on his own traditional roots with stories such as “The Spirit in the Bottle” and “Aladdin” from Arabian Nights, combined with Polynesian superstitions and ghosts, to create a narrative that bridged a Sāmoan, American, and European readership. Not surprisingly, “The Bottle Imp” was

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first published in Black and White, but also translated into Sāmoan for his local readers (Swearingen, 1980, 144–47). Jolly points out in her essay that focuses on “The Ebb-Tide” how Stevenson blends a harsh realism in his Pacific fiction with dreamscapes of beauty and magic. Jolly argues that in spite of the unnerving realism of “The Ebb-Tide” and its uncouth, unsympathetic trio of protagonists, there is a deliberate theatricality that the Pacific so readily offers up through its natural beauty, particularly in its light (both day and night), and in the artificial lighting of torches that resemble theatrical lighting of western theatre. In contrast, a story such as “The Isle of Voices,” presents this dreamscape as nightmarish, since the dark magic of the protagonist Kalamake (whose name literally translates to mean “dead money”) transports him and the character Keola via a magic carpet (yet another nod to Arabian Nights) to other islands while invisible. Kalamake is an albino Native Hawaiian magician who exploits his magic to rob other island nations – namely the Low Archipelago (the Tuamotus) – of its natural resources for financial gain. Kalamake’s albinism is a nod to a Polynesian playing a white man’s game: international trade. Jolly has explained elsewhere that this story is a commentary, and a metaphorical explanation, of the mechanics of capitalism and rogue nations profiting from vulnerable island nations, stealing natural resources for massive profit in far-away lands (in Stevenson, 1999, ix–xxxiii). As with almost every other story, Stevenson writes, “The Isle of Voices” is predicated on geography; understanding the cartography of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific, even on a basic level, is crucial to unravelling the story. More significant to this volume, however, is that Kalamake lives on the island of Molokaʻi, in the Hawaiian archipelago. Molokaʻi lies only 80 miles from Honolulu on Oahu, but that physical distance represents a temporal one too; Molokaʻi was considered less touched by the hyper-modernism of Honolulu, holding to the old ways and superstitions of Native Hawaiʻi. Molokaʻi is geographically adjacent to modernity, but exists at its periphery, lagging behind – or resisting – it, in a similar way that the Highland culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seemed other to Lowland and urban Scotland, as explored by Scott’s Waverley Novels. Stevenson’s Pacific stories demonstrate what Jolly refers to as “the partly-modern, partly primitive Pacific Islands.” However, the “primitive” of the Pacific merely highlights the brutality of modernity, of the crushing effects of commercialism and conservative religion, of blackbirding and racial exploitation. What these stories truly demonstrate then, when read together, is what Penny Fielding points out is the Pacific’s newly constructed interconnectivity with the modern world. As Fielding states, Stevenson thought “constantly about distance,” because distance in the Pacific could infer not just space, but

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time, an issue which in the late nineteenth century, and the development of telegraphic communication, was an concern made immediate by the International Meridian Washington Conference of 1884, which established Greenwich Mean Time. The world was shrinking even in the 1880s and 90s, and as with the Highlands of the 1790s, traditional Polynesian cultures were being marginalized by modernity, while their indigeneity was being diluted. As a result, indigeneity seems to survive at the peripheries; whether it’s Moloka‘i in Hawaiʻi, or Sāmoa, or the Highlands, there is a tension between the old world and the new. It is these very peripheries of nations that find themselves secondary to the whims of empires, that are also most vulnerable to exploitation and destruction. This is also a point of sympathy between Scotland and the Pacific, though a less obvious one. Hawaiʻi again provides a strong example: on the North Shore of Molokaʻi, descended from the sea cliffs, lies the peninsula of Kalaupapa. This is the site of the former leper colony, where two recently-canonised saints – Father Damien and Sister Marianne Cope – constructed and ran a hospice that would care for those who were stranded there by successive administrations. Stevenson attempted to visit Father Damien, who died shortly before his arrival in 1889 (although he did meet Sister Cope). Therefore, if Molokaʻi was considered “backward,” then its North Shore was the perfect place to deposit and forget the unwanted and afflicted. It was a site of great suffering, primarily of Native Hawaiians, who were subject of cruel policies enforced by primarily haole administrations (albeit under Hawaiian sovereignty).4 Another example from the 21st century is the island of Kahoʻolawe, in Maui County, which was evacuated by the US military and used as target practice for American bombers during World War II. In fact, the island is still being cleared and reclaimed by Native Hawaiian groups, who are not only trying to revivify the land, but also the religious sites damaged by the bombing (Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve Commission, n.d.). Further afield, though far from the only example, the Marshall Islands were evacuated and used as testing sites for increasingly destructive nuclear weapons by the United States, often entirely destroying the islands and poisoning environments and their populations for hundreds of miles. Michelle Keown has discussed such devastation of the Marshall Islands: “23 nuclear tests were conducted on Bikini Atoll between 1946 and 1958, but the 15-megaton BRAVO bomb – 1000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima – was the largest and ‘dirtiest’ ever tested by the US” (2018, 592). France also tested atmospheric nuclear weapons

4 For a detailed history of the leper colony on Kalaupapa, see John Tayman, The Colony (2006).

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on Pacific atolls until 1975. As destructive as the bombing was, more insidious has been the legacy of the poisoning of indigenous peoples (592). Not surprisingly, history is littered with such out-of-sight experimentation, and the island phenomenon echoes experiments such as those on Gruinard Island, or “Anthrax Island,” off the Scottish West Coast that was poisoned in 1942 as a countermeasure against possible German invasion (“Britain’s Anthrax Island,” 2001); the Outer Hebrides are sites for RAF pilot training; the North Coast of Scotland was recently the site of a massive NATO joint-forces exercise (Musgrove, 2021); and numerous Scottish islands such as St. Kilda have been abandoned due to increasingly difficult living conditions brought on by their disconnection from modernity. These islands, both Pacific and Scottish, have histories, mythologies, and dislodged peoples that have produced artistic expression. Keown provides such examples as Māori artist Ralph Ohtere, who created a series of lithographs and paintings called “Black Rainbow,” and writers such as Huberd Brémond, Henri Hiro, Charles Manutahi, Chantal Spitz, and the poet-activist Déwé Gorodé (2018). Quoting Tongan scholar Epeli Hauʻofa, Keown describes how the Pacific was conceptualized as a “constellation of tiny, putatively isolated and sparsely populated ‘islands in a far sea’” (2018), making them ripe for exploitation. Stevenson dramatizes this process in “The EbbTide” through Attwater’s micro-colonization of his pearl-island and its people. In echoes of these writers, the work of Orkney author George Mackay Brown, and in particular his 1972 novel Greenvoe, is an elegiac response to similar (if not as devastating) effects of militarism and imperial indifference to local, indigenous ways of life that are tied to their landscapes. As with Jolly’s description of Stevenson’s work, Ali Smith, in her introduction to Greenvoe, describes the novel as both “dreamy and timeless, yet shockingly twentieth-century” (in Mackay Brown, 2004, v). “It’s a book of locality,” Smith states, and yet it is also a “book about history and contemporary history,” much in the manner of Ginzburg’s and Levi’s micro-histories. Greenvoe, the village on the island of Hellya, is fictional, like Falesá, but it contains profound reflections of the effects of history on indigenous individuals within the context of imperial militaristic manoeuvring. Smith also points out Greenvoe’s ultimate contradiction: “it’s a book where even when everything’s lost, there’s hope and there’s life.” In yet another experiential mirroring with the Pacific, Greenvoe enacts the reclamation of “dead” land following Operation Blackstar, a governmental nuclear experiment which displaces the locals. Those locals return to bury one of their own, planting a new seed, or sacrifice, to the land that needs to revivify. Mackay Brown’s novel was prescient, as it predicted the very real political push a few years later to mine his native Orkney (on which Hellya

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is based) for uranium, which sparked protests on the island in 1979.5 Mackay Brown, in a letter to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, following her visit to Stromness in 1980, wrote, “The Uranium is slumbering among its rocks … ​What will Stromness be in fifty years?” (quoted in “Deep Time Materials: Uranium,” 2017). He is expressing the potential fallout of such mining in the long term for the residents of the island, long after the mining operation would have moved on. Such experiences are playing out in the Pacific, as on Kahoʻolawe, where Native Hawaiian restoration is bringing back vital plant life, clearing ordinance, and reinstituting ancient practices (Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve Commission, n.d.). Scotland is not a nation of islands, but its islands are crucial to its national-historical and cultural identity, spanning millennia; the treatment of its islands signals Scotland’s true position – subsidiary – within the British imperial hierarchy, just as treatment of Pacific atolls signals their true importance to the nation states that have claimed them. Although this is not solely a Stevenson book, any Scottish literary analysis of the Pacific must pay due attention to his work and his impact. Therefore, this collection inevitably uses Stevenson as a primary focus. As Keown has pointed out, there is much Pacific Island literature that is a response to Stevenson, attempting to reclaim their own narrative in their own indigenous voice (2008). Stevenson’s work anticipates so much of what was to follow, creating a new kind of literature in a Deleuzean manner of applying established knowledge and wisdom to new experiences. He seems, in his Pacific work, to anticipate racial theory, micro-history, and broader ways of thinking such as post-colonialism and post-structuralism. Importantly, Stevenson seems to experience the Pacific as something of a mirror to Scotland, in which treasures become Pandora’s boxes, landscapes move under our feet, and the exotic becomes relative to your geographical location. Nathalie Jaëck here points out how the realism of Stevenson’s Pacific fiction highlights the exoticism of the Scottish landscape, in her discussion of Kidnapped and “The Beach of Falesá.” However, as many of the essays here point out, and following work by Jolly (2009), Joseph Farrell (2017), and Manfredi among others, Stevenson is also a man of his time, and not above reproach. He may well have identified some of the facets of racial theory that reinforced imperial ambition, but he 5 The uranium debates in Orkney triggered a “political awakening” of many of its residents, as local resistance to the plans of the South of Scotland Electricity Board, the North of Scotland Hydro Electric Board, the Highlands and islands Development Board, supported by the European Commission (Grahame, 2020). See also Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time, an AHRCfunded project through the University of the Highlands and Islands (2017).

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also benefitted from it in securing his privilege when he settled on Sāmoa, and as a tourist with a camera traveling through Pacific Island chains. He becomes Omai in the Pacific: both viewer and viewed (as Manfredi neatly describes, he is often the object of derision by those whose photographs he is actually taking). Stevenson is also far from the only Scot to experience, report on, and write about the Pacific. One of the earliest and most valuable accounts we have of early post-contact Polynesian life comes from a Scottish settler in Hawaiʻi, Archibald Campbell (1787–1821), whose account A Voyage Round the World from 1806 to 1812 provides details of Polynesian life merely thirty years after the death of Cook on the Island of Hawaiʻi in 1779. Campbell gives an account of a performance in 1809 of a musical derivation of the Scottish poem Ossian by MacPherson, entitled “Oscar and Malvina.” An English “block-maker” James Beattie, “who had been at one time on the stage in England,” apparently chose the musical derivative of MacPherson’s poem as an early theatrical production for the royal court of Hawaiʻi. Campbell describes the scene in comical terms, worth quoting at length: This piece was originally a pantomime, but here it had words written for it by Beattie. The part of Malvina was performed by the wife of Isaac Davis. As her knowledge of the English language was very limited, extending only to the words yes and no, her speeches were confined to these monosyllables. She, however, acted her part with great applause. The Fingalian heroes were represented by natives clothed in the Highland garb, also made out of taper, and armed with muskets. The audience did not seem to understand the play well, but were greatly delighted with the after-piece, representing a naval engagement. The ships were armed with bamboo cannon, and each of them fired a broadside, by means of a train of thread dipped in salt-petre, which communicated with each gun, after which one of the vessels blew up. Unfortunately, the explosion set fire to the forest, and had nearly consumed the theatre. (1817, 143–44) This snapshot is significant in understanding how particularly Scottish literature – and its associated iconography – resonated with a Pacific audience. As Campbell describes, the play itself meant little to the audience (which would have been a majority Polynesian as there were very few haoles – foreigners – in Hawaiʻi in 1809), but the use of tapa (“taper”), a cloth made from tree bark used by Hawaiians, to create “Highland garb,” indicates a touchpoint between the two cultures. It’s easy to imagine an early Polynesian audience

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appreciating costumes made from their own materials representing another national dress (the kilt). Significant, too, is the date: in 1809, Walter Scott was yet to publish Waverley (1814), which transformed the literary market of the nineteenth century and popularized the “Highland garb” around the world. Therefore, by the time Stevenson arrived in San Francisco to set sail into the Pacific, there was already a heavily established Scottish presence, and literary connection, in place, from which he could then draw inspiration, make connections, and create new work. There exists in Hawaiʻi alone a strong Scottish community of ex-pats, descendants, and clubs; there is a middle school named after Robert Louis Stevenson; in Mãnoa on Oahu is preserved the hut in which Stevenson reputedly finished the writing of The Master of Ballantrae (see Hill, in Fulton et  al., 2018, 107–22); and there are streets in Waikiki named after the Scottish members of the royal family, Archibald Cleghorn, and his hapa daughter, Kaʻiulani. Where there are roots that run so deeply on mutual recognition, on industrial and commercial reciprocity, and on shared or paralleled histories, there are bound to be literary connections too. This book attempts to explore and expand this connection from a Scottish perspective, hoping to encourage further research from both sides of the planet on a relationship that is mutually enriching and creative. The chapters of this collection speak to the themes, issues, and concerns that surround this fascinating connection of worlds across the oceans. References “Britain’s ‘Anthrax Island.’” 2001. BBC News. 25 July, 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi /uk_news/scotland/1457035.stm. Brown, Angie. 2020. “Author Irvine Welsh addresses anti-racism protest in Edinburgh.” BBC News. 20 June, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east -fife-53121886. Campbell, Archibald. 1817. A Voyage Round the World, from 1806 to 1812, in which Japan, Kamschatka, the Aleutian Islands, and the Sandwich Islands were Visited, including a Narrative of the Author’s Shipwreck on the Island of Sannack, and his Subsequent Wreck in the Ship’s Long-boat; with an Account of the Present State of the Sandwich Islands, and a Vocabulary of their Language. New York: Van Winkle, Wiley & Co. Accessed January 14, 2022. https://books.google.com/books?id=jkoMAAAAYAAJ &printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f= false. Devine, T. M. 2011. To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland’s Global Diaspora, 1750–2010. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.

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Estate of James Campbell, eds. 2003. “James Campbell, Esq.” James Campbell Company. Honolulu: Electric Pencil. https://www.jamescampbell.com/media/rvlf5eaw /jamescampbellstory.pdf. Farrell, Joseph. 2017. Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. London: MacLehose Press. Fulton, Richard, Stephen Hancock, Peter Hoffenberg, and Allison Paynter, eds. 2018. South Sea Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America. New York: Routledge. Grahame, Fiona. 2020. “Orkney’s Uranium Protests.” The Orkney News, July 25, 2020. https://theorkneynews.scot/2020/07/25/orkneys-uranium-protests/. Hackler, Rhoda E., ed. 2000. The Story of Scots in Hawaiʻi. Honolulu: The Caledonian Society of Hawaiʻi. Hessell, Nikki. 2018. Romantic Literature and the Colonised World. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jolly, Roslyn. 2009. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Kahoʻolawe Island Reserve Commission. N.d. “Kaho‘olawe History.” Accessed January 24, 2022. http://kahoolawe.hawaii.gov/history.shtml. Keown, Michelle. 2008. “‘Our Sea of Islands’: Migration and Métissage in Contemporary Polynesian Writing.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, 11 no. 4: 503–522. DOI: 10.1386/ijfs.11.4.503/1. Keown, Michelle. 2018. “Waves of Destruction: Nuclear Imperialism and Anti-Nuclear Protest in the Indigenous Literatures of the Pacific.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54 no. 5: 585–600. DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2018.1538660. Liliʻuokalani. 1990. Hawaiʻi’s Story by Hawaiʻi’s Queen. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing. McCarthy, Angela. 2022. “Historians, Activists and Britain’s Slave Trade Abolition Debate: The Henry Dundas Plaque Debacle.” Scottish Affairs, 31:3, 325–344. DOI: 10.3366/scot.2022.0420. McCarthy, Angela and John. M. MacKenzie, eds. 2017. Global Migrations: The Scottish Diaspora since 1600. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McGaw, Sister Martha Mary. 1950. Stevenson in Hawaii. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press. Mackay Brown, George. 2004. Greenvoe. Edinburgh: Polygon. Manfredi, Carla. 2018. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, 1888–1894. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Musgrove, Gavin. 2021. “One of Europe’s largest military operations set to start in North of Scotland this weekend.” Strathspey and Badenoch Herald. September 16, 2021. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/1457035.stm. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1999. South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Stevenson, Robert Louis. 994–95. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Ed. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Swearingen, Roger. 1980. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide. Connecticut: Archon Books. Szasz, Ferenc Morton. 2000. Scots in the North American West, 1790–1917. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tayman, John. 2006. The Colony: The Harrowing True Story of the Exiles of Moloka‘i. New York: Scribner. University of the Highlands and Islands. 2017. “Deep Time Materials: Uranium.” Orkney: Beside the Ocean of Time August 8, 2017. https://www.uhi.ac.uk/en/archaeologyinstitute/our-research/research-projects/oceanoftime/blog/deep-time-materialsuranium.html Wendt, Albert. 1976. “Towards a New Oceania.” Mana Review 1:1, 49–60. Zambucka, Kristin. 2005. Princess Kaʻiulani of Hawaiʻi. Honolulu: Mutual Publishing.

Chapter 1

Dia-Colonialism in Scotland and Aotearoa Sarah Paterson-Hamlin 1 Introduction The university town of Dunedin lies on the east cost of the Otago region, towards the southern tip of Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island (Te Waipounamu). Its present-day English-language name derives from Dùn Èideann, the Scottish Gaelic for Edinburgh. Each March, the town celebrates its founding in 1848, by a group representing the Free Church of Scotland. Of course, indigenous Māori populations had made the area home long before this, since at least the 12th century (Hamel, 2001, 9–13). Dunedin has very little in the way of statuary, but the two which dominate are those of Queen Victoria and Robert Burns. Burns is particularly prominent, seated in the town’s centrepiece – the Octagon. This is the fourth and final in the set of near-identical statues designed by the artist John Steell in the late nineteenth century, the other three residing in New York, Dundee, and London. Spreading out from Burns in every direction are the street names of Edinburgh transposed on an entirely different landscape to that which they were designed for. There can be little doubt that the colonial metropole of Dunedin is not London but Edinburgh. Within the field of Scottish literature, there is a growing tendency to utilise the language and concepts of post-colonial studies in order to make sense of topics such as Scotland’s relationship to the London metropole both past and present, the great and expanding body of diasporic literature, or, more recently, the creative responses to devolution and independence referenda. The existence of a town like Dunedin need not negate the value of such studies, but it does complicate them. How can the Scotland of the Highland Clearances also be the Scotland that planted a “new Edinburgh” in the midst of land already named Mapoutahi, Taieri, and Taiaroa? Is it really possible to investigate Scottish literature through the lens of post-coloniality, given its integral role in the British Empire? The internal colonisation of Scotland is permanently interwoven with the external colonisation of a British Empire that ultimately came to govern nearly a quarter of the world’s population. It is therefore not so much a case of reconciling two seemingly opposing positions – that of coloniser and colonised – but of understanding the quite unsurprising relationship between the two in the case of a nation like Scotland.

© Sarah Paterson-Hamlin, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_003

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Scottish literary studies have gained much from post-colonial scholarship, but, in the words of Michael Gardiner, negotiating Scotland’s position in regards to both Britain and its Empire has proved to be “wearied and misleading.” Likewise, considering Scottish literature in a purely post-colonial framework, risks underestimating the multi-directional impact of Scotland’s colonial legacies in the Pacific and all over the world. In this chapter, I will propose that the term “dia-colonial”1 replace “post-colonial” when it comes to Scottish literature, allowing us to embrace Scotland’s complex relationship with the British Empire, rather than fearing that complexity. I will develop this term by examining two contemporary Scottish literary figures and their relationship to dia-coloniality, Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray, exploring the influence of post-colonial literary movements from around the world, but with a particular focus on New Zealand’s Māori Renaissance, as well as Scotland’s devolution/independence movements of the past half-century. I will conclude with an examination of the dia-colonial in one of Scotland’s literary works of the current era, and how this may signal future trends in Scottish literature. 2

Scottish Literature and Post-Colonialism

The Scottish devolution referenda of 1979 and 1997, and the independence referendum of 2014, brought to prominence arguments relating to finances, immigration, foreign policy, land use, trade, and a host of others. Principally, however, they pitted two co-existing but conflicting identities against one another: Scottishness and Britishness.2 While the separation between these two identities was a key factor in the origins of these referenda, it must also be acknowledged that Scottish and British identities are not easily separated from one another. The confusion in common parlance regarding the name of the nations and nation-states that make up the British Isles is clear evidence of this. Many continue to struggle openly with the conflation of the terms “English” and “British,” both in common parlance and media as in the infamous Andy Murray example, or in academia, as Robert Crawford does for example in Devolving English Literature (1992). While at times these conflations can be 1 The prefix “dia” here indicating multi-directionality, as in the words diagonal, diacritic, dialysis, or diamagnetism, from the Greek origin on dia meaning through or across. 2 See for example the results of this Lord Ashcroft Poll, taken the day after the referendum: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/20/scottish-independence -lord-ashcroft-poll.

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comic or seem only a mild inaccuracy, they can also have much more significant consequences. In a clear example of dia-coloniality, referring to certain things as English rather than a more accurate British has the effect of both dominating Scottish (and Welsh, Irish) culture, and exonerating it from imperial guilt. It is no wonder, therefore, that literary critics of the post-colonial age have grappled with where to place Scotland in this context.3 The vast majority of postcolonial studies generally discuss colonial relationships in a European/non-European binary form, with expatriate colonial administrators resting uncomfortably in-between as the archetypal example of Bhabha’s hybridity concept (Bhabha, 1990, 2). Scotland, as an “active and enthusiastic partner in British Empire building,” is undeniably a colonising nation, whether viewed independently or as part of Great Britain (Hart, 2008, 199). However, there are also many who contest that Scotland itself was ever colonised by its more powerful southern neighbour. The publication of Michael Hechter’s Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development 1536–1966 (1975) was something of a watershed in the framing of this debate. For contemporary literary critics, postcolonial concepts can offer what Silke Stroh calls a “theoretical toolbox,” which can be extremely helpful in analyses of certain Scottish texts (Stroh 2015, 337–54). Despite the difficulties in classifying Scotland as a straight-forward case of the postcolonial, the majority of those who have approached the issue have ultimately found a place for Scotland within a postcolonial framework. Cairns Craig, Carla Sassi, Michael Gardiner, Michael Hechter, and Theo van Heijnsbergen have all done so, generally taking care to at least acknowledge Scotland’s role within the British Empire before doing so. Silke Stroh, for example, argues that postcolonial studies have provided a helpful background for the study of independence attempts such as the Referendum, outwith a specifically postcolonial context: postcolonial concepts can, and should, be used as a theoretical toolbox that enables critics to explore processes of empire-building, of power relations and cultural oppression but also the practices of decolonisation and freedom campaigns worldwide. (Stroh, in Sandrock, p. 339) 3 One intriguing example of this conflation is the Treaty of Waitangi – the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand, signed in 1840 between the British Crown and over 500 Māori leaders. Many discrepancies between the English and Māori language versions have been debated over the years, but one major difference in the very first sentence remains largely unnoticed. Where the English text reads “Her Majesty Victoria Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland,” the Māori version reads “Ko Wikitoria te Kuini o Ingarani” (Victoria the Queen of England).

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Sassi and van Heijnsbergen agree with Stroh on the need for interaction between Scottish and postcolonial research, particularly in regard to writers such as Edwin Morgan and Alasdair Gray, who have articulated their dissatisfaction with the state of the Union [and] have often pursued agendas which bear evident similarities with postcolonial ones. (Sassi and van Heijnsbergen, 2013, p. 3) They contend that Scotland’s imperial complicity cannot and should not be ignored in applying postcolonial theory to writers such as Gray. This position is increasingly popular amongst those who discuss Scottish literature with reference to postcolonial studies, such as Murray Pittock in his chapter within Scotland 2014 and Beyond – Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence? Michael Gardiner in The Cultural Roots of British Devolution, and Graeme McDonald in Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature, and is an important part of my own definition. However, as Sassi and van Heijnsbergen also point out by citing Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, “[Scotland’s] complicity in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonised peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as postcolonial” (2013, 6). Liam Connell is one notable exception to this trend in contemporary Scottish literary study. Connell argues that “the belief that England colonised Scotland is unhelpful for a proper conception of either colonisation or Scottish history” (Connell, 2004, 253). Scotland’s depiction as a colonised nation originates with the development of political and literary nationalism in the 1920s, according to Connell, and is a nationalist rhetorical strategy as opposed to an historical reality. He points out Scotland’s retention of powerful civic structures following the Treaty of Union in 1707 such as the church and the law, Scottish participation in the elite of British society (including colonial administration overseas), and a “similar standardizing process within England itself” with regard to Anglicising linguistic hegemony in Scotland (255). Despite these objections to classifying Scotland as a colony of England, Connell does accept that “post-colonial theory does not require that Scotland was a colony for its application” (262). Connell’s work raises important objections to placing Scottish literature in post-colonial studies, including the reality of Scotland’s role in the British Empire. Describing Scotland in colonial terms in relation to England, for example, is indeed a pro-independence rhetorical strategy for both Lochhead and Gray, as I shall explore. These objections however, when noted and understood, can also form an application of post-colonial theory to Scottish literature with the potential for great benefits to the field. As Sandrock states,

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postcolonial criticism and Scottish studies  …  ​may enter into a fruitful relationship if, and only if, the relationship is critically theorized and self-consciously evaluated. (Sandrock, 2015, 337–54) The Treaty of Union itself can provide an interesting starting point for examining the colonised face of Scotland’s Janus-like relationship to post-colonial studies. Graeme Morton argues that Scotland’s eighteenth-century lawmakers and nineteenth-century nationalists, “… believed their nation had entered the Union of 1707 as an equal, and that was how they demanded to be treated” (Morton, 2001, 5). However, the Union’s legacy in Scotland is perhaps the experience which most closely mirrors elements of other colonial relationships. In Aotearoa, the Treaty of Waitangi was signed in 1840 between representatives of the British government and Māori leaders from across the country. It too was established on the understanding of equal partnership. Cairns Craig argues: […] the movement for Scottish Home Rule developed not so much out of resistance to the Union but out of insistence upon it, and upon the fact that the treaty was being breached by the Westminster parliament. (Beveridge, 1989, i) In the same way, elements of Aotearoa’s literary post-colonialism have been framed in reference to the Crown’s failure to uphold the Treaty of Waitangi. For example, the establishment of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 was concurrent and closely related to the Māori literary and cultural renaissance (Derby, 2011). The phrase “Māori renaissance” is applied to the explosion of cultural works by Māori artists, or works that included Māori language or culture as a central element, over the period from approximately 1970 through to the end of the twentieth century. Key examples include Te Karere (the Māori language news broadcast), the nationwide Te Māori exhibition (1984–87), the 1983 film Utu, Keri Hulme’s Man Booker Prize winning novel The Bone People (1984), Hinewehi Mohi’s musical activism, the writings of Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, Rawiri Paratene, and others, and the foundation of the theatre company Taki Rua in 1990. This movement accompanied significant political changes such as those land claims instigated by the Tribunal, including the large Taranaki and Kai Tahu claims, the Māori Language Act 1987, and the establishment of the first kōhanga reo (Māori language immersion preschool) in 1982. Increasing public acknowledgement of the unequal partnership represented by breaches of the Treaty has had a tangible effect on post-colonial literature in Aotearoa, with which we can draw a direct parallel to Scottish constitutional debate.

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Furthermore, neither this Renaissance nor Scotland’s constitutional debate can be separated from wider global trends. Over the course of the 1960s, nineteen sovereign nations were created by gaining independence from the UK.4 In 1979, the year of the devolution referendum in Scotland, Kiribati, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and St Lucia all followed suit, as did nine others during the 1970s.5 Between this time and the 1997 referendum, three others had likewise permanently departed the once-vast Empire. The Trusteeship Council was disbanded in 1994, further reducing Britain’s administrative “duties” over other nations. Accepting that the imagined community of Britain is tied to the idea of the British Empire, the rise of post-colonialism and the departure of former colonies from British control has an inevitable effect on how British people conceive their own nation. Sassi, van Heijnsbergen, Gardiner, Macdonald, and others are correct in their assertions that studies of Scottish literature and postcolonial literature, including movements like the Māori renaissance, are “less separate trends, than intricately related and often conjoined critical positionings,” and this is a connection which provides exciting opportunities for Scottish literary studies (Gardiner, 2011, 3). However, this relationship is as significant when it comes to Scotland’s history as a colonising power as it is when considered as part of an opposition to a hegemonic Anglocentrism, and there are legitimate concerns regarding the classification of a nation such as Scotland as “post-colonial.” In order to acknowledge these concerns, and to embrace the possibilities of considering Scotland’s (and others’) multifaceted relationship to colonialism, I propose the use of a new term – “dia-colonial” – to replace post-colonial in the Scottish context. Using the term dia-colonial enables a more holistic understanding of some of the forces which have shaped Scottish literature over the past three centuries. James Robertson expresses the aspiration to unlock this understanding in his epigraph to Joseph Knight (2003), a novel based on the historical eponymous figure, an enslaved person brought from Jamaica to Scotland who subsequently won a freedom suit against his former master. Robertson’s epigraph is a quotation from the Nigerian writer Ben Okri: “If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings” (1996, 21). Embracing Scotland’s dia-coloniality, facing this truth rather than

4 Botswana, Gambia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia, Antigua and Barbuda, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Maldives, Singapore, and Malta. 5 Seychelles, Bahamas, Dominica, Grenada, Qatar, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Tuvalu.

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continuing to apologetically utilise post-colonialism’s “toolbox,” can lead to flowerings within both criticism and literature itself. Scottish literature is dia-colonial because it is influenced by Scotland’s role in the British Empire, but simultaneously experiences a sense of marginalisation in literature in an Anglicised Britain administered from a London metropole. This marginalisation finds helpful expression via the mechanisms of post-colonial theory. The term “metropole” is a particularly important one for this study. Metropole, derived from metropolis, is a term used in post-colonial studies to describe the centre of an empire. The metropole in relation to the British Empire is variously described as either London or the entire UK, a conflation which in itself speaks of Scotland’s divided, dia-colonial relationship with that metropole. This is one of the ways in which a dia-colonial approach can also sit well with studies of Welsh and Irish/Northern Irish literatures.6 Anthony Chennells explains the significance of the metropole to postcolonial studies in the following terms: The one paradigm to which the postcolonial critic is always alert is the paradigm on which any concept of empire is based: centre and periphery. Whether the centre is Rome, St Petersburg and Moscow, London, Lisbon, Vienna or Paris, empires constitute the imperial metropole as both normative and authoritative. Whatever meaning the periphery has, imperialism implies, derives from its relationship with the metropolitan centre. (1999, 111) This London metropole is Lochhead’s “glistening city that sucked all wealth to its centre” (1987, 11–12). Anthony Webster’s definition of metropole, however, describes Britain as a whole as the metropole of the British Empire, rather than London specifically (2006). For Scottish co-colonial writers such as Gray and Lochhead, both definitions of the metropole in relation to the British Empire are significant, and both require negotiation from the Scottish perspective. The essential nature of Scotland’s dia-colonialism is that it is at once centre and periphery.

6 See for example Stefanie Lehner, 2005, “Towards a Subaltern Aesthetics: Reassessing Postcolonial Criticism for Contemporary Northern Irish and Scottish Literatures”; Esther Whitfield, “Empire, Nation and the Fate of a Language: Patagonia in Argentine and Welsh Literature,” Postcolonial Studies, 14 (2011).

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Liz Lochhead

Liz Lochhead was Scotland’s second Makar at the time of the 2014 referendum for Scottish independence, and an enthusiastic supporter of a Yes vote in favour of independence. She was born in Motherwell in 1947 and published her first poetry collection, Memo for Spring, in 1972. Since that time, she has remained a consistent presence in Scottish poetry and theatre as a prolific writer and performer of her work. Lochhead was not always a wholehearted supporter of Scottish independence, and did not support devolution in the 1979 referendum. The outcome of that referendum, however, altered her stance on the subject: I was, I remember, very anti any form of ‘nationalism’, equating it automatically with jingoism  …  ​After the [1979] referendum I was ashamed and thought, ‘What kind of country doesn’t want to have more of a say in its own affairs?’ And, gradually, I’ve realised it would be perfectly possible to pursue the same concerns as I’ve always had as an equal European and a citizen of a small, independent country. One that didn’t think of itself as ‘better’ than any other, but one perfectly capable of taking responsibility for itself. (Gonzalez, 2004, 26) Despite her changing view on Scottish independence, Lochhead’s creative work has been consistent in its challenge to hegemonic discourse alongside the aversion to jingoism she describes in the above quotation. The identification and opposition of cultural hegemony is a core element of post-colonial writing, and one which Lochhead has increasingly come to utilise in relation to her depictions of Scotland. One of the works for which Liz Lochhead is best known is Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off, a play which was first performed in the 1980s telling the story of two Queens and two poets, Mary and Elizabeth. Their story is central to Scotland’s history as a nation-state, and the constitutional story which was causing Lochhead such frustration in the 1980s. Returning to the origins of the original Union of the Crowns between England and Scotland at a time when the resulting constitutional relationship was increasingly under scrutiny, had a positive impact on Lochhead’s reputation in Scottish literature. Adrienne Scullion argues that the play’s reception flourished in these circumstances: The context […] was sustained public debate about political nationalism that impinged strongly on the critical and scholarly agenda of Scotland.

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The roots of this nationalism—and indeed the roots of the first phase of Scottish theatre studies—lay in the 1960s and a generation of Scottish historians taking seriously the past of Scotland and the academic and popular recovery of Scottish folk traditions. (2013, 118) In this, we can clearly see parallels between Lochhead’s interrogation of colonising narratives within Britain, and those challenging Scotland’s own colonising influence overseas. Immediately prior to Lochhead’s work on Mary Queen of Scots, for example, Keri Hulme gained international recognition when she won the Booker Prize for The Bone People, a novel praised for its interweaving of Māori and Pākehā cultural traditions as an effective method of “writing back” to Empire and a continued colonising discourse within New Zealand’s contemporary literature and wider culture. Since her tenure as Makar, Lochhead is perhaps better known for her poetry. A dominating theme throughout five decades of poetics is writing back to various hegemonic discourses, including both Anglocentrism and British colonialism. This is perhaps best summed up in some of Lochhead’s most famous lines of poetry: the way it had to be said was as if you were posh, grown-up, male, English and dead. (2003, 20) In a more recent example, Lochhead satirises the same hegemony of the English language and literary canon: “Nick Dowp, Feeling Miscast in a Very English Production, Rehearses Bottom’s Dream.” Sections of the poem are Scots translations of Bottom’s speech from Act Four of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but most of it is expressed through Nick Dowp’s voice. He attacks the canonical English writer’s attitude to Scottish culture: Shakespeare’s (excuse me for being cynical) Attitude to Scotch verse is that it’s kina like McGonagall’s And only guid enough for thae Rude Mechanicals An Loss-the-Plots To tumpty-tum their numpty lyricals In accents Scots. (Lochhead, 2016, 100) Crucially, Lochhead remains conscious of the Scottish colonising position in her explorations of hegemony. As Makar, she was commissioned to write and perform a poem for the 2012 Commonwealth Day celebrations in Westminster Abbey along that year’s theme of “Connecting Cultures.” Lochhead took the

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opportunity to shed light on the legacy of colonial exploitation at the hands of hegemonic power structures. In her poem, “Connecting Cultures,” she takes apart the colonial euphemism of Commonwealth, pointing out that “Wealth is what we do not have in Common.” Her poem alludes to cultural hegemony in the second stanza, which unpacks the term “communication.” She likens the transfer of culture to that of martial troops, recalling Gramsci’s definition of hegemony as parallel to force. The poem also speaks of a “wind of change,” and concludes with an aspirational address to those who share her position of privilege in the context of the Commonwealth: Such words can sound like flagged-up slogans, true. What we merely say says nothing All that matters is what we do. (Lochhead, 2016, 75) Lochhead’s use of the pronoun “we”. addressing a Commonwealth “you”, definitively locates the poet as part of the colonising power in this poem; a demonstration of Lochhead’s sensitivity to dia-colonialism. She is evidently conscious that as a Scot she is the beneficiary of hegemonic power structures on a global scale, even though in other works she legitimately examines the Scottish position on the receiving end of similar structures within the UK. 4

Alasdair Gray

Lochhead’s contemporary, Alasdair Gray, is another excellent example of the dia-colonial at work in Scotland’s recent literature. His interrogation of the colonial as both input to and output from Scotland is evident in all of his major works, including 1982, Janine (1984) and Lanark (1981), the latter of which was adapted for the stage in 2015 in the wake of the independence referendum. Here I will focus on The Fall of Kelvin Walker, where Gray is dia-colonial at his most bitingly satirical. In The Fall of Kelvin Walker, the list of chapter titles reads like an itinerary of a typical colonial travelogue in the style of imperial travel writers like Mary Kingsley or David Livingstone. In place of an “othered” non-British location, however, it is London itself, the “first city of Empire,” that is being discovered by Kelvin Walker of Glaik, Scotland. These chapter titles include: Chapter 1: The Discovery of London Chapter 2: A Meal with a Native […]

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Chapter 7: Taking the Summit Chapter 8: Securing the Base Chapter 9: The Conquest of London Clearly, it is an absurdity to suggest that a young man from small-town Scotland was the first to discover London in the 1960s in the sense of being the first to find it. Gray’s point is that this is no less absurd than describing Captain James Cook, for instance, as having “discovered” or “found” Australia, when human beings had been living there for at least 40,000 years beforehand. Indeed, at the time of writing, these are still the terms used by the 2021 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica regarding Cook and other European explorers’ exploration of places such as Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and Hawai‘i. Kelvin is the embodiment of what Gray controversially termed a colonist in his 2014 essay, “Settlers and Colonists”, but being a complicated and not wholly unsympathetic character in his own right, Kelvin is more palatable to the reader than Gray’s more recent, less nuanced depiction in non-fiction (Hames, 2014). As a coloniser, Kelvin is permanently liminal, and no matter how much control Kelvin exerts over his new countrymen, he can never fully belong in London. As we learn from his father and from Kelvin himself, he also cannot be fully at home in Glaik, his place of origin. As a result, Kelvin’s empire “falls”, as the title implies, and he must return to his homeland with as much humility as his particular character allows. In this regard, Gray’s Kelvin and Lochhead’s Mary, Queen of Scots are strikingly similar. As her maidservant reminds Mary: “Naw, naw, ye’ve never seen your country!” (Lochhead, 1987, 12). She is a “Frenchified” but Scots-speaking Queen of a country that is her own, that she was born in, but that is new for her as an adult. She says of her own kingdom, “I canny mak sense o it at aw”, and she ultimately fails to do so, leading to her “Exodus”, as it does for Kelvin. Kelvin and Mary have attempted to rule places to which they feel they have a right, but failing to make sense of their surroundings and to “go native”, neither of them can succeed. Gray makes Kelvin’s colonising attempts appear ridiculous by reversing the narrative through ironic prose. Kelvin’s summation of Jesus, for instance, is a comic reveal of his own God complex: “He [Jesus] had the chance of importance when the Devil offered to make him king of all the nations of the world but he refused, I think unwisely” (Gray, 1985, 12). The characters of Mary and Kelvin explore Lochhead and Gray’s own frustrations with being ruled by a government they perceive to be unrepresentative of themselves. Although we sympathise with Mary and, perhaps to a lesser extent, with Kelvin, we also understand that their downfall is inextricably linked with their failure to understand the places they are trying to rule over.

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These witty texts lead us to question colonising power structures and how they affect the ability to articulate one’s own truth in one’s own voice. 5 Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry The next generation of Scottish poets are being carried forward by an increased understanding of the dia-colonial ties which connect Scotland to the rest of the British Isles and to the wider world. In 2016, I was one of two co-editors of the Luath Press anthology, Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry, alongside the performance poet, Katie Ailes. This process gave us a snapshot of the thematic concerns preoccupying poets in the immediate aftermath of the 2014 independence referendum, and in the heat of the 2016 “Brexit” referendum. Submissions closed the very week that the UK electorate voted to leave the European Union. Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the context of that timing, questions of immigration and refugees dominated our submissions. Several poets approached the issue from a uniquely Scottish perspective, drawing comparisons between suffering in Syria, Greece, or Calais with that of Scotland’s own diaspora. Some did not shy away from the other side of that coin, and images of Empire in many of the works revealed a Scotland deeply concerned with its own complicity. No doubt the editors’ position played a part in this, but Aiblins is a decidedly dia-colonial collection. “Viewpoint” by AC Clarke for example, instructs the reader to “Look up in Glasgow” to see: Ship-laden wealth […] that fed itself on comfortable lies, didn’t look deep into the holds to see the cargo stashed or smell the stench of living coffins crammed with marketable bodies. (2016, 33) Brian Johnstone describes the maps of his childhood which proudly displayed the spread of the British Empire: “A notion far too tightly rolled/to ever be thrown out, as if/subjugation was equivalent to defeating a disease” (2016, 36). In another of his poems that feature in the collection, “Four Allegories of Independence”, he describes ordinary Scottish housing which in other texts is used as a symbol of an internal colonialism, as “ballast in the holds of empire” (2016, 41). David Forrest’s poem “The Exceptionals” interrogates some of the rhetoric surrounding the 2014 referendum and Scottish independence more broadly,

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as the title suggests. He identifies a narrative where “the mouments we were guid, see that, see that,” but “Get it awa fae ye the mauments we were hertless, racists,/cruel … ​the mauments we/ looked awa an ravaged your country bare” (Forrest, 2016, 79–80). Forrest explicitly calls out a culture of “it wisna me” when it comes to Empire, which debates around Scottish independence or internal colonialism especially risk encouraging: “Oor history’s blue and white wi no blood red!” (2016, 79). This is a particularly strong argument for embracing a dia-colonial rather than post-colonial attitude towards Scottish literary studies and production. Not all of the perspectives are damning, and dia-colonialism can also provide a space for celebration and reconciliation. Arun Sood’s “Divali in Kessock” depicts a harmonious “lustered memory” of “masala chai/ on a cold doorstep” (2016, 59). The poem’s tone is gentle, and easily brings together the cultures of coloniser and colonised without acrimony. 6 Conclusion The term dia-colonialism has potential far beyond the writers and contexts I have mentioned here. Publications such as Aiblins, and Scotland’s second Booker Prize-winning novel Shuggie Bain, demonstrate clearly that the dia-colonial is alive and well in Scotland’s literary landscape. Dia-colonialism as a concept may also ameliorate discussions reaching further back to those whose lives and works coincided with the height of the British Empire, many of whom are already being reassessed with the benefit of postcolonial theory, such as Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, and those Scottish writers who found identities and careers amongst London’s elite, such as Arthur Conan Doyle or J.M. Barrie. Regarding the significance of both London and Britain as metropole, the term dia-colonial may also be used to describe other cultures which are subaltern within the British state, but which, like Scotland, are complicit in and beneficiaries of imperial expansion. Welsh and Northern Irish literatures can perhaps be most easily discussed in this framework, but also New Zealand literature as it interacts with the Pasifika for example, as well as Irish, American, Canadian, and probably elements of most literatures currently examined as post-colonial. Furthermore, within England itself the term dia-colonial can be applied at a regional level, for example, in relation to Merseyside literature, such as the Liverpool Poets, who were contemporaries of Gray and Lochhead at the outset of the modern postcolonial movement in the 1960s.7 7 See for example L. Pearce, C. Fowler, and R. Crawshaw, 2005, Postcolonial Manchester: Diaspora Space and the Devolution of Literary Culture.

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British identity cannot be divorced from the British Empire; therefore, any definition of Scottish literature as postcolonial must also acknowledge and investigate the entrenched relationship between Scotland and Empire, Scotland and Britain, and Scotland and imperialism. The challenge for contemporary writers is to develop the post-colonial Scottish identity they espouse in their work, whilst remaining sensitive to these connections; in other words, to be dia-colonial. References Ailes, Katie and Sarah Paterson, eds. 2016. “Introduction.” Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry. Edinburgh: Luath Press. B. Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths, and H. Tiffin. 2000. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Routledge. Beveridge, Craig and Ronald Turnbull. 1989. The Eclipse of Scottish Culture: Inferiorism and the Intellectuals. Edinburgh: Polygon. Bhabha, Homi K. 1990. Nation and Narration. Oxford: Routledge. Chennells, Anthony. 1999. “Essential Diversity: Post-Colonial Theory and African Literature.” BRNO Studies in English, 25. Clarke, A.C. 2016. “Viewpoint.” Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry. Ed. by Katie Ailes and Sarah Paterson. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Connell, Liam. 2004. “Scottish Nationalism and the Colonial Vision of Scotland.” Interventions, 6. Craig, Cairns. 2001. “Constituting Scotland.” The Irish Review, 28: 1–27. Crawford, Robert. 1992. Devolving English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Derby, Mark. 2011. “Māori-Pākehā Relations – Māori Renaissance.” Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. Forrest David. 2016. “The Exceptionals.” Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry. Ed. by Katie Ailes and Sarah Paterson. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Gardiner, Michael. 2006. “Postcolonialism and Scottish Studies.” New Formations, 59 (2006): 116–31. Gardiner, Michael, and Graeme Macdonald. 2011. Scottish Literature and Post-Colonial Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gonzalez, Carla Rodriguez. 2004. “An Interview with Liz Lochhead.” Atlantis, revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos, 26. Gray, Aladsair. 1985. The Fall of Kelvin Walke. Edinburgh: Canongate. Gray, Aladsair. 2014. Independence: An Argument for Home Rule. Edinburgh: Canongate. Hamel, Jill. 2001. The Archaeology of Otago. Wellington, Department of Conservation. Hames, Scott, and Alasdair Gray. 2012. “Settlers and Colonists.” Online: Word Power Books.

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Hart, C. 2008. Heroines and Heroes: Symbolism, Embodiment, Narratives & Identity. Lulu Press. Lehner, Stefanie. 2005. “Towards a Subaltern Aesthetics: Reassessing Postcolonial Criticism for Contemporary Northern Irish and Scottish Literatures.” eSharp, 1:1–14. Lochhead, Liz. 2016. Fugitive Colours. Edinburgh: Polygon. Lochhead, Liz. 1987. Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off. London: Nick Hern Books. Lochhead, Liz. 2003. The Colour of Black & White: Poems 1984–2003. Edinburgh: Polygon. Lochhead, Liz. 2013. “The Referendum Q&A.” Herald Scotland. Herald and Times Group. Morton, Graeme. 2001. “Constituting Scotland.” Ed. Cairns Craig. The Irish Review, 28. Okri, Ben. 1996. Birds of Heave. London: Phoenix Publishing. Sandrock, Kirsten. 2015. “Postcolonial Perspectives on the Scottish Independence Debate.” Scotland 2014 and Beyond: Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence? Ed. by Klaus Peter Müller. Bern: Peter Lang. pp. 337–54. Sassi, Carla. 2009. “The Border in Modern Scottish Literature.” The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature. Ed. by Ian Brown and Alan Riach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 145–55. Sassi, Carla. 2015. The International Companion to Scottish Poetry. Glasgow: Scottish Literature International. Sassi, Carla, and Theo van Heijnsbergen. 2013. Within and without Empire. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Scullion, Adrienne. 2013. “A Woman’s Voice.” The Edinburgh Companion to Liz Lochhead. Ed. Anne Varty. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 116–25. Sood, Arun. 2016. “Divali in Kessock.” Aiblins: New Scottish Political Poetry. Ed. by Katie Ailes and Sarah Paterson. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Smith, Angela. 2016. “Scottish Literature and the British Empire.” Scotland and the British Empire. Ed. John M. MacKenzie and T. M. Devine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stroh, Silke. Kirsten Sandrock. 2015. “Postcolonial Perspectives on the Scottish Independence Debate.” Scotland 2014 and Beyond: Coming of Age and Loss of Innocence?, ed. by Klaus Peter Müller. Bern: Peter Lang. pp. 337–54. Webster, Anthony. 2006. The Debate on the Rise of the British Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Villiers, Alan John. 2016. “James Cook.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Online.

Chapter 2

Literary Perils of Piracy: the Strange Case of Alexander Selkirk Allison E. Francis Samuel G. Goodrich’s engaging children’s book The Story of Alexander Selkirk from 1867 begins with a tantalizing paragraph: I suppose all my little readers know the story of Robinson Crusoe. It is very interesting, but it is not true. The fact is that a famous man by the name of Daniel Defoe, made up the story from the adventures of Alexander Selkirk, which I am now going to relate. (Goodrich, 1867) Goodrich’s adult audience understood that Goodrich, like multiple writers before him, was attempting to supplant an insanely popular, fictional account of a shipwrecked and marooned man with a true story, which promises to be as riveting (or more exciting) than Daniel Defoe’s original The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). And, Goodrich’s tone in this introduction seems to subscribe to the belief that Defoe’s protagonist, Robinson Crusoe, is a pale rendering of an actual, historical shipwreck survivor, Alexander Selkirk (1676‒1721). Therefore, Goodrich’s 1867 version, albeit formatted as a children’s story, should garner proper, if not more attention than Defoe’s fictional account. 1

Alexander Selkirk’s Tale

So, who was Alexander Selkirk? In 1704, Selkirk was “a British sailor, who, for upwards of four years lived deprived of all human society, up on the island of Juan Fernandez” (Howell, 1829). According to the news article, “Alexander Selkirk, The Original Robinson Crusoe,” published in The North Star newspaper in 1849, and edited by world-renowned fugitive slave turned international orator and abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, Selkirk “had with him on the Island his clothes and bedding, with a firelock, some powder, bullets, and tobacco; a hatchet, knife, kettle, his mathematical instruments, and a Bible.” More recently, in 2005, an acknowledged relative of Selkirk and writer for the Smithsonian Magazine, Brian Selcraig, describes Selkirk as “a navigator

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FIGURE 2.1 Selkirk left on island by Captain Thomas Stradling.” From The Story of Alexander Selkirk,. Samuel G.   Goodrich (1841)

and legitimate buccaneer for the British Crown,” who argued with his “21-yearold captain, Lt. Thomas Stradling” because their ship “was languishing off the coast of Chile in a battle-scarred, worm-eaten British ship called the Cinque Ports.” Having found no relief from his clashes with the young captain, Selkirk demanded that he be left on the largest island in the archipelago rather than potentially drown on the doomed vessel. Happy to oblige his recalcitrant crewmember, Strandling marooned Selkirk, despite Selkirk’s change of heart when he realised none of the crew would join his mutiny. Surprisingly, Selcraig also informs us that, “poor Alex—pirate, lout and hero—was not in fact born with the name Selkirk, but with an even less common Scottish name, one to which I’ve grown attached: Selcraig” (Selcraig, 2005).1 Of course, the truth is that the strange case of Alexander Selkirk is a finely entangled literary web because Robinson Crusoe, a fictional character, made headlines, generated income for its author, and engendered a new literary genre – the Robinsonade,2 or castaway narrative – before Selkirk’s tale could 1 Selcraig writes that “according to Scottish genealogist Tony Reid, directly descended from Alex’s oldest brother, John. Alex apparently never had children.” See his Smithsonian article “The Real Robinson Crusoe” (2005). 2 “Robinsonade” (/ˌrɒbɪnsəˈneɪd/) is a literary genre that takes its name from the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. See, Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, And Fantasies of Conquest, by Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (2007).

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be promoted properly. Not surprisingly, in response to Defoe’s success, the “real” experiences of Selkirk beget a slew of “true-life” accounts that flooded the 18th-century literary marketplace, as writers and biographers made an effort to share in, or negate Defoe’s glory. So, fiction reveals reality, while reality attempts to disclaim fiction. Rather than contribute entirely to the ongoing debate concerning the validity of the claim that Alexander Selkirk is indeed the progenitor to Defoe’s character, Robinson Crusoe (although I shall address this issue), this chapter examines the complications, or perils of literary piracy (or adaptation), that occur when a writer appropriates historical figures and real events. I am compelled not by the literary merits of the books and articles written about Selkirk, but by when and where they purport to offer the truest or “truer” tale of Robinson Crusoe (a fictional character), and when they don’t. Finally, I will briefly examine how our literary marketplace since the 18th century pits together a fictional character and an historical figure, demanding the ascendancy of either literature or history through this strange case of a hot-headed, Scottish buccaneer marooned on the South Seas. 2

Literary Piracy

In his fascinating discussion of the ethics of translation, Ashok K. Mohapatra presents competing theories regarding the appropriation of texts in translations: (1) showing fidelity to the original text; or (2) granting “newness to the target text” (2011). His argument centres on Madhussudan Rao’s translation of William Cowper’s 1782 poem, “The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk.” Mohapatra writes “that the greater the autonomy [within a translation], the lesser is the fidelity to the original, which is to be estimated not in terms of how much the translation differs from the original, but in terms of how much newness of themes, imagery, tonalities and prosody it acquires to claim distinctiveness and autonomy” (2011). Ultimately, Mohapatra offers this interpretation of Rao’s translation of Cowper’s poem (which is in itself an appropriation of Selkirk’s verses): “as an example of cultural appropriation the poem expresses new poetic sensibility and flavour that actually came from the source language and culture” (2011). So, if I apply, or appropriate Mohapatra’s argument to the perilous literary piracy, that is, in essence, the debate between the character, Robinson Crusoe and the true-to-life man, Alexander Selkirk, what we have here is an additional method by which to experience the narrative: this creation of a third level of enquiry that lies between what is real, and what is fictive, rather than merely determine which figure, imagined or real, merits more literary attention.

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In Defence of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Many modern readers are divided in their assessment of Defoe’s castaway novel—arguably, the first of its kind. They may label it either a captivating story of “radical individualism” (Franzen, 2011), or an account of what Michael White coined an “economic Robinson Crusoe,” a term which Ufuk Karagoz explores in detail in his article “The Neoclassical Robinson Antecedents and Implications” (2014).3 Notwithstanding, this vital, academic controversy, according to an “Overview” on the British Library website, “Defoe’s book was instantly popular, inspiring a number of responses and imitations which have continued to the present day” (“Robinson Crusoe Overview”). And this is quite true because in addition to the literary publications we will examine here, we see Crusoe, or the castaway narrative replayed in bizarre ways through popular culture, to support the Robinsonade genre. Take, for example, Disney’s film, Swiss Family Robinson (1960) and its television series spin-off in the late 1990s of the same title. Then there is the British classic comedy, directed by Lewis Gilbert and based on J. M. Barrie’s play, The Admirable Crichton or Paradise Lagoon (1957), Robert Zemeckis’ Hollywood film, Cast Away (2000), and Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2005). We also have the more dystopic literary examples like Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island (1874), and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1957). And, we cannot forget the slick, 2018 reboot of the Lost in Space series on Netflix (which was first a television series in 1965, then a film in 1998, and now a series again). As you can see from this very short list, despite John Donne’s assertion that “No man is an island,” clearly, literary and media cultures prefer their audiences to believe humans are most resourceful, clever and resilient when we are, indeed, living isolated on islands in oceans, space and time. Even before our contemporary cannibalism of the Crusoe stories, Defoe’s literary marketplace was flooded with the stories themselves (see Free, 2006, 89–90). In fact, Melissa Free reminds us that there are two more volumes of the Crusoe saga: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), and Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720). In her quest to recover and “un-erase” these two further volumes of the Crusoe trilogy, Free uses, in part, Robert W. Lovett’s list of English language editions 3 Ufuk Karagoz’s intriguing article attempts, in part, to identify “the shift from the pre-marginalist uses of Robinson Crusoe in political economy to the Neoclassical Robinson,” which Karagoz surmises is a theoretical rather than a methodological change (77). He argues “that on a hypothetical plane Robinson might be considered as a first approximation to the idealized economic man as conceived by the founding figures of the marginalist revolution” (77).

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of Defoe’s books, to determine that there were “1198 editions of Crusoe published between 1719 and 1979” (Free, 2006).4 From Lovett’s data, Free was able to ascertain that “English-language publications of Crusoe in the eighteenth century generally included either all three volumes (nearly 50 per cent) or the first two volumes (just under 47 per cent); less than 4 per cent were made up of RC1 alone” (Free, 2006). Free adds that, [n]ineteenth-century boys and girls of all ages and classes devoured Crusoe, a common gift for children. Although editions for the very young were frequently abridged, evidence suggests that, more often than not, young Victorians who read Crusoe read both of the first two volumes. Even among the numerous bastardized versions for children, frequently pared down to RC1, several contained incidents from RC2, including the obviously sparse Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable (1880). (Free, 2006)5 Clearly, Defoe’s novels were widely disseminated. Moreover, Free tells us that “Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), a novel so popular that it outsold Dickens’s Great Expectations in All the Year Round, and famously peppered with references to Crusoe, draws its final Crusonian quotation from RC2” (Free, 2006). Not surprisingly, Robinson Crusoe will remain an indelible part of the canon for both children’s and adult books, and for both popular and scholarly consumption, well into our next millennium. But despite, or really because of this novel’s popularity, critics from the very beginning became consumed with identifying the progenitor to Defoe’s character. And of course, Alexander Selkirk became one of the first figures to be thrown into the literary battlefield.

4 Free locates these statistics in Robert W. Lovett’s Robinson Crusoe: A Bibliographical Checklist of English Language Editions, 1719–1979. According to Free, “Lovett limits his checklist to the first volume of Crusoe, ‘published by W. Taylor on April 25, 1719, and all subsequent editions whether abridged, modified, adapted, or epitomized, without respect to purity of text, and under whatever title, so long as it can be identified as Defoe’s narrative of the man on the island’ (L, xiii). (Free, 2006, 90). 5 Although not pertinent to my study, it is interesting to note that The Original London Post, or, Heathcot’s Intelligence (1719–1720), chose not to publish the third volume even though it contains “excellent Meditations, and other divine Subjects, we thin[k] not proper to be inserted in a Publick Paper, but recommend it as a Book highly useful in all Christian Families, especially those who have the two other Volumes” (Free, 2006, 97).

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In Support of Alexander Selkirk

Even though as early as 1829, authors like John Howell offered meticulous evidence to position Alexander Selkirk as the progenitor of Robinson Crusoe, some scholars still prefer to champion their own models for Defoe’s character. Take, for instance, the footnote to Tim Severin’s book excerpt, “Marooned: The Metamorphosis of Alexander Selkirk” in the American Scholar (2002): Although the mariner Alexander Selkirk may have been the prototype for Daniel Defoe’s castaway, the details of Defoe’s story were drawn from the stranding of Henry Pitman, and English surgeon, on the Caribbean desert island of Salt Tongue. (Severin, 2002) So, according to Severin, who is Henry Pitman? Although this is not an exhaustive investigation of Pitman’s story, suffice it to say he was a country doctor who joined the Duke of Monmouth’s failed revolt against King James II’s ascension to the English throne in 1685. Apparently, Pitman was among the captured rebels sent to a labour camp on the island of Barbados. After Pitman’s daring sea escape in 1685, with the help of a fairly large number of debtors and rebels on the island, the castaways were rescued by pirates, then Pitman and his crew were marooned on the island of Margarita (off the coast of Venezuela) for four months when they refused to join the buccaneers (Vallar, 2009). Eventually, however, Pitman was rescued by more pirates, and enjoyed some lively adventures with them until returning to Somerset in perhaps 1689.6 So, returning to Severin, we see that he serves as one example of a critic supporting his literary model in the highly volatile and promiscuous marketing world of Robinson Crusoe. However, Scottish inventor John Howell would publish the first dedicated biography of Selkirk in 1829, The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, wherein Howell details visiting Selkirk’s birthplace in Largo, Scotland, and Selkirk’s relatives in Edinburgh. Howell even tells us he was able to examine authentic Selkirk artifacts like “the flip-can our hero had with him on the island” of Juan Fernandez (Howell, 1829, 4). Then, from 1850 to 1851, Howell published two more Selkirk books whose titles do not question that this is indeed the progenitor of Defoe’s protagonist: The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, 6 See Marcus Rediker’s resource, Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. (2014). Also see Henry Pitman’s own book, A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry Pitman (1689); and Rafael Sabatini’s fictional account of Pitman’s life, Captain Blood (1922).

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the Real Robinson Crusoe: A Narrative Founded on Facts, to Which Is Added History of the Wanderings of Tom Starboard, in Various Countries: With Numerous Engravings (1850); and The life and adventures of Alexander Selkirk containing the real incidents upon which the romance of Robinson Crusoe is founded: in which also the events of his life, drawn from authentic sources, are traced from his birth, in 1676, till his death, in 1723: with an appendix, comprising a description of the island of Juan Fernandez and some curious information relating to his shipmates, & c. (1850–51). The first title is of particular interest wherein Howell reminds us that his is “A Narrative Founded on Facts,” rather than a bittersweet, colonial romance. And Howell’s second more elaborate title promises us “authentic sources” and “a description of the island Juan Fernandez.” In effect, this second volume unabashedly moves into the travel narrative genre. In her lively 2002 review of two contemporary books by Daisuke Takahashi and Tim Severin that are both entitled In Search of Robinson Crusoe, Paula Backscheider tells us that there was a “rich outpouring of travel books written in two waves, between 1550–1625 and 1680–1720, that Defoe and his contemporaries would have known” (2002).7 The early travel narrative genre foreshadowed how media cultures can influence tourism, which is evident in cable shows like the spectacular HBO series Game of Thrones, which prior to the global Covid pandemic, increased tourism in New Zealand, Northern Ireland, and other European countries like Croatia and Spain (Roberts, 2019). Suddenly, Robinson Crusoe is not just a book, but also a burgeoning multi-media empire, that extends its reach through literature and timelines, to travel and tourism. Perhaps, this is the reason the case to restore Selkirk’s name into this melee was, and still is a contentious literary battle, with potential economic advantages. 5

Crusoe as Selkirk: Truth versus Fiction

Although the current scholarly debate about the genesis of Robinson Crusoe at times dismisses, or advocates, Selkirk as the progenitor of Defoe’s protagonist, Selcraig writes that there were two known sources of Selkirk’s marooned trials: his “rescuer, Capt. Woodes Rogers, a distinguished English privateer (or despised pirate, if you were Spanish) who wrote A Cruising Voyage Round the World, about his 1708–1711 expedition, and English essayist and playwright Richard Steele, who interviewed Selkirk in 1711 for the magazine The 7 See Paula Backsheider’s book review “Of Daisuke Takahashi’s In Search of Robinson Crusoe and Tim Severin’s In Search of Robinson Crusoe,” in the Washington Post (2002).

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Englishman” (Selcraig, 2005). However, Tim Severin questions the veracity of Steele’s interview, and some historians have claimed that Selkirk was illiterate, so there remains more work to be done to uncover (or recover) certain truths. Fortunately for Selkirk, Rogers’ navigator was none other than William Dampier, who recognized Selkirk as a comrade from the St. George-Cinque Ports voyage. Dampier likely told Selkirk the bittersweet news that he had been all too right about the decrepit Cinque Ports. Soon after abandoning the Scotsman in 1704 the ship sank off the coast of Peru, killing all but Stradling and a dozen or so men, who wound up in Spanish prisons.” (Selcraig, 2005) Consequently, Woodes Rogers’ 1712 account of Selkirk’s rescue is worthy of further inquiry. In Roger’s account, he offers several examples of Selkirk’s experiences that are intriguing because these episodes are echoed in Defoe’s novel, seven years later. The British Library’s webpage that examines Rogers’ account list these telling similarities between the real and fictional narratives: how Selkirk danced with cats and goats (p.  126) and marked time in notches on a tree (p. 128). Rogers also reframes the adventure as an exemplary tale of morality and empire, paving the way for Defoe to do the same. Selkirk suffers ‘Melancholy’, but solitude makes him a ‘better Christian’ (p. 126) and he survives through God’s ‘Providence’ (p. 128) – a word repeated 55 times by Defoe. Selkirk is described as the ‘Absolute Monarch of the Island’ (p. 130), just as Crusoe is ‘King, or Emperor’ (p. 109). (“The Story of Alexander Selkirk in Woodes Rogers’ Cruising Voyage Round the World, 1712”) Therefore, Robinson Crusoe tells us in chapter IV, “First Weeks on the Island,” that he “went out once at least every day with my gun, as well to divert myself as to see if I could kill anything fit for food; and, as near as I could, to acquaint myself with what the island produced. The first time I went out, I presently discovered that there were goats in the island, which was a great satisfaction to me” (Defoe, 2001). In the same chapter, Crusoe laments his fate: I had great reason to consider it as a determination of Heaven, that in this desolate place, and in this desolate manner, I should end my life. The tears would run plentifully down my face when I made these reflections; and sometimes I would expostulate with myself why Providence should

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thus completely ruin His creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable; so, without help, abandoned, so entirely depressed, that it could hardly be rational to be thankful for such a life. But something always returned swift upon me to check these thoughts, and to reprove me. (Defoe, 2001) And to mark his time, Crusoe says he “cut with my knife upon a large post, in capital letters – and making it into a great cross, I set it up on the shore where I first landed – ‘I came on shore here on the 30th September 1659’” (Defoe, 2001). These scenes clearly indicate Defoe’s familiarity with Selkirk’s tale, and I believe, prove that Defoe liberally colours the character of Robinson Crusoe with these engaging episodes of Selkirk’s marooned experiences, from Rogers’ book. John Howell’s account of Selkirk’s experiences also seems to be reflected in Defoe’s fiction. For example, Howell reminds us that for Selkirk,

Figure 2.2 “Selkirk amusing himself with his Cats.” From The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe, a Narrative founded on Facts … ​(1850)

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It was in this trying situation, when his mind, deprives of all outward occupation, was turned back upon itself, that the whole advantages of that great blessing, a religious education in his youth, was felt in its consoling influences, when every other hope and comfort had fled. (Howell, 1850) Fortunately, Selkirk was marooned with a Bible, so he found solace in its perusal just as Robinson Crusoe does in Defoe’s novel. For example, while he is suffering from the ague, Crusoe takes up one of the Bibles he has salvaged from the shipwreck, suspecting his death is imminent: having opened the book casually, the first words that occurred to me were these, ‘Call on Me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.’ These words were very apt to my case, and made some impression upon my thoughts at the time of reading them. (Defoe, 2001) Of course, critics like Severin will note that “Defoe assembled his hero from a jumble of half-remembered tales of adventure, marooning, and shipwrecks. Crusoe, like his island, is a composite – not a mere clone of Alexander Selkirk” (Severin, 2002). And this positioning is rightfully so because in its entirety, the novel Robinson Crusoe does not replicate Selkirk’s tale; however, Defoe clearly peppered his fictional account with fascinating titbits from Selkirk’s adventures. Therefore, as many scholars like Severin have conceded, Defoe’s Crusoe most probably is this composite of various castaway figures, real and imagined, rather than a solitary tale of one man’s radical perseverance in the face of incalculable adversity. 6

Alexander Selkirk’s Legacy

So, what is Selkirk’s legacy today? Gary Reucher informs us that “Robinson Crusoe Day” is February First, and “was created in 1999 by the publishers of the Chase’s Calendar of Events, a definitive book on unusual celebrations” (2007). The irony, of course, is that it was Selkirk who “was reportedly rescued on 1 February 1709 and brought back to England, where a journalist [Steele] found interest in his story. Literary experts presume that the resulting article was Daniel Defoe’s inspiration for his three-part novel, which was first published in 1719” (Reucher, 2017). This means, a fictional character is venerated and has been designated a holiday, despite the fact that the day celebrated is based on the rescue of a real-life figure. Once again, the fictive supplants the real.

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Fortunately for supporters of Selkirk, he is “memorialized today by the Isla Alejandro Selkirk, a tiny volcanic island in the south-eastern Pacific off the coast of Chile” (Wills, 2018). Jonathan Franzen explains that “In the nineteen-sixties, Chilean tourism officials renamed the island for Alexander Selkirk, the Scottish adventurer whose tale of solitary living in the archipelago was probably the basis for Daniel Defoe’s novel “Robinson Crusoe,” but the locals still use its original name, Masafuera: Farther Away” (2011). In fact, Franzen describes this site as a forbiddingly vertical volcanic island, seven miles long and four miles wide, that is populated by millions of seabirds and thousands of fur seals but is devoid of people, except in the warmer months, when a handful of fishermen come out to catch lobsters. And, what about the actual island that Selkirk resided on? Interestingly enough, it was renamed the “Robinson Crusoe Island” in 1966 (2011). Perhaps more significant about Selkirk’s legacy in relations to Crusoe’s, is that there is a Crusoe Hotel above a sandy beach in Lower Largo, Scotland where Selkirk was born, which contains one room with a few photographs and documents commemorating Selkirk’s days on the Juan Fernandez Archipelago. Then, there is “a curious outdoor statue of Selcraig on Main Street, dressed in goatskins, looking out to sea as though he had lost a golf ball,” without any display, or explanation (Selcraig, 2005). Beneath the Selkirk statue is a plaque which reads, In memory of Alexander Selkirk, mariner, the original of Robinson Crusoe, who lived on the island of Juan Fernandez in complete isolation for four years and four months. He died 1723, lieutenant of HMS Weymouth, aged 47 years. This statue is erected by David Gilles, net manufacturer, on the site of the cottage in which Selkirk was born. Unfortunately for Selkirk, on November 1720, at age 44, he returned to the only life that ever meant anything to him, signing on as the first mate of a naval warship, the HMS Weymouth, bound for Guinea and the Gold Coast of Africa in search of pirates. It would be another cursed voyage, plagued by yellow fever and perhaps typhoid. In all his travels Selkirk had never seen “the fever” destroy as many men as this. The ship’s terse log recorded dozens of deaths within a year’s time, often three or four a day. On December 13,

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1721, it recorded another. “North to northwest. Small Breeze and fair,” it read. “Took 3 Englishmen out of a Dutch ship and at 8 pm. Alexander Selkirk … ​died.” (Selcraig, 2005) Severin calculates that Selkirk was 47 years old when he died, and that Selkirk’s marooned experience represents “an island terrain of the imagination, yet Defoe was at pains to give the impression that the island really did exist and could be found off the coast of South America, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Caribbean Sea” (Severin, 2002). 7 Conclusion In the universally popular mediums of film and television, viewers routinely learn that even before the show begins, it was most likely “based on a true story,” or “inspired by true events.” This frame is added to appeal to those of us enmeshed in the generation of reality television, wherein we might feel closer to the scripted and unscripted actors because they could be just like us. However, fiction and fictive characters appear to be much more engaging than the “real thing,” to many of us. So, perhaps there is no denying that the character of Robinson Crusoe “is much more interesting and diverse than Alexander Selkirk, and more complex” (Severin, 2002, 80). However, instead of engaging in the tireless debate over the truest progenitor, or first model for the character of Robinson Crusoe, what we literary critics should consider is the unique literary merits and historical content of both Daniel Defoe’s narrative and Alexander Selkirk’s adventures. Reading these texts as complimentary narratives, rather than as combatants on a literary battlefield, opens up a new space for collaborative and interdisciplinary research. Until then, this type of literary piracy will continue to thrive in all mediums, languages, genres and cultures. Ultimately, rather than fight vainly to claim specific intellectual property, perhaps we should celebrate the unique sensibilities and values we derive from literary appropriation – whether in the 18th or 21st century. References “Alexander Selkirk, the Original Robinson Crusoe.” 1849. The North Star. February 23, 1849. http://www.accessible.com/accessible/print.

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Backscheider, Paula. 2002. Review “Of Daisuke Takahashi’s In Search of Robinson Crusoe and Tim Severin’s In Search of Robinson Crusoe.” Washington Post Book World, June 30–July: 8–9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books /2002/06/30/survivor/8d82d243-eec1-4201-83ee-851db92b899a/?noredirect =on&utm_term=.7e7f2ded1556. Defoe, Daniel. 2001. Robinson Crusoe.The Electric Book Company. https://ebookcentral .proquest.com/lib/chaminade-ebooks/reader.action?docID=3008559. Franzen, Jonathan. 2011. “Farther Away.” April 11, 2011. The New Yorker. https://www .newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/18/farther-away-jonathan-franzen. Free, Melissa. 2006. “Un-Erasing Crusoe.” Book History. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 9 September, 2006: 89–130. https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2006.0004. Goodrich, Samuel G. 1841. The Story of Alexander Selkirk: With Engravings. Philadelphia: Henry F. Anners. http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=http://find.galegroup .com/openurl/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev :mtx:ctx&res_id=info:sid/gale:NCCO&ctx_enc=info:ofi:enc:UTF-8&rft_val_fmt =info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:unknown&rft.artnum=CDIVAV764724803&req_dat=info:sid /gale:ugnid:new64731. Howell, John. 1829. The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk Containing the Real Incidents upon Which the Romance of Robinson Crusoe Is Founded : In Which Also the Events of His Life, Drawn from Authentic Sources, Are Traced from His Birth, in 1676, till His Death, in 1723 : With an Appendix, Comprising a Description of the Island of Juan Fernandez and Some Curious Information Relating to His Shipmates, &c. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd Tweedale-Court and Whittaker, London. Howell, John. 1850. The Life and Adventures of Alexander Selkirk, the Real Robinson Crusoe: A Narrative Founded on Facts, to Which Is Added History of the Wanderings of Tom Starboard, in Various Countries: With Numerous Engravings. Philadelphia: Hazard & Mitchell. http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/AHHXN0. Karagoz, Ufuk. 2014. “The Neoclassical Robinson: Antecedents and Implications.” History of Economic Ideas. Vol. 22.2 pp.  75–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf /43924177.pdf? Mohapatra, Ashok. 2011. “Appropriation, Coloniality and Ethics of Translation: Madhusudan Rao’s Nirbasitaro Bilapa and William Cowper’s The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk.” Ravenshaw Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 1 (1): 35–48. https:// docuri.com/download/rjlcs-2011_59c1cb76f581710b28610d27_pdf. Rediker, Marcus. 2014. Outlaws of the Atlantic: Sailors, Pirates, and Motley Crews in the Age of Sail. London: Verso. Roberts, Kayleigh. 2019. “What 20 Iconic ‘Game of Thrones’ Filming Locations Look Like in Real Life.” Marie Claire. 5 April 2019. https://www.marieclaire.com/celebrity /g14447754/game-of-thrones-filming-locations-real-life/.

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“Robinson Crusoe Overview.” N.d. The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/works /robinson-crusoe. Selcraig, Brian. 2005. “The Real Robinson Crusoe.” Smithsonian. July, 2005. https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-robinson-crusoe-74877644/. Severin, Tim. 2002. “Marooned: The Metamorphosis of Alexander Selkirk.” The American Scholar 71 (3): 73–82. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41213335. “The 17th-Century Adventures Of The Outlaw, Henry Pitman.” 2017. The Historian’s Hut Articles (blog). 23 February 2017. http://historian-hut-articles.blogspot .com/2017/02/the-17th-century-adventures-of-outlaw.html. “The Story of Alexander Selkirk in Woodes Rogers’ Cruising Voyage Round the World, 1712.” n.d. The British Library. 21 June 2019. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the -story-of-alexander-selkirk-in-woodes-rogers-cruising-voyage-round-the -world-1712. Vallar, Cindy. 2009. “Captain Blood: The History Behind the Novel.” Pirates & Privateers: The History of Maritime Piracy. http://www.cindyvallar.com/captainbloodhistory .html. Weaver-Hightower, Rebecca. 2007. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wills, Matthew. 2018. “The Real-Life Robinson Crusoe (Maybe).” JSTOR Daily. January 25, 2018. https://daily.jstor.org/the-real-life-robinson-crusoe-maybe/.

Chapter 3

Omai the Traveller Meets George the Tourist: a Pacific Voyager at the King’s Visit to Edinburgh, 1822 Caroline McCracken-Flesher In October 1774, Mai the Traveller paid a sensational visit to England. More exactly, he was brought there by a ship from Captain Cook’s exploratory fleet to do the work of a noble savage for scientific and sentimental London (Connaughton, 2005, 83–85). By June 1776, after twenty months among the great and the well-intentioned, to his hosts his novelty and usefulness had declined. Now, Cook was to return him to the South Seas (165). This, we know, did not turn out well for Cook, who lost his life on the Island of Hawai‘i in February 1779. Mai himself was dead by 1781. Nonetheless, for 1822 Britain, that is to say Edinburgh, and specifically Blackwood’s Magazine, Mai, in the person of his fictive descendant Omai, merited a return visit. This chapter pursues the work “Omai” accomplished for Edinburgh. Or more precisely, the work Blackwood’s found for Omai to do. Notably, Omai did not arrive in Edinburgh alone. The September 1822 number of Blackwood’s places him at the August visit of George IV (“The Second Voyage,” 1822).1 Although the king was the fourth of his ilk, this was the first personal encounter, in Scotland, between a Hanoverian monarch and their northern subjects. For Blackwood’s and Scottish purposes, however, this “son of the son of [Mai]” himself constituted an important guest (The Second Voyage, 285). Yet was this imaginary Omai really a traveller, or only a tourist in Edinburgh? James Buzard has shown that the much-proclaimed difference between the one who journeys and suffers, and the tourist with their superficial experience and acquisitive demeanor, can be one of perception alone, and it is formed in this romantic period (1993, 1–6). Roughly: I am of course a traveller, of intelligence and insight, but you all are just a gaggle of tourists. The visual consumption of place, John Urry adds, actually aligns travellers and tourists in their 1 This was the second “Omai” on his second trip: Blackwood’s had trialed the concept of Mai’s descendant in “A Visit to the Great Island of Edinburgh, called Britain. By Eree Omai” (Otaheite, 1821)—a fictive review of a supposed volume by this Omai. Blackwood’s 11.65 (June 1822): 709–715.

© Caroline McCracken-Flesher, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_005

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deployment of the gaze (1992, 180). It is the gazing that matters. Thus, the king, travelling without travail on a steam yacht, exercised a gaze which Urry would consider a pseudo-colonial expression of power over a town laid out, as per royal visits, for his visual consumption. Omai, though arriving on the horse-drawn barge from Glasgow, is a significant personage in his own eye, and equally curious about the sights. He is also agog to see, “the great King of all the world, the King who lives at London island, and makes the laws of Parliament” (“The Second Voyage,” 1822, 285). Still, presumably, there is a differential between the monarchical gaze and that of Omai. Not specifically so, say So-Min Cheong and Marc L. Miller. In their assessment, the tourist gaze is indeed a gaze of power, but “power is everywhere in tourism” (2000, 372). Such a multiplication, distribution and refraction of the gaze, I suggest, allows the subversion, redirection and reappropriation of its power. For Edinburgh in 1822, detouring the gaze through Omai as “traveller” problematizes the king as “tourist.” Moreover, it hints toward an act of gazing and a locus of power behind the scenes. Omai, as Mai’s supposed successor, carried a lot of baggage not his own— baggage the British knew well. It was this that made him so fit for Blackwood’s purposes, for it constituted him already as a complex traveller—a known unknown. In England, Mai had served as a representative of his people, but according to the needs of the host culture. As Vanessa Smith observes, “Oceanic travellers were asked to play different and conflicting roles—local informant, generic Oceanian, island prince, noble savage, savage savage, sentimental subject” (2009, 142).2 And Mai fulfilled distinct purposes for the era’s theoretical historians. Presuming stadial advancement, many scholars, with Scots prominent among them, turned to observation of the peoples encountered during Cook’s voyages to find models for early stages in human behaviour.3 One among many indigenous visitors—consider the Cherokee of 1730 and 1762, or the combined Wappinger and Mahican delegation of 1766 (Vaughn, 2006, 137– 89)—Mai extended the data set as the first Pacific islander to arrive in London. As noble savage he held the function to admire England, and even mildly critique, but he was also a control case in a variety of thought experiments.

2 See also Neil Rennie, 1995, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 111–12. 3 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, found in the South Seas the remnant of the “golden age”: Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 1774, 2nd ed., 1: 226 fn; Keith Costain tracks such “theoretical history” forward into the work of the Blackwood’s contributors who imagined the second Omai: “Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of John Galt,” ELH 43.3 (Autumn 1976): 342–65, see 349.

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Mai might be read, with no disrespect to him but detriment to his “enlightened” hosts, as a souvenir that served English purposes. A specimen even. While Granville Sharp sought to teach him English and constructed An English Alphabet, For the Use of Foreigners with him in mind (Sharp, 1786), others lamented Sharp’s lack of success, for Mai was kept “as an object of curiosity, to observe the workings of an untutored unenlightened mind,” and showed no aptitude for English in any case.4 Johann Georg Forster, who had been on Cook’s second voyage, equally complained about the lack of good being done to Mai: “a man with a good heart, such as [he] really was possessed of,” might have been taught “a rational idea of virtue,” and “the importance of religion,” not to mention “to fabricate iron into tools, to make pots … ​of clay,” and so on, rather than spending his time “at court, at the play, pantheon, taverns, and other scenes of dissipation.”5 Whether through education or its absence, Mai’s encounter with this foreign culture was deliberately managed. Thus, it could only be superficial. And with Mai neither an involved traveller nor a freewheeling tourist, his gaze turned problematic. What did he see? Observers, frustrated in their own projects, found themselves speculating about what he did not understand. Or perhaps, what he understood differently. In fact, Mai would never appear to understand, for he never did fit British Enlightenment purposes. Cook wondered why Captain Furneaux, who transported Mai to England, “would encumber himself with this man, who … ​was not a proper sample of the inhabitants of these happy islands, not having any advantage of birth, or acquired rank; nor being eminent in shape, figure, or complexion” (Captain Cook’s Three Voyages, 1814, 215). Numerous scholars have wondered too, remarking the ways in which Mai’s appropriation was for England always a misrecognition. He was no prince or priest, but a commoner and, worse, a second-class refugee from Raiatea. In fact he was a substitute for the higher class, more educated, and priestly Tupaia, who Joseph Banks, the botanist on the Endeavour, had celebrated as “a most proper man, well born, chief [sic] Tahowa or priest,” even as he had ironized his welcome to Britain as a “curiosity,” to be kept “as some of my neighbours do lions and tygers” (Vanessa Smith, 2009, 139).6 But Tupaia, the “proper” specimen whose aristocratic ease allowed him to negotiate between cultures (147), had died before he could make it to England. And, if the British sought or misrecognized in Mai a noble savage, 4 Reverend Sir John Cullum and Reverend Michael Tyson, qtd. Connaughton, 2005, 134. 5 “A Reply to Mr. Wales’s Remarks,” in George Forster, A Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof (n.d., vol. 2, 764–65). 6 Banks’s words are often read within a strictly postcolonial framework; Vanessa Smith sees him recognizing an equivalence between himself and Tupia in the British academic eye (2009, 138–41).

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time showed he had other and, in some cases, problematic attributes.7 Moreover, whatever their colonial or intellectual goals, the refugee aimed to go back, empowered by them, to repossess his home (Connaughton, 2005, xvi, 19; ­Rennie, 1995, 126). So predictably, on his return his to the islands Mai proved to be a disappointment. As he pursued his own purposes, an 1824 account suggests, there came incident after incident of “Imprudent Conduct” that lost him status and negotiating potential with the people of the islands the British sought to cultivate (Kerr, 1824, iii–iv). Mai, that is, proved imprudent in the context of colonial ambitions. It could hardly be otherwise. Whoever Mai was in the British mind’s eye, Mai himself saw things from a different perspective—from another place entirely. In the literature surrounding him and that seeks to emplace him, English authors struggle to name Mai consistently. In records of the voyage and its aftermath, Cook and John Rickman, who sailed with him, reference “Omai” (Rickman, 1781, 5, 3).8 A pantomime thereby accomplishes comic effect, characterizing Mai as the stereotypical tourist “Omai”—as in “Oh, my!”9 This Omai comes to England as prince yet supplicant to court Londinia, then flees through disparate sites around the world where stage business allows numerous opportunities to live up to his name (O’Keeffe et  al., 1785).10 An Historic Epistle  …  t​ o the Queen of Otaheite, with its Rousseauesque critique of the English nation as a “world of prejudice, where Error rules, / By Folly bred, and rear’d in Fashion’s schools,” supposedly comes from “Omiah” (1775, 1). Moreover, the prefix “O” actually signified “it is,” as in “it is Mai” (Vanessa Smith, 2009, 145–46). Thus, in the instant of being named, Mai stands both emplaced and misplaced. Gazed upon, a tourist without freedom, and a traveller unable to engage, Mai confused categories. Further, through a naming that constructed him but failed to address him, the figure of Mai implied a positioning unrecognized, off the cultural map, outside available systems. An unwieldy souvenir, Mai implied the unplaceable gaze, resistance within a system of power. He could only complicate the contexts in which he was placed. Thereby, Mai provided a usable example—for Scots.

7 8 9 10

Connaughton rehearses Mai’s engagements with ladies of rank (2005, 162–65). Rickman spells the captain himself as Cook and Cooke, both in text and in running heads, indicating that indeterminate spelling impacts not only foreign travelers (1781, 5, 6). The cast also includes “Harlequin, Servant to Omai,” “Britannia,” and “Don Struttolando, Rival to Omai.” Many scenes feature only prompts for location and comic business. Omai and Londinia visit Kamtschatka, an Ice Island, a Village in Tongataboo, and the Sandwich Islands (O’Keeffe et al., 1785, 12–15).

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Mai’s case had long resonated northward. As a “noble savage,” and sartorially distinct, Mai again and again was culturally mapped to Scotland. In a positive example, Joshua Reynolds portrayed Mai in a pose Allan Ramsay jr. had used to signify dignity for the Chief of MacLeod (Bernard Smith, 1992, 83). On the negative side, the putative Historic Epistle claims “the original manuscript [will be] left at the Printer’s (after the manner of Ossian’s) as incontestable proof that it could only be written by Omiah himself” (An Historic Epistle, 1775, iii). It thereby situates Mai within the English/Scottish, Samuel Johnson/ Hugh Blair debate over originary texts and authenticity—and as yet another Scottish fraud.11 At the same time, the supposed Omai’s critique also trends northward: “[No] land a richer group can show” of ridiculous philosophical speculators than Scotland; the day’s poetry glimmers darkly sentimental, as under “northern lights” (lines 297, 365). Omiah’s Farewell; inscribed to the Ladies of London, gives Mai another backhanded compliment with, again, the Scots as the butt. “A Scotsman,” the preface claims, “is the only creature that can return to a barren soil of ugly women, and leave plenty and beauty behind, by giving a preference to his own land of cakes”; Mai, demonstrably fond of women, has at least “a natural sense, that can more rationally distinguish the beauty of new objects, beyond the discernment of a lettered Scot” (Omiah’s Farewell, 1776, iv). Gazing at this colonial other perversely invoked the Scots. Still, Scots were no strangers to such criticism, or to being the cynosure of the English eye. They knew what it was to be degraded as a traveller, or through the gaze of a tourist—witness cartoons mocking the bathroom habits of the kilted army that had reached Derby with Prince Charles in 1745 (one leg down either hole in a two-seater “bog-house”), or Johnson’s declamations as he travelled the north and battled with Macpherson.12 By 1822, however, through the strivings of Walter Scott and the realities of the Napoleonic wars, the Scots had learned there was a power in being looked at. Scott’s 1814 novel, Waverley, directed the outsider’s gaze across long lochs and into deep mirrors toward a Scotland figured as exotic, other, ancient, valued. The title character, having 11 James Macpherson’s poems Fingal (1761) and Temora (1763) purported to be translated from Gaelic originals; Scottish and English authorities divided and battled over their authenticity, with Hugh Blair on one side, and Samuel Johnson on the other. Macpherson averred through his publisher Thomas Becket that the originals had been available for review in his shop in London in 1762—though now returned to Macpherson. See Thomas Bailey Saunders, The Life and Letters of James Macpherson (1894, 249). 12 “Sawney in the Bog-house,” 1745, British Museum, no. 1868,0808.12385; and James Gillray, “Sawney in the Bog-House,” 1779, Wellcome Library, no. 12169i. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775: see 267 for his comments on Gaelic, and 273 on Macpherson and Ossian.

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traversed the land from south to north and back again, ultimately sees himself reflected, resituated and revalued as tartan portraiture (Scott, 2007, 361). After Waterloo, such Scottish distinctiveness figured military power. Scott heard from a Flemish woman that “Your countrymen … ​are made of iron”; he witnessed how, for Parisian ladies, highland soldiers’ outfits allured as signs of savagery, exoticism, power and, of course, prowess (1816, 142, 221). Colonial roles made Scots both objects and agents of the gaze; experience made them canny, manipulative subjects. The gaze, whether of tourist or traveller, is in fact relational. Further, Jonas Larsen insists, the “‘mutual gaze’  …  ​brings out the resistance and power of hosts when interacting face to face with tourists” (Larsen, 2014, 309). Consequently, “gazees are not necessarily passive and powerless” (2014, 308). And if Mai was constructed in and for England, at the occasional expense of Scotland, the mystery of his gaze could be remade in Omai and cannily deployed to relocate power to Scottish purposes. In 1822, Scotland needed to reroute the gaze. The king’s visit was a moment of self-conscious cultural construction that balanced opportunity against risk. If George IV came, in the popular press’s mocking terms, as a “Royal Tourist,” as a tourist nonetheless royal, his role however trivial was also potentially damaging in its selective gaze upon the local.13 Scots had seen that inevitable power in recent, degrading operation. At the Coronation the year before, that ostentatious highlander Glengarry had almost been ejected from events. A London lady, gazing on his kilted and armed splendour, misrecognized him as an assassin (Osborne, 2002, 198–99).14 Local colour, out of place, produced policing. Then the king’s arrival in Ireland showed the Irish in a bad light. The appropriate dignitaries were not on hand to welcome him and redirect his gaze. Thus, the parade into town, in Blackwood’s eyes, enacted “mob-favour.”15 A poem in the magazine dramatized an enthusiastic bard in his cups who “threw the empty bottle down, to chaunt about the King” (“Ode on the King’s Landing,” 1822, 95). Having thus observed these sad effects of the unmanaged touristic gaze, and even visited them upon Ireland, Blackwood’s aimed in its pages for a more, canny Edinburgh encounter with the king. The challenge was to be distinct and recognizable in the English eye, not merely subject to. And Mai offered a vehicle to negotiate the gaze by means of the locally uneven development and obscured power that too often played in favour of the tourist or traveller. The trick lay in careful staging. Thus, 13 14 15

See the Scotsman, 3 August 1822: 246. The episode was mocked in Blackwood’s 10.54 (August [part II] 1821): 22-24 and fn. Blackwood’s, 10.55 (September 1821): 224.

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Blackwood’s exploited the unsteadiness of the gaze. Through Omai it foregrounded multiple, clashing perspectives. It triangulated the king and all-comers to rework the concept of the gaze and the play of its power. The moment was complex. The king, as onetime regent, Mrs. Fitzherbert’s husband and Queen Caroline’s errant spouse, himself was unpopular and his status contingent. After the failures of Ireland, Scotland offered him a moment to reset his reign. Moreover, it was only a newly valued king who could appropriately recognize and revalue the Scots. So, Edinburgh piled on the adulation. Walter Scott encouraged all to recognize—more accurately to imagine—that “The blood of the heroic Robert the Bruce … ​is in his veins” (1822, 6–7). Blackwood’s proclaimed the king “was about to grace the Halls of his Ancestors.”16 But Scott’s “celtified pageantry,” in which Blackwood’s was fully complicit, long has been blamed for encouraging a wholesale appropriation of Scottish signs and a constriction of Scottish culture into all the panoply of tartanry (Lockhart, 1837–38, 5:204; Nairn 191). Blackwood’s itself was distinctly loyal and irrepressibly, often obnoxiously Tory. Together, king and Blackwood’s might only compound the Scottish problem. But Blackwood’s writers knew they needed to figure out how to invite the gaze without beseeching, to be gazed at and survive the gazing. Past masters at negotiating the rivalries of the Edinburgh press, they strove to convert potential loss into social profit.17 John Galt could do it. Galt was himself an avowed “theoretical historian” with a specific interest in the South Seas (Costain, 1976, 350–51). While contemporary historicizing focused broadly, on large events and major figures, Galt favoured local models and small movements as exemplifying larger progress in the smaller scale. An alignment between the king and Omai, sure of his stature yet always out of step with local British realities, could show a major event but as made up of minor people. The fictive Omai, mirroring the people as they gazed at the king, and the king as he gazed at the people, showed the inconsequentialities of all. Galt deployed multiple gazes to produce a refracting spectacle of ordinariness. Omai, of course, presumes to know who he is and how he interacts with the world. “I, Omai … ​saw”; “I, Omai, knew,” he declares (“The Second Voyage,” 1822, 285). Assuming his role as a chief in Otaheite, like the king, he affects tartan; like the king, he is positioned to be gazed upon. Yet his position is problematic. 16 Blackwood’s, 12.68 (September 1822): 257. 17 The Edinburgh Monthly Magazine foundered under its early editors, James Cleghorn and Thomas Pringle, who ultimately decamped to the rival publisher, Archibald Constable; Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, rebranded in opposition, immediately taunted Constable and his editors in a libelous religious spoof, “Translation from an Ancient Chaldee Manuscript,” thus ensuring notoriety and sales. See Blackwood’s (October 1817): 89. The Chaldee was so scurrilous, it was removed from the second edition.

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“I Omai” signifies only at a distance; he is “the son of the son of Omai, the traveller, who was the friend of the great Cook.” Omai’s role is that of an errand boy, or merchant, at best: “I, Omai, must go … ​to the island of Edinburgh, to bring from the illustrious Morton more of his plough instruments.” Going native in “the spotted clothes of cloth of tartan,” Omai does not appropriate local culture, he succumbs to it (291). In “a philabeg or petticoat, with heath in my bonnet hat, and a sword and pistols, and a purse apron,” he says with pride, he “was a Celt.” More troublingly, “nobody knew me for Omai … ​because I was a tartan Macgregor.” Wrapped in plaid and positioned to receive the gaze, Omai is like everyone in Edinburgh. Still, that makes him like the king. Or, the king is like him. The panoply of tartanry that should signify the patina of age and authenticity (McCracken, 1988, 32) on Omai and the king signifies both recent acquisition and immediate loss of identity, even a reduction to comicality. The king in his plaids proves invisible to Omai, appearing as “only a Highlander” (“The Second Voyage, 1822, 292). This gaze is not so threatening. Omai, in fact, manifests the gaze as misdirected, for king and would-be Otaheitan chief. In the streets to admire the illuminations, he admires the women, and remarks how he “touched thousands of ladies so beautiful, who smiled so sweetly in the face of me, Omai” (291). This close encounter with Edinburgh’s ladies of the night establishes a strategic line of surveillance onto the king, for a few pages later, the handsy George IV lives down to reputation when “the ministers kissed hands [with the king]; for no person must kiss the King’s mouth but only ladies” (293). Indeed, routed through Omai, the gaze manifests mutual misrecognition. Omai, whatever his get-up, and however longingly he gazes at the king, never achieves an unproblematic return. Watching the parade, “I, Omai, bowed three times very low in the fashion of this people, and the King saw I was a chief, for he smiled and bowed his head even to me” (288). But what is it that the king sees, and to whom does he actually bow? At a morning reception, “the Good King … ​was going to speak to me as I fell down upon my knee before him, for he knew me not for a stranger, but thought me a great Highland Eree,” but “as [the king] was preparing to speak, a fat chief or lord touched me, Omai, upon the shoulder, to go away; so I went” (292). When Omai finally does receive the king’s handshake, it confirms nothing: “the King looked and saw I was a chief, and shook me, Omai, by the hand” (306). Or, the exchange confirms a misunderstood relation: “And the great Eree, called my Lord of Fife … ​spoke of me, Omai, to the King, and laughed, and the King looked back and bowed again to me, Omai, and I waved my hat, and gave the hurra cry. … ​and when the King hears hurra, he must always take off his hat … ​ And it was not a hat … ​but rather a cap.” Omai’s false inferences are built into

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the structure of his broken English. Looking presumes seeing; “I” presumes “Omai” as appropriately seen. Thus far, like Mai before him, Omai stands, in Jason Kelly’s terms, as no power broker (Kelly, 2012). He shows the clashes of culture; he does not wield the flow of power. Yet at the same time, Omai reveals the contingent play of power as directed through culture. If the Scots, considered as unevenly developed across borders, cities and Gaelic highlands, beseeched the king’s gaze, the king, insofar as he is aligned with and beseeched by Omai figures, too, as stumbling, out of step. Though the king shakes Omai’s hand, he misses his own gesture’s object. Wrapped in plaid, he does not grasp that Omai misrecognizes him, and according to an Edinburgh laughing at the pink fleshings he wore under his kilt, he was actively misrecognizing himself. In the primary trope for this tale, “I, Omai, saw,” signifies, but I didn’t actually get it. And nor do you. In “The Second Voyage of Omai, the Traveller,” then, the practice of gazing itself stands revealed not as a mode of discipline, as one might expect post-Foucault. Rather in an instance of reverse anthropology, for Galt gazing produces the viewer as confined in perspective and limited in knowledge. Operating from this angle, say So-Min Cheong and Marc L. Miller, the local gaze can make a captive of the unwary tourist. Locals “can be proactive and resistant, as they constantly negotiate and contest … ​in the pursuit of their rights and interests”; indeed, “tourists are captives to a wide variety of agents including brokers and guides” (Cheong and Miller, 373, 381). Galt, then, through the mutual and confused gazes of Omai and monarch, both attempting to go native but becoming misdirected strangers in others’ eyes, implies a knowing, staging viewer, elsewhere. Specifically, this Blackwood’s article produces Blackwoods. How did Galt rearrange the gaze? His Omai is a viewer and an object of the gaze, with patterns of encounter derived from his Enlightenment predecessor. But he is also known for patterns of misrecognition. Blackwood’s had tested these phenomena in a previous thought experiment, for “the son of the son of Omai” enjoyed his first Edinburgh outing in the magazine for June 1822. Here, Omai apparently achieves the “insider access” that is imagined to separate the traveller from the tourist. Blackwood’s credits him with a “talent for observation in a striking degree,” and details his visits to “Mr Morton of Leith-walk,” for agricultural implements, to “Mr Menzies’ carpenters [who] encouraged him to assist them in their work. … ​[and] The forges of the smiths.”18 Omai seems to 18

“A Visit to the Great Island of Edinburgh, called Britain. By Eree Omai”—a fictive review of a supposed volume by Omai (Otaheite, 1821). Blackwood’s, 11.65 (June 1822): 709–715, see 709–10.

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have moved, in accordance with Erving Goffman’s theories, from the front to the back of house (Goffman, 1959, 144–45; see also MacCannell, 2013, 92–93). What he encounters, however, is only a staged authenticity (Maoz, 2006, 224). And he doesn’t understand what he sees. The streets, he says, “(I could not count them nor tell one from another, they are all so like, though some are longer and some are shorter,) are all shops; and shops are houses where men and women sell … ​some I cannot tell what. … ​And the people make fires of black stone; for it is not wood” (“A Visit to the Great Island,” 1821, 710). Omai has access, but it foregrounds a misrecognition enabled, even sponsored, by Blackwood’s. “We believe it was ourself,” the magazine opines, in its standard second person, “who gave Captain Fraser and his friend [Omai] a note to see the printing establishment of Messrs Ballantyne & Co” (“A Visit to the Great Island,” 1821, 714). And Omai vaguely evokes Blackwood’s. He reflects that “the people of this wonderful island have a book, and it is written with printed letters every new moon; and the people look at it and laugh, for there is the figure of a black man on the outside … ​and it makes the people wise; for the English people of the island of Edinburgh are wiser than all the world. And my Captain said, I must take this book to Otaheite, for it would make our chiefs wise” (714). The review begins, indeed, with Blackwood’s avowed amazement on receiving Omai’s account of his first visit, addressed to “the ‘Great Wise Man of ­Edinburgh Island, Britain,’” and discovering “We did not know that THE Magazine had been so universally read in the South Sea Islands” (709). Blackwood’s stages the South Seas watching a not quite understood Blackwood’s. From June 1822, Blackwood’s has been implied as the object of desire that itself shapes the gaze of those who seek. Not surprisingly, then, at the king’s visit it is Blackwood’s that introduces the king to Omai, and Omai to the king, Omai recounts that “the great wise man of Edinburgh, that is, Ambrose, or North, was [at the banquet], because all the great Erees like him, and the King he cannot want him. And he took me in a great coach. … ​And Mr North said, laughingly, Truly we were a precious coachful … ​and nobody could deny it” (“The Second Voyage,” 301). Blackwood’s, through its fictive personae Ambrose and North, directs the traffic of the gaze, and by implication holds the prior, shaping, invisible, powerful perspective. One final, oblique outing for Omai makes the case. The January 1823 Blackwood’s printed what it claimed had been a supplement in the previous Edinburgh Review. The Review was the Tory Blackwood’s Whig rival, and had resisted the tide of sentiment surrounding the king’s visit. Now, Blackwood’s “quoted,” “The King’s Visit was calculated to reconcile the moderate of all parties”

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(“Supplement to the Last Number,” 1823, 126–27). But engaging with “Mr North” as a real person with his “eye to the Governor-generalship of a distant colony,” this supposed reprint advertised itself as a spoof, and one alert to the powerplays of the gaze asserted across the monarch’s time in Edinburgh. That play, the Blackwood’s satirist specifies, centred in Omai. The Edinburgh Review is staged as declaring, We had occasion to see our respectable friend, Omai, at his Majesty’s Levee, and met him more than once afterwards in private society; and though a little dark-complexioned man, scarcely perhaps so tall as ourselves, yet his striking aptitude for information, and the correctness of his general views, so well exemplified in his picturesque account of the joyous reception of the King, augur well for the rising civilization of the island which gave him birth. (1823, 127) Blackwood’s presents the Edinburgh Review looking at Omai, and in turn admiring his view of the Edinburgh spectacle. The Review gazes at Omai, gazing at the king, according to the Blackwood’s script. As Darya Maoz argues, in the tourist encounter, “Everybody gazes at everybody. … ​both groups simultaneously undergo and exercise power” (2006, 225). Yet “tourism is an activity substantially shaped by middlemen,” as Cheong and Miller point out (2000, 379). Tour guides invisibly direct the gaze. Power can be played. When Blackwood’s stages its rivals as looking at a Blackwoodian character looking at the king, and deriving their view thereby, it presents confusion in the foreground, and implies its own directing gaze in the background. But invisible, that gaze was inaccessible. It triangulated the gaze of others, without coming into subjection. As with Mai’s mystifying perspective, that was where the magic lay. Small wonder, then, that when William Blackwood developed an authoritative list of his anonymous contributors, John Wilson, the “Christopher North” who had supposedly shepherded Omai, effectively undid the record by tossing in made-up names. Asserting a kinship between skirted peoples, invisible but potentially powerful brokers across the oceans, he dashed in one, loaded but unverifiable source: “Omai.”19

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Blackwood, in 1825, drafted a list of contributors which would have shown the talents behind his magazine while removing their anonymity; Wilson, reading proof, “dashed in the names of such celebrities as Omai the Otaheitan, and Pius VII,” putting an end to the project. See Henry Curwen, A History of Booksellers: The Old and the New (1874, 224).

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References “A Visit to the Great Island of Edinburgh, called Britain. By Eree Omai.” 1822. Blackwood’s 11.65, June: 709–715. An Historic Epistle, from Omiah, to the Queen of Otaheite; being his Remarks on the English Nation. 1775. London: T. Evans. Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo. 1774. Of the Origin and Progress of Language. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: J. Balfour. Buzard, James. 1993. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918. Oxford: Clarendon. Captain Cook’s Three Voyages to the Pacific Ocean. 1814. vol. I. New York: E. Duyckinck. Cheong, So-Min and Marc L. Miller. 2000. “Power and Tourism: A Foucauldian Observation,” Annals of Tourism Research 27.2: 371–90. Connaughton, Richard, M. 2005. Omai: The Prince Who Never Was. London: Timewell. Costain, Keith. 1976. “Theoretical History and the Novel: The Scottish Fiction of John Galt,” ELH 43.3 (Autumn): 342–65. Curwen, Henry. 1874. A History of Booksellers: The Old and the New. London: Chatto and Windus. Forster, George. N.d., vol. 2 A Voyage Round the World. Ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City: Doubleday. Johnson, Samuel. 1775. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. London: W, Strahan. Kelly, Jason M. 2012. “Omai, Mai and Joshua Reynolds: A Portrait of the Pacific Borderlands.” HistoryWorkingPapers.org http://www.historyworkingpapers.org/?page _id=73. Kerr, Robert. 1824. A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol.  16. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Larsen, Jonas. 2014. “The Tourist Gaze 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.” The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Tourism. Ed. Alan A. Lew, C. Michael Hall, Allan M. Williams. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons. Lockhart, J. G.. 1837–38. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. vol. 5. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. MacCannell, Dean. 2013. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. Berkeley: U California Press. Maoz, Darya. 2006. “The Mutual Gaze.” Annals of Tourism Research 33.1: 221–39. McCracken, Grant. 1988. Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nairn, Tom. 1997. Faces of Nationalism. London: Verso.

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O’Keeffe, Loutherbourg and Shields. 1785. Omai, or, A Trip round the World, New Edition London: T. Cadell. “Ode on the King’s Landing in Ireland.” 1821. Blackwood’s 10.54 (August [Part II]): 94–98. Omiah’s Farewell; inscribed to the Ladies of London. 1776. London: G. Kearsley. Osborne, Brian D. 2002. The Last of the Chiefs: Alasdair Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry 1773–1828. Glendaruel, Argyll: Argyll. Rennie, Neil. 1995. Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rickman, John. 1781. Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, on Discovery; Performed in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779. 2nd edition. London: E. Newberry. Saunders, Thomas Bailey. 1894. The Life and Letters of James Macpherson. London: Swan Sonnenschien. Scott, Walter. 1816. Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk. Philadelphia: Moses Thomas. Scott, Walter. 2007. Waverley (1814). Ed. Peter D. Garside. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Scott, Walter. 1822. Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh, and Others, in Prospect of His Majesty’s Visit. Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute. Sharp, Granville. 1786. An English Alphabet, For the Use of Foreigners. London: J. W. Galabin. Smith, Bernard. 1992. Imagining the Pacific in the Wake of the Cook Voyages. New Haven: Yale University Press. Smith, Vanessa. 2009. “Banks, Tupaia, and Mai: cross-cultural exchanges and friendship in the Pacific.” Parergon 26.2: 139–160. “Supplement to the Last Number of the Edinburgh Review.” 1823. Blackwood’s 13.62 (January): 126–27. “The Second Voyage of Omai, the Traveller.” 1822. Blackwood’s 12.68 (September): 285–306. Urry, John. 1992. “The Tourist Gaze, ‘Revisited’.” American Behavioral Scientist 36.2 (November): 172–186. Vaughan, Alden. 2006. Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500–1776 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 4

Sovereignty and the Shadows of Indigeneity: Stevenson’s Remediations of Scott in The Master of Ballantrae Yoon Sun Lee In 1889, Robert Louis Stevenson completed The Master of Ballantrae and wrote its dedication in Honolulu: “by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor, scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends” (1995, xiii).1 Although Stevenson seems to emphasize the geographical distance that separates Scotland from Hawai‘i, I want to suggest that they are intricately connected through this novel’s extensive, almost dreamlike reimagining of Scotland’s position vis-à-vis the past and present of empire. Stevenson’s novel alludes to, incorporates, even remediates Walter Scott’s late novel, Redgauntlet (1824), as an examination of sovereignty and its conditions. As Waverley (1814), Scott’s first novel about the Jacobite rebellion, had done, Redgauntlet had appeared to situate absolutism in the past, albeit in a melancholy and iterative mode that suggests a case harder to close than Scott wants to admit. In The Master of Ballantrae, Stevenson views things differently. Absolute sovereignty is not regarded as something fast becoming a historical artifact. It is not treated as a political phenomenon superseded historically by the modern rule of law, by commerce or contract. Rather, sovereignty emerges as something continually contested, negotiated, and, most of all, shadowed by indigeneity. Indigeneity, in turn, is intensely reimagined in Stevenson’s peculiar historical novel. It is evoked through the material, physical state of the land, and by a connection to the land that is not one of property or legal title, but one so intimate and embodied as to verge on the unrepresentable. In other words, indigeneity is not something that can be represented, directly or immediately. It involves multiple claims made in different forms and media; it challenges settled concepts of sovereignty. Through such mediations, Stevenson draws together those scenes and these shores.

1 All further references are to this edition.

© Yoon Sun Lee, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_006

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The dynamic of contested sovereignty was clearly occurring in Hawai‘i at the time when Stevenson visited; just two months after he completed the dedication, there was an attempt to restore to the monarch a sovereignty that had been gradually undermined throughout the century by outside American interests. In 1893, a committee of Americans removed Queen Lili‘uokalani and declared that “The Hawaiian Monarchical system of Government is hereby abrogated” (Alexander, 1896, 60). Under the pretext of protecting the “personal, political, and property interests of every citizen of the land,” and claiming the right to do so, this group gave up Hawai‘i’s sovereignty: “The Government of the Hawaiian Islands [sic] hereby cedes … ​absolutely and without reserve to the United States forever all rights of sovereignty of whatsoever kind in and over the Hawaiian Islands and their dependencies, renouncing in favor of the United States every sovereign right of which as an independent nation it is now possessed” (73). In several more years, Hawai‘i would be officially annexed by the U.S. This essay explores how Stevenson’s novel connects this situation to Scotland, even though The Master of Ballantrae does not directly represent Hawai‘i. Native North Americans also remain largely invisible, ghostly agents only glimpsed in the novel at a distance, or through their effects. Rather, the novel accomplishes this by taking apart, turning inside out, recycling and repurposing Scott’s novel about the vanishing of sovereignty. Redgauntlet concerned a fictional last attempt in 1765 to overturn the Hanoverian monarchy and restore Charles Edward Stuart to the throne. Placing the issue of sovereignty in the same historical moment, The Master of Ballantrae connects the borders of Scotland with the shifting and contested borders of the Seven Years War and its aftermath in North America. Notable among those emergent borders were those that separated settlers from indigenous Americans. Stevenson’s remediation of Scott’s novel focuses on rendering both sovereignty and land as shaped by time, as much fluid as solid. Stevenson also raises the question of remediation itself as an act or process that grapples with questions of priority, remaking, ownership, right, and boundary, thus connecting it with the problem of sovereignty. While reshaped to these ends, the form, the plot, and the particular historical setting of Redgauntlet remain partially visible, buried beneath the surface. Redgauntlet stands out among Scott’s novels for its cluttered and rather uncomfortable narrative heterogeneity. It begins as letters, continues as a journal, and then ends as not one but two intercalated third-person narratives, the “Narrative of Darsie Latimer,” and the “Narrative of Alan Fairford,” Darsie’s friend. Darsie, brought up in secrecy in Scotland and ignorant of his own identity, is kidnapped by his uncle, Redgauntlet, who wants to use him to promote

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his lifelong project—the restoration of Charles Edward Stuart to the throne in a second, successful Jacobite rebellion. The year is 1765, and the turmoil following the end of the Seven Years War is cited by Redgauntlet as a factor in his favor. Trying to persuade the reluctant Darsie, he pleads, “All is false and hollow … ​the apparent success of Chatham’s administration has plunged the country deeper in debt than all the barren acres of Canada are worth … ​the rich are alarmed—the nobles are disgusted—the populace are inflamed—and a band of patriots … ​have resolved to set up King Charles’s standard” (Scott, 1985, 340). Stevenson’s novel also begins with the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. James Durie, the elder Durrisdeer son and master of Ballantrae, fights on the Stuart side, disappears after Culloden, and is presumed dead. The younger brother, Henry, marries the cousin who had been in love with James, and becomes the head of the family. But James, alive in exile, starts to demand money, returns in 1756 to torment his brother to the point where they duel; James is stabbed, left for dead, but then vanishes. He returns again in 1764, this time with a servant from India, Secundra Dass. The younger brother and his family flee to New York, where James pursues them. In the final sequence, James journeys far north into the mountains with assassins hired by his brother, hoping to recover treasure he had buried there long ago, but before finding it, he apparently dies. It is discovered that he had planned with Dass to be buried alive, to get rid of his companions, and to be dug up later and resuscitated. But the ground is too cold, Dass arrives too late, and the corpse only opens his eyes for a moment— long enough for his brother to drop dead at the sight. This novel, too, as I will discuss below, presents itself not as a smooth unified narrative, but as a series of fragmented and partial documents from various sources. The dramatic turmoil of the Durrisdeer family turns on the struggle between the prior claims of the elder son and the younger who has replaced him as the possessor of both right and property. The dates are important: they dovetail with the war that began in 1755 and ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. While Scott’s Redgauntlet focuses only on its domestic fallout in Britain, Stevenson’s novel engages with it more deeply. The historical figure of Sir William Johnson, who mediated between Indian tribes and English settlers, plays a significant role in the novel’s denouement because it is in his company that Henry follows his brother’s trail north, in the hope of confirming his death (Calloway, 2006, 26–27; 2008). Thus does Johnson become an important witness at the remarkable scene of attempted resurrection that ends the novel. But beyond historical persons and places, Stevenson’s novel engages the longer-term transformations and struggles that resulted from that war. Significantly, no American Indians are named or mentioned in the novel, except as unseen

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presences who follow the small party of assassins through the forest after the Master’s burial, invisibly taking one life each night. What underlies the novel more extensively is the historical struggle over land and boundaries and who had the right to allocate and settle them, as emigrants began to flood into America after the war, including 20,000 Scots who arrived between 1763 and 1775. After 1763, as Colin Calloway notes, the British wanted “clear boundaries dividing colonial settlers and Indian nations … ​The concept of an Indian boundary line was established, but the line was porous and impermanent” (2006, 92). Settlers and speculators wanted land that was claimed by indigenous American tribes. A royal proclamation in October 1763 established boundaries and claimed to protect Indians, yet in doing so appeared to claim the right to give land, thus confusing the issue of tribal sovereignty (96). In 1764, twenty-four Indian nations assembled at Niagara to pledge peace and alliance, in the belief that “Indian people held rights to unceded lands in British North America, and that those rights could be surrendered only to the Crown or its duly appointed agents in public council” (97). Yet George Washington, the soon-to-be president, spoke for many when he wrote in 1767, “I can never look upon that Proclamation in any other light … ​than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians & … ​[it] must fall of course in a few years … ​ [A]ny Person therefore who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good Lands & in some Measure Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them) will never regain it” (99). Washington’s words, “marking and distinguishing [lands] … ​to keep others from settling them,” are ominous. They describe boundaries in terms of an active process; they also incorporate futurity into the land itself, and equate possession with keeping future “others” out—especially those who had been there before, or who had prior claim to the land. The kinds of active personal boundary-making that Washington recommended do not accord with modern versions of sovereignty, often defined as “the territorialization of political rule by means of state formation” (Grimm, 2015, 1). In post-Westphalian Europe, “Sovereignty is … ​manifested not only in control over the inhabitants of a territory but also in the ability to control one’s own borders” (2). But recent theorists of sovereignty remind us that the ability to control one’s own borders depends on a mutual recognition of sovereignty: the political frontier is territorially delimited, a line over which the adjoining sovereign nation lies. In contrast to the ever-moving settler-colonial frontier, which sporadically and discontinuously consumes and disgorges Indigenous space, the political frontier is capable of precise identification and representation at any one time … ​A precise boundary

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is possible when there are two or more sovereign entities that recognize each other. When sovereignty is asserted, unilaterally, boundaries are simply imposed. (Evans et al., 2013, 11) Even a precise boundary line results only from a tense face-off, a frozen confrontation of powers. In the case of settler colonialism, the boundary’s essential fluidity emerges more starkly. The fact that sovereignty is never fully settled, that it can be reopened, is the insight that sparked Scott’s career as a novelist: Waverley’s epigraph reads, “Under which king?”2 That question continues to animate Redgauntlet, though in a faded rather than a vigorous mode. But Stevenson’s novel casts sovereignty squarely within a context of settler colonialism. Redgauntlet had already begun to complicate the assumption that sovereignty is tied to stable boundaries in space. It tries to resurrect the boundary between Scotland and England, a border that Scott had described in 1806 as merely a playground for antiquaries: “losing by conquest or by union their character as frontier, scenes once the theatre of constant battle, inroad, defence and retaliation, have been for two hundred years converted into the abode of peace and tranquillity” (Scott, 1835, 7:3–4). So Redgauntlet’s legal sovereignty over his nephew exists solely in England and does not extend to Scotland: “I wished you to visit England,” he tells Darsie, “because … ​my rights over you would revive” (Scott, 1985, 215). But his power over Darsie turns out to be limited at best. Though he can restrain him physically, Redgauntlet cannot revive in his nephew “the blood and sentiments of [his] ancestors” (338), the basis of his claim. Even when Redgauntlet dramatically unveils his plan to Darsie in sight of the grave of Edward I, at “the cradle of [Scotland’s] national freedom” (338), Darsie remains silent. Nor can Redgauntlet restore a Stuart monarch. Given his failure to command territory or control borders, Redgauntlet’s sovereignty relies on simple anteriority, but ultimately fails there as well. It is left to rest significantly on personal charisma, the ability to perform the act of command rather than to bring about results. The performativity of monarchy is an old idea; James the First had written in the Basilikon Doron, “A King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly doe behold” (Benite et al., 2017, 16). But in 1765 it is clear that there is nothing more to support the claim of Redgauntlet over his nephew, or Charles Stuart over the British than mere personal bearing. The latter is described at the end of the novel as moving “with a dignified 2 The full quotation is from Henry IV, Part II: “Under which King, Bezonian? speak, or die!” (Waverley, ed. Claire Lamont, 1986, 1).

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courtesy which at once supplied whatever was deficient in external pomp, and converted the wretched garret into a saloon worthy of the occasion” (Scott, 1985, 376). But it is not enough to inspire his followers, or even to alarm the Hanoverian state, whose representative allows all the would-be rebels to leave quietly at the end. In Stevenson’s novel, James is the elder son called the master of Ballantrae, who exercises this archaic or residual mode of sovereignty: “what makes the king a king is not merely what the monarch decides or says but how he appears when so doing” (Benite et  al., 2017, 21). He has neither territory nor money. James describes himself as an archaic type of sovereign: Had I been the least petty chieftain in the Highlands … ​my people would have adored me. A bad man, am I? Ah! but I was born for a good tyrant! Ask Secundra Dass … ​[if you] become my slave, my chattel, a thing I can command as I command the powers of my own limbs and spirit—you will see no more the dark side that I turn upon the world in anger. I must have all or none … ​I have a kingly nature: there is my loss! (Stevenson, 1995, 166) It is only through a performative mode that James exercises or exploits the command that he has over others: through his remarkable beauty, self-assurance, and grace of manner. Every gesture reveals “grace and mockery” (67); he boasts that “I never yet failed to charm a person when I wanted” (167). His charisma transforms every place into a theater in which he is at the center, every act, including death, into a mere performance. What transforms this sovereignty into something more than an archaic formation is the contested, literally time-inflected character of land in this post-1763 moment. Scott’s novel again offers the inspiration. A significant part of its beginning describes the Solway estuary, to which Darsie has been unconsciously drawn. He first sees his uncle, Redgauntlet (not yet identified), engaged with his followers in spear-fishing salmon: “they chased the fish at full gallop, and struck them with their barbed spears” (Scott, 1985, 32). Darsie lingers in this zone, though the tide advances and the sands become less solid by the minute: “the sands at the same time turned softer, and my footsteps, so soon as I had passed, were instantly filled with water” (33–34). He is only saved from the quicksand by Redgauntlet, who comes by on his horse. Stevenson relocates the quicksand episode to Florida, where James Durie has landed after time on a pirate ship in the Atlantic, after escaping Scotland in 1746. Wandering in the swamps with his treasure, Durie manages to avoid the quicksand in which his companions sink, and finds his way to New York. The phenomenon

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of quicksand stands as a figure not only of transition in space, but of transition in time and mode of production. In Redgauntlet, the estuary is a site of struggle between Redgauntlet’s men, who follow the older mode of fishing, and the Quaker, Joshua Geddes, who runs a commercial tide-net operation, “where, by certain improved modes of erecting snares, opening at the advance of the tide, and shutting at the reflux, many more fish are taken than can by destroyed by those who, like the men of Broken-burn, use only the boat-net and spear, or fishing-rod” (Scott, 1985, 73). This is also where the Durrisdeer family resides, “near St. Bride’s, on the Solway shore” (2). Re-reading Scott’s novel through the mediation of Stevenson’s, we can see this struggle differently and in terms of indigeneity that can be linked to Hawai‘i as well as to North America. As recent geographers note, “Indigenous cartographies are process oriented,” and “emphasize experienced space or place,” as well as the ways in which both the land itself and its use change and shift according to time and season. Scott’s novel, viewed through Stevenson’s eyes, heavily emphasizes the way the character of the land changes according to time and season (Pearce and Louis, 2008, 110–11). This way of mapping reflects indigenous ways of organizing and dividing the land: Hawaiian political boundaries, formalized by the early 1600s, organize the islands into levels according to geographical and political relationships … ​an ahupua‘a is a land unit divided according to the distribution of resources … ​This land division, with its variable plant zones from the rainforest down to the beach and marine zones from the shore to just beyond the reef, ideally provided the necessary resources to sustain life for the communities that reside within them. (115) The boundaries of traditional units “encoded the way the ahupua‘a were to be used … ​the locations and meanings of ahu [stone pile markers] were designed to be flexible and move with the shifting locations of resources with environmental and seasonal change” (115). After the American system of private property was officially adopted, “ahupua‘a boundaries were translated into a Western concept of boundary, thus distorting their meaning and function. The Hawaiian concept of boundary as inclusive and fluid—adjusting to changing environmental conditions with the seasons for the equitable distribution of natural resources—was misrepresented as a non-Indigenous concept of boundary as an exclusive, fixed line” (115). The tension between these different understandings of boundaries seems to drive the ambiguations imaginatively performed by The Master of Ballantrae.

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In Stevenson’s novel, the question of sovereignty is affixed to a land that shifts its shape and texture, that seems to absorb and reflect the affective states and situations of its temporary inhabitants.3 The land itself seems to possess the qualities of water. For example, the Florida sequence, as noted above, occurs on unstable ground: “we often sank in the most terrifying manner” (Stevenson, 1995, 43). Two companions sink and are swallowed up by this watery land, together with their ill-gotten treasure. And the Master and his friend become lost: “the estuary, which spread into a vast irregular harbour, turned us off upon every side with a new stretch of water” (46). When they stumble upon a ship that will take them all the way to Albany, New York, and then decide to head north toward the French on Lake Champlain, they find themselves in a similar situation of ambiguous solidity. Not only are the people of Albany “much concerned in contraband trade across the desert with the Indians and French” (48), and thus explicitly linked with the smugglers on the Solway coast, but the land itself, once the Master moves north, becomes fluid: “The reader must conceive for himself the dreadful wilderness which we had now to thread; its thickets, swamps, precipitous rocks, impetuous rivers, and amazing waterfalls” (50). The journey is undertaken on “a labyrinth of rivers, lakes, and portages” (50). Ballantrae’s Irish companion recalls waters on every side, bogs, and a lack of solidity: “In some the bottom was full of deep swamp, and the whole wood entirely rotten. I have leaped on a great fallen log and sunk to the knees … ​I have sought to stay myself, in falling, against what looked to be a solid trunk, and the whole thing has whiffed at my touch like a sheet of paper” (52). This is also the only place in which the narrative describes American Indians passing through these woods. Because the American land is fluid, it can also be frozen, and this is the state in which we see it in the long final sequence of events, which is set up elaborately. In a remarkable, dreamlike episode in the center of the novel, the Master travels to New York in 1764 in pursuit of his brother, accompanied and watched by Mackellar, the family steward who serves as the novel’s narrator and documentarian. Though loyal to the younger brother, Mackellar becomes fascinated by James, as they sit together on the deck of the rolling ship: the sea hove ever the higher. All night the Nonesuch rolled outrageously; the next day dawned and the next, and brought no change. To cross the 3 See Jenni Calder, “Figures in a Landscape: Scott, Stevenson, and Routes to the Past,” and JeanPierre Naugrette, “The Master of Ballantrae or the Writing of Frost and Stone,” both in Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries, ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury, 2006.

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cabin was scarce possible  …  ​the great bell by the anchor-bitts continually and dolefully rang. One of these days the Master and I sat alone together … ​our feet hanging down … ​I had continually before my eyes a measure of our evolutions in the person of the Master … ​Now his head would be in the zenith and his shadow fall quite beyond the Nonesuch on the farther side; and now he would swing down till he was underneath my feet, and the line of the sea leaped high above him like the ceiling of a room. I looked upon this with a growing fascination … ​he spoke down at me, smiling from high above; the next, he was under my feet. (Stevenson, 1995, 158–62) This description of the ocean’s movement is subtly recalled and negated at the novel’s climax, when Mackellar, Henry, and Sir William have found their way almost to the Master’s grave, in the frozen Adirondack mountains: it appeared almost warm, like a night of July: a singular illusion of sense, when earth, air, and water were strained to bursting with the extremity of frost. My lord [Henry]… stood … gazing before him on the surface of the wood. My eyes followed his, and rested almost pleasantly upon the frosted contexture of the pines, rising in moonlit hillocks, or sinking in the shadow of small glens. Hard by … was the grave of our enemy … the earth heaped for ever on his once so active limbs … ​(Stevenson, 1995, 213) At this moment, they hear the ring of iron not from a bell but from a shovel. Secundra Dass is digging up the grave where James had arranged to have himself buried alive temporarily: “we set forth along the uneven bottom of the forest; frost crackling, ice sometimes loudly splitting under foot … Our way led down into a hollow of the land … we could now perceive the ring of iron” (215). They find Dass standing “ankle-deep in the grave of his late master” (216). Described as “rising … or sinking,” the forest takes on the characteristics of the ocean and the vertiginous qualities of the rolling ship; the scene is frozen and yet fluid, and Secundra Dass stands ankle-deep in the land, as if it were water. Most importantly, the person of the Master is under his feet only temporarily, as the body or living person is about to be lifted up. The novel has been leading up to this scene, and it possesses a powerful, grotesque complexity. There is the racist caricature of Secundra Dass, described elsewhere as a “decayed gentleman of India” (Stevenson, 1995, 172), who is bizarrely substituted for the American Indians who populate this territory. Dass speaks a non-specific pidgin English (“he not dead. He bury, he not dead” [217]) and exhibits the usual characteristics of the slavish, cunning, and easily

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terrified generic “native.” He is described as Ballantrae’s “familiar spirit” (210). But in this scene, this human shadow possesses his own shadow as he frantically digs the ground to uncover Ballantrae’s body: “behind him, strangely deformed and ink-black upon the frosty ground, the creature’s shadow repeated and parodied his swift gesticulations” (216). Most grotesquely, the scene offers a parody of an embodied claim to the land. Ballantrae is literally in the land, and has used his own body to “mark and distinguish” it, to assert his sovereignty over it. Stevenson uses the term “parody” to describe the relationship between the real movements occurring and their representation or repetition by the shadow. But another term we might use is catachresis, the rhetorical figure of abuse or misuse.4 There are multiple catachreses occurring not only at the level of rhetoric, but at that of plot. It is true that the substitution of Dass for the Native Americans has a historical referent in the expansion of British Empire that occurred as a result of the Treaty of Paris, and the Master is not the only one who claims knowledge of both “the East and the West” (Stevenson, 1995, 179). But Dass’s profound out-of-placeness could not be more strongly stressed. Most consequentially, the practice he teaches James of “[swallowing] his tongue” to suspend his animation does not transfer: “good way in warm climate, good way in India; here, in this damn cold place, who can tell?” (217), Dass asks while digging up the body. Most jarring is the catachrestic distortion of the idea of the indigenous as “native or belonging naturally to (the soil, region, etc.). (Used primarily of aboriginal inhabitants or natural products)” (OED). The Master’s body is gradually uncovered in its grave: “Every moment the form of the Master, swathed in his buffalo robe, grew more distinct in the bottom of that shallow trough” (Stevenson, 1995, 218). Not only does the novel represent this as a connection to the land, it also notes that the Master attempts unsuccessfully to make a verbal claim after his body emerges from the soil. Mackellar relates, “I have heard from others that he visibly strove to speak … ​that his brow was contorted with an agony of pain and effort” (218). The sequence illustrates literally how “sovereignty is mutable and fragile, requiring constant care and support; sovereignty is overpowering in the instant, yet never once and for all” (Benite et al., 2017, 3). Dass attempts to revive the body for several hours before concluding that the ground was “too cold” (Stevenson, 1995, 219). I would like to conclude by considering the question of remediation. As conceptualized by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin and more recent media theorists, remediation involves the retelling of a story in a way that both 4 See the Oxford English Dictionary entry, “Improper use of words; application of a term to a thing which it does not properly denote; abuse or perversion of a trope or metaphor. 1589 G. Puttenham Arte Eng. Poesie iii. xvi. 150 Catachresis, or the Figure of abuse.”

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erases and recalls the existence of the former medium in which the story was embodied.5 The Master of Ballantrae is presented as a collection of letters and documents, scrupulously collected and annotated by the steward, Mackellar. These papers are situated in a narrative frame in which the unnamed narrator meets an old friend in Edinburgh, a lawyer who shows him “a prodigious accumulation of old lawpapers and old tin boxes …. Among other collections, were all the papers of the Durrisdeers” (Stevenson, 1995, xvi). The novel’s actual pages are supposedly contained within “a packet, fastened with many seals and enclosed in a single sheet of strong paper,” which the narrator vows to publish “just as it stands” (xvii–xviii). Stevenson here gestures playfully toward a longer generic history in which the novel presents itself as a found manuscript or as a collection of letters or papers. The more specific remediation, however, involves another aspect of Scott’s Redgauntlet. If the novel’s primary side is Darsie’s tale, its verso is the story of his friend, Alan Fairford. Alan has just begun his legal career by inheriting a famously convoluted case, one that, anticipating Bleak House’s Jarndyce, has reduced its plaintiff to poverty and madness. Peebles versus Plainstanes arrives as “two huge leathern bags, full of papers to the brim, and labelled on the greasy backs with the magic impress of the clerks of court” (Scott, 1985, 134). It is described as a “huge chaotic mass of unintelligible technicality” (144) that had been created by legal art out of a simple claim. Stevenson’s novel also incorporates into its narrative this action of legal tangling, untangling, and documenting. Mackellar includes, for example, a “Schedule of Papers” that he had given to Henry’s wife, complete with busy notes: “‘C. Three original letters from the said Mr of Ballantrae to the Hon. Henry Durie, Esq., under dates …’ (follow the dates) … ​‘Nota: given me by Mr Henry to answer: copies of my answers A 4, A 5 and A 9 …. The purport of Mr Henry’s communications, of which I can find no scroll, may be gathered from those of his unnatural brother …’” (Stevenson, 1995, 110, original ellipses and emphases). The notations of the “editor” are layered on Mackellar’s, and he even inserts his own annotations in square brackets within the text: “[Editor’s Note.—Five pages of Mr Mackellar’s MS are here omitted … ​Against the seventh Lord Durrisdeer (with whom, at any rate, we have no concern) nothing material is alleged---R.L.S.]” (123). By presenting itself as a set of annotated legal documents, the novel engenders a kind of immediacy, yet at the same time draws attention to the flimsy materiality of legal claims as well as facts. Calloway remarks about the Seven Years War that “[a]lthough the 5 See Christina Lupton, Knowing Books, 2012; Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, eds. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 2009.

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Proclamation established a line on paper separating the British colonies from the southern Indian nations, the physical boundary was established in a series of treaty conferences negotiated in the months and years that followed” (Calloway, 2006, 102). The treaties seemed to be made to be broken. The Master of Ballantrae calls into question the legitimacy of documentation even as it insists upon it. The plot also draws our attention to the way in which printed matter wanders in highly consequential ways. The novel’s final sequence, in which Henry encourages James to go find his treasure in the company of hired assassins, is put in motion by the arrival of a pamphlet from England, part of a “little packet of pamphlets” (Stevenson, 1995, 179). One of them claims without any proof that the forfeited estates of Jacobites will be restored, mentioning the elder Durrisdeer by name. Reading this spurs Henry’s descent into madness, much like Peter Peebles’s. Mackellar reflects, “it was reserved for some poor devil in Grub Street, scribbling for his dinner, and not caring what he scribbled, to cast a spell across four thousand miles of salt sea, and send forth both these brothers into savage and wintry deserts, there to die” (179). The poisonous letter wanders without control. Stevenson’s most haunting remediation involves both a figure and a story of homelessness. “Wandering Willie” is a song by Robert Burns to which Stevenson wrote new lyrics (though to a different tune). In a strange metalepsis, Stevenson has the Master sing parts of his own lyrics to Mackellar as they leave Durrisdeer to sail to America: “Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces … ​Now … ​Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold, / Lone let it stand, now the folks are all departed, / The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old” (Stevenson, 1995, 151). Stevenson thus remediates his own remediation of the Burns song. James “began first to whistle and then to sing the saddest of our country tunes … ​‘Wandering Willie.’ The set of words he used with it I have not heard elsewhere, and could never come by any copy; but some of them … ​linger in my memory,” notes Mackellar (151). Wandering Willie is also an important figure in Scott’s Redgauntlet, and is a blind, itinerant fiddler, and living repository of Scottish music whom Darsie befriends. The tale Wandering Willie tells, cryptically embedded in Scott’s novel, is one of strange survival and deferred consequences. The protagonist Steenie (Willie’s grandfather) is challenged by his new landlord to produce a receipt for the payment he had given to the previous one (an earlier Redgauntlet) at the exact moment of the latter’s death. Steenie goes with the help of the devil “under the earth” (Scott, 1985, 111) to find his deceased master, with his servants and friends, presiding in the exactly same house, where everyday life seems to continue in (nearly) exactly the same exuberant way: “mony, mony mair were coming and ganging … ​as busy in their vocation as if they had been

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alive” (112). Far from being cold or deserted, the house is busy, full of familiar faces. Steenie obtains the receipt, and the signature on it ties together in an impossible knot death and life, past and present. Just as Steenie brings one into the other, Willie brings his tale into the narrative present, which Stevenson curiously remediates. Settler colonialism “converts external into internal, rendering Indigenous sovereignties either nonexistent or domesticated. Annexation does the same thing … ​Thus the frontier is a line in time as well as in space. … ​Temporally, [the frontier] marks the conversion of outside into inside; it renders externality a thing of the past … ​the Native realm becomes a thing of the past, superseded. …” (Evans et al., 2013, 112). But Wandering Willie offers this moral for his tale: “What was fristed wasna forgiven” (Scott, 1985, 117). Interestingly, Stevenson does not quote this. Yet he places Wandering Willie at the center of The Master of Ballantrae, and carefully rewrites settler colonialism into his version of Scott’s novel. Indeed, Stevenson goes to some length to incorporate the historical figure of Sir William Johnson into its plot. As noted above, Mackellar and Sir Henry go north in search of the Master’s body in his company, but Johnson has his own aims. There are rumors of war: “the Indian diplomatist had, thereupon, sped into the Wilderness, even at the approach of winter, to nip that mischief in the bud. Here, on the borders, he learned that he was come too late” (Stevenson, 1995, 207). Johnson even utters these words aloud: “‘I have come too late,’ he said more than once, and would fall into a deep consideration” (208). This appears to be Stevenson’s way, perhaps, of making the same point as Wandering Willie’s tale. Things of the past are not superseded; past debts are still outstanding. The empty house is wishful thinking. References Alexander, W.D. 1896. History of Later Years of the Hawaiian Monarchy and the Revolution of 1893. Honolulu: Hawaiian Gazette Company. Ambrosini, Richard and Richard Dury, eds. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Benite, Zvi Ben-Dor, Stefanos Geroulanos, Nicole Jerr, eds. 2017. The Scaffolding of Sovereignty: Global and Aesthetic Perspectives on the History of a Concept. NY: Columbia University Press. Calder, Jenni. 2006. “Figures in a Landscape: Scott, Stevenson, and Routes to the Past.” In Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 121–32.

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Calloway, Colin. 2006. The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America. New York: Oxford University Press. Calloway, Colin. 2008. White People, Indians, and Highlanders. New York: Oxford University Press. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney, eds. 2009. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. De Gruyter. Evans, Julie, Ann Genovese, Alexander Reilly and Patrick Wolfe, eds. 2013. Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Grimm, Dieter. 2015. Sovereignty: The Origin and Future of a Political and Legal Concept. New York: Columbia University Press. Lupton, Christina. 2012. Knowing Books. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Naugrette, Jean-Pierre. 2006. “The Master of Ballantrae or the Writing of Frost and Stone.” In Robert Louis Stevenson: Writer of Boundaries. Ed. Richard Ambrosini and Richard Dury. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 97–108. Pearce, Margaret Wickens and Renee Pualani Louis. 2008. “Mapping Indigenous Depth of Place.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 32, 3: 107–26 Scott, Sir Walter. 1835. “Essay on Border Antiquities.” The Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 30 vols. Edinburgh: Robert Cadell. Scott, Sir Walter. 1985. Redgauntlet, Ed. Kathryn Sutherland. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Scott, Sir Walter. 1986. Waverley, Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Ed. Claire Lamont. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1995. The Master of Ballantrae. In The Scottish Novels. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics.

Chapter 5

“Where will all come home?”: Global Stevenson Penny Fielding Stevenson’s 1892 novel The Wrecker (officially co-authored with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne) takes its thwarted artist protagonist Loudon Dodd from his native Michigan to, variously, California, Scotland, France, Midway Island and Hawai‘i. Other characters travel to Sydney, and an epilogue imagines a destination in Persia. Amid this restlessly transnational novel, Dodd describes a street scene in San Francisco: Chinatown by a thousand eccentricities drew and held me; I could never have enough of its ambiguous, inter-racial atmosphere, as of a vitalised museum; never wonder enough at its outlandish, necromantic-looking vegetables set forth to sell in commonplace American shop-windows, its temple doors open and the scent of the joss-stick streaming forth on the American air, its kites of Oriental fashion hanging fouled in Western telegraph-wires, its flights of paper prayers which the trade-wind hunts and dissipates along Western gutters. (Stevenson, 1892, 123) In this strange half-life between a living museum and dead vegetation, time is confusing and space even more so. A disordered geographic heterogeneity mixes disparate places with competing technologies and motions as a Chinese kite becomes entangled with the “Western telegraph wires.” And the whole picture seems to have been blown there by the forces of global capitalism that gave the Trade Winds their name. Throughout his writing career, Stevenson explored how, or if, it is possible to make sense of such a world. How can individual human beings navigate spaces as these become increasingly heterogeneous through technology immigration and global trade? What happens to the empirical life, both physical and psychological, of men and women in this world, and can the artist who confronts them maintain a course more successfully than does Loudon Dodd? Stevenson frequently puzzled over these questions. His own constant need, or compulsion, to travel was marked by an interest not only in his new destinations, but also in the distances between them, and the challenge of measuring those distances. What tools could be used to map such dimensions? How could he reconcile the author’s task of recording the experience of the body

© Penny Fielding, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_007

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as it moves through time and space with this alienating world of global spaces and new technological ways of measuring them? At the most general level, Stevenson is interested in two ways of thinking about his place in the world: first, the conjunction of the spatiality of experience with the spatiality of cartography; and secondly, how to map this empiricist question onto a sociological one. Both of these dimensions have a political context for understanding their modern spatiality. In The Wrecker, for example, the Chinese goods in the greengrocer’s shop are “outlandish” where the American building is “commonplace.” The street scene is not simply a tangle of disordered geographical images–the immigrant society is apparently out of place in a location that is supposed to be a place in common. All the elements of this scene are important for my argument. Stevenson’s sense of time and space draws on the subject’s experience of their own position in relation to changing conceptions of global distance. More specifically, his narrative or poetic voices try to mediate between a space that is felt and one that is given, or between the space engendered in the imagination and the distances measured by the new mathematics of space and time. And, as his writing turns to the Pacific, this attempt to reconcile temporal and spatial modes comes under increasing pressure from his colonial situation. 1

“Continents and Continental Oceans”: Imagination and Technology

My discussion of Stevenson’s global reach will take us to the Pacific to trace his negotiation of the relations of time and space. But before focusing on particular geographies, I want to step back and look more generally at his literary imagination, and at how global spatiality infuses his form and style. To begin, we can see some of the complexity of this spatial imagination already in one of his most simple poems: Dark brown is the river, Golden is the sand. It flows along for ever, With trees on either hand. Green leaves a-floating, Castles of the foam, Boats of mine a-boating— Where will all come home?

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On goes the river And out past the mill, Away down the valley, Away down the hill. Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring my boats ashore. (Stevenson, 1950, 369) The elements of this scene from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) are fluid and rather mysterious. As with many of Stevenson’s poems for children, the child’s success in creating a phenomenological world is invaded by the largeness or autonomy of the external world. In this scene, the child himself is somewhere in the background of the other objects in the scene—the river, sand, trees and mill. The child’s own act of setting the boats in the water is not mentioned, and his claim to be in charge of them, the possessive “boats of mine,” is immediately vitiated by the phrase “a-boating.” It is normally we who go boating in boats; these boats are boating through their own agency. The poem introduces a key idea: how Stevenson’s continued return to the empirical act of reading survives in a world that is becoming bigger, more impersonal, and more technological, yet not in uniform ways that can coherently map time and space onto each other. The poem has an almost simplicity reminiscent of Blake’s Songs, in which complexity resides in small, apparently insignificant, intricacies. The river “flows along for ever, / With trees on either hand.” The child’s mind is unburdened by a Newtonian sense of time and space as media in or through which other things happen. Here the trees and the river exist in a complex relation that generates a flux in the perceiving mind. The river may not have trees on either hand for the whole of its length. Its act of flowing along “forever” is paradoxically determined by its passing through a single place. We measure its infinite motion not in the way it moves from point A to point B, but because it passes through a singular location. The poem plays a kind of auditory trick on us. If we hear it without reading it, we may not notice the full stop at the end of stanza 3 that changes the meaning of the anaphoric “away.” In formal and grammatical terms, the poem looks both forwards and backwards. The first aways are temporal—it is the river that is passing away. The third is spatial, denoting a point in the river’s length. “Away” is where the other little children are. The world of the poem is where time and space determine each other, but one in which they can also change places. We can be carried along in a continuous, subjective present,

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“away flows the river,” but we can also travel from one point to another “away down the river.” Clearly something is going on with time and space here, and we could place Stevenson in a general turn towards a modernist temporality. Time, for the child of “Where Go the Boats?” is both a flow and a network of correspondences, memories and projections. The boats are spatial objects that can only be experienced in time, but the times in which they can be known—the now of the child putting them in the water and the then of the other little children’s claiming them—are temporal modes. But this evocation of internally embedded time is not the only one in A Child’s Garden of Verses. To focus on the formal details of this poem is to understand the deep level at which Stevenson’s sense of the work of the artist was imbricated in modes of mapping his travels, real and imaginary, in ways that are at the same time geographical, cultural and scientific. If we take a second poem from A Child’s Garden, another context becomes apparent. In “The Sun’s Travels,” as in “Where Go the Boats?”, the child speaker seeks to position himself in relation to distance that is dependent on temporality, but this time the “other little children” are set in their global frame. The speaker calculates his own daily routines against the expected activities of children round the world in a way that makes time and space relative to each other: The sun is not a-bed, when I At night upon my pillow lie; Still round the earth his way he takes, And morning after morning makes. While here at home, in shining day, We round the sunny garden play, Each little Indian sleepy-head Is being kissed and put to bed. And when at eve I rise from tea, Day dawns beyond the Atlantic Sea, And all the children in the West Are getting up and being dressed. (Stevenson, 1950, 379) The poem starts with the child’s apparently naïve view of a pre-Copernican universe where the sun takes its journey round the earth. But beneath this is a more extensive and more knowing idea about global space. A Child’s Garden was published in 1885—just a year after the international conference in Washington D.C. that, after many competing claims, finally established the

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Prime Meridian as a line of longitude passing through Greenwich. The speaker of this poem is a child who knows that the world has been uniformly divided into regular units of space and time, and who can synchronize global activity accordingly. Here space and time are dependent on geographical markers and temporal divisions. In “Where Go the Boats?” the child’s cognitive process is an imaginary projection into the unknown, but the speaker of “The Sun’s Travels” is aware of a given world made knowable by the standardisation of time. The child’s view of the natural passage of day and night comes at a point when the Washington Conference had recently decided the official span of a “day” and when it began and ended.1 And this is also a question of perspective—the child’s assumption that morning and evening are synchronised, places him in a position of geographical simultaneity. It was precisely this position that Sandford Fleming, one of the leading architects of the Washington Conference, saw as a symptom of modern communications technology. The ability of one point on the globe to reach another on the international telegraph cable network meant that “noon, midnight, sunrise, sunset, are all observed at the same moment” and were thus in need of the rationalisation of time zones that would keep them separate (quoted in Kern, 2003, 11). So we have one form of modernity—the standardisation of time—working to regulate another—the expansion of communications technology. And we can locate Stevenson at the central point of this world that seems able simultaneously to expand and contract time and space. One way of thinking about these contrasting poems would be to plot them in relation to the modernist project of defining and exploring the private flows and durations of psychological time (“Where Go the Boats?”), against the newly standardised and quantified time of a universal and public discourse of temporality (“The Sun’s Travels”). But rather than fitting Stevenson into something called “modernism,” my argument will follow his own, multifaceted exploration of spatiality as it reflects his encounters with the technological implications of global time. Stevenson thought constantly about distance, and the two poems introduce forms that are imbricated through his work. First, the idea that our sense of self is dependent on our imaginative extension into other spaces, even (or especially) where these cannot be known, and secondly, the knowledge that our world is mapped and managed by clock time and temporal zoning. For Stevenson, these temporalties merge and intersect in the act

1 The issue here had been that the astronomically-measured day and the day of civic life did not begin and end at the same points. See Charles W. J. Withers, Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian, 2017, 212–13.

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of writing and in images of communication and simultaneity, which take on more defined global contexts after his move to the Pacific. A few years after A Child’s Garden of Verses, Stevenson wrote another poem that grapples with spatial and temporal distance. As in “Where Go the Boats?”, his sense of place demands an immediate, experiential account of his surroundings, but he now can only calibrate this in relation to distance. In “The Tropics Vanish” we find Stevenson on an island in the Gilbert Islands (now part of the modern nation of Kiribati), but thinking about Edinburgh and the tomb of his lighthouse-building family. Again, he uses poetic form and language to measure the space not between two equal points, but between a lived place and a vast impersonal distance: Continents And continental oceans intervene; A sea uncharted, on a lampless isle, Environs and confines their wandering child In vain. (ll. 19–23) (Stevenson, 1950, 270) In a perfectly self-enacting piece of poetry, Stevenson cuts global space free of its external dimensions. The insistent, assonant diphthongs “isle,” “environs,” and “confines” seem to home inwards with an internal semi-rhyme onto the line end “child.” But Stevenson does not just delay the sentence’s object (“child”); he changes the sound to leave behind the circling i-diphthongs. The sea confines the child “in vain.” Delayed to the start of a line, the sound change gives the speaking voice a unique focal point and establishes the artist’s ability to manipulate space and to reach out—like the children in A Child’s Garden—across the globe. This telescoping of time and space is a way of thinking about the production of space in a way that is simultaneously geographical and psychological. And it also traces a cognitive experience of dimension— the way we think about space in terms of what we know—and suggests that as we reach out towards limitless space, we do so by setting lines, contours and travels. The poem first imagines the biggest geographical unit—a continent— and then expands it to something even bigger—a continental ocean. While the poem flexes its spatial sensibility, it also calls up more technological imagery. As Stevenson’s imagination maps the distance between the Pacific islands and Scotland, it follows routes that had been, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the pathways of new forms of information technology. The relationship of continent to ocean reminds us that Stevenson’s lifetime saw the linking of the globe by undersea telegraph cables. As he reaches back in time in “The Tropics Vanish” to make the connection with his family, that

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temporal shift is also one described by geographical technology. His memory follows the tracks of the “continental oceans,” and gives the imagery a technical grounding—the tracks of a global network of undersea cables that clung where possible to continental landmasses. The world saw the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866 (there had been a number of more or less false starts from the 1850s). In 1870, a cable was laid from London to Mumbai; by 1872 India was linked to Australia, and in 1876 Australia and New Zealand were connected. By the time Stevenson wrote The Wrecker, the commercial college that Loudon Dodd briefly attends in Michigan has international reach: “Electric wires connected it (to use the words of the prospectus) with ‘the various world centres’” (Stevenson, 1892, 16). For the cable companies, the idea of a continental ocean had a practical significance in a globe that was being mapped for and by technology. The poem both calls on a phenomenological sense of place and demands that we visualize that global space of “continental oceans” in terms of mapping. The world was—physically—becoming more connected and Stevenson was mapping his work accordingly. It is this interest in the new technologies of communication that drives Stevenson’s sense of space in ways both phenomenological and scientific. It is easy to accept his own self-recriminations about his rejection of the family trade of engineering in favour of writing, and his anxiety at his decision to “To play at home with paper like a child” (Stevenson, 1950, 144). Readers have been apt to conclude, with Fanny Stevenson, that “he is an artist and he knows nothing about science” (Stevenson, 1995, 7:80). But Stevenson’s interest in science and technology remained with him after his award, as an engineering student, of a silver medal for an essay on “A New Form of Intermittent Light” for lighthouse lamps. Science and literature were not opposed, but mutually interactive in Stevenson’s writing. Rosalind Williams’s survey of his travel writings makes a very persuasive case for the interaction during his career of ideas about the engineer and the writer “who both bring the simplifying power of symbolic representation to clarify the otherwise bewildering complexities of the world” (Williams, 2013, 251). Williams is here pointing to Stevenson’s connection, in his essaybased conversation with Henry James on realism and romance, of the abstracting power of mathematics to sublimate the quotidian representation of detail to the work of the novel. A novel “is not a transcript of life,” and its success depends on its evocation of life by more general means (Stevenson, 1887, 297). I want to pick up on this association, and to think about it more specifically in relation to information technology. In doing so, I hope to dismantle a little Stevenson’s own insistence that that the technical understanding of “life”—the subject of his debate with James—is different from “art” in a fundamental way.

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Yet, as we will see, Stevenson’s engagement with the underlying structures of engineering turns out not to simplify the complexities of living, but to render them in perplexing detail, as the sense of a felt home comes up against a distance that can be measured. Stevenson was interested in science throughout his life. His biographical writings led him to trace his own scientific lineage in Records of a Family of Engineers, which highlights the career of his grandfather, the lighthouse engineer Robert Stevenson. Robert becomes the focus of Stevenson’s sense of the speed of technological change and its acceleration in the modern era. Louis records the rapidity of transportation and the scientific innovations of that expanded time and space: It is to be remembered that he came to engineering while yet it was in the egg and without a library, and that he saw the bounds of that profession widen daily. He saw iron ships, steamers, and the locomotive engine, introduced. He lived to travel from Glasgow to Edinburgh in the inside of a forenoon, and to remember that he himself had ‘often been twelve hours upon the journey, and his grand-father (Lillie) two days’! The profession was still but in its second generation, and had already broken down the barriers of time and space. (Stevenson, 1924, 214) Stevenson’s articulation here of modernity as a compression of time and space would become a familiar characterisation of global experience as a modern geographical consciousness that leads to the concept of space-time compression—the idea that distances are relative to the speed of travel or the technology of communication. In addition to the barrier-breaking mode of transport he lists in the quotation above, Stevenson was also well aware of developments in communication technology. In 1885 he published his Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, the first Regius Professor of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, whom he had much admired from his own student days. To compose the Memoir, Stevenson uses Jenkin’s own accounts of the “telegraph voyages” that he undertook between 1858 and 1873, to lay marine cables in the Mediterranean.2 Stevenson paints his professor as an explorer, not only of places but also of the new science of telegraphy: “New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new inquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened before him

2 For Jenkin and the history of electrical engineering, see Gillian Cookson and Colin Hempstead , A Victorian Scientist and Engineer: Fleeming Jenkin and the Birth of Electrical Engineering, 2000.

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continually” (Stevenson, 1924, 54). This was a new world of time and space, and it demanded new ways of thinking. If we add these new technologies to the already divided spaces of the poems from A Child’s Garden, we find a spatiality split between a global technological consciousness and the immediate, nervous experience of communication at a distance. In the second half of the 1870s the telephone was being developed, just in time for Louis in California to reunite with his fiancée, Fanny Osbourne, to experiment with the new invention. He describes this new experience in The Silverado Squatters of 1880: Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills. […]. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilized career. So it goes in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears. (Stevenson, 1883, 18–19) Typically, Stevenson associates technology with a composite temporality— here the tactile closeness of the telephone receiver, the distance of the man “several miles off,” and the wider global contexts of telegraphs and newspapers that make this technology possible. To understand this better, we can compare his understanding of the spread of communication technology with that of R. M Ballantyne’s The Battery and the Boiler: Or Adventures in the laying of Submarine Electric Cables of 1883. Here is a typical moment from the novel that conjures up a very different species of bear from the ones Stevenson found in California. ‘In short,’ continued Sam […] ‘there isn’t a civilised quarter of the globe which is not tied to us by telegraph, and from which we might not hear any morning of the events of the preceding day.’ ‘Always excepting Central Africa and the two poles,’ said the captain. ‘I said civilised quarters,’ retorted Sam, ‘and, as far as I know, the poles are inhabited only by bears.’ ‘True, I forgot, the poles are barely civilised,’ said uncle Rik. (Ballantyne, 1883, 407–08) While acknowledging that the telephone and the telegraph were very different systems in practice (there was no intercontinental telephony until the 1920s),

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we can nevertheless draw them both into ideas about technological modernity in the 1880s. Ballantyne’s temporality is linear and imperialist. For him, the world rests on the assumption of a primitive substructure that technological “civilization” will gradually transform (the novel is typically evangelical). One stage will become another in a uniform and inevitable historical process. Stevenson’s temporality, by contrast, is much more complex, and his bears coexist with modern technology. The telephone inspires Stevenson to think about temporality on micro and macro levels at the same time. In terms of micro history, he is amazed by the immediate temporal congruity that the telephone calls into being. Yet he also experiences the temporal moment as a form of historical incongruity. The simultaneity of the telephone call sits against the temporality of the bears and the Native Americans. Technology does not convert all actors—instruments, animals or people—to the same temporal moment. Modernity is not a process of gradual assimilation, as it is for Ballantyne, and it is never possible to call up the old Enlightenment categories of stadial history without seeing them imbricated in each other.3 It is this disjunction that we can trace in Stevenson’s sense of place when he is writing from the Pacific islands. 2 “What is the Difference between London and Papeete?”: the Pacific and Global Time Stevenson’s sense of spatiality, as we have seen, is a complex one that combines the alienating effects of uniform world time with an intense focus on the experience of his own spatial imagination, and understands both of these in a field of global communication technology. But he is also aware—particularly after his extended family moved to Sāmoa—that neither of these ways of thinking about distance was without problematic political implications. As Adam Barrows has pointed out, the fixing of the Greenwich Meridian, with its apparently objective mathematical certainties, was not a neutral or an a-political act. Rather, Barrows argues, the Washington Conference signalled a form of temporal imperialism as it “marks the date when England begins to export British time as a commodity to an entire globe newly dependent on Greenwich precision” (Barrows, 2011, 8). In the Pacific, Stevenson considers not only his

3 This kind of uneven development in technology also has a counterpart in the spatiality of the global economy in Stevenson’s Pacific writings. See Philip Steer, “Romances of Uneven Development: Spatiality, Trade and Form in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Novels,” 2015.

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own relation to the homes he has left behind, but also the more general displacements of empire. The Pacific Islands were a contested site both for late nineteenth-century imperialism and for the bureaucracy of time and space. If the child speaker of “The Sun’s Travels” had been asked to put dates to his understanding of the passage of day and night across the world, it would not have been so easy for him to do so. The position of the International Date Line was not fixed by the Washington Conference, and a notional “anti-Meridian” of 180 degrees from Greenwich was in play for establishing discrete dates. But this hypothetical and mathematical geography was undercut by the political needs of imperial powers to regulate trade and commerce within their zones of influence by standardising days and the working week. The Spanish-controlled Philippines, for example, had moved themselves onto the Asian side of the date line in 1844 to facilitate trade with China and the Dutch East Indies. Sāmoa, where the Stevensons made their home, was caught up in a further temporal adjustment when American traders pressured King Malietoa Laupepa to move his territory onto the Eastern side of the line (Ariel and Berger, 2006, 143–45).4 These kinds of political considerations disrupt the abstract, geometrical homogeneity of a globe mapped by time zones and connected by the telegraph cables. In his study of the development of telegraphy in the nineteenth century, Roland Wenzelhuemer reminds us that we should not be too quick to assume the abolition of space and time that comes about with information technology. He is one of a number of historical and social geographers who have moved away from the idea that modernity is both the result of, and produced by, homogenous empty space. Wenzelhuemer argues that we need a more “multilayered and relation concept of space that […] acknowledges the social production of spaces just as it is able to accommodate the particularities of geographic space.” What matters are modes of connectivity and actor-centred metrics. Space is always produced, and the growth of telegraphy is one way of exploring the multiple social systems and acts that produce it (Wenzlhuemer, 2012, 40).5 Space here is measured not by abstract mathematics, but by the interactions of the actors that inhabit and use it. 4 As Ariel and Berger comment, “the Pacific islands fueled the perpetual saga of the ever-changing date line” (2006, 144). Adam Barrows points out that Stanford Fleming, architect of the Washington Conference, was not immune from political pressure: “During the period in which he was planning to connect the Pacific Cable via small islands in the Pacific he was contacted by English agents to enlist his support in pressing for political action on sovereign islands” (2011, 49). 5 For literary and artistic responses to the telegraph see Clare Pettitt, “Mermaids amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch in the Nineteenth Century,” in Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor (eds), Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1880s, 2019, 15–33.

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For Stevenson, in a world that increasingly demanded recognition of a homogeneous modernity, these lessons would remain important. To see how this uneven development of modernity plays out against a world of global technology, we can move to Tahiti, and to the opening chapter of The Ebb-Tide (1894). Here we meet our three anti-heroes—Herrick the bankrupt businessman with a Cambridge education, Brown the disgraced American sea captain, and Huish the “vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk” (Stevenson, 2008, 127). Broke, sick and washed-up on the beach, they try to keep up their spirits by telling stories to each other. Herrick, more educated than the other two, invents an elaborate tale about meeting an old Arab seaman who owns a “Travelling Carpet.” In this exchange between Herrick and Captain Brown, Herrick recounts his proposal to the imaginary Arab that he use the carpet to return home to Britain: ‘You don’t mean to say this is the Travelling Carpet?’ I cried. ‘You bet I do,’ said he. ‘You’ve been to America since last I read the Arabian Nights,’ said I, a little suspicious. ‘I should think so,’ said he. ‘Been everywhere. A man with a carpet like this isn’t going to moulder in a semi-detached villa.’ Well, that struck me as reasonable. ‘All right,’ I said; ‘and do you mean to tell me I can get on that carpet and go straight to London, England?’ I said, ‘London, England,’ captain, because he seemed to have been so long in your part of the world. ‘In the crack of a whip,’ said he. I figured up the time. What is the difference between Papeete and London, captain?’ ‘Taking Greenwich and Point Venus, nine hours, odd minutes and seconds,’ replied the mariner. (130) As in the passage from The Wrecker with which I started, there is considerable geographic complexity in this story. There seem at first to be two forms of comparison here. On the one hand there are Pape‘ete, the capital of Tahiti, and London—both empirical, lived locations for Herrick and his friends. On the other, these places are also Greenwich and Point Venus, locations that stand for their mathematical significance, and seemingly abstract positions that can be “figured” on a globe rendered impersonal by the homogenised time that had established the Prime Meridian as running through London. And these comparisons are enabled by the transportation technology of the “magic carpet” (whose owner seems to Herrick to be suspiciously modern and American). Herrick is immediately able to synchronise global times: “Calling this three in the morning, I made out I would drop into London about noon” (Stevenson, 2008, 151). These places are not equal and opposite, nor are they simply abstract positions for calculating time. If “Greenwich” stands for the centre of Western time, then “Point Venus” stands for its outreach in colonised areas of the world in

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order to establish standardised measurements for time and space. Point Venus was named for the 1767 James Cook expedition to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun.6 Tahiti was chosen by Cook in part because it was already on the map as a point for measuring time and space. Even before the award of the Longitude prize to John Harrison in 1773, the coordinates of Tahiti had already been established as accurately as possible. The significance of the name “Point Venus” would have been reinforced to Stevenson by the more recent 1874 expedition to Hawai‘i to record from Honolulu the Transit of Venus.7 The purpose of this expedition, the most important of several in 1874, was to establish more accurately the solar parallax, that is, the angle between the earth and the sun, and a great detail of time was spent on efforts to perfect the latitude and longitude of the viewing position. The most recent Transit, in 1882, had been the occasion of multiple expeditions by European nations and the United States. The various Transit of Venus projects represent the Western occupation of indigenous spaces to impose an imperial claim to measure universal distance. A Blackwood’s Magazine article of 1901, reviewing the recent Transit expeditions, imagines them as a moment of world-wide simultaneity in which global position and epistemological interest are aligned: “Over half the world people had themselves watched through smoked glasses the planet Venus pass, across the shining surface of the sun; and they were curious to know what advantage the astronomers had gained in going so far afield.”8 The writer assumes a single unitary space in which planetary motions constitute universal time, and that time can be uniformly observed. But we also learn that it can only be observed by people whose vision is mediated with the western technology of “smoked glasses,” and the point of view of these people is that the astronomers have had to travel “far afield” from the assumed centre of scientific knowledge. In the very act of asserting universal time-space, the writer acknowledges that not all spaces and not all viewing positions are equal. 6 We are now only beginning to understand the full extent to which the South Pacific islands were re-invented as a canvas for European science and social science. We should remember that the rudimentary observatory constructed by Cook, was “defended” with mounted guns transferred from Cook’s ship the Endeavour. See Neil Rennie’s study of the “scene” enacted both in Tahiti and Britain with its sexual as well as colonial implications. Neil Rennie, FarFetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas, 1998, 83–108. 7 A myth circulates that the lighthouse at Point Venus was designed by Thomas Stevenson, Louis’s father, when it was in fact a French design, completely unlike any of the Stevensons’. See http://www.tahitiheritage.pf/phare-de-la-pointe-venus-teara-o-tahiti/. A plaque currently on the lighthouse claims to quote Louis’s experience of seeing the lighthouse with his mother in 1888, but this cannot be authenticated and is almost certainly an invention. 8 “Measuring Space,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 169 (May 1901): 629.

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Stevenson denies a universal viewing position that could transcend local difference. There is another answer to the question: “What is the difference between London and Papeete?” The magic carpet ride takes Herrick to London, where his attempts to narrate his visit are overtaken by his companions embellishing the story with visits to pubs and restaurants, and the purchase of various Western consumer goods (these include champagne—the very commodity that will undermine their attempt to steal the cargo of the schooner Farallone when it turns out to be an insurance fraud and the supposed champagne is largely water). The assumed western imperial centre has become orientalised into a fantasy of pleasure with which Tahiti had been associated.9 Now the “difference” between Pape‘ete and London is even harder to assess. The rapidity of communication, troped in the magic carpet ride, has introduced modernity in unexpected ways. The novel questions which is more real—the imperial “home” of London, or its supposed global peripheries, the site of myths and exoticism. Herrick and his companions are representatives of imperial temporality (America, where the Prime Meridian was decided, and London, where it was fixed), who find themselves alienated and confused. The novel disrupts what Adam Barrows, picking up on a term used at the Washington Conference, has called “cosmopolitan time”—the aspiration for a transnational universal time that imagined a humanist uniformity, and a temporality that could be promoted as a humanist ideal.10 Instead, The Ebb-Tide shows a world that has disrupted local systems without achieving the ideal, uniform global integration. The magic carpet ride parodies the immediacy of a world connected by telegraph and by global trade, rendering fantastical the simultaneity afforded by the cable. The characters’ world is one of global capital that should thrive under the rapid connectivity of economic systems. Part of Herrick’s fantasy is the understanding that his arrival in London will be facilitated by the immediacy of currency exchange, so the first thing he does in the London tale is to obtain British money to pay for his consumer pleasures. Yet this fantasy has no purchase on the actual economic fortunes of the trio who remain throughout in their desperate condition.

9 10

For the history of the European exoticisation of Tahiti, see Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti, 2009. Barrows’s meticulous analysis of the archive of the Washington Conference shows that the temporal ideal of cosmopolitanism was demoted in favour of the spatial regulation of longitude, but that the aspiration for universal time persisted in popular and literary culture. The Cosmic Time of Empire, 2011, 31–52.

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The three antiheroes of The Ebb-Tide are absurdly out of place. The cultural violence of empire has resulted in people and objects adrift, and the claim of cosmopolitan time, extending evenly across the globe and transcending political and local difference, has failed along with it. If we look more closely at the telegraph network, its configuration of space is not a universal one. One important aspect of the spread of telegraphy is that its development was uneven—the Atlantic cable, for example, was connected long before the Pacific one. Information technology can have the effect of shrinking the temporality of some distances and increasing those of others even when they are in the same place. Any claim about global distance very much depends on the perspective of those who are able to understand or use the means by which it is computed. As Jeremy Stein points out, only a very few members of the global population during the spread of global communications were in a position to experience it. They are, in Stein’s term, the “privileged social observers” for whom the rapidity of change is apparent (Stein, 2001, 107). Had the Transit of Venus expeditions succeeded in their goal of mapping the size of the universe, it is not as if the local populations of Tahiti or Hawai‘i would have wanted, or needed, to create fractional units of measurement from these dimensions. The Ebb-Tide takes a dark and cynical look at claims for the comprehension of global time. But Stevenson himself was not immune from the assumptions of empire. To locate him in this unequal geography, we can turn to another poem he wrote from the Gilbert Islands. “To S.C.” was written for his friend and literary associate Sidney Colvin and enclosed in a letter to him. The poem will take us back to the pair of Child’s Garden verses with which I began, and will show how Stevenson’s interior centring of spatial experience is cut into by his awareness of the external politics of global geography. The phenomenological consciousness of “Where Go the Boats?”, and the geographical awareness of “The Sun’s Travels,” meet in this poem, and both are subject to Stevenson’s equivocal understanding of his own position as a colonising agent. At the start of “To S.C.,” we find Stevenson walking alone on a stormy night on a beach in the Gilbert Islands: I heard the pulse of the besieging sea Throb far away all night. I heard the wind Fly crying and convulse tumultuous palms. I rose and strolled. The isle was all bright sand, And flailing fans and shadows of the palm; The heaven all moon and wind and the blind vault; The keenest planet slain, for Venus slept. (ll. 1–7)

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The scene seems immediate and entirely natural, conjuring up the sounds of the wind and sea. But already the colonial associations of The Ebb-Tide,with its exoticisation of the Pacific, creep into this apparently spontaneous moment. The invisible planet Venus turns out, in the next line, to hint at a sexual metaphor: “The king, my neighbour, with his host of wives,/Slept” (ll.8–9). The idea of sleep then takes Stevenson’s mind to London and to the house of Colvin, who, since 1883, had been Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum: To London first, and chiefly to your house, The many-pillared and the well-beloved. There yearning fancy lighted; there again In the upper room I lay, and heard far off The unsleeping city murmur like a shell; The muffled tramp of the Museum guard Once more went by me[.] (ll. 14–20) (Stevenson, 1950, 271-72) Stevenson remembers being in Colvin’s house at night and hearing the city “murmur like a shell.” This is a multiple-layered image that draws together the phenomenological and the technical worlds. In one sense, it layers memory through time and space in a way that looks forward to Gaston Bachelard’s spatial poetics. Bachelard records a similar experience: as he falls asleep in Paris, he naturalises the sound of the city into an “ocean roar” that calls up a line from the French poet Yvonne Caroutch: “the murmur of an empty sea shell” (1994, 29). Bachelard’s shell image evokes a complex field that explores the ways in which subjects situate themselves imaginatively in the world. The shell is at once a familiar home and a position of isolation, a dwelling in which inhabitant and frame are both fused and separate. An empty shell, Bachelard writes, “invites day-dreams of refuge” (107)—a good description also of the way Stevenson’s image works in the poem. On the Pacific sea-shore, he hears echoes of the country he left—a home that is at once familiar and distant. Here, location is a state of mind, a feeling of bifurcation between places that Stevenson also noted in the Preface to The Master of Ballantrae as he describes returning to a familiar city: “Elsewhere he is delighted with the presence of what is new; there tormented by the absence of what is old. Elsewhere he is content to be his present self; there he is smitten with an equal regret for what he once was and for what he once hoped to be” (1996, 5). The shell images the immediacy of communication in a sensory, almost tactile way that Stevenson uses elsewhere. For example, in The

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Wrecker telegraphic communication seems to take on a life and feeling of its own: “Night and day, too, the telegraph clicked with disastrous news and anxious inquiry” and telegraphy becomes a metaphor for bodily experience: “his hand shook like a telegraph operator’s” (Stevenson, 1892, 340; 145). If the shell is a structure of consciousness, it also calls up technological images. The shell in the poem is both material and metaphorical—Stevenson is on the beach with shells, and he imagines the sounds of London to be like a shell. They come together in the telephonic picture of holding a shell to one’s ear to hear the sea remotely. The sound of the sea acts as a kind of mnemonic telephone that connects the Pacific beach, where he is physically, with his memories of Colvin’s house in London. Shells and telephones allow us to hear what is not physically present, and Stevenson’s telephonic imagination allows him to be in two places at the same time. Technology becomes a way of comprehending space and time in the individual consciousness and here the past is rewritten by the present to understand how connections can be made in global space. Having set up this structure of interchanges, the poem makes another move that steers into political questions as Stevenson imagines the British Museum, where Colvin lived in a keeper’s house:11 Lo, now, when to your task in the great house At morning through the portico you pass, One moment glance, where by the pillared wall Far-voyaging island gods, begrimed with smoke, Sit now unworshipped, the rude monument Of faiths forgot and races undivined: Sit now disconsolate, remembering well The priest, the victim, and the songful crowd, The blaze of the blue noon, and that huge voice, Incessant, of the breakers on the shore. (ll. 29–39) The “island gods” to whom Stevenson is referring are the statues, or moai, Hoa Hakananai‘a and Moai Hava that were brought from Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in 1869 and were exhibited at the entrance to the British Museum (the “pillared

11

Colvin, who always tended towards the literal, observed that Stevenson has conflated his house with the British Museum itself, “as though the keepers’ houses stood within the great front colonnade.” E.V. Lucas, The Colvins and their Friends, 1929, 219.

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wall” of the poem) until the Second World War.12 The poem seeks to draw parallels between the voyaging gods and the displaced coloniser, but these are not symmetrical. Stevenson makes it difficult to distinguish between his own memories of London, and the statues’ memories of their island. The statues in London remember the islands, and Stevenson, in the islands, remembers the statues remembering the islands. The act of imaginative memory becomes a global communication network, but not one in which each party can communicate equally. The sounds of the “breakers on the shore” with which the poem opened become more vivid in the statues’ memory than in Stevenson’s direct experience. But at the same time, removed from their Pacific context, the statues are monuments to “faiths forgot and races undivined,” bearing witness to the colonising society’s inability to accept that colonised peoples have independent histories that may not be fully understood elsewhere, not least the fact that Stevenson does not appear to know much about the statues themselves. The telephonic shell that connects Stevenson with the moai is not an instantaneous contact that abolishes the distance between them. The difference between the two points makes Stevenson, to use Jeremy Stein’s phrase, a privileged social observer who sets the terms for the management of space, and the act of imaginative sympathy with the homeless “island gods” only entrenches that privilege. In a geographic context made to fit the correspondences of the poem, Stevenson conflates Easter Island with the Gilbert Islands, approximately 9,000 kilometres distant from each other, to impose his global parallelism. The abolition of physical space that the cable network makes possible does not remove those spaces, nor the specific differences between localities. Stevenson finds himself between two locations that demonstrate both the reach of global technologies and the places and things that are the remainders in these calculations. Beneath the polish of Stevenson’s style, is an uneasiness about temporal synchronicities, and one that reveals more general questions about literary space in the late nineteenth century. Stevenson’s travels are multi-national, but they are also mediated by contrasting epistemological modes. Through him, we can see literary and epistemological reactions to a world that was becoming 12

For the history of the British Museum moai, see Jo Ann van Tilburg, Remote Possibilities: Hoa Hakananai‘a and HMS Topaze on Rapa Nui, 2006. Although Stevenson is unlikely to have known this, the name Hoa Hakananai‘a, communicated when the statue was removed, probably means “lost or stolen friend,” underscoring its displacement. In 2018 the Rapa Nui people petitioned the British Museum for the return of Hoa Hakananai‘a and Moai Hava. http://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum -story/contested-objects-collection/moai.

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joined up and fragmented as if at the same time. Stevenson records his travels empirically, ever attentive to the way his consciousness must continually recalibrate itself to its own location, but that very sense of locatedness is continually invaded by a world of given measurements that render time and space universal. In one way, advances in technology—the telegraph and the telephone—interact with Stevenson’s spatial imagination, acting as metaphorical structures or homologies by means of which he can locate himself. The interior, vitalist flow of Bergsonian time and the public precision of a world mapped by meridians meet and merge in his writing, while, at the same time, the world created by these technological possibilities de-centres him and exposes discontinuities. The imaginative reach of the child of “Where Go the Boats?” can never be fully troped in the technologies of time and space that Stevenson saw as characterising his age. But neither can the geographical certainties of “The Sun’s Travels” remain a standard for a world whose claim to that knowledge was distributed unequally. The question posed by the child on the riverbank cannot easily be answered: where, if anywhere, will all come home? References Ariel, Avraham, and Nora Ariel Berger. 2006. Plotting the Globe: Stories of Meridians, Parallels, and the International Date Line. Westport CT: Praeger. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Ballantyne, R. M. 1883. The Battery and the Boiler: or Adventures in the Laying of Submarine Cable. London: James Nisbett. Barrows, Adam. 2011. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cookson, Gillian, and Colin Hempstead. 2000. A Victorian Scientist and Engineer: Fleeming Jenkin and the Birth of Electrical Engineering. London: Routledge. Fielding, Penny and Andrew Taylor, eds. 2019. Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1880s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kern, Stephen. 2003. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1919. 1983: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lucas, E.V. 1929. The Colvins and their Friends. London: Methuen. Pettitt, Clare. 2019. “Mermaids amongst the Cables: The Abstracted Body and the Telegraphic Touch in the Nineteenth Century.” Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: the 1880s. Edited by Penny Fielding and Andrew Taylor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Rennie, Neil. 1998. Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salmond, Anne. 2009. Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Steer, Philip. 2015. “Romances of Uneven Development: Spatiality, Trade and Form in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Novels.” Victorian Literature and Culture 43: 343–56. Stein, Jeremy. 2001. “Reflections on Time, Time-Space, Compression and Technology in the Nineteenth Century.” TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality. Edited by Jon May and Nigel Thrift. London: Routledge, 2001. pp. 106–19. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1887. “A Humble Remonstrance.” Memories and Portraits. London: Chatto and Windus. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1950. Collected Poems. Edited by Janet Adam Smith. London: Rupert Hart-Davis. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1996. The Master of Ballantrae. Edited by Adrian Poole. London: Penguin. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1924. Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin and Records of a Family of Engineers, Tusitala Edition. London: Heinemann. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2008. South Sea Tales. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1995. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Bradford A Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1883. The Silverado Squatters. London: Chatto and Windus. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1892. The Wrecker. London: Cassell. Tilburg, Jo Ann van. 2006. Remote Possibilities: Hoa Hakananai‘a and HMS Topaze on Rapa Nui. London: British Museum. Wenzlhuemer, Roland. 2012. Connecting the Nineteenth-Century World: The Telegraph and Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Rosalind. 2013. The Triumph of Human Empire: Verne, Morris, and Stevenson at the End of the World. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Withers, W. J. 2017. Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 6

Empire on a Small Scale: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Footnote as a Sāmoan Microhistory Lucio De Capitani Since the late 1990s, in the wake of the rise in critical attention for the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish writer has often been cast as a precursor of seminal literary movements, intellectual shifts and critical currents, including modernism (Sandison, 1996)⁠, cultural relativism (Reid, 2006)⁠, and postcolonialism (Dryden, 2011; Largeaud-Ortéga, 2013). Stevenson’s interest in historiography and historical modes of narration has also been well established in recent scholarship, with A Footnote to History (1892), his account of the Sāmoan Civil War, receiving increased critical attention. Building on recent studies on this pamphlet, this chapter argues that the Footnote can be confronted with strategies and questions that Italian microhistorians like Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi employed or addressed. I focus on two features of Italian microhistory: the adoption of a micro-scale of analysis, normally conjoined with an interest for a-typical, exceptional individuals and events, which test, complicate or question historical meta-narratives; and the practice of explicitly telling – or rather, narrating – the steps, procedures and obstacles of historical research, as a way to navigate between positivist orthodoxy and epistemological scepticism. I argue that both aspects are present in Stevenson’s Footnote. On the one hand, the scale of historical narration, and the “outlandish subject” that Stevenson chooses, both function to question and estrange the mainstream narratives of imperial history. On the other, Stevenson’s narrative history also is stylistically defined by incorporating the obstacles to reach historical truth. This allows Stevenson to explicitly remind his reader of the tentative and artificial aspects of his historical recreation, while also not giving up on the task of the historian to reach a form of truth, however imperfect. By focusing on these theoretical, stylistic, epistemological convergences, I frame the Footnote as a microhistorical experiment ante litteram. Started in 1899 and finished in 1892, A Footnote to History is an account of political and military strife in Sāmoa between 1882 and 1892. The country, nominally independent but largely ruled by westerners, was the site of a

© Lucio De Capitani, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_008

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struggle between colonial powers and various native factions for the control of the territory, its resources and of its traditional political system. In particular, the Footnote focuses on the conflict between Germany – the main military and commercial contender, supporter of the “puppet-king” Tamasese – and Mataafa – the insurgent chief opposing German rule, supported by Britain and the United States. The pamphlet is one of Stevenson’s most prominent engagements with Pacific politics, and, harshly critical of German administration and fundamentally favourable to Mataafa’s cause, is a strong attack against the failings of corrupt, incompetent, colonial governance. As such, the Footnote has prominently featured in critical analyses of Stevenson’s Pacific writings, as a source of insight on Stevenson’s political imagination⁠ (see Colley, 2004; Buckton, 2007). The first systematic discussion of the Footnote as historiography – exploring which epistemological problems he had to face while writing this history, and which methodology he employed – was Roslyn Jolly’s Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific (2009). Elaborating on Stevenson’s general interest for historiography⁠ (Menikoff, 2005),1 Jolly locates Stevenson’s Footnote between two rival modes of 19th century historiographical practice: the more traditional “romantic” mode, and the more modern “scientific” mode, arguing that it takes elements from both schools. For Jolly, the Footnote is intended as an accurate reconstruction of recent Sāmoan history, in line with the ambition of scientific historiography, and consistently it uses some of its techniques, like the cross-checking of sources and the use of indirect evidence. At the same time, it highlights the difficulty of reaching a definite truth about the past, echoing the epistemological scepticism of the romantic school, and it calls attention to the gaps in its narrative and on the impossibility of choosing between contrasting accounts. Jolly’s analysis of the Footnote has opened the way for new interpretations of this unique piece of Stevenson’s production, as more recent scholarship demonstrates⁠ (Gorak, 2015; Tulloch, 2017). Building on these interventions, I offer a reading of the Footnote that highlights how the scale of historical narration and the “outlandish subject”⁠ (Stevenson, 1895, v) that Stevenson chooses to discuss, function to enable an alternative narrative of imperial history, which is revealed as an account of greed and folly and not simply as a study of impersonal forces and matters of state. This dynamic, as well as the peculiar approach to historical truth in this text, and the way it is resolved through 1 Menikoff’s work is a necessary premise for Jolly’s analysis, as he is the first scholar that systematically explored Stevenson’s desire to work as a historian and to write history.

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specific narrative choices, resonates with Italian microhistory, to which I first turn before addressing the Footnote in detail. 1 Microhistory It is often argued that “microhistory never was one thing, never a codified procedure that one could embrace or reject” (Walton et al., 2008, 12)⁠. This is especially accurate for the contemporary panorama, which has seen a multiplication of “microhistorical” approaches, to the point that conflicting versions of microhistory exist (Vito, 2019, 351)⁠. But it is true even if we consider the original versions of microhistory that emerged in the 1970s, among a group of Italian historians working around the journal Quaderni Storici: even according to its own members, this group never amounted to a “school” (Ginzburg, 1993, 34; Grendi, 1994, 540)⁠. This was a result of the experimental character of microhistory, which rejected all forms of methodological orthodoxy (Levi, 2001, 97) ⁠. Nevertheless, by looking at Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms⁠ (1980), and Giovanni Levi’s Inheriting Power⁠ (1988), the two canonical texts of Italian microhistory, various shared features clearly emerge. The Cheese and the Worms is entirely focused on a single figure: Domenico Scandella, known as Menocchio, a 16th-century miller from Friuli, in north-eastern Italy, burnt at the stake as a heretic by the Inquisition. Ginzburg’s work is based on the transcripts of the Inquisition trial, which represent an exceptional point of access to a subaltern voice: Menocchio is an incredibly articulate figure, and, in spite of the incredible danger he finds himself in, is willing to engage the inquisitors in theological debates on the details of his complex and bizarre religious beliefs. Ginzburg uses Menocchio to prove that high and popular culture actually intersected and influenced each other in the 16th century—as Menocchio’s religious beliefs, which Ginzburg connects to a bewildering variety of sources and readings, ultimately show. Levi’s Inheriting Power similarly starts from an Inquisition trial, that of an unauthorized exorcist, Giovan Battista Chiesa, who was illegally operating in a small area of Piedmont, in north-western Italy, in the 17th century. Levi uses this point of departure to reconstruct the power relations, strategies of survival and internal struggles of Chiesa’s hometown and main area of activity—the town of Santena. He too employs a local history to complicate the historical narrative of how the absolute state and the “free market” had been imposed onto a passive, immobile Italian countryside in the early modern period. Levi stresses how the local networks of power, of relationships and beliefs not only resisted this process, but also managed to inform and influence its course. In

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doing so, he reveals the peasant world to be an active participant in the shaping of modern social structures. In terms of shared features, both texts employ a reduction of the scale of historical research—the most intuitive meaning of microhistory. They deal with a story that, at first sight, seems extremely localized and hence only locally relevant. This reduction of scale, however, is not employed exclusively to narrate a “silenced” history that is ignored by the grand narratives, or by the official record. Instead, the micro-scale is functional to test a hypothesis that originates within macro-historical grand narratives. Ginzburg interrogates the traditional understanding of the relationship between popular and high culture, believed to be rigidly separate. Levi questions the received relationship between rural world and absolute state, restoring the agency of the former. Both of them, in Francesca Trivellato’s words, strive “less to recover the everyday life of ordinary people than to employ the micro-scale of analysis in order to test the validity of macro-scale explanatory paradigms” (2011)⁠. Through what Levi calls a “deep observation focused on one point”⁠ (2012, 112), they aim to tell a story that has larger implications, revealing features and factors of general relevance that a macro-scale would fail to notice. Crucially, this implies working between the micro- and macro-scale. This operation is carried out by deliberately choosing extra-ordinary case studies. In both The Cheese and the Worms and Inheriting Power, the micro-scale does not lead to “the pursuit of the typical, emblematic case”⁠ (Levi, 2012, 128). Edoardo Grendi, another major Italian microhistorian, argues that “the exceptional document can turn out to be exceptionally ‘normal’, precisely because it is relevant” (Grendi, 1977, 512)⁠.2 In line with this approach, both Ginzburg and Levi choose a-typical documents, individuals, or situations to complicate, or increase the variables of analysis, of simplistic historical explanations or meta-narratives. As Ginzburg puts it, “any document, even the most anomalous, can be inserted into a series. In addition, it can, if properly analysed, shed light on still-broader documentary series” (Ginzburg, 1993, 21). Moreover, both The Cheese and the Worms and Inheriting Power mix analysis and narration. Microhistory, in Ginzburg’s and Levi’s view, is a form of narrative that explicitly foregrounds the obstacles historians face in their attempt to reconstruct the past. If one of the characteristics of microhistory is that it is experimental, it is equally important to make sure that the procedures under which the “experiment” is conducted are explicit (Allegra, 2011, 59)⁠. In Levi’s words, microhistorical texts are “an attempt to narrate without concealing the 2 My translation from Edoardo Grendi: “Il documento eccezionale può risultare eccezionalmente ‘normale,’ appunto perché rilevante.”

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rules of the game that the historian is following,” as the process through which history is reconstructed is declared, including “fruitful paths and dead-ends” (2012, 125). The reader is asked to survey the documents alongside the historian, to participate in their guesses. About The Cheese and the Worms, Ginzburg states that it “does not restrict itself to the re-construction of an individual event; it narrates it”; but that it does so by incorporating “the obstacles interfering with the research,” instead of producing “an account that filled the gaps in the documentation to form a polished surface”⁠ (1993, 23). This form of narrative history, however, never descends into scepticism, into the idea that history is ultimately fiction, or into a rhetorical exercise: their approach to history assumes that documents do lead to an objective reality that the historian can go back to, however imperfectly. Both Ginzburg and Levi have been vocal in their rejection of “relativist positions […] that reduce historiography to a textual dimension, depriving it of any cognitive value” (32; see also Levi, 1985). My argument is that the characteristics of Ginzburg’s and Levi’s formulations of microhistory that I have highlighted so far – a focus on small scale and the “exceptionally normal” in order to critically revisit macro-historical narratives, and a commitment towards narrating the process and the obstacles of historical research – resonate with Stevenson’s Footnote. Reading this text through the lenses of microhistory highlights both the vision of imperial history presented in the pamphlet, and its epistemological concerns about historical truth, addressed through specific stylistic choices. 2

Rethinking Imperial History

Stevenson’s preface to A Footnote to History is a good place to start. Here is how Stevenson introduces his historiographical undertaking: An affair which might be deemed worthy of a note of a few lines in any general history has been here expanded to the size of a volume or large pamphlet. The smallness of the scale, and the singularity of the manners and events and many of the characters, considered, it is hoped that, in spite of its outlandish subject, the sketch may find readers.⁠ (Stevenson, 1895, v) The preface is apologetic, feeling the need to justify the unusual characteristics of the Footnote. In doing so, however, Stevenson highlights a number of points of great theoretical interest. Specifically, the points that I discussed regarding

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Italian microhistory find an echo precisely in these lines.3 Stevenson stresses that the scale and the singularity of the events result in the narration of an “outlandish subject,” which might be deemed more suitable as a footnote to “general” history – that is, macro-history. And yet he hopes that these facts will be interesting – that is, relevant – in spite, or perhaps, because of their small scale and singularity. All of this begs for a genuine theoretical question – the same that could be asked about the stories of Menocchio and Giovan Battista Chiesa: why is that the case? The Footnote, throughout its narrative, implicitly answers this question, and, while doing so, shows that the scale and the extraordinariness of its subject can actually be assets for the production of historical knowledge. The problem of scale is actually introduced before the preface – in the very title. Graham Tulloch makes an interesting comment about its significance: What does it mean to say that the “Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa” of Stevenson’s subtitle are “A Footnote to History”? One answer is that they do not belong to the mainstream of history but are nevertheless in some way attached to it. The mainstream of history in Stevenson’s time, the Age of the Empire, was imperial history, in this case the history of imperial Britain and Germany and of the rise of the American empire. Events in Samoa cannot be central to that history but they are intimately connected with it. The nature of a footnote is to be both part and not part of a book – it is not part of the main narrative but it is attached to it and part of the totality of the book […]. (Tulloch, 2017, 151) ⁠Tulloch rightfully points out that the metaphor of the footnote introduces the problem of the relationship between a local history and “mainstream” (imperial) history. But how exactly is “local” history connected to imperial history? And, is it really the case that Sāmoan history “cannot be central to imperial history”? Stevenson seems actually to challenge this statement, trying to answer the question that would eventually occupy Ginzburg and Levi: can a single case, intensely studied, be theoretically relevant? And what is the nature of its relevance? Stevenson’s answer is similar to that of the two microhistorians: the small scale of a local history, if meticulously observed, can reveal something about a larger pattern, as it allows to get a different understanding of a larger 3 These first lines are remarkably similar to one of Ginzburg’s summaries of The Cheese and the Worms: “In reducing the scale of observation, that which for another scholar could have been a simple footnote in a hypothetical monograph on the Protestant Reformation in Friuli was transformed into a book” (Ginzburg, 1976, 22).

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history. It is, therefore, inherently relevant, but, crucially, it is also a way to complicate and question this larger history, not just to replicate it on a small scale. In fact, Stevenson suggests several times that adopting a small scale can be a source of insight. In a letter to Henry James, referring to the events in Sāmoa, he claims that “you don’t know what news is, nor what politics, nor what the life of man, till you see it on so small scale and with your liberty on the board for stake” (Stevenson, 1995, 499, emphasis mine). The “small scale” reveals, allowing us to grasp relationships and power struggles that, on a macro-scale, would remain abstract, and therefore cannot be described. In another letter to E. L. Burlingame, Stevenson claims that “here is for the first time since the Greeks […] the history of a handful of men, where all know each other in the eyes and live close in a few acres, narrated at length and with the seriousness of history” (196). The result of this intense study of a small group of political actors living in such proximity, however, is to shed new light on commercial and political relationships in the Pacific: as he points in his introduction to Apia, “the seat of the political sickness of Samoa” (Stevenson, 1895, 20), “commerce, like politics, is here narrowed to a focus, shows its ugly side, and becomes as personal as fisticuffs”⁠ (27). In other words: the small scale of politics and commerce in Apia allows a new, far from flattering side of colonial enterprise to emerge, which would be simply invisible if politics and commerce were not “narrowed to a focus.” History is therefore circumscribed to a narrow space, whose web of political and personal relations can be mapped comprehensively. This space can be easily traversed and observed in the course of a single stroll – as Stevenson metaphorically does alongside the reader in one of the opening chapters. In this way, Apia becomes the ideal point of departure for a new description of colonial power: Here, then, is a singular state of affairs: all the money, luxury, and business of the kingdom centred in one place that place excepted from the native government and administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it not in common but in hostile camps, so that it lies between them like a bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end. (Stevenson, 1895, 25) The “state of affairs” – depredation of native resources; uneven power relations that favour the colonial elite; and infighting between the colonists themselves – is described as “singular,” an expression that echoes the “the singularity of the manners and events and many of the characters” of the preface. Yet this state of affairs is unquestionably part of imperial history – indeed, the situation

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that Stevenson describes is colonialism, stripped down to its hegemonic drives and its predatory ambitions. In this context, “singular” could be interpreted as exceptional, and hence irrelevant on a macro-scale; but, I would argue, it is best read as the “exceptional normality” of imperial expansion. As such, it is not to be discarded as inconsequential, but, instead, it is to be studied to reveal new facets of imperial history as a whole. Indeed, the situation of Sāmoan politics appears singular, exceptional or outlandish only if imperialism is perceived as a civilising and modernising mission – a perspective Stevenson shares to an extent. This is most noticeable in his description of the short-lived rule of Captain Brandeis, one of the few administrators that Stevenson genuinely admires: he praises his attempts at development and modernisation, stating that they were, admittedly, “alien’s work” (Stevenson, 1895, 97), but highly necessary for the improvement of the country; and that, sadly, they were unappreciated by the Sāmoans and sabotaged by the other whites. This shows that Stevenson, at least at first, “did subscribe to the principle that if a non-western colony were to succeed, it required a strong and informed foreign leadership” (Colley, 2004, 137)⁠. However, the other examples of white leadership provided throughout the Footnote are rarely strong or informed. The Great Powers are described as “the three ruffians of the elder playwrights” (Stevenson, 1895, 37)⁠; the whites are “known to be prolific of […] overbearing men and inconsistent orders” (153); and the work of their leaders can hardly be described as successfully carrying out the white man’s burden: in a passage describing the aftermath of consul Becker’s machinations in 1888, Stevenson notes how Apia “had fallen back in civilisation about a thousand years” (158), due to Becker’s intrigues. Assessing the state of European rule towards the end of his narrative, Stevenson talks of European leaders that have left “a picture of themselves, as bearded like the pard, full of strange oaths, and gesticulating like semaphores” (290). Even if this description of colonial governance does not emerge from a systemic criticism of imperialism, Stevenson’s fixation on its seemingly most “outlandish” representatives does lead him to a revision of imperialism itself. For this revision to happen, Stevenson must see this cast of political actors located at the periphery of the Empire as able to set in motion events with world-historical importance. Two passages explicitly establish these connections between micro- and macro-history. The first passage details events in the aftermath of the battle of Fangalii, in which Mataafa’s forces managed to defeat the Germans. As the situation between all parties involved becomes much more tense, and the relationship between the colonial powers deteriorates, the German consul Knappe orders the shelling of a village in retaliation. The village has been emptied and “not a soul [is] injured” (Stevenson

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1895, 226). However, an American flag is damaged in the process, an event that Stevenson characterizes as both “an incident too small to be chronicled,” and “of historic interest and import”; in fact, “these rags of tattered bunting occasioned the display of a new sentiment in the United States; and the republic of the West, hitherto so apathetic and unwieldy, but already stung by German nonchalance, leaped to its feet for the first time at the news of this fresh insult” (226–27). In the midst of the squabbling among the colonialists, the “mutilation” of a flag intimates at the rise of American imperialism – certainly a significant historical development. But what is the result of connecting this broader trend with a reaction of wounded pride, as well as to a more general context of incompetence and infighting? The point is not that that the microscale provides the historian with an inherently privileged path to understand imperial history; but that understanding it through this point of observation highlights the role played by petty sentiments and motivations in what imperial historiography would understand in terms of impersonal historical processes. This move anticipates the passage in which Stevenson explicitly advances the idea that his pamphlet is, perhaps, not a footnote at all, but a genuine, significant part of a larger history: the narration of the hurricane that devastates Apia Bay in March 1889. Since the colonial powers are living in an atmosphere of deep mistrust, they have amassed a great number of ships in the bay; and because no one is willing to abandon their position, the ships, clustered into a small and dangerous space, are decimated by a violent storm. The event, for Stevenson, has genuine global repercussions: Thus, in what seemed the very article of war, and within the duration of a single day, the sword-arm of each of the two angry Powers was broken […]. Both paused aghast; both had time to recognise that not the whole Samoan Archipelago was worth the loss in men and costly ships already suffered. The so-called hurricane of March 16th made thus a marking epoch in world-history; directly, and at once, it brought about the congress and treaty of Berlin; indirectly, and by a process still continuing, it founded the modern navy of the States. Coming years and other historians will declare the influence of that. (Stevenson, 1895, 267) Once again, the events playing out in Sāmoa can be connected – this time much more assuredly – to a great trend of imperial history. It may be tempting to say that Stevenson’s response to whether a single case, intensely studied, can be theoretically relevant is, simply: yes, if it intersects, or directly causes a major event in what is officially recognized as general history.

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Stevenson, however, does not simply show that the Sāmoan Civil War played an important part within a larger narrative; he is showing that observing that narrative from the reduced scale of the Sāmoan Civil War brings other variables to the table that imperial historiography would not normally care about. As Roslyn Jolly comments, the hurricane chapter “reads as a parable of the folly of imperial ambition” (2009, 94). But, if the consequences of the hurricane must be recognized as world-historical, the same should be said about the folly of the Great Powers, whose actions in Sāmoa inform a general understanding of imperial history. Stevenson is interrogating the very meaning of imperial history, anticipating the work of postcolonial studies by questioning the assumptions of a field that, for almost another century, would remain “the most hidebound in its insistence on an austere empiricism that stressed the official archive and the political, military and economic concerns of the state” (Kennedy, 2013, 467)⁠. Telling imperial history from the micro-perspective allows Stevenson to see it, instead, as a story “of rapacity, intrigue, and the triumphs of temper” (1895, 172) – a far cry from the dignified focus on impersonal forces, on the raison d’État, at work within imperial macro-historical narratives. Moreover, this allows Stevenson to subvert the hierarchies between of the imperial centre and periphery. As Jan Gorak comments, “it is not Samoa that is the backwater, but Europe, since it is in places like Samoa that a new vision of European power actualises” (2015, 37)⁠. To borrow an expression from Jean and John Comaroff, Stevenson in the Footnote is doing “theory from the South,” namely showing that “it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” (2012, 1) ⁠. But Stevenson seems to be arguing that, to reveal “the workings of the world,” the global south has to be observed at a manageable scale, and through “exceptionally normal” characters and events: it has to be described within a microhistorical experiment, which yields, as a result, imperial history as a history of exploitation, revenge, greed and unchecked emotions. 3

Narrating History

The other area in which Stevenson is comparable with microhistory is his concern about the narrative form of the historical text. I am referring to the second half of Stevenson’s preface: It has been a task of difficulty. … Truth, in the midst of conflicting rumours and in the dearth of printed material, was often hard to ascertain, and since most of those engaged were of my personal acquaintance,

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it was often more than delicate to express. I must certainly have erred often and much; it is not for want of trouble taken nor of an’ impartial temper. (Stevenson, 1895, v–vi) Stevenson highlights the challenges connected to discovering and expressing – that is, writing – historical truth, stressing the epistemological and formal difficulties of writing this particular history. I would argue that the way Stevenson handles these difficulties in the text, as well as the epistemological preoccupation behind his stylistic choices, predict microhistory once more, specifically its style of narrative history. In this respect, there seems to be, at first, a significant gulf between Stevenson and the microhistorians. As mentioned, microhistory, as conceived by Ginzburg and Levi, is meant to be transparent about its process of experimentation, acknowledging the various faux pas of the historian, as “the search for truth [becomes] part of the exposition of the (necessarily incomplete) truth attained” (Ginzburg, 1993, 24)⁠. Stevenson, on the other hand, makes abundant use of his literary imagination to create engaging dialogues between the various “characters” of his history (Jolly, 2009, 80)⁠. This might give the impression that the Footnote is an “account that [fills] the gaps in the documentation to form a polished surface” (Ginzburg, 1993, 23) of the kind that Ginzburg refuses, and does not seem to echo the microhistorical ambition for a narrative that, ideally, conceals nothing of the process. Stevenson, however, willingly breaks the illusion of the “polished surface” of his historical narrative by reminding his reader of the artificiality of his recreation. As he tells in an early part of the book: “this history is much from the outside; it is the digested report of eye-witnesses; it can be rarely corrected from state papers; and […] I must still be silent or proceed by guess” (Stevenson, 1895, 49). This statement is consistent with a narrative that is punctuated by expressions of tentativeness, by the awareness that, as much as it relies on logic, plausibility and also imagination to fill the gaps in the historical record, he must have “erred often and much.” Stevenson rhetorically keeps the narrative together, but, crucially, the reader is warned of the rhetorical trick. Moreover, especially when he talks about the Sāmoan side of the historical narrative, for which he often cannot provide an account, Stevenson explicitly opts to stay silent. For instance, when he needs to narrate the way in which Mataafa prepares his insurrection, he says that “the history of the month of August [of 1888] is unknown to whites; it passed altogether in the covert of the woods or in the stealthy councils of Samoans” (112). When, later in the narrative, Stevenson is at loss to explain the deteriorating relationship between the remaining Sāmoan leaders, he admits that “foreigners in these islands know

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little of the course of native intrigue. Partly the Samoans cannot explain, partly they will not tell” (274). It is useful, at this point, to go back to Jolly’s assessment of the Footnote as an encounter between a “romantic” historiography (that is, epistemologically sceptical historiography, conceiving history as art, fiction or narrative), and scientific historiography (that is, positivist, critical historiography, convinced that the truth can be found though a rigorous method). In other words, the Footnote walks the line between two seemingly irreconcilable epistemological positions. As Jolly sums it up, it is caught between the attempt to discover the truth, and the discovery of “how elusive the truth can be” (2009, 71)⁠. It is, ultimately, narrative history with a scientific ambition, or, alternatively, positivist historiography haunted by the spectre of scepticism. I would argue that Stevenson tries to find a narrative solution to this epistemological struggle between desire for truth and its elusiveness (and the scepticism that might derive from that position). The tentativeness that is interspersed in Stevenson’s narrative is then meant to correct, but not to undermine, a critical approach to historiography, deliberately leaving unresolved the tension between epistemological uncertainness and the search for historical truth. In doing so, his solution is remarkably similar to that embraced by Ginzburg and Levi, similarly caught between a rejection of scepticism and the impossibility of a complete, total, representation of historical truth. Like the microhistorians, Stevenson’s acknowledgement of the partial nature of his narrative warns against the illusion of a narrative whose surface is alluringly “polished,” while also not giving up on the task of the historian to reach a form of truth, however imperfect. 4 Conclusion In lieu of a conclusion, I suggest two possible encounters between Stevenson and Ginzburg, which may shed a final light on Stevenson’s intimations of microhistory. The first encounter is literary. One of the central influences that Ginzburg acknowledges, in fact, is Tolstoy: he points out that he was profoundly influenced by Tolstoy’s idea that “a historical phenomenon can become comprehensible only by reconstructing the activities of all the persons who participated in it” (Ginzburg, 1993, 24), which would inform his conception of The Cheese and the Worms: The story of a miller whose death is decreed from afar, by a man (a pope) who one minute earlier had never heard his name, can be considered a

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small, distorted product of Tolstoy’s grand and intrinsically unrealizable project: the reconstruction of the numerous relationships that linked Napoleon’s head cold before the battle of Borodino, the disposition of the troops, and the lives of all the participants in the battle, including the most humble soldier. (24) Stevenson’s Footnote follows a similar pattern: intensely focused on the small town of Apia, its tight-knit cast of characters and their personal relationships, but reaching towards the seats of European power and the machinations of far more prominent political actors, while simultaneously re-contextualizing their meanings through its local perspective, it may be seen as yet another attempt to enact Tolstoy’s impossible project. The second comparison involves, instead, anthropology. While Ginzburg has not, to my knowledge, ever commented on the Footnote, he engaged with Stevenson’s work in one significant occasion. In a fascinating (albeit highly speculative) essay named “Tusitala and his Polish reader,” he suggests that Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the founding figures of anthropology, was able to identify the system of exchanges called Kula – the social feature he studied during his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands – only after reading Stevenson’s short story The Bottle Imp. Since Stevenson’s tale describes the exchange of a certain good – a magic bottle – that can only occur under specific circumstances – not unlike the ceremonial exchanges that form the Kula – Ginzburg speculates that “Stevenson’s short story would have given Malinowski not the actual content of his discovery, of course, but the ability to see it, through a leap of imagination, as a whole, as a Gestalt”⁠ (2000, 85)⁠. Reading Stevenson’s Footnote in the mirror of microhistory means undertaking a similar process: it provides little insight on the content of Stevenson’s historical narrative; but it gives the ability to see Stevenson’s text, as a whole, through new eyes. References Allegra, Luciano. 2011. “Ancora a proposito di micro-macro.” In Microstoria: A venticinque anni da L’eredità Immateriale. Edited by Paola Lanaro, 59–68. Milano: Franco Angeli. Buckton, Olivier S. 2007. Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. Colley, Ann C. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers. Dryden, Linda. 2011. “Literary Affinities and the Postcolonial in Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.” In Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives. Edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald, and Niall O’Gallagher, 86–97. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1976. Il formaggio e i vermi. Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ’500. Torino: Einaudi. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1993. “Microhistory : Two or Three Things That I Know about It.” Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi. Critical Inquiry, 20 no. 1: 10–35. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 2000. “Tusitala and his Polish Reader.” In No Island Is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective, 69–88. New York and Cichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Gorak, Jan. 2015. “Stevenson’s Samoa and the Metamorphoses of Power.” Journal of Stevenson Studies 12: 33–52. Grendi, Edoardo. 1977. “Micro-analisi e storia sociale.” Quaderni Storici, 12 no. 35: 506–20. Grendi, Edoardo. 1994. “Ripensare la microstoria?” Quaderni Storici, 29 no. 86 (2): 539–49. Jolly, Roslyn. 2009. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire, and the Author’s Profession. Farnham: Ashgate. Kennedy, Dane. 2013. “Postcolonialism and History.” In The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Edited by Graham Huggan, 467–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Largeaud-Ortéga, Sylvie. 2013. “A Scotsman’s Pacific: Shifting Identities in R. L. Stevenson’s Postcolonial Fiction.” International Journal of Scottish Literature, no. 9: 85–98. Levi, Giovanni. 1985. “I pericoli del geertzismo.” Quaderni Storici, 20 no. 58 (1): 269–77. Levi, Giovanni. 1988. Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist. Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levi, Giovanni. 1985. L’eredità immateriale. Carriera di un esorcista nel Piemonte del Seicento. Torino: Einaudi. Levi, Giovanni. 2012. “Microhistory and the Recovery of Complexity.” In Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence. Edited by Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen, 121–32. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Levi, Giovanni. 2001. “On Microhistory.” In New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Edited by Peter Burke. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Menikoff, Barry. 2005. Narrating Scotland: The Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Reid, Julia. 2006. Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin-de-Siècle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sandison, Alan. 1996. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism. London: Macmillan. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1895. A Footnote to History. Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1995. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 7, September 1890– December 1892. Edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. New Haven: Yale University Press. Trivellato, Francesca. 2011. “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies 26, 2: 217–20. https://doi.org/10.5811 /westjem.2011.5.6700. Tulloch, Graham. 2017. “A Footnote to History: Stevenson, the Past and the Samoan Present.” In Robert Louis Stevenson and the Great Affair: Movement, Memory and Modernity. Edited by Richard J. Hill, 148–61. London and Basingstoke: Routledge. Vito, Christian G. De. 2019. “History without a Scale: The Micro-Spatial Perspective.” Past and Present, 242 no. 14: 348–72. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj /gtz048. Walton, John, James F Brooks, and Christopher R N DeCorse. 2008. “Introduction.” In Small Worlds: Method, Meaning and Narrative in Microhistory. Edited by James F Brooks, Christopher R N DeCorse, and John Walton, 3–12. Santa Fe, N.M: School for Advanced Research Press.

Chapter 7

Turning The Ebb-Tide: Ghosts in the Machine Roslyn Jolly The Ebb-Tide (1894), Stevenson’s last completed work of fiction, is also his most experimental, and in that sense, his most modern. Stylistically, it is unlike any other of his other Pacific works: there is the romance of “The Isle of Voices,” the realism of “The Beach of Falesá,” and the “queer realism” of “The Bottle Imp”; then there is The Ebb-Tide, which combines the qualities of all three with something quite different besides.1 My aim in this chapter is to identify some of the formal elements that work together to create the strange magic of Stevenson’s aesthetic achievement in this fictional narrative, whereby extreme, physical immediacy is suffused with a dreamlike ideality. These identifications will enhance our understanding of the novella’s particular and pioneering contribution to the emergence of British literary modernism. The composition history of The Ebb-Tide is complex. The work began as a collaborative enterprise between the author and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Originally titled The Pearl-Fisher, this novel was intended, like The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and another Stevenson-Osbourne collaboration, The Wrecker (1892), as “a tale of many lands” (Stevenson, 1917, 143), with sizeable sections to be set in Europe as well as the Pacific. However, after several interruptions to the writing, Osbourne drifted away from the project, and Stevenson took it in hand alone, rewriting much of the narrative, reshaping the plot and, importantly, choosing to end the story before the projected return of some of the characters to England (Swearingen, 1980, 183–7). The resulting narrative roams widely across, but does not leave, the Pacific Ocean, and seems to possess some of the fluid, fragmented qualities of the region of ocean and islands it inhabits. It is also a work in which the stylistic features of symbolism and self-reflexive artifice become ever more dominant, the further the story progresses from its realistically depicted opening scenes in Pape‘ete, Tahiti. The exact nature 1 On the realism of “The Beach of Falesá” and the “queer realism” of “The Bottle Imp,” see Jolly, 1999 and 2013. The phrase “queer realism” is from Stevenson’s letter to Sidney Colvin, dated 1 December 1892 (Stevenson,1994–95, 7: 436).

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and extent of Osbourne’s contributions to the final text are unknowable. It is possible that he may have composed the novella’s extraordinary first sentence, a masterstroke of deadpan naturalistic narration: “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” (Stevenson, 1996, 123). But it is certain that the symbolist turn The Ebb-Tide takes, particularly in its second half, was the inspiration of Stevenson alone, and it is responsible for the novella’s peculiarly experimental and avant-garde qualities. 1

An Experiment in Silence

The nature of Stevenson’s experimentation in The Ebb-Tide may be illuminated by considering another experiment, one conducted within the story-world. (Such self-reflexivity is characteristic of the work, as we shall see.) Stevenson’s experiments are with language, but in the ninth of the novella’s twelve chapters, Attwater, by ringing a silver bell, performs an “experiment […] in silence”: The note rose clear and strong; it rang out clear and far into the night and over the deserted island; it died into the distance until there only lingered in the porches of the ear a vibration that was sound no longer. ‘Empty houses, empty sea, solitary beaches!’ said Attwater. ‘And yet God hears the bell! And yet we sit in this veranda on a lighted stage with all heaven for spectators!’ (Stevenson, 1996, 214) The chapter is titled “The Dinner Party,” and its setting, on a “deserted island,” is an example of the technique of dissonant juxtaposition, which Stevenson uses liberally throughout the novella. This writerly technique reflects his observation, while travelling, that “the Pacific is a strange place, the nineteenth century only exists there in spots; all round, it is a no man’s land of the ages, a stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilisations, virtues and crimes” (Stevenson, 1994–95, 6: 312). It also supplies a tool for crafting an avant-garde aesthetic, in which incoherent connections, disjunctions and category mistakes create an ambience at once absurd, menacing and surreal. Attwater’s “experiment in silence” proves to him, if not to his guests, that the veranda on which their dinner party takes place is “a lighted stage with all heaven for spectators” (Stevenson, 1996, 214). Because he is a religious maniac who believes he has a divinely appointed right to enslave the (now mostly dead) inhabitants of “his” island, Attwater’s claim that “God hears the bell!” may not strike many readers as a compelling demonstration of the existence

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of a divine being; on the contrary, his “experiment in silence” may have the opposite effect, suggesting how utterly alone the island’s few residents are in a vast, empty universe that is indifferent to their plight. Nevertheless, Attwater’s image of the “lighted stage” indicates something essential about the kind of experimental writing in which Stevenson is engaged: its theatricality. Theatrical language pervades The Ebb-Tide. When Davis, Herrick and Huish arrive at New Island and enter the lagoon, the land seems uninhabited. Then “suddenly the curtain was raised” and they “beheld, with an astonishment beyond words, the roofs of men” (Stevenson, 1996, 189). The metaphor of the raised curtain is strange here, because the spatial dynamics of the scene are horizontal rather than vertical – the settlement is “revealed” by the schooner rounding a section of shoreline and so getting beyond a “tall grove of trees” that had previously “denied further view” (189). Such movement does not naturally suggest the sight of a curtain being raised, so the image evokes the mental state of the men rather than describes physical phenomena within their field of vision. Or perhaps the metaphor of the raised curtain is not focalized through the characters at all, but is part of an overall image-scheme employed by the author to organize his fiction. Chapter 12 suggests just this, measuring the temporal span of the story as “a month since the curtain rose upon this episode” (250), as if The Ebb-Tide were a play rather than a novel. Such comments from the narrator suggest that, in addition to Attwater’s veranda being a “lighted stage,” the whole island may be a space for dramatic performance. In fact, at the beginning of Chapter 10 the narrator explicitly invites such thinking, saying “[t]he isle, at this hour […] wore an air of unreality like a deserted theatre” (220). Recounting the dinner party, the narrator’s statement “[t]here followed a bar of silence” (214) also suggests performance of a musical score. What kind of play is it that the characters enact? Herrick calls the unfolding action a “barbarous tragedy” (Stevenson, 1996, 212), but we may see in it something more modern. Alan Sandison has observed: “The scene around the table […] becomes a very modern sort of theatre where disjunction, incongruity and a pervading sense of incoherence dominate the action” (Sandison, 1996, 357). Some of the dialogue is positively Pinteresque, as in this exchange between Attwater and Davis: ‘I was about to say that I have still eight dozen,’ he added, fixing the captain with his eye. ‘Eight dozen what?’ said Davis. ‘Sherry,’ was the reply. Eight dozen excellent sherry. Why, it seems almost worth it in itself; to a man fond of wine.’

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The ambiguous words struck home to guilty consciences, and Huish and the captain sat up in their places and regarded him with a scare. ‘Worth what?’ said Davis. ‘A hundred and twelve shillings,’ replied Attwater. The captain breathed hard for a moment. He reached out far and wide to find any coherency in these remarks; then, with a great effort, changed the subject. (Stevenson, 1996, 213) On their “lighted stage”, the three interlopers find themselves locked into an absurdist drama scripted and directed by a fourth character, whose religious beliefs predicate a supernal realm, viewed from which the experience they take for reality appears as merely a piece of theatre. Reinforcing this, the account of Attwater’s “experiment in silence” contains an allusion to perhaps the most famous play in English literature. The phrase “porches of the ear” quotes Hamlet, when the ghost of Hamlet’s father explains the manner of his death: “Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, / With juice of cursèd hebenon in a vial. / And in the porches of mine ears did pour / The leperous distilment” (Shakespeare, 2007, 1939). An allusion to Hamlet at this point in The Ebb-Tide is thematically apt: the plot to kill a king and steal his kingdom, which is the backstory to Shakespeare’s play, is the archetype of the scheme meditated by Davis and Huish – to murder Attwater so they can usurp his private realm of power and wealth. Whether they will carry it out depends on choices made by Herrick, an indecisive, Hamlet-like figure who is caught between two rival father figures. But the allusion has a further resonance, for “porch” is another word for “veranda” (OED), and a veranda is the location of the dinner party. As the four characters sit on a veranda or porch, the sound of Attwater’s bell rings in the “porches” of their ears while (according to Attwater), the sound of the bell, along with all their speech, also vibrates in God’s ear. The suggested parallel between the architecture of an ear and the architecture of a house creates a mise-en-abyme effect. The human ear, the veranda, and God’s ear are a series of vessels in which sound vibrates; these vessels being equivalent in form, but progressive in scale and enclosed one inside another, like a set of Russian dolls. Mise-en-abyme dizzies the mind with its potential for endless replication and displacement, which undermines the idea of a stable centre, or point of origin. This affects the results of Attwater’s “experiment in silence,” both for the other characters and for the reader. Within the story-world, Davis and Huish had hoped that the dinner party would mark the culmination of their journey, offering a way out of their predicament and an opportunity to take control of their destinies. Instead, Attwater’s mind-games show them to be caught in

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a web of limitless extent, within which their puny schemes are meaningless. Meanwhile, the reader of The Ebb-Tide sees that the story’s grounding in “the real” is far less secure than it may have appeared, as every material object or action represented in the narrative has a double existence as theatrical performance, metaphysical expression, or both. The machine of realism that appears to be driving the story forward is inhabited by very powerful anti-realist ghosts, two of which, I shall argue, had haunted Stevenson from his youth. Their names are Skelt and Quarles. 2 Skelt The imaginative connection between The Ebb-Tide and the beloved toy theatre of Stevenson’s childhood, Skelt’s Juvenile Drama, is suggested by one of the novella’s many intertextual references. In Chapter 1, while improvising a story to entertain the influenza-stricken Huish, Herrick mentions the opera Der Freischütz and the famous performance in it by German bass Karl Johann Formes. As he tries to remember how to “raise Beelzebub” Herrick says, “I knew you made a ring of skulls, for I had seen that in the Freischütz”; “I had seen Formes do that when he was playing Kaspar” (Stevenson, 1996, 129), the hunter who sells his soul to a devil in return for magic bullets that always hit their mark. Der Freischütz (The Free-Shooter), composed by Carl Maria von Weber, is widely regarded as the quintessential German Romantic opera. It premiered in Berlin in 1821, followed by London in 1824, and became a standard item in the nineteenth-century operatic repertoire. But whereas Herrick says he has experienced the opera first-hand, in his 1884 essay “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured,” Stevenson identified Skelt’s Juvenile Theatre as the source from which he “got the romance of Der Freischütz long ere I was to hear of Weber or the mighty Formes” (Stevenson, 1925, 138). It was the toy theatre, not the opera, that originally acquainted Stevenson with the German folktale, searing such details as the dark forest and the ring of skulls into his mind. The thematic significance of the allusion to Der Freischutz is obvious. Attwater is linked to Kaspar when he tells Herrick that he is “what you would call a fine shot” (Stevenson, 1996, 209), never missing his target; this is part of the aura of invincibility by which, as much as by force, he wields complete power over the island. The claim also intensifies Herrick’s and the reader’s suspicion that Attwater is somehow inhuman, or superhuman. The allusion has a further contextual significance, as it recalls a display of shooting skill Stevenson had witnessed during his Pacific travels. “There was an old king one knew in the western islands,” says Attwater, “who used to empty a Winchester all round

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a man, and stir his hair or nick a rag out of his clothes with every ball except the last; and that went plump between the eyes” (209). This was the tyrant Tembinok’, ruler of Apemama in the Gilbert Islands, who hosted the Stevenson party for about six weeks in 1889 during the cruise of the Equator, and of whom Stevenson reported: “I am told the king is a crack shot; that when he aims to kill, the grave may be got ready; and when he aims to miss, misses by so near a margin that the culprit tastes six times the bitterness of death” (230). The technique used by Tembinok’ for terrifying his victims into submission is mirrored in Attwater’s treatment of Davis at the end of the novella’s penultimate chapter (248), which also illustrates Attwater’s similarity to Kaspar from Der Freischutz. It may be that the accounts he heard in 1889 of Tembinok’s prowess with a rifle reminded Stevenson of Der Freischutz, not only supplying an intertextual reference for the narrative of The Ebb-Tide, but also prompting further memories of the medium by which he first came to know the Freischutz story – the toy theatre. The way this chain of memories connects Stevenson’s recent Pacific travels and his Edinburgh childhood yields an important insight into the creative process through which the strange aesthetic of The Ebb-Tide was formed. In destabilizing what might be called “consensus reality” (Ermath, 1998), the dissonant juxtapositions of the partly-modern, partly-primitive Pacific islands found their counterparts in, and unlocked the power of, non-realist narrative forms from Stevenson’s past. One was the high-cultural genre of Romantic opera. The other, and I suggest far more important, was the primal imaginative influence of the toy theatre. Stevenson’s essay on the toy theatre makes clear that the influence of Skelt was foundational to his development as a creator of imaginative fiction.2 Although Stevenson writes in the essay as if Skelt were an individual, the name “Skelt” designates a brand of consumer items rather than a single maker, for several members of the Skelt family of stationers were involved in the production of the toy theatres in the mid-nineteenth century. Skelt products were an important artistic influence on Stevenson, who claimed that “out of this cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem to have learned the very spirit of my life’s enjoyment” and “acquired a gallery of scenes and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I might enact all novels and romances” (Stevenson, 1925, 138). In “the silent theatre of [Stevenson’s] brain,” memories of Skelt nourished the environment of self-reflexive theatricality within which The Ebb-Tide unfolds. “[Y]ou seem to me to be a very twopenny pirate!” Attwater says to Davis after easily uncovering the scheme to 2 For an insightful discussion of Skelt’s influence on Stevenson’s writing generally, see G. K. Chesterton, Robert Louis Stevenson (1927), especially Chapter 2, “In the Country of Skelt.”

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murder and rob him (Stevenson, 1996, 224). From character to character, it’s an expression of contempt; but the wording echoes the title of the essay in which Stevenson celebrated his lifelong fascination with the play-world of Skelt’s. A “twopenny pirate” treads a toy stage, manipulated by the hands of a godlike playmaker. In “A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured,” Stevenson coined the term “Skeltery” to evoke a particular quality of staginess (Stevenson, 1925, 136). A strong vein of “Skeltery” runs through The Ebb-Tide, contributing to the text’s romantic irony: the island is “like a deserted theatre,” the veranda is “a lighted stage,” “the curtain [is] raised” on the scene of Attwater’s settlement. And, although Part II is particularly emphatic in its staginess, Skeltery is also present in Part I. Think how the squall that almost capsized the schooner blew by, “sudden as a trick-change upon the stage” (Stevenson, 1996, 173). Or, consider this sentence describing nightfall in Pape‘ete town: “Long ago the band had broken up and marched musically home, a motley troop of men and women, merchant clerks and navy officers, dancing in its wake, arms about waist and crowned with garlands” (123). “[T]roop” is one name for “a company of performers” (OED), while “motley” may designate “[t]he particoloured costume of a jester, harlequin etc.” So, Stevenson begins the story by inviting us to view the “merchant clerks and navy officers” of the Tahitian colonial establishment as harlequin-like figures, participants in some sort of improvised street theatre, like the commedia dell’arte. This briefly glimpsed, almost phantasmagorical scene strikes an early note of theatricality, which is also present more realistically in the first paragraph, with its mention of European men in the Pacific who “sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with memoirs of the music-hall” (123). The idea of entertaining an island audience recurs in Chapter 2 with Davis’s “performance” – whistling and dancing for an “audience” (135) of Pacific-island sailors in return for breakfast. Later, on the stolen ship, Herrick feels almost as if he and his partners are following a script laid down by the previous crew and is horrified by “the scene in which himself was acting” (170). A great part of Skeltery’s appeal, Stevenson wrote, was its “footlight glamour” (Stevenson, 1925, 136). The Ebb-Tide places great emphasis on artificial lighting, especially lamplight. It is “the prevalent illumination of the lamps,” as well as the “smooth floor of sand” and “pillared roof overhead” (an impression created by the neatly spaced palm trees) that makes Attwater’s island resemble a “deserted theatre” (Stevenson, 1996, 220). “All round in the verandahs lamps were lighted” (209) and “under the light of the hanging lamps, the table shone with napery and crystal” (211); this illumination making the dinner party seem like a performance on a “lighted stage” (214). Lamplight is also

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insistently present in Pape‘ete, “the embowered city studded with rare lamps” (127), where, after the “motley” revellers depart, “[o]nly the street lamps shone on, making a glow-worm halo in the umbrageous alleys or drawing a tremulous image on the waters of the port” (123–4). The four men sitting on the “lighted stage” of the veranda have, Attwater says, “all heaven for spectators” (Stevenson, 1996, 214). Spectators, whether heavenly or earthly, are an essential component of the Skeltery of The EbbTide. When Herrick attempts to commit suicide by drowning himself, he pictures “imaginary spectators” (228), watching him from the “very bright planet” whose reflection in the water provides a “line” for him to follow into the sea (227). His imagination transforms the bright planet into an aerial city, “along whose terraces there walked men and women of awful and benignant features, who viewed him with distant commiseration. These imaginary spectators consoled him; he told himself their talk, one to another; it was of himself and his sad destiny” (228). This brilliantly focalized paragraph displays Herrick’s self-pitying sentiment and tendency to self-dramatization. The spectators’ imagined commentary, which “was of himself and his sad destiny,” spurs on his performance – until the body’s will to survive punctures “the fairy tale of suicide” (229). The effect of the “bright planet” casting its light over New Island recalls an earlier instance of celestial illumination in Pape‘ete: The moon, racing through a world of flying clouds of every size and shape and density […] threw the marvel of her Southern brightness over the same lovely and detested scene. […] The moon shone too, with bull’s-eye sweeps, on his companions … ​(Stevenson, 1996, 127) This is another illuminated “scene,” in which Herrick, Davis and Huish are actors, playing their established parts as washed-up vagrants, unaware of the new roles they will soon be offered. The moon, personified as female, is not only the lighting source, but also a spectator, looking down on the three men. She picks them out of the darkness, “with bull’s-eye sweeps.” A “bull’s-eye,” in this context, is a type of lens. In the nineteenth century it was well-known that bull’s-eye lenses were used in police lanterns (OED), and this association compounds the moon’s illumination into surveillance, suggesting the apparatus of discipline and punishment that runs through The Ebb-Tide. But for Stevenson “bull’s-eye” lights had another meaning. In his 1887 essay “The Lantern-Bearers,” he describes how, for a young boy holidaying on the Scottish coast, “a tin bull’s-eye lantern” (Stevenson, 1998, 229) was the passport to a thrilling imaginary world of shared play and escape: “to know you had a bull’s-eye at

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your belt” was a reason “to exult and sing” (230). In the essay Stevenson connects this childish pleasure with the “poetic fire” that exists inside every human being, so that the humble bull’s-eye lantern become a sign for “the poet in the full tide of life” (231). Herrick, though, is a poet at The Ebb-Tide of life, so perhaps the “bull’s-eye” light of the moon is a reminder of his wasted poetic potential. Furthermore, the moon’s light is not stationary, but “sweeps” over the town, over the water. A very sophisticated type of bull’s-eye lens – at the opposite end of the spectrum of engineering skill from the tin lanterns of Stevenson’s boyhood – was Fresnel’s “annular lens,” adopted for lighthouse illumination by the Stevenson family of lighthouse engineers and discussed in admiring detail by Thomas Stevenson in his 1881 work Lighthouse Construction and Illumination (Bathurst, 1999, 157; T. Stevenson, 1881, 64–65). So, taking into account all the different connotations of the phrase “bull’s-eye sweeps” in Stevenson’s imagination, the moonlight may inspire and hearten, guide, expose, or apprehend the three men it illuminates. And by figuring the moon as a “bull’s-eye” light, Stevenson turns it from a natural light-source into another form of artificial illumination, as befits the theatrical world of The Ebb-Tide. As well as the use of stage metaphors and the presence of imagined spectators and artificial lighting, a further aspect of The Ebb-Tide that links it to the imaginative system Stevenson called “Skeltery” is its sudden shifts in scale. Effects of miniaturization and magnification occur frequently in The EbbTide (remember the ears and porches), reflecting the optics of a toy theatre, in which one is either a playmaker looking down on a miniature world, or a miniscule actor performing for the benefit of giant spectators. Pape‘ete is called a “tiny pagan city” (Stevenson, 1996, 123), its tininess contrasting with the immensity of the oft-invoked metropolis of London. In chapter 10, after leaving Attwater’s dinner, Davis and Herrick walk beside the lagoon, where a “miniature surf” produces a mere “rustle and tinkle” compared with “more distant and loud reverberations from the outer coast” (220). And, when Herrick tries to drown himself, the “radiant speck” of the “bright planet” (227) on which he fixes his gaze is “magnified” in his mind, so that it becomes a “City of Laputa” (228). To the distant viewers he imagines as his audience, he would be a tiny “speck” swimming through a “miniature surf” (220) – by magnifying them, he miniaturizes himself. The reference to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels evokes the imaginary lands of Lilliput and Brobdingnag with their unsettling changes of proportion and perspective. In The Ebb-Tide, suggestions that the action may be taking place within a miniature copy of a larger world elsewhere reinforce the overall sense of the text’s theatricality, fracturing the illusion of the story’s reality.

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The plays Stevenson mounted (or “assisted others in the illumination of”) using the materials of Skelt’s Juvenile Drama were works with “stirring names” such as The Battle of Waterloo, tales of runaways (Three-Fingered Jack, the Terror of Jamaica), pirates (The Red Rover) and dashing outlaws (Robin Hood and Jack Sheppard) (Stevenson, 1925, 131). If, stimulated by the novella’s many references to stages, artificial lighting and miniaturization, we think of Attwater’s island as a kind of toy theatre, we find that the dramas played out there are very different in kind from the staples of Skelt. They are absurd and fragmented, with the flavour not of old romance but of a deeply disenchanted modernity. Huish’s monologue as the boat carries Davis and him from the Farallone to the beach for one last throw of the adventurer’s dice, has something of both T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett in its disjointed bricolage. The monologue is an act of dramatic bravado, so clearly a piece of theatre that Stevenson intersperses the dialogue with stage directions: ‘Golly, but it’s ‘ot!’ said he. ‘Cruel ‘ot, I call it. Nice d’y to get your gruel in! I s’y, you know, it must feel awf’ly peculiar to get bowled over on a d’y like this it. I’d rather ’ave it on a cowld and frosty morning, wouldn’t you? (Singing) “ ’Ere we go round the mulberry bush on a cowld and frosty mornin”.’ (Spoken) Give you my word, I ’aven’t thought o’ that in ten year; used to sing it at a hinfant school in ’Ackney, ’Ackney Wick it was. (Singing) “This is the way the tyler does, the tyler does.” (Spoken) Bloomin’ ’umbug. (Stevenson, 1996, 242–43) Huish’s nursery rhymes and snatches of music-hall songs are a forlorn shoring of fragments against ruins. After the boat has landed, as Huish walks along the beach towards Attwater, it seems to the watching Davis that “[t]he surrounding glare threw out and exaggerated the man’s smallness; it seemed no less perilous an enterprise, this that he was gone upon, than for a whelp to besiege a citadel” (246). The harsh illumination of the scene – its “glare of scathing brightness” (242) – miniaturizes the tiny actor in Davis’s eyes, emphasizing Huish’s hopeless exposure to forces far greater than himself. The beach has become yet another “lighted stage” in “the silent theatre of [Stevenson’s] brain,” this one set for a drama of annihilation. 3 Quarles Skelt’s influence upon the development of Stevenson’s novelistic imagination was profound. But how exactly were plays performed as a child in a toy theatre

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and as an adult in “the silent theatre of the brain” to be transformed into prose fiction? Stevenson told Henry James in 1893 that he conceived of his characters dramatically: “I hear people talking, and I feel them acting, and that seems to me to be fiction” (Stevenson, 1994–5, 8: 193). Hence his preference for first-person narration – so long as he could hear the character telling the story, he had his narrative voice. With third-person narration, which he tended to avoid in longer fictions, it was not so straightforward. As he explained to Edmund Gosse, the difficulty of according the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in the third person) is extreme. That is one reason out of half a dozen why I so often prefer the first. It is much in my mind just now, because of my last work, just off the stocks three days ago; The Ebb-Tide: a dreadful, grimy business in the third person; where the strain between a vilely realistic dialogue and a narrative style pitched about (in Quarles’s phrase) ‘four notes higher’ than it should have been, has sown my head with grey hairs … ​(Stevenson, 1994–5, 8: 103) This letter usefully presents the compositional problem of The Ebb-Tide as one of co-ordinating mimesis (the characters’ speech) and diegesis (the narrator’s discourse). The tension between the two gives the novella its energy and edge. In the Introduction to South Sea Tales, I described it this way: “The Ebb-Tide shows how Stevenson preceded Conrad in working out a narrative mode that overlaid extreme realism with symbolism and a kind of dreamlike imagistic excess to explore the nightmare of imperialism” (Jolly, in Stevenson, 1996, xxxii–xxxiii). I would like now to analyze in more detail how this “overlaying” works. In his letters, Stevenson spoke constantly of the ugliness of The Ebb-Tide and its qualities of pollution, decay and infection. It was, he said, “about as grim a tale as was ever written, and as grimy, and as hateful” (Stevenson, 1994–5, 8: 91); “a rancid yarn” (8: 90); “a tale that will make you be ready to throw up; horror upon horror’s head accumulated: barratry, drunkenness, vitriol, are the three golden strands that hold it together; and out of the four characters, three are mere wolves and foxes” (8: 79). Yet parts of the narrative are extraordinarily beautiful. There’s the arrival at New Island, of course, when “Herrick thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate” (Stevenson, 1996, 187). There’s Herrick’s first view of the lagoon, in which a “drove of fishes, painted like the rainbow and billed like parrots […] glinted in the submarine sun,” prompting a lovely instance of synaesthesia: “They were beautiful, like birds, and their silent passage impressed him like a strain of song” (1996, 189). And there’s a moment, just after Herrick has fled Attwater’s

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dinner party and Davis has followed him, when “[t]he lagoon broke at their feet in petty wavelets, and with a sound as delicate as a whisper; stars of all degrees looked down on their own images in that vast mirror” (220). Earlier, over another lagoon, in Pape‘ete, the moon “threw the marvel of her Southern brightness” while “racing through a world of flying clouds of every size and shape and density, some black as inkstains, some delicate as lawn” (127). For a novel so “grimy” and “hateful,” there’s a great deal of beauty and delicacy, especially in the celestial and submarine spheres. One way to understand the co-presence of such starkly contrasting elements in The Ebb-Tide is as a dialectic between the two dominant literary modes of the 1890s – naturalism and symbolism.3 We’ve already seen how, in Chapter 11, the narrator all but removes himself from the scene of Huish’s naturalistic monologue, where after the initial “he said,” diegesis is reduced to the merest of performance directions – “Singing” and “Spoken” (Stevenson, 1996, 242–3). Yet just a few paragraphs earlier, the narrator provides a diegetic passage of remarkable subjective intensity, which is vital to establishing the mood of the same episode: The isle shook before them like a place incandescent; on the face of the lagoon blinding copper suns, no bigger than sixpences, danced and stabbed them in the eyeballs; there went up from sand and sea, and even from the boat, a glare of scathing brightness; and as they could only peer abroad from between closed lashes, the excess of light seemed to be changed into a sinister darkness, comparable to that of a thundercloud before it bursts. (242) This long sentence conveys the characters’ perceptions in the voice of the narrator, which is “pitched,” as Stevenson said to Gosse, about “four notes higher” than the voices of their dialogue. The shaking island and the multiplication of miniaturized suns are phenomenological effects that arise from the “excess of light” in the scene, but they also suggest psychological and physical distress within the viewers. Pictorially, the narrator’s description of the island-scape resembles Impressionist painting techniques, in which extreme luminosity can 3 Writing on “The Modernist Novel” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (Levenson, 1999), David Trotter notes the importance of “nineteenth-century debates about Naturalism and Symbolism” (74) for the development of a modernist literary aesthetic. He claims that “[t]he dialectic between Naturalism and Symbolism is nowhere more apparent than in [James Joyce’s] Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)” (75), but I argue that the Stevenson anticipated Joyce by twenty-two years in making this dialectic central to the emergent modernism of The Ebb-Tide.

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break down the surface of physical objects, dissolving naturalistic representation into more ideal or abstract forms. The description also projects emotions onto the landscape in the manner of Expressionist art. As a painter of landscapes this narrator is part-Monet, part-Munch. He envisions an aggressively dynamic environment in which the characters are under attack from eerily multiplied, miniature suns “stabb[ing] them in the eyeballs.” This landscape, where “scathing brightness” collapses into “sinister darkness,” is as much symbolic as physical, suggesting both the moral exposure of the characters and their blindness to their fates. In his letter to Gosse, Stevenson identified the source of the phrase “four notes higher,” which he used to describe the elevated “pitch” of the narrative voice in The Ebb-Tide, as “Quarles.” Francis Quarles (1592–1644) was the author of an “extremely successful and popular” book titled Emblems: Divine and Moral, first published in 1635 (Birch, 2009, 818). An emblem book, according to the OED, is “a book containing drawings with accompanying interpretations of their allegorical significance.” Stevenson engaged with this tradition when he produced his Moral Emblems for Lloyd Osbourne’s toy printing press in 1882. In Quarles’s book, each emblem consists of three parts: a verse from the Bible; an engraved image (based on pictures in earlier Jesuit emblem books); and an original poem interpreting the picture in relation to the scriptural text. References in Stevenson’s letters show that he assumed his correspondents shared his familiarity with this work. Presenting some of his woodcuts to W. E. Henley in 1882, he jokingly compared himself to Quarles (Stevenson, 1994–95, 3: 300), and way back in 1874, critiquing a piece of fiction by his cousin Katharine de Mattos, Stevenson praised one of her similes as “very grim and good; like a sort of Quarles emblem” (2: 62). Stevenson’s quotation of the phrase “four notes higher” comes from the “Invocation” at the beginning of Quarles’s Emblems: Rouse thee, my soul; and drain thee from the dregs Of vulgar thoughts; screw up the heighten’d pegs Of thy sublime Theorbo four notes high’r, And high’r yet, that so the shrill-mouth’d quire Of swift-wing’d seraphims may come and join, And make the concert more than half divine. (1812, 13–14) A “theorbo” is a stringed musical instrument similar to a lute, which is tuned by turning pegs that tighten or loosen the strings, and Quarles uses the metaphor of tuning such an instrument to convey his sense of needing to achieve a higher pitch of poetic utterance to make his verses worthy of their spiritual

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meanings. In his letter to Gosse, Stevenson quoted this phrase from Quarles to convey his sense of the disparity between The Ebb-Tide’s heightened “narrative style,” and “vilely realistic” subject matter. But whereas Quarles sought to leave “the dregs / Of vulgar thoughts” behind in order to perform a “concert more than half divine,” Stevenson faced the technical challenge of keeping the vulgar and the transcendent simultaneously in play, making the discord between his dialogue and his narrative the basis for a new kind of contrapuntal music. I’d like to consider the ways in which The Ebb-Tide may be indebted stylistically to Quarles in particular, and to emblem literature in general. In literary history, Quarles belongs to the outskirts of the metaphysical tradition in seventeenth-century English poetry, using discordant imagery and strained analogies.4 His poems find symbols of the spiritual life in all manner of disparate images – telescopes, labyrinths, tennis games, dice tables, maps, cages, grindstones. Typical of his method is a poem beginning “The world’s a sea; my flesh a ship,” which proceeds to anatomize the ship, finding a spiritual equivalent for every component of its fabric – topsail, cable, anchor, keel, compass, plummet – and bringing the ship’s captain, crew, passengers and freight, along with the external environment of sea, wind and sand, into an exhaustive catalogue of correspondences (Quarles, 1812, 131). To get the full “metaphysical” flavour of Quarles’s Emblems we must look to the engraved pictures as well as the poems that respond to them. The image that accompanies Emblem 8 in Book 5, shocking in its condensed disparity, shows a child trapped inside an adult skeleton (Figure 7.1); it brings to mind John Manning’s observation that in medieval and early modern emblematic culture “[n]o opportunity was lost to surprise the eye and the mind into moral reflection” (2002, 26). The same could be said of metaphysical poetry, although the reflections it prompted were not always moral. When struggling with the composition of the novella, Stevenson wrote to Colvin of the difficulty he experienced in maintaining the “forced, violent, alembicated” style of the narration (Stevenson, 1994–5, 8: 70) “Alembicated” is an alchemical term meaning “over-refined, excessively subtle” (OED). Alchemists sought to distil spiritual essences from base matter, which was also, in a different way, the concern of emblem-writers. Alchemical imagery was much used by the greatest of the English metaphysical poets, John Donne. Stevenson’s characterization of his narrative style in The Ebb-Tide as “forced” and “violent” also recalls Dr Johnson’s famous statement that in metaphysical

4 On the metaphysical qualities of Quarles’s verse, see Eleanor James, 1943.

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Figure 7.1  from Quarles’s Emblems (1812), Book 5, “Emblem  8,” p. 289.

poetry “[t]he most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.”5 The metaphysical poets, like the emblem-writers, looked everywhere for analogies, no matter how far-fetched, and forced them together in often startling combinations. This is how Herrick behaves when he first sees New Island. “He tortured himself to find analogies. The isle was like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood; so slender it seemed amidst the outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty …” (Stevenson, 1996, 188). This “combination of dissimilar images” (Abrams and Harpham, 2012, 59) has often puzzled readers: why compare something as “frail and pretty” as the atoll to something as harsh and industrial as “an annular railway”? The “discovery of occult resemblances in things 5 Samuel Johnson, “Life of Cowley” in Lives of the English Poets (1781), qtd Abrams & Harpham, 2012, 59.

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apparently unlike” (Abrams and Harpham, 2012, 59), which Johnson regarded as an identifying mark of the metaphysical method, also characterizes a later comparison of the island to a public garden at midnight. A man looked about him for the statues and tables. Not the least air of wind was stirring among the palms, and the silence was emphasized by the continuous clamour of the surf from the sea-shore, as it might be of traffic in the next street. (Stevenson, 1996, 220) The comparisons are surprising; the resemblances “occult.” Who would think to compare a wild tropical island with “a public garden at midnight”? A metaphysical poet would, and it’s worth remembering that this passage, like the earlier sentence I quoted, is focalized through the mind of Robert Herrick, who shares his name with another poet on the edge of the metaphysical tradition. Robert Herrick, the seventeenth-century poet, was born just one year earlier than Francis Quarles, moved in some of the same social and professional circles (Höltgen, 1965), and immediately precedes Quarles in the canonical historical survey of English poetry first published in 1900, The Oxford Book of English Verse. The knowledge that Stevenson was thinking of Quarles as he composed The Ebb-Tide alerts us to the qualities his narrative shares with the style of metaphysical poetry. Another specific aspect of the text illuminated by the connection with Quarles is its interest in parables. Quarles introduced his Emblems by saying “[a]n Emblem is but a silent parable” (Quarles, 1812, 10). Parables are explicitly mentioned twice in quick succession in The Ebb-Tide, both times by Attwater: “And does Mr Hay find a parable?” he asks Herrick when he finds him staring entranced at the contents of a store-house, which “seized on the mind of Herrick with its multiplicity and disorder of romantic things.” Herrick disclaims such a process of organized interpretation, saying merely “I find at least a strong impression” (Stevenson, 1996, 201). Had Quarles been there, he would no doubt have turned the long list of abandoned tools of maritime enterprise into a parable about the vanity of human aspiration. On the next page, Attwater tries again to engage Herrick in the exercise of parabolic thought, and this time he succeeds, although not with the result he intended: “Fond of parables?” he asks, to which Herrick replies “O yes!” Referring to the diving outfits used by his pearl-fishers, which keep them “dry as toast” although submerged in water, Attwater invites Herrick to attribute an emblematic meaning to them, as “a dress to go down into the world in, and come up scatheless.” Herrick suggests the diving outfits might represent “[s]elf-conceit” or “self-respect” (202), but Attwater rejects this interpretation, preferring to see in the diving dress

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a parable of the protective force of “God’s Grace” (203). Towards the end of the same chapter (Chapter 8), Attwater indirectly suggests a parabolic reading of his own treasured pearls as mere “[g]ewgaws” symbolizing the brevity of life, the transience of material things and the folly of storing up treasure on earth rather than in heaven (210).6 And finally, during the dinner party scene in Chapter 9, he tells what might be called a parable of earthly desert—the story of his ill-fated servants, “Obsequiousness” and “Sullens,” who carry the names of abstract qualities, like characters in that exemplar of parabolic literature, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Parabolic thought is not peculiar to the ultra-religious Attwater, but pervades the narrative within which that character exists. The story of Wiseman and Wishart is a parable of the emptiness of materialistic life, of pride coming before a fall, the cost of ignorance and the wages of sin. The Bunyanesque names of the Farallone’s former officers were not given to them in fancy by another character, but are their “real” names within the story-world, creations of the author’s parabolic imagination. Wiseman and Wishart are the “insane conductors” of a ship “lost on the huge deep,” whose crew has “drunk deep of terror” (Stevenson, 1996, 169); in this they resemble the “craz’d” pilot of Quarles’s Book 3, emblem 11, whose ship carries a freight of “corruption” and passengers “confusedly driven / From fear to fright” (Quarles, 1812, 182). The emblematic quality of the Farallone, both within the interpolated story of Wiseman and Wishart and in the larger narrative, is obvious. So is the emblematic way that Herrick mentally images the moral choice he faces on the island – whom to betray: “The three lives went up and down before him like buckets in a well, or like the scales of balances. […] For certain invaluable minutes, the wheels of life ran before him, and he could still divert them with a touch to the one side or the other, still choose who was to live and who was to die” (207). Traditional figures, the wheel of life or fortune and the idea of lives or souls weighed in the balance are both depicted in Quarles’s Emblems (Quarles, 1812, 29, 45, 122, 177). Emblematic thought also informs Stevenson’s portrait of Attwater at the dinner party, where “[a] cat of huge growth sat on his shoulder purring, and occasionally, with a deft paw, capturing a morsel in the air” (Stevenson, 1996, 212). The presence of the cat draws attention to Attwater’s cat-like qualities, and the narrator is explicit about the similarity 6 Cf. Jesus’ teaching in the sermon on the mount: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6: 19–21).

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between man and animal: “To a cat he might be likened himself, as he lolled at the head of his table, dealing out attentions and innuendos, and using the velvet and the claw indifferently” (212). But the connotations of the image surpass this straightforward comparison when we remember that in early modern times cats were regarded as the familiars of witches and devils, and were conventionally depicted as such in woodcut emblems. The huge cat on Attwater’s shoulder at the dinner table emblematically suggests that he is endowed with supernatural and diabolical powers, or may even be the devil himself. The ship, the cat and the “scales of balances” are all conventional symbols, each with “a relatively determinate reference” (Abrams and Harpham, 2012, 395). In contrast, The Ebb-Tide’s best-known symbol, the ship’s figurehead that stands by the pier on Attwater’s island, has no shared meaning. In naming the statue “the ensign” of the settlement, the narrator explicitly calls attention to its symbolic importance – “ensign” is a synonym for “emblem” (OED) – but gives the reader no help in interpreting “its perpetual gesture” (Stevenson, 1996, 190). The figurehead’s inscrutability only increases our desire to “read” it, a situation dramatized in the novella by Herrick’s inconclusive pondering of its significance: From the crown of the beach, the figure-head confronted him with what seemed irony, her helmeted head tossed back, her formidable arm apparently hurling something, whether shell or missile, in the direction of the anchored schooner. She seemed a defiant deity from the island, coming forth to its threshold with a rush as of one about to fly, and perpetuated in that dashing attitude. Herrick looked up at her, where she towered above him […] And he could have found it in his heart to regret that she was not a goddess, nor yet he a pagan, that he might have bowed down before her in that hour of difficulty. (190) Formerly “the blind conductress of a ship among the waves” (200), the beached figurehead can offer Herrick no guidance out of the ethical labyrinth in which he is caught. If this emblem is a “silent parable,” its meaning remains hidden from both characters and reader. Like Stevenson’s own experiments with the emblem genre in Moral Emblems, the figurehead is “a springboard for symbolic interpretation” (Hill, 2017, 91), but even less than those often ironic or enigmatic texts does this emblem disclose a securely authorized meaning. Two further aspects of The Ebb-Tide that connect it with the emblem tradition represented by Quarles are stylistic features previously mentioned in connection with Skelt. Like toy theatres, emblem literature often presents a Lilliputian world in which some actors and objects are miniaturized in order to show their frailty and ephemerality. On the “miniaturized world” of emblem engravings John Manning writes: “We enter a Lilliputian state where worldly

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plans and schemes can be reduced to nothing more than a child’s game.” He also observes that this miniaturized world represented in emblem literature is not a “morally proportioned” “microcosm” of the actual world, but “a satiric distorting mirror” – not a parvus mundus but a mundus parvulorum (Manning, 2002, 166, 160). Such disproportion and disparity of objects is present in The Ebb-Tide, where some things are larger than life and others smaller than life. The figurehead represents “a woman of exorbitant stature” (Stevenson, 1996, 190), Attwater is a man of “huge proportions” (216) and his cat a creature “of huge growth” (212). Anything to do with the three adventurers is made to look contrastingly small. The Farallone is caught up by the tide and carried into the lagoon “like a toy” (189); Attwater views Herrick as “a puppy in pyjamas” (203); Huish’s attack on Attwater is compared to an attempt by “a whelp to beseige a citadel” (246). I suggested earlier that the conceit of heavenly spectators looking down on this world of small things, which is repeatedly employed in The Ebb-Tide,

Figure 7.2  from Quarles’s Emblems (1812), Book 3, “Emblem  10,” p. 137.

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may reflect the mechanics of the toy theatre, where the child-operator enjoys a godlike view of his miniature stage. In emblem literature a similar point of view is invoked as a way of regarding human life sub specie aeternitas – under the aspect of eternity (Manning, 2002, 252). In the Invocation to his Emblems, Quarles specifically articulates his intention to adopt such a celestial point of view, urging his soul to rise to So high a pitch, that men may seem no more Than pismires [ants], crawling on the mole-hill earth. (Quarles, 1812, 14) Several illustrations in Quarles also depict heavenly spectators looking down on a human drama, or attempt to represent an all-seeing, all-hearing God as witness to an earthly “show” (105, 137). Skelt and Quarles converge on the common ground of theatricality, their treatment of the world as a stage and the stage as a world. The Skelt-like, Quarles-like aspects of The Ebb-Tide disrupt “the illusionistic integrity” (Facos, 2009, 2) of the realist narrative, straining against its mimetic elements and pushing the text toward symbolism and expressionism. In a tiny, stage-like city, aboard an emblematic ship, and finally on a not-quite-real island, the characters in this extraordinary work contend with God, the devil and their own black souls within a metaphysical world of plays and symbols. The anti-realist influences of Quarles and Skelt, juxtaposed with naturalistic observations of the Pacific islands and ocean as he saw them in the 1890s, enabled Stevenson to produce a new kind of storytelling: one marked by violent shifts of register, riven by deep divisions of narrative voice, and energized by a constant strain between materiality and ideality. References Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. 2012. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 10th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. Bathurst, Bella. 1999. The Lighthouse Stevensons. London: Harper Collins. Birch, Dinah, ed. 2009. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 7th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chesterton, G. K. 1927. Robert Louis Stevenson. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. 1998. Realism and Consensus in the English Novel: Time, Space and Narrative. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Facos, Michelle. 2009. Symbolist Art in Context. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Hill, Richard J. 2017. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text: A Case Study in the Victorian Illustrated Novel. New York: Routledge. Höltgen, Karl Josef. 1965. “Herrick, The Wheeler Family, and Quarles.” In Review of English Studies 16: 399–405. James, Eleanor. 1943. “The Imagery of Francis Quarles’ ‘Emblems.’” Studies in English 23: 26–49. Jolly, Roslyn. 1999. “Stevenson’s ‘Sterling Domestic Fiction’: ‘The Beach of Falesá’.” Review of English Studies 50: 463–82. Jolly, Roslyn. 2013. “Stevenson’s Pacific Transnarratives,” International Journal of Scottish Literature, 9: 5–35. Levenson, Michael, ed. 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manning, John. 2002. The Emblem. London: Reaktion Books. Quarles, Francis. 1812. Emblems, Divine and Moral. London: Chiswick Press. Accessed via https://www.archive.org/details/emblemsdivinemor00quarl. Sandison, Alan. 1996. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernis. London: Macmillan. Shakespeare, William. 2007. “Hamlet.” In William Shakespeare Complete Works. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. Houndsmills: Macmillan. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1998. In The South Seas. Ed. Neil Rennie. London: Penguin Classics, 1998. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1925. Memories and Portraits. London: Chatto & Windus. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1998. “The Lantern-Bearers.” In The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1994–95. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. 8 vols. Eds. Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1996. South Sea Tales. Ed. Roslyn Jolly. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1917. “The Genesis of ‘The Master of Ballantrae.’” In Essays in The Art of Writing. London: Chatto & Windus. Stevenson, Thomas. 1881. Lighthouse Construction and Illumination. London: Spon. Swearingen, Roger G. 1980. The Prose Writings of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Guide. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books.

Chapter 8

Inter-Racial Intimacies: Stevenson’s Late Pacific Tales Mandy Treagus In making her defence of the study of intimacy as a prime site in the operations of imperial power, Ann Laura Stoler notes that such a study fills out and complicates the dynamics at play: “[r]eplacing colonialism’s stick figures with actors who combined goodwill and sympathy for the dispossessed with racist beliefs underscores that colonial regimes were not less complex racially inflected social and political configurations than are ours today” (2001, 896). The characters in Stevenson’s late-Pacific works, “The Beach of Falesá” and The Ebb-Tide, experience inter-racial intimacies of different kinds. In “Falesá,” Wiltshire embarks on an initially exploitative sexual relationship with the young islander Uma. Over time, this develops into a domestic partnership that results in children, household wealth and contentment. In The Ebb-Tide, faced with danger at sea and his fellow adventurers’ collapse into alcoholic stupor, Herrick forms close bonds with the islander crew in the intimate space of the schooner. These fictions show both complications and ambivalences around race in such intimate spaces. Well before his entry to the Pacific on the Casco, Stevenson had been surprised by incidents of racism, especially those that seemed unconnected from immediate events. Katherine Linehan, in an early piece on race in Stevenson’s Pacific fiction, notes how he reacted with surprise about the attitudes of fellow passengers during the train journey across the US (1990). What shocked Stevenson most was the apparent mindlessness of this racism: “the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought of them, but hated them a priori” (Stevenson, 2018, 113). Similar to this is the mockery shown by these same passengers in the presence of Native Americans: “The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves” (115). Here, Stevenson not only attempts

© Mandy Treagus, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_010

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to see the conditions of Native Americans in their historical context, but he also acknowledges that the contemporary Euro-American of whatever stripe obtained ongoing benefits from the dispossession of indigenous people, benefits that implicate these beneficiaries in the fate of the dispossessed. Once he encountered the Pacific and its indigenous peoples over more sustained periods of time, Stevenson’s responses become more ambiguous. In the chapter “Depopulation” from In the South Seas, the writings based on his travels that had been contracted by McClure before the Casco cruise, he appears to be participating in the dying race discourse (Brantlinger, 2003), that was such a dominant part of imperial rhetorical strategies of domination. Based largely on seeing the devastation wrought in the Marquesas since contact, Stevenson generalised that The Polynesian falls easily into despondency: bereavement, disappointment, the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from life. The melancholy of the Hawaiian and the emptiness of his new life are striking; and the remark is yet more apposite to the Marquesas. (Stevenson, 1892–96, 42) But rather than a simple reassertion of the susceptibility of an “inferior” race, Stevenson notes specific circumstances, largely brought about by unsympathetic missionaries, that had resulted in specific instances of depopulation and decline: “Thus (by all accounts) the Catholics in Mangareva, and thus (to my own knowledge) the Protestants in Hawaii, have rendered life in a more or less degree unliveable to their converts. And the mild, uncomplaining creatures (like children in a prison) yawn and await death” (44). Rather than asserting a simplistic form of Social Darwinism of the type that was becoming popular in exhibitions and worlds’ fairs, in which “lower orders” naturally failed in the presence of “more advanced” races (Treagus, 2013), Stevenson tracks cause and effect, neither of which have any inevitability about them, nor any clear connection with race. At the same time, the ascription of childishness to these representatives of Polynesia undercuts this, with its implication that there is a hierarchy amongst races that renders some more like children. While written early in his experience of Pacific peoples, these two trends – the rejection of some dominant racist views alongside the re-inscription of others – typifies Stevenson’s engagement with race and racial difference in his late fiction. Stevenson’s growing familiarity with Pacific Islanders, and especially with Sāmoans once he settled in Vailima, incited some strong reactions amongst his friends in London. This was especially so once he began to take up political

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causes, particularly those involving Euro-American powers and their engagement in Sāmoa. John Kukich has observed that “One of the less immediate risks Stevenson took involved his literary reputation, which suffered because he was seen as having gone native, having lost his authorial equilibrium in the heat of a moral crusade, and having lapsed into an infelicitous realistic style” (2007, 76). Elements of this style were to continue in his Pacific fictions, and reflect the unsuitability of the romance adventure to deal with the reality of life on the edges of empires. Well may Oscar Wilde have made fun of his change in direction, when he famously wrote, “I see that romantic settings are the worst surroundings possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Samoa, he wrote letters to the Times about Germans” (1962, 520). But despite his actual letters to the Times, in his fiction Stevenson was moving into a style that could encompass the uglier realities of late empires, not just its imaginary aspects. This is especially true of The Ebb-Tide with its arresting range of generic gestures, what Alan Sandison refers to as the text’s “tentative questing among forms” (1996, 338). For friends like Colvin, it was Stevenson’s apparent inattention to the European world that evoked a belittling of Sāmoa and its affairs: “for three letters or more you have not uttered a single word about anything but your beloved blacks – or chocolates – confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested, as shutting out your thoughts, or so it often seems, from the main currents of human affairs” (Stevenson, 1994–5, 8: 279). Questioning Stevenson’s interest in “the main currents of human affairs” in opposition to those of “chocolates,” makes explicit Colvin’s acknowledgement of race as an element in his question; Stevenson’s response calls for a wider vision on Colvin’s part: “You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you?” (8: 281–82). In both tales considered in this chapter, the term “Kanaka” is used to refer to Pacific Islanders. The origins of the term are Hawaiian, from the term for person, Kānaka Maoli, but kanaka came to be used by Euro-Americans for any Pacific Islander. It passed into wide use through shipping, when islander crew volunteered, were enlisted, or were kidnapped as crew of ships plying the Pacific and beyond. The OED records its first use in print as 1840, in R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, but it was undoubtedly used from much earlier, possibly from the time Hawaiians began crewing on sailing ships, in the late-eighteenth century. One of the most common uses of the term was in Queensland in the second half of the nineteenth century as kanaka was the general term for indentured labourers “blackbirded” from Pacific islands, especially from Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. The term kanaka is now considered offensive, and descendants of these labourers in Australia are known as South Sea

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Islanders. Stevenson’s traders, missionaries and seaman use the term kanaka, as historically such persons did, though Stevenson himself, in his non-fiction writings about the Pacific, was much more likely to be specific, writing of Marquesans, Hawaiians or Sāmoans. Kānaka Maoli, as part of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, the language of Hawai‘i, is of course still in use to mean a Native Hawaiian person. It is perhaps such bluntly racist responses from home, referred to earlier, that prompted the creation of the character Wiltshire in “The Beach of Falesá,” “a story which is at once a critique and an enactment of racism and sexism” (Linehan, 1990, 408). Wiltshire, doubly evoking Englishness with his origins and his name, is the common man through which Stevenson explores interracial sexual and domestic intimacy. The story self-consciously raises race as a constructed category at the outset, destabilising the taxonomies that are in play in the story. Wiltshire has been four years “on a low island near the line, living for the most part solitary among natives” (Stevenson, 2008, 3), and is now “sick for white neighbours” (4). But racial categories seem malleable, when Wiltshire notes that of the white men on the island, “One was a negro, to be sure” (5). He reiterates this idea almost immediately: “we had come in view of the house of these three white men; for a negro is counted a white man, and so is a Chinese! a strange idea, but common in the islands” (7). Fanny Stevenson had noted this practice in her diary of their voyage on the Janet Nichol (as she spelt it) (Fanny Stevenson, 2004, 28). While on Manihiki, she wrote “The only ‘white man’ in the settlement was a Chinaman, dying for curry-powder” (92). This had also been true in Apia, Sāmoa, earlier in the century, when John King Bruce, a Negro born in Liverpool, insisted on calling himself the first white man on the beach: “I am British born and bred, thank God! and at that time no people in the islands but British were called ‘white.’” [emphasis added]. (Ralston, 1977, 156) The status of “white men” can cross racial lines when those men serve the interests of Euro-American trade in remote parts of the Pacific, but sexual and domestic intimacy between white men and brown women is a different case; it has the potential to produce mixed-race offspring, which, while a common enough event in actual life of the time, was rarely addressed in fiction, and certainly not positively. There is a hint, early in the tale, of the possibility of not just an interracial relationship but an actual interracial marriage with mention of Case’s will and his Sāmoan wife. Wiltshire tells us early that Case is now dead, setting up the tension of the story, which promises to resolve through the conventions of adventure romance. In giving a brief account of Case, Wiltshire mentions that

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Case’s wife was his beneficiary after death: “he had made a will, like a Christian, and the widow got the lot,” so that she now “does the lady to this day in her own place” (Stevenson, 2008, 5). This hints at the domestic plot to follow, in which the expected masculine adventure romance, while recounted, is ultimately overtaken by the more feminine-aligned genre of domestic fiction, as demonstrated by Roslyn Jolly (1999). Initially, though, it is not a marriage which Wiltshire embarks upon, but a certificate for a one-week stand, changed from Stevenson’s initial one night by the delicacies of the editors of The Illustrated London News. He had refused a request to depict it as a legal marriage from the start, and he made it clear that this, too, was a compromise (Jolly, 2008, xxxiv). Writing wryly to Colvin, Stevenson concedes “Well, well, if the dears prefer a week, why, I’ll give them ten days,” though he refers to an original “marriage” document, on which this incident is based, that ran for one day only (Stevenson, 1895, 170). This original “certificate” was sighted by Stevenson in the Gilbert Islands and it read that “her gracious partner was at liberty to ‘send her to hell’ the next morning,” though as he noted, she was still apparently married at this later date (Stevenson, 1892–96, 289; Jolly, 2008, 262 n.11). This was not Stevenson’s only experience of dubious “marriage” ceremonies involving traders and undertaken with spurious documents. He also recounts that one trader was married to a Gilbertese woman using one of his works (presumably as a legitimising faux sacred text), his main complaint being that it was a “pirated edition” (Stevenson, 1895, 289). In terms of narrative development, for Wiltshire to have had a legitimate legal marriage under English law from the start would have missed the point entirely, for it is the transition from one-night stand to lifetime commitment that the tale is most concerned with. The relationship begins on an entirely fraudulent basis. Case, in a seemingly casual comment, mentions to Wiltshire, “By-the-bye […] we must get you a wife” (Stevenson, 2008, 6). Case’s motivations are later revealed to be more sinister than simple masculinist concern for the sexual needs of a fellow trader, but when he points out Uma, Wiltshire gives an equally casual response: “She’ll do” (7). Wiltshire’s prior account of Uma does indicate his sexual interest, as it is nothing if not erotic for the time: “She had been fishing; all she wore was a chemise, and it was wetted through. She was young and very slender” (7). He follows with an unusual comment that both animalises and diminishes her – that she has “a shy, strange, blindish look, between a cat’s and a baby’s” (7). This is just one of a number of explicitly racist statements from Wiltshire, made about Uma and other islanders. From this beginning, there appears to be little to distinguish their relationship from many others of the time in which a white man makes temporary use of an available brown woman, possibly through duplicitous means, while considering her his racial inferior. Case

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confirms this with his comment, “You can have your pick of the lot for a plug of tobacco,” and Wiltshire makes his casual intentions clear with his comment, “I didn’t care for the word marriage, and I said so” (7). Yet Uma’s preparations for the “ceremony” are entirely serious: She was dressed and scented; her kilt was of fine tapa, looking richer in the folds than any silk; her bust, which was of the colour of dark honey, she wore bare only for some half a dozen necklaces of seeds and flowers; and behind her ears and in her hair she had the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus. She showed the best bearing for a bride conceivable, serious and still. (10–11) But this seriousness is not evident in the words of either the ceremony nor the certificate. The celebrant is the “grinning negro,” whose race now differentiates him, but in the negative (11). In imitation of the incident, Stevenson recounts how in In the South Seas, he pretends to read from a sacred book which is actually a “volume of a novel,” but actually speaks “words […] not fit to be set down” (11). He is just part of the joke, as is the document Case draws up: This is to certify that Uma daughter of Fa‘avao of Falesá island of __, is illegally married to Mr John Wiltshire for one night, and Mr John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her to hell next morning. John Blackamoor Chaplain to the Hulks. Extracted from the register By William T. Randall Master Mariner. (11) The acknowledgement by Wiltshire of his misgivings is one of his most sympathetic traits, and he confesses that “I thought shame to stand up with her in that mean house […] I thought shame,” though in a way typical of his double-minded thinking throughout, he justifies it immediately with “it was the practice in these parts” (11). Throughout, Wiltshire keeps up a rhetoric of racism in which whites are superior and locals are childlike. Though she might be able to enlighten him, he refuses to inquire of Uma when he is “tabooed,” because “it’s a bad idea to set natives up with any notion of consulting them” (Stevenson, 2008, 21); he also refers to her as “a kind of a baby” (9). Similarly, if not childlike then the locals are adolescent: “It’s easy to find out what Kanakas think. Just go back to yourself any way around ten to fifteen years old, and there’s an average Kanaka”

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(55). Wiltshire believes in his own superior status, despite his working-class English origins, asking Case to tell the chiefs, “that I demand the reason of this treatment as a white man and a British subject” (24). He then informs the reader that the locals “haven’t any real government or any real law,” though his account of meeting with the chiefs demonstrates their clear system of rule and authority, indicating the contradiction between his rhetoric and his experience (24). Uma’s thoughts and motivations on the day of this ceremony come to us only through Wiltshire, though he tells us that she “had had her head nigh turned with vanity and gratitude” by Case’s stories that Wiltshire was “mad to have her” (Stevenson, 2008, 12). We also hear that she tells her new partner, “You good,” so she is shown to be entering the arrangement with that assumption (12). Wiltshire, meanwhile, wavers between thinking her like a “a child or a dog,” or alternatively “a countess” (12), and when she declares “Me – your wifie,” he is overtaken by desire (13). Alongside this ambivalence, Wiltshire maintains a rhetoric about inter-racial intimacies of this sort, which, despite the adventure to follow and the account of his life with Uma, he maintains until the tale’s ironic conclusion. He tells us that “I was one of those most opposed to any nonsense about native women, having seen so many whites eaten up by their wives’ relatives, and made fools of in the bargain” (12). That this rhetoric is in marked contrast to his actual life is one of the ways by which Stevenson highlights the contradictions in Wiltshire’s racist principles. As the story develops, and Wiltshire confesses to his growing feelings for his wife – “I love you too much” – she demonstrates her devotion in a range of ways (28). Despite his desire to keep her in the background, she refuses to be without agency. When no one will work for him, Uma, her mother Fa‘avao, and Wiltshire himself, work on Fa‘avao’s small coconut plantation to produce copra, not so much to make money as to stay occupied. Wiltshire is thereby not only aligned with the feminine, but also with enslaved workers, as Case points out to him: “You haven’t got one pound of copra but what you made with your own hands, like a negro slave” (56). This change of status for the white man opens the way for Uma to function more as his equal. Not only does Uma work hard, but she displays extraordinary courage when she follows Wiltshire into the bush at night, bush she knows culturally to be filled with aitu, devils. In warning him that his rival is following him, she puts her own life at risk, not just from aitu, but also from Case. Uma thus asserts her own agency, even if it is in the service of a colonial stereotype, that of the faithful and trusting “native.” Yet this is partially undercut by the tale’s ending. The adventure romance has its conclusion with the death of Case; it is with the domestic romance that the tale is concluded, a decade or two on, as Wiltshire tells us, humourously, of

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Uma: “She’s only the one fault: if you don’t keep your eye lifting, she would give away the roof off the station. Well, it seems natural in Kanakas. She’s turned a powerful big woman now, and could throw a London bobby over her shoulder. But that’s natural in Kanakas too; and there’s no manner of doubt that she’s an A 1 wife” (Stevenson, 2008, 70–71). While the usual adventure romance would limit the possibility of miscegenation, or at least not dwell on it (consider, for example, the convenient death of Foulata in King Solomon’s Mines and its presentation as a blessing) (Haggard, 1994, 274), Wiltshire shares with readers his dilemma as the father of mixed-race children while at the same time maintaining the discourse of racism which seems to be held with almost religious allegiance: My public house? Not a bit of it, nor ever likely. I’m stuck here, I fancy. I don’t like to leave the kids, you see; and there’s no use talking – they’re better here than what they would be in a white man’s country, though Ben took the eldest up to Auckland, where he’s being schooled with the best. But what bothers me is the girls. They’re only half-castes of course; I know that as well as you do, and there’s nobody thinks less of half-castes than I do; but they’re mine and about all I’ve got. I can’t reconcile my mind to their taking up with Kanakas, and I’d like to know where I’m to find them whites? (Stevenson, 2008, 74) The undoubted irony with which this dilemma is presented to readers seems designed to call into question those same readers’ own racist assumptions. In putting this discourse into the narration of a lower-class yet likeable Englishman, Stevenson invites readers to at the least sympathise, and further, to question the racial categories at play, especially where they have seemed malleable at other junctures in the story. Contemporary readers may have been challenged by the blunt depiction of miscegenation, but were undoubtedly reassured by the assertion of the superiority of an Englishman of whatever class. While racism is inherently questioned by the irony of Wiltshire’s dilemma, and race itself as a construct is shown to be pliable, at the same time the tale is a demonstration of the superior powers of the white hero. Though this is not achieved as simplistically as is the case in most imperial romances, such as the aforementioned King Solomon’s Mines, the tale nevertheless reiterates whiteness through Wiltshire’s courage, initiative and success, just as Aileen Moreton-Robinson has suggested of the colonial project: “[a]s a regime of power, patriarchal white sovereignty manifests through white male bodies; [in] performative reiteration of white possession” (2011, 59). While Wiltshire might be the victim of irony in the tale’s denouement, he is ultimately an effective

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agent of empire. He takes possession of trade on the island and its profits. He succeeds by ignoring the beliefs of the locals in favour of a rationalist post-Enlightenment understanding of landscape and phenomena, thereby triumphing over and killing the corrupt trader while navigating the relevant systems of authority on the island: economic, religious and tribal (Treagus, 2014, 320). By use of his “superior” epistemologies, Wiltshire, despite his flaws, confirms the centrality of whiteness in the imperial project, and himself as a suitable white coloniser. If “The Beach of Falesá” is self-conscious about drawing attention to racism while also seeming to be less conscious of its endorsement of whiteness, it shows equal ambivalence about genre. While still functioning as an adventure romance, the tale is at the same time conjoined to a domestic fiction which overtakes it. The Ebb-Tide is less ambivalent about the adventure romance, ultimately depicting its plot drivers and central adventurers as corrupt and destructive representations of both empire and of whiteness, thereby destabilising the genre itself. Unlike “The Beach of Falesá,” by the time Stevenson came to write The Ebb-Tide, he had abandoned the drivers of the genre he had championed and which had made him so successful. It is a tale in which all of the white characters are deeply flawed – “look at my three rogues; they’re all there, I’ll go bail. Three types of bad man, the weak man, and the strong man with a weakness, that are gone through and lived out” he wrote to Colvin (Maixner, 1981, 453). The trio consists of Davis, an American ship’s captain, Huish, a Cockney clerk, and Herrick, an Oxford graduate. These are topped in determination and roguery by the other white character, Attwater, who exemplifies in one person the main activities of empire: ‘“I have had a business, and a colony, and a mission of my own. I was a man of the world before I was a Christian; I’m a man of the world still, and I made my mission pay”’ (Stevenson, 2008, 204). That he also seeks to be the violent dominator of others is clear from the start. Before highlighting the shipboard interracial intimacy of the tale, I first discuss the role of the Pacific Islanders under Attwater’s domination in order to contextualise Herrick’s later betrayal of the islander crew. Attwater makes his appearance in “Part II: The Quartette,” when the original trio of adventurers, in a desperate condition, come upon his island. That night, at a dinner in his house with the entire quartette present, the stakes are high for all despite the initial appearance of polite conversation. Smallpox has decimated the island’s population, with thirty-one cases, of which twenty-nine died (Stevenson, 2008, 194). In his self-appointed role as patriarch of the island, Attwater tells Herrick, the closest we get to a hero in the tale, that “I was making a new people here; and behold, the angel of the Lord smote them and they were not!” (204). It emerges during the dinner that Attwater’s labourers have been taken from other islands in the Pacific by his business partner Symonds,

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“as far west as the Kingsmills [in current day Kiribati] and as far south as Rapaiti [south of Tahiti in French Polynesia]” (215). There is no talk of exactly how they were engaged, but there is also no talk of indenture, so they appear to have been blackbirded – kidnapped – with no chance of return to their former homes. Attwater, who is always armed, has trained them under his fearful dominance: “one way or another, one got it knocked into their heads that they must work, and they did … ​until the Lord took them!” (216). It is a dinner story about his treatment of two labourers that tips the protagonist, Herrick, into an emotional collapse. Attwater outlines his classification of “natives” into the categories of “obsequious” and “sullen,” and his story is apparently to illustrate these “types,” though its main function is to reveal his brutality (Stevenson, 2008, 216). Having been punished by Attwater over and over for day after day, the worker referred to as “Sullens” disappears, provoking Attwater to realise he had been punishing him mistakenly. The fault actually lay with another referred to as “Obsequiousness.” On the way to this conclusion, Attwater tells the other three men that “The native who talks, like the woman who hesitates, is lost. You set him talking and lying; and he talks, and lies, and watches your face to see if he had pleased you” (218). But rather than confront “Obsequious” with his fault Attwater plays with him, finally commanding him to cut down “Sullens” from the tree in which he had hung himself, presumably from hopelessness. Attwater’s shot brings them both down dead. This example of Attwater’s cruel and autocratic rule provokes Herrick’s outburst “It was a murder,” together with his collapse into hysterical crying at the table (219). Attwater’s rule is entirely self-serving, autocratic, and violent, though it is not exceptional in terms of known historical figures in the Pacific.1 This account of Attwater’s beliefs and practices puts into context just how devastating Herrick’s betrayal of the crew of the Farralone at the end of the tale is. It is the fissure which breaks open Stevenson’s tale, showing that a core of racism underlies Herrick’s, and potentially the author’s apparently sympathetic approach to the crew. Just as in “Falesá,” the tale loses its self-consciousness about race in its unrelenting focus on the white male protagonist. When describing the ship he has been offered to captain, Davis tells Herrick and Huish that the “Captain and mate were the only white men; all the hands Kanakas; seems a queer outfit from a Christian port. Three of them left 1 See for example the account of Father Laval of Mangareva who was responsible for the premature deaths of thousands of islanders forced into labour (Eskridge, 1931, 183–83). Stevenson specifically mentions Mangareva in his account of Pacific depopulation, making Laval a likely model for Attwater (Stevenson, 1892–96, 40). Similarly, both Charmian and Jack London described the extreme methods employed to control labourers on a plantation on Penduffryn in the Solomon Islands, where overseers and the Londons were required to be armed at all times (Stasz, 1998, 183).

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and a cook” (Stevenson, 2008, 146). Despite their experience at sea, Davis has clear ideas about the islander crew’s capacities, claiming that when the previous captain and mate of the schooner had died of smallpox, the islander crew “bummed around at sea like babes in the wood; and tumbled end-on upon Tahiti” (147). He reiterates his belief in their inferiority for the work when he announces “I don’t hold with this Kanaka crew racket,” giving Herrick the role of mate despite his lack of experience at sea (147). Yet when Davis and Huish go on a champagne bender, consuming the schooner’s cargo, Davis is happy enough to leave the sailing to the inexperienced Herrick and the islander crew. Not all of the crew are taken with the trio of white men; one of them discerningly jumps overboard as they head through the reef at Pape‘ete while Davis threatens the others should they attempt it (157). The remaining crew consist of an unnamed cook, seaman Sally Day, “a lean-flanked, clean-built fellow from some far western island, and of a darkness almost approaching to the African” (155), and seaman Uncle Ned, who has been renamed by Davis who cannot understand the sound of his name (156). Sally Day was the actual name of a sailor on the Janet Nichol voyage, and Fanny Stevenson has commented on his energy and his and other crew’s cannibal origins: “they declare they were mere infants when they were taken away and can remember nothing about the savage customs of their people” (Fanny Stevenson, 2004, 180). There is just a hint of the suppressed story of the kidnapping of these sailors. Similarly, Herrick thinks the character Sally Day on the Farralone is “the child of cannibals, in all likelihood a cannibal himself” (168). The intimacy between Herrick and the three islander men is built up over the course of the voyage, as Davis and Huish lapse into drunkenness and fail to take their turn at watch. This forces Herrick, Uncle Ned and Sally Day into doing all of the sailing duties on an already undermanned ship. The vessel is a schooner, the most typical of sailing ships in the Pacific of the time, so they were not designed for the comfort of crew or passengers (Young, 1993). The close living and sailing conditions brought about intimacy whether it was sought out or not. This is only reinforced when Herrick is forced to take charge of the ship, despite his inexperience, as it is the knowledge of the crew that enables the voyage to continue. This is the point at which Herrick “could trust the men, between whom and himself a close relation had sprung up” (Stevenson, 2008, 167), and it goes beyond the duties of all and into real connection, as he learns about their lives. He talks “long” with Uncle Ned at night, hearing “his simple and hard story of exile, suffering, and injustice among cruel whites” (167). Similarly, the cook, discovering that Herrick did not eat with the other two white men, “produced for him unexpected and sometimes unpalatable dainties, of which he forced himself to eat” (167). (Just as in “Falesá,” Stevenson liked to include a joke about the capacities of islander cooks.)

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Affection is expressed physically by Sally Day, with Herrick “surprised to feel a caressing hand run down his shoulder, and to hear the voice of Sally Day crooning in his ear: ‘You gootch man!’ He turned, and, choking down a sob, shook hands with the negrito” (Stevenson, 2008, 168). While Davis and Huish drink, the crew sing hymns and read Bibles in their various languages on Sunday, Herrick seeing this as a “cutting reproof” to the whites on board (168). Their final act of kindness is to insist that he rest, with the cook and sailors “clustered about their mate with expostulations and caresses” (168). As a final mark of esteem, Uncle Ned tells him his real name, Taveeta, “all-e-same Taveeta King of Islael” (168). Despite this, Herrick does not see the crew as equals. He considers them “kindly, cheery, childish souls,” and refers to the cook as “a savage,” but he also contrasts their faithful care of him with the corruption of the whites (168, 182). Faithfulness in “natives,” as mentioned in relation to “Falesá,” is of course a common colonial stereotype. The crew are presented as capable though, contrary to Davis’s assessment of them, with Uncle Ned’s sailing knowledge on display when he knows there is an atoll ahead from its lagoon’s reflection on the clouds (184). Part 1 of The Ebb-Tide is subtitled “The Trio,” demonstrating the primacy with which dynamics between the three white characters are held in the narration. Despite this, the text puts a strong emphasis on the relationships between the islander crew and Herrick during the voyage from Pape‘ete to Attwater’s island. This focus on the close and inter-dependant relationships that grow up between them shows Stevenson’s sympathy and compassion for the islanders in the tale, but this intimacy only goes to reiterate Herrick’s betrayal of these men in its denouement. Having been exposed to Attwater’s treatment of “his” “natives,” both Herrick and the reader are aware that any islander who fell into his clutches would be forced into a life of utmost obedience and labour without respite. It is the revelation of Attwater’s brutality and cruel form of justice that evokes the hysterical response from Herrick at dinner. To abandon his intimate shipboard companions to this fate seems not only negligent but cruel. In the final brief chapter, the reader does hear of the crew, but minimally. Attwater is observed assisting and directing “five Kanakas,” presumably consisting of the crew and his previous labourers, who are enthusiastically working (Stevenson, 2008, 250). No longer graced with names, despite Herrick’s former intimacy with them, the group’s efforts result in the Union Jack floating “once more on its staff” (250). The Union Jack is a very obvious sign of the restoration of hierarchical inter-racial relationships which underpin the Empire. Soon after, having torched the Farralone, Herrick reminds Davis, with no hint of regret, that the ship’s crew are “disposed of,” and thereby unlikely to spill the beans on the illegal activities associated with Davis’s captaincy (252). To have merely “disposed of” his formerly intimate companions, with whom he

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had shared the perils of not only the incompetent and dangerous leadership of Davis, but also a wild storm at sea that almost sank the ship, seems both negligent and callous. Though Herrick was always one of Stevenson’s “rogues,” one might expect some concern for the men he has shared such intimacies with. Stevenson’s “Falesá” seems unaware of its own imperialist drivers in its assertion of whiteness, while showing the emptiness of Wiltshire’s racist rhetoric. Similarly, The Ebb-Tide presents Sally Day, Taveeta and the unnamed cook in an entirely sympathetic light, showing their competence as well as their kindness to Herrick. At the same time, the narrator, through the consciousness of Herrick, sees them as childlike, even though they are fully aware of the danger the ship would be in without their interventions. These two tendencies drive a wedge in the depiction of inter-racial intimacy at the end of the tale, when Herrick abandons his former companions to Attwater’s tyranny. This crack in the discourse around race exposes two different impulses: one is the desire to show Pacific Islanders as fully human individuals; the other is to dismiss as insignificant their narrative arcs. Both of Stevenson’s tales carry conflicting discourses that reveal their ambivalence around race, bearing out Stoler’s assertion, quoted at the start of this chapter, that “colonial regimes” – and fiction is undoubtedly one of them – “were not less complex racially inflected social and political configurations than are ours today” (Stoler, 2001, 896). References Brantlinger, Patrick. 2003. Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Eskridge, Robert Lee. 1931. Manga Reva: The Forgotten Islands. Indianapolis: BoobsMerrill. Haggard, H. Rider. 1994. King Solomon’s Mines. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Jolly, Roslyn. 2004. “Introduction.” The Cruise of the Janet Nichol among the South Sea Islands. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. 13–43. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Jolly, Roslyn. 2008. “Explanatory Notes.” South Sea Tales. Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. 259–289. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Jolly, Roslyn. 2008. “Note on the Texts.” South Sea Tales. Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. xxxiv–xxxvii. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Jolly, Roslyn. 1999. “Stevenson’s ‘Sterling Domestic Fiction’, ‘The Beach of Falesá.’” The Review of English Studies 50, no. 200: 464–482. Kucich, John. 2007. Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Linehan, Katherine Bailey. 1990. “Taking Up With Kanakas: Stevenson’s Complex Social Criticism in ‘The Beach of Falesá’.” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920, 33 no. 4: 407–422. Maixner, Paul, ed. 1981. Robert Louis Stevenson: The Critical Heritage. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2011. “Bodies That Matter: Performing White Possession on the Beach.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 35 no. 4: 57–72. Ralston, Caroline. 1977. Grass Huts and Warehouses: Pacific Beach Communities of the Nineteenth Century. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Sandison, Alan. 1996. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Appearance of Modernism: A Future Feeling. London: Macmillan. Stasz, Clarice. 1988. American Dreamers: Charmian and Jack London. New York: St Martin’s Press. Stevenson, Mrs Robert Louis (Fanny). 2004. The Cruise of the Janet Nichol among the South Sea Islands. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1892–1896. In the South Seas. 1891; New York: Charles, Scribner’s Sons. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2018. The Amateur Emigrant: With Some First Impressions of America. Edited by Julia Reid. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2008. South Sea Tales. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1994–95. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1895. Vailima Letters: Being Correspondence Addressed by Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, November 1890–October 1894. London: Methuen. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2001. “Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response.” The Journal of American History, 88 no. 3: 893–97. Treagus, Mandy. 2014. “Crossing ‘The Beach’: Samoa, Stevenson and ‘The Beach at Falesá’.” Literature Compass, 11 no. 5: 312–320. Treagus, Mandy. 2013. “The South Seas Exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893.” Oceania and the Victorian Imagination: Where All Things Are Possible. 123 by R. Fulton & P. Hoffenberg, 45–48. London: Ashgate. Wilde, Oscar. 1962. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Hart-Davis. Young, John. 1993. “Sailing to Levuka: The cultural significance of the island schooners in the late 19th century.” The Journal of Pacific History, 28 no. 1: 36–52.

Chapter 9

“‘The world was Like all New Painted’: Correspondences in Stevenson’s Rhetoric of Landscape in Kidnapped and The Beach of Falesá” Nathalie Jaëck Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondances’, Les Fleurs du Mal Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance In a deep and tenebrous unity, Vast as the dark of night and as the light of day, Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond. (Translated by william aggeler)

∵ In Kidnapped, written in 1886, and “The Beach of Falesá,” written in 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson uses two corresponding sentences to describe the Scottish and the Pacific landscapes. The protagonist Wiltshire’s elated description as he approaches the shore of Falesá, “The world was like all new painted” (Stevenson, 1996, 6), echoes David Balfour’s sense of aesthetic delight as he gazes at the Highland landscape in Kidnapped: “The Valley was as clear as in a picture” (Stevenson, 2007, 142). In both cases, the first-person narrators, both coming from the Lowlands – “I should say I had been for years on a low island near the line” (Stevenson, 1996, 3) – envision the unknown territories they are about to enter as static picturesque representations, as aesthetic landscapes to be enjoyed, from a commanding position, from the vantage-point of cultural superiority. I would like to show in this chapter that Wiltshire’s orientalist fantasized study in pink (“To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond” (3)), just like David’s

© Nathalie Jaëck, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_011

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“clear picture” of eternal Scotland, are addressed by Stevenson in the exact same way: in the course of their respective adventures, Wiltshire and David do have to reassess their rhetoric of landscape, to historicize and localize their aesthetics of emotion in order to achieve political awareness. They will both be compelled to rearticulate the idealized static landscape to be enjoyed from above, when confronted with antagonizing practised territories that are lived in and fought for by the native populations. The aim of this chapter is thus twofold: to show in detail how the two texts, written five years, thousands of miles and literary genres apart, closely resonate through each other, how Kidnapped actually rubs off on and shows through “The Beach of Falesá,” and to propose that they both participate in Stevenson’s redefinition of the concept of landscape, a redefinition that becomes part of his intention to address the issue of English rule over colonised peoples, equally for Scottish Highlanders and for Pacific islanders. In both texts, the definition of landscape, “a handsome piece of scenery” (17) says Wiltshire by-the-book, as if he were quoting the dictionary – “a view or prospect of natural inland scenery, such as can be taken in at a glance: a piece of country scenery” (OED) – will make room for a more dialectical definition, to prove that “landscape imagery is contested political terrain” (Pugh, 1990, 2). Colonized peoples, “sitting their ground” (Stevenson, 1996, 15) are eventually returned to their territories through Stevenson’s literary reconfiguration: both texts crucially have in common to enact an alternative distribution of geographic space, through consistently similar literary patterns, in order to rephrase aesthetic positions as social and political constructs. I would thus like to read “The Beach of Falesá” through the intertext of Kidnapped, to show that Edmund Gosse’s well-known exclusive binary, “The fact seems to be that it is very nice to live in Samoa, but not healthy to write there” (Charteris, n.d., 126), underrates both the literary and the ideological similarities between the two texts. The correspondences between the Scottish fiction and the South Sea tales are well-documented – starting from Stevenson himself, who wondered in an undated letter to Barrie: “It is a singular thing that I should live here in the South Seas under conditions so new and so striking, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit that cold old huddle of grey hills from which we come” (Stevenson, 1994–95, 264). Such proximity was confirmed by Stevenson’s wife, Fanny: “It might seem a far cry from Samoa to Scotland,” she wrote in her introduction to Catriona, “and yet in many ways the one recalled the other” (quoted in Farrell, 2017, 212). This critical line has been taken up by contemporary critics, and linked with Stevenson’s recognizing in the Highlands the same imperialist structures as in the South Seas: “Stevenson recognized a similarity between the ‘savage’ South Sea Islanders and the ‘barbaric’ Highlanders exploited and harmed by fellow Scots (Lowlanders) who, as Jenni

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Calder points out, ‘regarded them as primitive savages speaking a barbaric language’ and ‘holding back the progress of civilisation’” (Colley, 2004, 5). Or “Stevenson’s narrative device of finding parallels between the new location he visits and his native land tended to destabilize the hierarchy of ‘civilized’ Britain (or Europe) and ‘savage’ colonies” (Buckton, 2007, 21). It thus seems established that “Stevenson remained […] trenchantly aware of the history of Scotland as a colonized land” (25), and that as Barry Menikoff proved, Stevenson linked the conflicts between the Highlands and the Lowlands to a political context that had much to do with imperial domination (Menikoff, 2005). I mean to highlight through close textual reading that Kidnapped and “The Beach of Falesá” are not indeed two tales apart, but more of a twice-told tale, sharing the same central preoccupation with the redefinition of the rhetoric of landscape. Of course, the differences are huge: Wiltshire is certainly no innocent, wavering, intendedly neutral David Balfour, “betwixt or between” (Stevenson, 2007, 60), but a focused copra trader, an active agent in the implementation of the politics of the Empire. The plot is hugely different, as is the genre. And as far as landscape is concerned, it is granted that there are no grouses and no heather in Falesá but “the bush” (51), “cinnabar” (45) and “dangle-down lianas” (48), no Red Fox but “the flying-fox (or vampire) flew there in broad daylight, gnashing its teeth” (45), and a whole bunch of exotic fruit: “wild lime and vanilla” (3), “cocoa-palms and breadfruit” (14), “muumy-apples” (50), “guavas” (51).  And, the islander Uma in “The Beach of Falesá” makes it very clear that these are not to be found in Wiltshire’s Scotland: “‘Well, you no got breadfruit,’ said she” (61). Yet and for all their obvious disparities, when one reads “The Beach of Falesá,” one does have un sentiment de déjà-lu, and it goes with the text as it goes with Kanakas: “This is mighty like Falesá; but, if you look at it another way, it’s mighty like Kidnapped too” (Stevenson, 1996, 53–54). The storylines are after all rather similar: two outsiders, Alan Wiltshire, a Scottish man from “a low island near the Line” (3), and David Balfour, a Lowlander, describe, in a first-person narration, their impressions of a land and people they both consider as quite exotic – in both cases, the narrators are apprentice anthropologists, trying to get at the “real character” of the people and the “details of life” as Stevenson put it, in a “realistic” way.1 Both come to a strange place equipped 1 “It is the first realistic South Seas story; I mean with real South Sea character and details of life. Everybody else that has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost – there was not etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale

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with their stereotypical representations and prejudices – and David is guilty of the same dismissal of the Highlanders as Wiltshire of the islanders, both peoples being similarly dismissed, animalised and infantilised, dealt with in the collective – “a rum crowd” (10). The character Alan is said to be “as nimble as a goat” (Stevenson, 2007, 57), “a bull, roaring as he went” (68), “a sheepdog chasing sheep” (68), “a fair heather-cat” (112), and the character Ardshiel “has to flee like a poor deer upon the Mountain” (81), to quote but a few. It is not different in Falesá, where the children are “like crowing poultry” (Stevenson, 1996, 3), “scampering for their lives and singing out like pigs” (15), the natives’ laugh is compared to “a dog’s bark” (15), and they stare “as straight as pointer dogs” (14), while the pastor is “a big buck Kanaka” (21). As for Uma, she is all at once “like a child or a kind dog,” and she purrs and croons “like a great cat” (9). The strange costumes, and unspeakable foreign tongues are part of both people’s panoplies when described by patronizing Wiltshire and David, who are both transformed and initiated by a private encounter with a native, Uma (for Wiltshire) and Alan (for David), and are thereby better able to understand and master their own territories and their entangled social networks. But this parallel between Uma and Alan leads us into more precise analysis, and reveals that there are between the two texts quite literal echoes, a textual fabric that is rather intertwined, and that Kidnapped shows through “The Beach of Falesá,” giving it the sound of an iridescent palimpsest. For example, the description of the women’s outfit in Falesá shimmers with the reference to Alan’s first appearance to David: they appear dressed in blue and red against a green mountainous background (“It was good to foot the grass, to look aloft at the green mountains, to see […] the women in their bright dresses, red and blue” (Stevenson, 1996, 3)), just like Alan in Kidnapped, who, on top of his gold belt, wears “a red waistcoat […] and a blue coat” (Stevenson, 2001, 74). Still about clothes, it reads as if the vocabulary of Kidnapped rubbed off on “The Beach of Falesá,” as if, by contagion or contiguity, the two peoples were dressed the same. Therefore, the very Scottish kilt is deterritorialised, and donned by the Islanders: Uma is dressed with a kilt for her mock-marriage “her kilt was of fine tapa” (Stevenson, 1996, 10); when the islanders are called “island dandies” reckoning up “the yards of print they wanted for their kilts and dresses” (17). The chiefs themselves, echoing the clan structure in Cluny’s cage, wear the national kilt while similarly engaged, sitting on the floor, smoking and singing and wearing Catholicism on their sleeves, and it might prove tricky to say whether the following passage comes from Kidnapped or “The Beach”: “Five than if you had read a library” (Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1994–95, 7: 161).

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chiefs were there; four mighty stately men, the fifth old and puckered. They sat on mats in their white kilts and jackets; they had fans in their hands, like fine ladies; and two of the younger ones wore Catholic medals, which gave me matter of reflection” (23). Textual iridescence is quite intense here, further reinforced by the nearly superimposable description of their colourful outfits: Wiltshire’s sketch, “ […] others were stalking silent, wrapped in their many-coloured sleeping clothes like Bedouins in Bible pictures […]” (14), echoes David’s description: “Some went bare, only for a hanging cloak or great-coat, and carried their trousers on their backs like a useless burthen: some had made an imitation of the tartan with little parti-coloured stripes patched together like an old wife’s quilt” (Stevenson, 2007, 129). Both people often go bare, and their vivid outfits hang loosely on their bodies, so Stevenson blurs the territorial line, impregnating the South Seas with the imagination of his Scottish romance. It reads as if Kidnapped were actually folded into “The Beach”; as if scenes from the mother country were transferred onto the Pacific landscapes; as if there were an exchange, a transcoding of the two distinct territories. “Visions of England would inevitably crowd into his memory as an exiled man” (Largeaud-Ortéga, 2012, 54),2 and indeed, the co-presence of England and Sāmoa is made manifest in “The Beach of Falesá.” In another example, Uma first becomes caught in the becoming of Wiltshire’s deterritorialising imagination: “I felt for all the world as though she were some girl at home in the Old Country” (Stevenson, 1996, 12), and the process accelerates, as she becomes a European countess: “but in the house she had carried it the way a countess might, so proud and humble” (12), and her fellow islanders become “Highland dandies” (17). The cabin itself is traced back to a cosy British home sweet home: “[…] the stove was alight, the smoke going up in a Christian manner; all was shipshape and Bristol fashion […]” (14). Shift-shape would be more accurate, as the islanders become “figures on a chimney-piece” (15). The picturesque watercolour becomes a baroque transfer, and Wiltshire narration amounts to tracing paper as Britain is folded into the Pacific landscape, and as the landscape becomes completely mobile: “ […] the whole thing was clean gone from me, and I was dreaming England, which is, after all, a nasty, cold, muddy hole, with not enough light to see to read by; and dreaming the looks of my public, by a cant of a broad high-road like an avenue, and with the sign on a green tree” (17). Such textual shimmering speaks to the fact that Stevenson used literature in order to de-solidify set positions, to reconfigure links and contiguities between 2 Translated from, “es visions d’Angleterre ne manquaient point de se bousculer dans sa mémoire d’exilé.”

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seemingly separated territories, and as Buckton demonstrated, such formal choices sustained political positions: “Stevenson’s narrative device of finding parallels between the new location he visits and his native land tended to destabilize the hierarchy of ‘civilized’ Britain (or Europe) and ‘savage’ colonies” (Buckton, 2007, 21). Indeed, just like Kidnapped, and in very similar modes, “The Beach of Falesá” enacts a re-evaluation of the aesthetics of landscape, in order to further question established hierarchies, as they were forcefully represented in traditional 19th-century landscape painting (see Jaëck and Amelot, 2017, for a case-study of Dickensian landscapes). Just as David initially envisioned the Lowland landscape from above, going “to the top of a hill” (Stevenson, 2007, 12) to enjoy the panoramic vision of a domesticated highly pleasant landscape, “as clear as in a picture” (142), Wiltshire typically considers Falesá as “a piece of scenery” from the commanding vantage point of his colonial cabin: A fine show I made of it; and the third morning when I had lit my pipe and stood in the door-way and looked in, and turned and looked far up the mountain and saw the cocoanuts waving and posted up the tons of copra, and over the village green and saw the island dandies and reckoned up the yards of print they wanted for their kilts and dresses, I felt as if I was in the right place to make a fortune, and go home again and start a public-house. There was I, sitting in that verandah, in as handsome a piece of scenery as you could find, a splendid sun, and a fine fresh healthy trade that stirred up a man’s blood like sea-bathing […]. (Stevenson, 1996, 17) Sitting on that verandah, a pipe in his mouth, and looking far out at the landscape stretched in front of him, Wiltshire does enjoy the typical commanding vantage-point of the ruling classes, “a commanding view that establishes position” (Pugh, 1990, 2). The house he is given endows him with every possible mark of status: “The station was a wonderful fine place, coral built, with quite a wide verandah, and the main room high and wide” (Stevenson, 1996, 12). Beyond all the adjectives of praise, the commercial post, adequately called a “station,” is a synonym of status and rank: the white coral house, unique, high up, contrasts with the many dark wood cabins below, and is intended to endow its occupant with a point of view, with a perspective on things, as the repetition of the verb “I saw” in the quotation illustrates. Envisioning and encompassing the landscape and its inhabitants from above “far up” and “over,” he can enjoy the physical height and width that are congruent with social and cultural superiority; he can frame it and see it from a distance: “Landscape

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implies ‘separation and observation’ from the land as it is worked on and lived in” (Buckton, 2007, 13). From there, aesthetic delight is procured, and this “piece of scenery” is just as picturesque as David’s “clear picture,” with “a swift cold river” (Stevenson, 1996, 17) to echo David’s “pleasantly watered” low hills, “the green of the village” (17) as a resonance of “the green cultivated hills” (Stevenson, 2007, 188), and this lush land of bounty, “dotted with cocoa-palms and breadfruits and houses” (Stevenson, 1996, 17) is an exotic version of the fertile Scottish meadows, “the fields dotted with sheep” (Stevenson, 2007, 14). The Impressionist brush strokes are equally visible in the technical pictorial dots, and the owned territories are euphemised and neutralized as aesthetic landscapes. Exoticism does bring yet another level of de-realisation, as the pink colour pervades the whole canvas, from the fourth line of the novel: “To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond” (Stevenson, 1996, 3). To the east indeed, and right in Orientalist fantasies as they were analysed by Edward Saïd: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and has been since Antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (Saïd, 1977, 18). Wiltshire confirms that his reception of the landscape is fraught with previous representations, and amounts to a sort of aesthetic mirage, when he says that “Falesá might have been Fiddler’s Green, if there is such a place” (Stevenson, 1996, 3); it is perhaps enlightening to have a look at Gauguin’s picture Paysage Tahitien, painted in 1891 just one year before Stevenson wrote “The Beach,” to confirm the contiguities, the imaginary correspondences in European representations of the East, as the pink colour similarly seeps in and tints the whole experience. There is a difference though: Witshire is a liberal trader in the colonial enterprise, while David is a conservative prospective landowner. The prospect on landscape is thus changed a little in “The Beach of Falesá”: the “beautiful landscape” that “establishes ownership heritable property […] legitimating his political authority” (Pugh, 1990, 2), is no longer statically admired by the owning squire, as an emblem of the magnificence of immemorial England. It is now scrutinized and appraised by the copra trader who assesses both the manpower and the customers ready to make his fortune: “beautiful landscape” gives way to “handsome piece of scenery,” and the modulation in the adjectives is very telling. “Handsome” does have a mercantile element to it because it means “substantial” and “generous,” “profitable” as well as scenic, and “piece of scenery” highlights the fact that the landscape is going to be pieced apart to be allotted to the different traders. The landscape is thus reconfigured as part of colonial economic logics, despite Wiltshire’s typical

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humanist claims smacking of “the white man’s burden,” reinterpreted as “the white man’s quarrel” (Stevenson, 1996, 22): “I have come here to do them good, and bring them civilisation” (23). As Mitchell put it, the notion of landscape is thus marked as “particular historical formation associated with European Imperialism” (1994, 5). So, as Stevenson claimed about the island he conjured up for The Ebb-Tide: “If my island ain’t a thing of beauty, I’ll be damned” (Stevenson, 1994–95, 8:68). Similarly, Wiltshire sees Falesá as a thing of beauty, a timeless one as well, static and de-historicized, since indeed, as has been agreed upon since Keats’s “Endymion,” “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Within the landscape, the native populations are dehumanized, equally reduced to artefacts, aestheticized and reified, amounting to statues owned by some European amateur of Orientalist decorative art, “figures on a chimney” (Stevenson, 1996, 15), or mere effigies, “graven images” (15), picturesque illustrations, “like Bedouins in Bible pictures” (14), the alliteration in “b” reinforcing the blunt deprivation of culture, religion and agency. But what I want to prove now is that in “The Beach of Falesá,” just as in Kidnapped, Stevenson engages his protagonists in a reappraisal of such conventional rhetoric of landscape: like David, Wiltshire is taught to re-historicize the landscape, to view it not as an aesthetic neutral and fantasized surface but as an antagonizing, lived-in, practised territory, and eventually to return it to its lawful owners. The first step towards more “place-awareness” is for Stevenson to invert the direction of the gaze. In Kidnapped, as David is brutally landed in Earraid and cannot comprehend the landscape he has been suddenly immersed in, the Gaelic sailors are the ones looking at him and making fun of him. On the morning after his wedding with his tabooed wife, Wiltshire undergoes the exact same experience of having native populations staring at him, and making fun of him in a tongue he cannot understand. He becomes the one being framed in, looked at, and is reduced to the grammatical position of object in Stevenson’s sentences: Some dozen young men and children made a piece of a half-circle, flanking my house: the river divided them, some were on the near side, some on the far, and one on a boulder in the midst; and they all sat silent, wrapped in their sheets, and stared at me and my house as straight as pointer dogs. I thought it strange as I went out. When I had bathed and come back again, and found them all there, and two or three more along with them, I thought it stranger still. What could they see to gaze at in my house, I wondered, and went in. (Stevenson, 1996, 14)

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The islanders, whom Wiltshire is soon going to tellingly rename “the starers” (14), have unexpectedly out-spilled the frame of the picture, and actively occupy his private grounds, flanking his house, blocking the view on every side, “on the near side,” “on the far,” “on a boulder,” besieging him and forcing him to retreat within the house and renounce his vantage-point. Consequently, Wiltshire cannot fathom how he can suddenly have become the one framed in, the object of their straight gazes, as the stuttering and tautological formula indicates, “what they could see to gaze at, I wondered.” As they grow more numerous, and totally block the horizon, lining the beach and barring the view, Wiltshire engages in a confrontation of looks: “they stared at me […] with their bright eyes” vs. “I leaned my arms on the rail and stared back” (14), but the natives do have the upper look, and Wiltshire is forced to abandon his pedestal, to literally “come down the verandah stair,” and to mingle in, “right in the midst of a crowd,” passing “within three feet of them” (15). Wiltshire makes a last effort to keep cultural control over the situation, and to maintain the two spaces separate by resorting one last time to the aesthetic metaphor: as he comes down, the islanders are said to buzz, “like you hear in theatres when the curtain goes off” (15). Except that he is now the one on stage, the one looked out, and the 4th wall is down anyway, as everyone shares the same ground. The landscape is no longer separated and observable; it is no longer spread in front of him for his aesthetic delight, but all around him, “about the West end” and “across the river” (Stevenson, 1996, 15): it had become reclaimed territory, with the islanders who “sit [sat] their ground” (15). Wiltshire is thus led to operate a major displacement of the viewpoint, to renounce the illusion of a panoptic domineering gaze as he is flung inside the entangled territory he hoped to maintain in artistic distance and control: “I took the glass; and the shores leaped nearer, and I saw the tangle of the woods and the breach of the surf, and the brown roofs and the black insides of houses peeped among the trees” (3). The magnifying glass shortens the scope, and changes panoramic wide outlook into myopic reduced focus; the paratactic syntax speaks for the fact that elements are merely juxtaposed, that Wiltshire cannot take stock of them, cannot order the chaos of these entangled pieces of disjointed information, but only catch random fragments, bits and pieces; the systematic use of noun complements indicates an intricate meshing of relations, a complex network of interactions. The verb “to see” is euphemised and limited into the verb “to peep,” and the fantasy of a commanding vision is thus liminally questioned. Such defeat to see clearly was similarly staged in Kidnapped, with David who ineffectively “looked to see” (Stevenson, 2007, 83), and could only scratch his head when having to make sense of the territory of the Highlands: “there was

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no sign”; “It was nowhere to be seen” (92); and “At this I scratched my head, but had still no notion of the truth” (93). When Wiltshire has to engage in a territorial fight with Case and penetrate into the heart of the land, he is just as lost in island bush as David is in Highland heather. He is just as enmeshed in a resisting landscape, and the fantasized representation of the lush island, “very rich in game” (Stevenson, 1996, 45), becomes much more antagonizing and hostile as he embarks upon his “voyage of discovery” (51). The landscape once more begins to oscillate, and to become superimposed that of the Highlands, with “its sheer black cliffs,” and the sea “beating direct among crags [with] scarce a landing-place,” and the windward end laying “desert,” with “no sign of any path beyond” (45). Like David in the heather, “a piece of low, broken, desert land” (Stevenson, 2007, 154), Wiltshire has to confront “the beginning of the desert” (Stevenson, 1996, 51), but also “a part being mortal high and full of cliffs,” or “a heap of boulders” (51). Like David, crucially woven into the territory, “among the birches; now stooping behind low humps upon the mountain-side; now crawling on all fours among the heather” (121), Wiltshire is now immersed in it too, the land and the people all around him: But the queerness of the place it’s more difficult to tell of, unless to one who has been alone in the high bush himself. The brightest kind of a day it is always dim down there. A man can see to the end of nothing; whichever way he looks the wood shuts up, one bough folding with another like the fingers of your hand; and whenever he listens he hears always something new—men talking, children laughing, the strokes of an axe a far way ahead of him, and sometimes a sort of a quick, stealthy scurry near at hand that makes him jump and look to his weapons. It’s all very well for him to tell himself that he’s alone, bar trees and birds; he can’t make out to believe it; whichever way he turns the whole place seems to be alive and looking on. (Stevenson, 1996, 51) The initiation to a rephrasing of the rhetoric of landscape is here quite complete. Clarity of vision has been replaced with utter defeat of the senses, since “a man can see to the end of nothing.” The landscape is no longer displayed for aesthetic enjoyment, radically separated from the enlightened viewer, but the land closes in on the walker, and is all around him (“whichever way he looks,” “whichever way he turns”), impossible to take in at one glance, as the continuous ING aspect, the indefinite forms, the juxtaposing syntax, the nominal sentences, without ordering verbs, all highlight. Above all, the land bristles with the presence of its rightful and active owners: the figures on the chimney piece have been returned to their land and been reinstated as wood-cutters and

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workers, practising their territory. Wiltshire is helped by Uma and by Namu, who are able to pass on messages to each other in a territory they know the codes and the networks of – just as David is initiated to Highland territory by Alan and Cluny. So, Wiltshire gets access to an alternative to the cultural landscape of the outsider: he is introduced into what Jackson called “the vernacular landscape” of the insider (Jackson, 1984), the characteristics of which are that it is both practised and it consists in a network of natural and social interactions. As he emerges from the high bush after blowing Case’s indecently intrusive showcase of a manipulated landscape, Wiltshire may not have renounced his prejudices, but he has been initiated to a new vernacular interpretation of landscape, and Stevenson actually intertwines him with the land, disorienting his gaze and beautifully braiding his foreign fingers with the endemic lianas: “whichever way he looks the wood shuts up, one bough folding with another like the fingers of your hand.” I have thus tried, through close textual reading of “The Beach of Falesá” and Kidnapped to show that “The Beach of Falesá” does use Kidnapped as a favourite intertext, and that the strong network of correspondences between the two texts serves a common intention from Robert Louis Stevenson—to reassess the rhetoric of landscape, by having both protagonists evolve from aesthetic detachment to involvement with the logics of vernacular territory and thus resist, or at least displace, the common ideology of colonisation. I have thus tried to highlight the consistencies between the two texts, not I hope in an attempt “to rein in the errant author […] in defiance of his geographical and generic wanderings” (Jolly, 2009, 157), but I do feel there is “some consistence in voice, form and content” in Kidnapped and “The Beach of Falesá,” some identical political awareness that is configured through rather consistent literary form. As well as exploring the essential particulars of difference, there is an element of intense repetition in Stevenson, because as Proust put it: “Les grands littérateurs n’ont jamais fait qu’une seule œuvre, ou plutôt n’ont jamais que réfracté à travers des milieux divers une même beauté qu’ils apportent au monde” (2008, 25).3 References Buckton, Oliver S. 2007. Cruising with RLS. Travel, narrative, and the Colonial Body. Athens: Ohio University Press. 3 “Great writers have only ever written only one work, or rather refracted through different environments the same beauty they bring to the world” (my translation).

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Charteris, Evan, ed.. N.d. The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse. 1931. https://archive .org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.525249 Colley, Ann. 2004. Robert Louis Stevenson and the Colonial Imagination. Aldershot: Ashgate. Farrell, Joseph. 2017. Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. London: MacLehose Press. Jackson, John B. 1984. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jaëck, Nathalie and Xavier Amelot. 2017. “Dickens’s Pioneering Rhetoric of Landscape.” Représentations : la Revue Électronique du CEMRA. 3 October, 2017. https://hal .science/hal-01600018. Jolly, Roslyn. 2009. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific. Farnham: Ashgate. Largeaud-Ortega, Sylvie. 2012. Ainsi Soit-Île. Littérature et anthropologie dans les Contes des mers du sud de RLS. Paris : Honoré Champion. Menikoff, Barry. 2005. Narrating Scotland: the Imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press. Mitchell, W.J.T. ed. 2002. Landscape and Power. London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1994. Proust, Marcel. 2008. La Prisonnière. A la Recherche du temps perdu. Tome 5. Paris: Le livre de poche. 1923. Pugh, Simon, ed. 1990. Reading Landscape. Country – City – Capital. Manchester and New-York: Manchester University Press. Saïd, Edward. 1977. Orientalism. London: Penguin. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2001. Kidnapped. New York: The Modern Library. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1996. “The Beach of Falesá.” South Sea Tales. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1994–95. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Chapter 10

Blackbirding, Cannibalism, and the Demands of Appetite in John Cameron’s Odyssey Audrey Murfin The apparition of cannibalism, and rumours of its incidence, prompted racism against Pacific Islanders throughout the nineteenth century. This chapter looks at the portrayal of cannibalism by two very different Scottish writers at the end of the century. Both of these authors deploy the trope of cannibalism in ways that are more subtle and ambivalent than might be expected. Specifically, Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas (1896) proposes an intellectual exploration of cannibalism as a culturally relative practice, which is part of his critique of cultural imperialism. Stevenson’s ideas may have ironically (because they are deployed to opposite political ends) inspired his reader and countryman, ship captain John Cameron. Therefore, I will look at Cameron’s thoughts on the practice of cannibalism as he reflects on his own meditated act of cannibalism, and further develops the metaphor of white or European cannibalism as a justification for imperial violence and slavery in the region. In June of 1890, while on board the Janet Nicoll, Stevenson met Cameron, whose experience as one of the castaways from the mysterious 1888 wreck of The Wandering Minstrel was, at that time, well known. Cameron told Stevenson that he was writing an account of his adventures, and Stevenson wished to see it. Cameron did write his book: John Cameron’s Odyssey (1928), but not for 38 more years—34 years after Stevenson’s death. At the time that Cameron and Stevenson met, Stevenson was becoming more sensitive to regional politics in the Pacific, and particularly attentive to the various abuses that commercial colonialism was committing in the region, one of which was the labour trade, which displaced and, in some cases, enslaved Pacific Islanders to promote plantation and agricultural interests. The friendship, if such it was, between the two men was surprising for this reason: Cameron’s autobiography depicts a violent man, and attempts to justify the cruelties he perpetrated in his travels. Nevertheless, his memoir holds both historical and narrative interest as he engages the rhetoric of race in the nineteenth-century Pacific, promoting an ideal of the psychopathic white man as a natural cannibal, consuming the people and cultures of the Pacific. In order to understand Cameron’s views of cannibalism, it is first necessary to understand his role as a blackbirder and as

© Audrey Murfin, 2025 | doi:10.1163/9789004682177_012

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first mate onboard the Hawaiian “labour” ship, the Pomare. Then, I will look at Cameron’s identification with the psychopathic serial killer Adolph Jorgensen, a maroon whom Cameron met when the Wandering Minstrel was wrecked, who exemplifies Cameron’s ideals of violent white domination. Finally, I will look at how Cameron adapts Stevenson’s more tolerant views of cannibalism in order to defend the actions of whites in the Pacific. 1

John Cameron: Biographical Sketch and time on the Pomare

Born in the Highlands in 1850, Cameron left Scotland at seventeen to become a sailor. In 1880 he became first mate on board the Pomare, which was a “recruiting” or “labour” ship out of Hawaiʻi, bringing people from the New Hebrides and Gilbert Islands to work on Hawaiian sugar plantations. After the Pomare, he left Honolulu in 1887 on The Wandering Minstrel, which subsequently wrecked on Midway Island, from whence Cameron, with two companions, made a harrowing escape. In 1890 he met Stevenson and told him the story of the Minstrel, at least. In his later life, Cameron moved to Japan where he worked for Standard Oil. In 1920 he began corresponding with Andrew Farrell, a non-fiction writer with a few books about Pacific Island issues, and Farrell agreed to edit his memoirs, which Farrell published after Cameron’s death in 1925. Cameron entitles chapter six of his memoir—in which he discusses his time on board the Pomare under Captain Tripp—“A Woman’s Stocking Bank Pays my Fare to Honolulu, Whence I Go Hunting Blackbirds” (1928, 148). “Blackbirding,” a term for the kidnapping of Pacific Islanders, was practiced by Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth century to obtain labour for a variety of plantations, especially the Queensland Australia sugar plantations, which were particularly abusive (Scarr, 1967). Roslyn Jolly describes the practice of blackbirding: “At its most benign the trade was a system for gathering indentured labour; at its worst, it was a virtual revival of the slave trade” (Jolly, 2007, 158). According to Jolly, “Some degree of enticement, deception, or compulsion was needed to get indigenous labourers in sufficient numbers to work where and under the conditions Europeans wanted” (2007, 158). It is surprising that Cameron claims for himself this label of “blackbirder,” usually reserved for the cruelest offenders of the labour trade, and generally only applied to others, not to oneself. The Pomare was never meant to be a blackbirding ship; it was under a commission from the Hawaiian government to recruit more Pacific Islanders to live in the Hawaiian islands and work in their sugar plantations, which were better than those in Australia. Since the government hoped these labourers would willingly and permanently settle in the Hawaiian islands, it

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was imperative that the experience of these workers be positive. This, however, proved to not be the case. Hawaiian sugar plantations employed labourers from China, Japan, the Philippines and Korea. As Ronald Takaki has explained, the influx of labourers from these countries had a significant impact on the demographics of Hawaiʻi: “in 1872 Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians constituted 82.8 percent of the total plantation workforce” of 3,846, but ten years later, or roughly during the time that Cameron was recruiting, “the Chinese had replaced the Hawaiians as the primary source of labor: 49.1 percent (5,037 laborers) were Chinese, and only 25.1 percent (2,575 laborers) were from the native population,” and these Chinese laborers would later be supplanted by Japanese laborers in turn (1983, 28). Consequently, the Hawaiian government proposed a scheme to recruit labourers from other Pacific Islands to “preserv[e] the indigenous population by the injection of a cognate or kindred people” to counteract the perceived racial dilution (Bennett, 1976, 3). The Pomare, the Stormbird, the bark Hawaii, and several other ships were employed for this purpose (All about Hawaii, 1896, 119). In the Honolulu Advertiser, an anonymous writer argues that “men from New Hebrides” are “undoubtedly, the best field workers in the world—that is for plantation work in a hot country,” and that “100 of these men will do the work of 130 Chinamen,” and furthermore will be “the right people to supplant the Chinamen who are now overrunning the country” (“The Labor Question,” August 19, 1882: 5).1 The repopulation scheme was controversial, and many in Hawaiʻi felt that it was a waste of money, ineffective, inhumane, or all three. A number of editorials to the Honolulu Advertiser criticize the mission on both economic and moral bases, though since they are all penned anonymously it is hard to say if there was growing resentment, or simply one busy objector. In a letter to the editor, a writer using the pseudonym of X.Y.Z.2 regrets the amount of money that has been spent on outfitting ships for Hawaiian immigration, valuing the immigrants at “$50 per head” (“Apropos of Immigration,” November 20, 1880: 2). Others questioned how effective the ships were at collecting the people they were sent to collect: an editorial for the Honolulu Advertiser rues the heavy competition that the Pomare was facing in the New Hebrides, stating

1 Farrell, in a footnote to Cameron’s narrative, puts the number of “Polynesians, Micronesians, and Melanesians” recruited to Hawaiʻi between 1859 and 1885 at 2,444 people (Cameron, 1928, 431). 2 Possible George Gressly Jackson, see “Correspondence,” Honolulu Advertiser, December 25, 1880: 4.

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no fewer than seven full-sized craft are stated to be about among those islands recruiting; nor is there a nook or corner unworked whence recruits could be drawn … . By this it may be guessed the speedy return of the Pomare from that far-off region with anything like a full load of people is, to say the least, problematical. ( “Our Immigration Field,” September 4, 1880: 2) Still others questioned the humanity of the mission. Many complaints mention the disreputable actions of the ship the Stormbird, which Cameron’s friend Jim McLean had taken passage on shortly before Cameron himself joined the Pomare (Cameron, 1928, 152). One writer laments that, if not for British and French government intervention, the Stormbird’s poor reputation would have “stamped [Hawaiian government vessel’s] reputation in the South Seas as ‘kidnappers’” (“Apropos of Immigration,” 2).3 Another writer in the Honolulu Advertiser demands a death rate of the recent immigrants to discover “how many of the poor creatures themselves have laid down their lives, victims to the increase in the manufacture of sugar,” and quotes missionary Hiram Bingham II as saying there are “few who would not demand the return passage to their homes” (“Correspondence”, October 30, 1880: 2). Since the government of Hawaiʻi hoped that those recruited would choose to stay in Hawaiʻi when their labour terms had expired, the mission relied on the humanity and legality of the ships that it hired. According to the Minister of the Interior and President of the Board of Immigration, Samuel Wilder, who published his report in the Honolulu Advertiser, “The board agrees that all who desire shall at the expiration of their three year contracts, be returned to their homes; but expect that they will, at least the majority, make these Islands their home” (“Report of Captain Jackson,” November 9, 1878: 3). Because its goal was voluntary resettlement, they needed potential recruits to hear that the work was good, was fairly paid, and that the word of the recruiters could be relied upon. It is therefore ironic that Cameron and the others onboard the Pomare acted with the carelessness, cruelty and illegality that they displayed during their mission. Part of Cameron’s claim that he is innocent of the worst abuses of blackbirding relies on the argument that the Hawaiian system was more humane. While it was generally true that recruitment that was sponsored by the Hawaiian government and overseen by the British (which the Pomare was) was less abusive 3 The Stormbird had been recruiting for the harsher Australian plantations. William Wawn, whose own narrative is discussed below, was on the Stormbird at the time that it was recruiting for Australia (The South Sea Islanders and the Queensland Labour Trade, 1893, 155).

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than other blackbirding ships, the Pomare failed to adhere to the British and Hawaiian rules (Bennett, 1976, 8). Bennett notes that the Pomare had the highest number of fatalities of any similar Hawaiian labour ship (13), though Cameron takes for granted that such fatalities are to be expected because, in his words, “brown-skinned peoples succumb easily” (Cameron, 1928, 206). There is thus an irony in Cameron’s argument that he, and the Pomare, did their best to mitigate the worst offenses of the labour industry. Quite the opposite—the Pomare, in its violence, overstepped its own mandate. In response to pressure that the ships were not picking up enough people to recoup expenses, the Pomare increased the aggressiveness of its recruiting by taking on a so-called “recruiter,” Jimmy Kerrigan, or Cadigan, a notorious half-Irish, half-Fijian blackbirder also known as “Jimmy the Devil” (1928, 162). The most egregious crime that Cameron narrates occurred on the island of Aurora (Maewo), when a man who volunteered as a recruit changed his mind and escaped. Kerrigan determined in revenge to kidnap twelve “involuntary recruits” from the village that was sheltering him. When this fails, he and Cameron raid the village, killing all of their livestock, stealing their food and burning their huts to the ground (187–88). The recruits and abductees who survived their trip to Hawaiʻi onboard the Pomare were more fortunate than other labourers in the region in one regard: as labourers on the Hawaiian sugar plantations they were indeed released at the end of their terms, although once again the crew of the Pomare, including Cameron, managed to make things worse. After their three-year term was concluded, Captain Jenks of the Elsinore dropped them at Havannah Harbour in Efate; presumably, he didn’t know where else to take them, since the Pomare had not fulfilled its legal duty of recording names and places of origin for the labourers (Bennett, 1976, 11). Further complicating the matter is a lack of clarity about who had the right to determine if young men and women were able to leave on a labour ship, since it was not enough that the recruit him or herself wished to go; the elders of a village also had to agree, or be compensated. Nicholas Thomas, drawing on the account of William Wawn, a “recruiter” for the harsher Queensland plantations, notes the common practice of giving gifts to the relatives of the recruits, but reluctantly acknowledges that “these presentations were a form of compensation, emphatically not purchase” (2010, 226). Wawn cites the sacrifice the loss of a warrior would be for a small community: “To take a recruit in the presence of his friends without ‘paying’ for him, however willing he might be to go himself, would be, at any rate, extremely dangerous” (Wawn, 1893, 11). Cameron, however, explicitly mentions buying unwilling recruits from local leaders: “Had a native refused to indenture he probably would have suffered

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death. Our unfortunate twenty-one had left their homes that morning with never an idea that they would be sold like cattle […]” (Cameron, 1928, 180). On the other hand, many young people, especially in Cameron’s account, left their islands without permission. According to Scarr, “A considerable portion of the recruits obtained by labour vessels were runaways from the community” including adulterous couples and “ill-used wives” (1967, 15–16). With the addition of Jimmy Kerrigan to the crew, the Pomare more commonly takes their recruits by stealth without the permission of local leaders. On the island of Api, no one will go on board, but Kerrigan insists they anchor just off shore overnight, at which time twenty-three men and women sneak aboard (Cameron, 1928, 172). Further down the beach, Kerrigan and Cameron engage in a gun fight with the men, while women run for their ship (174–75).4 Naturally, those such as Cameron who participated in the labour trade tended to defend the right of young men and women to depart their islands with or without the authorization of elders; however, they also acknowledged the right of those same elders to sell, or trade labourers when it worked in their favour. Cameron condemns the brutality of blackbirding, and gives the brutal treatment of slaves on Sāmoa by the Germans as a reason that they have difficulty finding recruits. It was, according to Thomas, “a truism of the trade that a ship might be attacked because of some offence perpetuated by a previous recruiter” (Thomas, 2010, 228). Thus, Cameron’s rhetoric is typical in its appeal to some other, crueler, recruiter as the reason for distrust. 2

The Wandering Minstrel

It was seven years later that Cameron became famous for his involvement in the wreck of the Wandering Minstrel, a media sensation followed by many readers, including the Stevensons. The Minstrel departed Honolulu in December 1887, purportedly to fish for sharks, but Farrell and Fanny Stevenson both felt it was more likely smuggling opium (Fanny Stevenson, 1925, 454). On board were Cameron, Captain Frederick Dunbar Walker, Walker’s wife and two sons, and an international crew. The ship anchored in the harbour of Midway Island, where they met Adolph Jorgensen, a Danish sailor who was marooned there. Jorgensen explained that after the wreck of his previous schooner, the General Seigel, a number of officers were mysteriously murdered. When the rest of the Seigel crew escaped, they abandoned Jorgensen because they believed 4 By describing the women as “female slaves,” Cameron casts his actions as liberatory.

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he was the killer, which Olsen, Jorgensen’s former shipmate on the Seigel also explained to the Honolulu Advertiser in 1900 (“Murder Done in Southern Seas,” August 17, 1900: 6). Soon after, the Minstrel herself wrecked in Midway’s harbour, for reasons that are contested. Cameron blames the wreck on Captain Walker’s incompetence, or, worse, insinuates it may have been a deliberate decision by the captain, who did not wish to be accountable for the failure of his “shark fishing” mission (1928, 271). However, the official wreck report contradicts this account, stating that Walker had “managed his vessel in a seamanlike and proper manner […]” (“Wreck Report for the Wandering Minstrel,” 1889).5 Cameron then decided to secretly escape Midway in one of the ship’s boats, choosing for his companions Jorgensen and a Chinese cook whom he names “Moses,” chosen because he is “young, fat, and tender” (Cameron, 1928, 299).6 Cameron reasons that he and Jorgensen can eat him if things go poorly. The three men barely made it alive to Mille Island. Meanwhile, Walker, his family, and the crew remained on Midway, until their rescue by the ship the Norma. According to the Honolulu Advertiser, all of the Walkers contracted scurvy after subsisting on only eggs for so long, including one son quite severely, and a crew member died of the disease (“Wandering Minstrel,” April 8, 1889: 3). Later, Captain Walker accused Cameron of neglecting to report that the rest of the crew remained marooned on Midway when he reaches civilization, an accusation that Cameron denied. Although I am following Cameron’s adventures after the wreck of the Minstrel, it was Walker’s experiences that Stevenson revisited in his novel The Wrecker; however, based on Stevenson’s interviews with Cameron, it is likely he also planned to write about Cameron’s experiences. Fanny describes their meeting in her diary, The Cruise of the Janet Nichol, He was one of the men of the Wandering Minstrel that was so mysteriously wrecked on Midway Island, and was afterward charged by the captain with not reporting the fact of there being other starving castaways left on Midway when he was rescued […]. Louis got this much from Cameron—but I am sure very little, if any, of it is true—that he had written an account of the wreck which, with the log he kept on the boat, had been left on one of the islands we are about to visit, for safe-keeping. Before

5 “See the report reproduced at Portcities: Southampton, ID 15758, Plimsoll, 2008. http://www. plimsoll.org/resources/SCCLibraries/WreckReports/15758.asp 6 I’ve chosen to refer to this man in quotes throughout, since “Moses” is not his name but rather a nickname that Cameron foists on him.

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Cameron left he had given Louis a signed order for the apocryphal manuscript. (Fanny Stevenson, 2004, 142–43)7 It is a thrilling story, and it is unexpected that Stevenson would restrict his use of it in his fiction to the episode where the captain of the Norma shakes down Walker, which inspired the climactic violence in The Wrecker. But there is evidence that Stevenson meant to make more use of it. Writing to Sidney Colvin in June 1889 Stevenson notes that By the time I am done with this cruise I shall have the material for a very singular book of travels: masses of strange stories and characters, cannibals, pirates, ancient legends, old Polynesian poetry; never was so generous a farrago. I am going down now to get the story of a shipwrecked family, who were fifteen months on an island with a murderer: there is a specimen. (Stevenson, 1994–5, 8: 312) It does seem a shame that Stevenson, who frequently designed fictional characters after real people, would never do anything with the murderer Adolf Jorgensen. A reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser in 1900 wrote “Connected with the loss of the Wandering Minstrel is a story of the sea which if told in all its details would furnish material for a novel that would be worthy of the efforts of a Stevenson or a Defoe” (“Survivors Now Here,” August 15, 1900: 3). Is Jorgensen guilty? Is he criminally insane? And why would any person in Cameron’s situation, choosing a companion, choose a suspected serial killer over the crew he had been traveling with for months? In his interview with Jorgensen’s shipmate Olsen, Farrell writes: “‘Was Jorgensen pupule?’ I asked Olsen. ‘Pupule’ is a Hawaiian word meaning insane. ‘No,’ replied Olsen, ‘but he was lolo.’ ‘Lolo’ signifies ‘soft,’ silly, imbecile. It denotes weakness of mind rather than insanity” (Farrell, in Cameron, 1928, 438). In another account, Olsen describes how a naked Jorgensen threatened him by pushing the barrel of his gun to his chest, but afterwards begged to be tied up so that his shipmates would take him with them (“Murder Done in Southern Seas,” 6). But this account of Jorgensen as silly or weak of mind is unsatisfactory, since he, Crusoe-like, survives on Midway alone with remarkable resourcefulness, collecting thousands of eggs and building a veranda onto a small cabin on the island. Cameron’s own admiration of Jorgensen is because of, not in spite of, his violent nature, perhaps even his insanity. Cameron has an idea of the superior 7 Fanny Stevenson’s diary misspells the name of the ship, which was the Janet Nicoll.

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mental toughness of whites in the Pacific, and he argues that whites taking land, or labour, in the Pacific is both natural and inevitable because of the superior organizational skills and greater aggressiveness of white people. Jorgensen is ultra-violent, but also ultra-competent, in contrast to Captain Walker, who Cameron represents as an incompetent family man who has difficulty managing his crew. While on Midway, Cameron offers to assist Walker by shooting rebellious crew members (Cameron, 1928, 285). Walker refuses, marking him in Cameron’s mind as weak—the kind of man who cannot do what must be done. However, before the story is done, Jorgensen proves a disappointment. On the journey, he suffers from despair and hallucinations—the sure sign of mental illness in Cameron’s view, but perhaps only the expected results of starvation. By the time they arrive on Mille Island, Jorgensen is so weak he has to be lifted out of the boat. “Moses” proves more psychologically able to handle trauma, which disgusts Cameron, who refers to the Chinese as “the worst sailors of all” (Cameron, 1928, 233).8 As they part ways, Cameron tells Jorgensen “‘Yes, I forgive you, Jorgensen, I hope you’ll prove yourself the man I thought you were’” (324–35). Jorgensen’s failure to outperform “Moses” in the extreme endurance the journey requires upsets the racial categories that Cameron has in mind. Cameron’s sense of Jorgensen’s superiority is reinforced in his discussion of another white man from the Minstrel, cook Frank Lord. Before Cameron departed the island, Lord pre-empted them, escaping Midway on a boat with three crew members. The four were never heard from again, presumed dead. Cameron imagines the fate of these first defectors, floating without a hand at the tiller, while the corpses of men who had starved to death, jostled one another in the bottom [of the boat … ​] Of this much I feel sure: Lord was the last to perish, for he was a white man and had a revolver and ammunition with which to quell his crew and perhaps secure for himself what food remained. (Cameron, 1928, 301)

8 Fanny Stevenson notes that “‘Mosey’, the Chinaman who was in the boat with Cameron, was afterward wrecked again on the Tiernan, the schooner we so nearly took passage in ourselves, when we were accidentally marooned at Apemama during a former cruise” (The Cruise of the Janet Nichol 2004, 140). Cameron reveals that he runs into “Moses” again, now the successful owner of a trading station on Tarawa (Cameron, John Cameron’s Odyssey, 1928, 354). Jorgenson becomes a blackbirder until he dies of a fever in Mexico (355).

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The cannibalistic threat is less explicit, though because of the similarity to Cameron’s own boat ride, it is implied. Cameron identifies with Lord’s imagined domination and violent insatiability, racially coded as white. 3 Cannibalism The historical reality of cannibalism in the Pacific is the subject of debate. Asking if stories of cannibals eating missionaries in the Pacific is “just the result of white racism, or does it have a historical basis?” Patrick Brantlinger concludes “The answer appears to be both” (2011, 28). Regardless, cannibalism was a persistent theme in the construction of Victorian racial categories, and Victorian racism. According to Paul Lyons, “Euro-American texts have posited cannibalism as the mark of difference between westerners and Pacific Islanders since contact” (Lyons, 1995, 38). By linking the cannibal to the monster, Gananath Obeyesekere shows how the rhetoric of cannibalism created a hard line between civilization and savagery, to make certain people irrefutably other and thereby justify the civilizing missions of Europeans (2005, 13). Without doubt, the discourse has been used in this way, but not by John Cameron. Rather, Cameron’s writing on the topic attempts to blur cannibalism’s ability to create hard racial distinctions. Instead of using the cannibal label to justify his real crimes against those he “recruits,” Cameron embraces the label for himself, and makes it part of the adventure of the “Age of Sail” (Cameron, 1928, 2). Whenever Cameron discusses cannibalism, it is never a problem. It is almost always the victim’s fault, even when that victim is white. Here, he describes feeling at risk as he “recruits” around the island of Tanna: […] I kept on the alert, watching every movement of the natives, suspecting that they only awaited a favorable opportunity to gratify their insatiable appetite for human flesh. Much of that dish, indeed, had been devoured; but many whites who lost their lives were themselves to blame […]. (Cameron, 1928, 197) White people, Cameron argues, are to blame because they drink too much, are overfamiliar, or because “hundreds of bucks and Marys had been kidnapped and compelled to labour on the plantations of Samoa and Fiji, where they were treated brutally” (197). Scarr confirms that “Some of the attacks made on Europeans by islanders … ​were reprisals for actions by recruiters” (14). In Cameron’s view, cannibalism is only just revenge for the very labour practices in which he is currently engaged.

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Cameron was an avid Stevenson reader, even citing less popular works, such as Prince Otto (1928, 353), and Stevenson’s literary imagination pervades his narrative. Take for instance his description of his first sighting of the crew of The Wandering Minstrel, which owes its imagery to the pirates in Treasure Island: “They could have fitted perfectly into a picture of buccaneers of the Spanish Main if they had only had red sashes about their waist, cutlasses in their belts, braces of pistols in their hands, and above them the Jolly Roger” (242). It stands to reason then, that after having met Stevenson, Cameron would have an interest in Stevenson’s non-fiction accounts of the Pacific, In the South Seas. After all, these writings were about the very regions and people that both men knew. For Stevenson, an attempt to understand cannibalism is part of his wish to be “out of the shadow of the Roman empire” (Stevenson, 1998, 9), and he compares the practice of cannibalism to killing and eating a pig, an animal that, in his description, has “like appetites, passions, and organs as ourselves” (68). He argues that cannibals “were not cruel; apart from this custom, they are a race of the most kindly; rightly speaking, to eat a man’s flesh after he is dead is far less hateful than to oppress him whilst he lives” (70). In Stevenson’s case, this is a mere intellectual exercise—a sort of a formal argument to demonstrate his ability to think from another perspective. It doesn’t mean that he actually sanctions cannibalism, still less that he is curious to try it.9 Stevenson is responding to missionaries and others who invoked cannibalism as proof that Pacific Islanders were savages. Both Stevenson and Cameron reject this narrative. Cameron takes Stevenson’s arguments about cannibalism and extends them to their immoral, logical conclusion. Stevenson’s move is to humanize the pig, where Cameron dehumanizes the victim of cannibalism, and argues for appetite as a mandate that justifies any behaviour. Cameron rants about the circumstances of missionary John Williams, murdered at Erromango years earlier in 1839:10 9 Stevenson’s ideas of cannibalism were not unique to him. American anthropologist Frederick Starr made the news just a few years later defending the practice in a lecture at the University of Chicago. Starr discussed cannibalism committed in New Britain where some Germans were eaten, and concludes that the Germans deserved it. (“Reasons for Cannibalism,” Honolulu Advertiser August 15, 1900: 3.) See also “Justifies Cannibalism.” New York Times August 12, 1903: 1. 10 Fanny Stevenson reports on a joke Robert Louis Stevenson made at the missionary’s expense when the family saw Erromango from their ship. Punning on the name of the island, he declared that “the martyr Williams […]died from trying to eat [a mango] with too short a spoon” (Fanny Stevenson, 2004, 195). As the first missionary to visit Sāmoa, Williams was well-known to the Stevensons, but by this time he was more of a historical than a contemporary character.

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Why did the missionaries persist in such stupidity? The natives and their so-called immortal souls were not worth the life of one white man. Is there no great scale somewhere by which we may ascertain the relative values of some lives here and of others throughout eternity? The brown and black peoples should have been allowed to manage their own affairs as they pleased, heathenism, infanticide, cannibalism, and all. Without the slaughter of infants to repress the huge reproductive potentialities of man, to what would those Pacific islands have come? Without cannibalism, where would the people have got red meat?—not fish but good flesh? What did the white men do? First came traders; then missionaries—and I hesitate to say which class was more powerful “at home.” Then men-of-war. Afterward, the climax and catastrophe: annexation: grab, grab, grab. Humanity, or at least the white breed thereof, is never satisfied. (Cameron, 1928, 166–67) First, Cameron argues that the life of one white man is worth more than the souls of innumerable non-white people, so Williams should not have risked his life to convert anyone. Second, Cameron echoes Stevenson’s defense of cannibalism. His reference to “not fish but good flesh,” recalls Stevenson’s similar argument that when “vegetables can no longer satisfy” a man “begins to lust after flesh-pots” (Stevenson, 1998, 71). Third, Cameron critiques the actions of white traders and missionaries in the region, who are destroying Pacific culture. It is unexpected to find Cameron defending Pacific culture from the missionaries mere sentences after he has devalued the lives and souls of nonwhite people, but this call for cultural non-interference (also one of Stevenson’s main arguments in In the South Seas) is consistent through his autobiography. Finally, Cameron’s ends with a critique of the appetite of the “white breed” that must always “grab, grab, grab” and is “never satisfied,” phrasing that calls back to the cannibalism discussed in the middle part of the passage. This critique is also a boast, however, when we think of Cameron’s own easy acceptance of the cannibal role when he plans to eat “Moses,” as well as his sense of Jorgensen and Frank Lord’s imagined unscrupulous cannibalistic domination over nonwhite crew members. Cameron’s attitude is quite different from Stevenson’s own wariness towards blackbirding. In his discussion of the Australian (not Hawaiian) sugar plantations, Stevenson finds himself caught between defending the recruiting of labour for Queensland plantations and condemning the practice of “blackbirding.” Australian sugar plantations, like those in Hawaiʻi, largely made use of indentured labour, principally Melanesian (Scarr, 1967, 9). Stevenson argues that overpopulation on certain Pacific atolls is unsustainable, and that legal

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recruiting fills a need for both Queensland and the atolls in question, but also say “there has never been anywhere in the world anything more hideous than the labour traffic,” acknowledging too that determining whether any given recruits are voluntary or not is impossible (2008, 115, 113). Roslyn Jolly in her readings of Fanny Stevenson’s diaries emphasizes that Fanny Stevenson too had a growing awareness and hostility to the blackbirding institution (2007, 150), perhaps even more consistently than her husband. Stevenson contradicts himself saying both that “I have talked continually with blackbirders,” but also saying that as to whether blackbirding is currently practiced in the islands, “I do not know; nor can anyone” (2008, 115, 116). So, it isn’t exactly clear whether he counts Captain Cameron among those “blackbirders” he “knows,” or whether he would have considered Cameron a blackbirder at all, though Cameron refers to himself as a “blackbirder” explicitly (Cameron, 1928, 153). The contradictions speak to the uneasy gray area that the labour trade represented, wherein figures such as John Cameron operated in a space between the worst imaginable illegal actions and legal recruiting services. Cameron would have read Stevenson’s In the South Seas, with its larger concerns about depopulation in the Pacific Islands and the decline of Pacific culture in the face of missionary and mercantile incursions, and there is evidence in the book that Cameron has sympathy for this position; in fact, he often parrots many of Stevenson’s precise concerns. In his preface to the autobiography, Farrell apologizes for Cameron’s belief that “white men collectively and individually robbed the natives of their land” (Cameron, 1928, xi). Farrell seems to feel that it is Cameron’s sympathy with dispossessed islanders that opens this text to criticism, rather than his intolerable racism. And yet, Cameron’s narrative demonstrates that it is possible to critique the worst abuses of colonialism while still participating in those very abuses. Like Robinson Crusoe, to whom he makes frequent reference, Cameron is a casuist, using his autobiography to justify his crimes. Cannibalism becomes a controlling metaphor through which he does so. By renaming violence as appetite, Cameron is able to naturalize his actions as a blackbirder, and more largely, justify larger political land and power grabs as inevitable. References All about Hawaii: The Recognized Book of Authentic Information on Hawaii, Combined with Thrum’s Hawaiian Annual and Standard Guide. 1896. Honolulu Star-Bulletin. “Apropos of Immigration.” Honolulu Advertiser, November 20, 1880: 2.

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Bennett, J. A. 1976. “Immigration, ‘Blackbirding’, Labour Recruiting? The Hawaiian Experience 1877–1887.” The Journal of Pacific History, 11 no. 1: 3–27. www.jstor.org /stable/25168248. Brantlinger, Patrick. 2011. Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cameron, John. 1928. John Cameron’s Odyssey. Edited by Andrew Farrell. New York: Macmillan. “Correspondence.” Honolulu Advertiser, October 30, 1880: 2. “Correspondence.” Honolulu Advertiser, December 25, 1880: 4. Jolly, Roslyn. 2007. “Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 35 no. 1: 157–173. https://www.jstor .org/stable/40347129. Jolly, Roslyn. 2007. “Women’s Trading in Fanny Stevenson’s The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol.’” In Economies of Representation, 1790–2000: Colonialism and Commerce. Edited by Helen Gilbert and Leigh Dale. Farnham Surrey: Ashgate. Lyons, Paul. 1995. “From Man-Eaters to Spam-Eaters: Literary Tourism and the Discourse of Cannibalism from Herman Melville to Paul Theroux.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 51, 2 (Summer): 32–62. https:// doi.org/10.1353/arq.1995.0016 “Murder Done in Southern Seas.” The Honolulu Advertiser, August 17, 1900: 6. Obeyesekere, Gananath. 2005. Cannibal Talk: The Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press. “Our Immigration Field.” The Honolulu Advertiser, September 4, 1880: 2. Scarr, Deryck. 1967. “Recruits and Recruiters: A Portrait of the Pacific Islands Labour Trade.” The Journal of Pacific History 2: 5–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25167892. Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift. 2004. The Cruise of the Janet Nichol among the South Sea Islands: A Diary by Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Roslyn Jolly. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift. 1925. Preface. The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Scribner’s. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1998. In the South Seas. Edited by Neil Rennie. New York: Penguin Classics. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 2008. “The Labour Traffic.” In Sophia Scarlet and Other Pacific Writings. Edited by Robert Hoskins, 113–20. Auckland: AUT Media. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1994–95. The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, 8 vols, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994–95. “Survivors Now Here.” Honolulu Advertiser August 15, 1900: 3. Takaki, Ronald. 1983. Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii 1835–1920. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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“The Labor Question.” The Honolulu Advertiser, August 19, 1882: 5. Thomas, Nicholas. 2010. Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press. “Wandering Minstrel.” Honolulu Advertiser, April 8, 1889: 3. Wawn, William T. 1893. The South Sea Islanders and the Queensland Labour Trade: A Record of Voyages and Experiences in the Western Pacific 1875–1891. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Google books. Wilder, Samuel G. “Report of Captain Jackson and the Hawaiian Brig ‘Storm-Bird.” Honolulu Advertiser, November 9, 1878: 3. “Wreck Report for the Wandering Minstrel.” 2008. 1889. Board of Trade. Reproduced at Portcities: Southampton, ID 15758, Plimsoll. Web. February 6, 2015. http://www .plimsoll.org/resources/SCCLibraries/WreckReports/15758.asp

Index Adirondacks 66 ahupua’a 64 Aiblins 27–30 aitu 134 Alan Wiltshire 144 Alexander Selkirk 31–33, 35, 36, 38–44 Ailes, Katie 27 Anthrax Island 10 Aotearoa 16, 18, 20 Aoteroa New Zealand 17, 18, 24, 26, 28, 29 Apia 98–100, 104 Arabian Nights 8, 83 Arun Sood 28 Atlantic 1–2, 47, 75, 78, 86 Australia 1, 26, 78, 130, 155, 165 Bachelard, Gaston 87 Ballantyne, Printers 54 Ballantyne, R. M. 6 Ballantyne, R. M., works The Battery and the Boiler Or Adventures in the laying of Submarine Electric Cables 80 Banks, Joseph 47 Barrie, J. M. 6, 28, 34, 143 Basilikon Doron 62 Beattie, James 12 Bennett, J. A. 156, 158 Bhabha 18, 29 Black and White Magazine 8 blackbirding 2, 8, 154–55, 157, 159, 165 Black Lives Matter 1 Blackwood’s Magazine 6, 7, 45, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54, 84 Blackwood, William 55 Blair, Hugh 49 Blake, William 74 Brémond, Huberd 10 Brexit 27 Bright, Abigail Kuahelani Maipinepine 3 British Museum 87–88 Brown, George Mackay 6, 10, 11, 13, 14 Burns, Robert 4, 16, 69

Burns, Robert, works Wandering Willie 69–70 Cadigan, Jimmy. See  Kerrigan, Jimmy Cambridge 83 Cameron, John 154–166 John Cameron’s Odyssey 154, 162 Campbell, Archibald 12 Campbell, James 3 Canada 60 cannibalism 34, 154, 163–165 Captain James Cook 1, 12, 26, 45, 46, 84 Caribbean 1, 36, 42 Caroutch, Yvonne 87 Casco 128, 129 castaway narrative. See  Robinsonade Chaldee Manuscript 51 Charles Edward Stuart, Prince 49 Charles I 59, 60 Cherokee 46 Chesterton, G. K. 112, 126 China 1, 82, 156 Chinatown 72 Chinese 72, 73, 128, 131, 156, 160, 162 Clarke, A. C. 27 Cleghorn, Archibald Scott 3, 5, 13 Cleghorn, James 51 colonialism 1, ,2 4, 5, 21, 27, 28, 46, 48, 49, 62, 70, 99, 128, 154, 166 Colvin, Sidney 4, 7, 86, 130, 132, 136, 141, 161 Constable, Archibald 51 Cook, Captain James 1, 6, 12, 45–47, 52, 84 Cope, Sister Marianne 9 Cowper, William 33, 43 Crusoe. See  Robinson Crusoe Culloden 60 Darien 2 David Balfour 142, 144 David Forrest 27 Defoe, Daniel 6, 31, 32, 36, 40–42 depopulation 129 devolution 16, 17, 21, 23 dia-colonial 17, 21, 22, 25, 27–29

170 dia-colonialism 22, 25, 28 diaspora 1, 27 Dickens, Charles 68 Donne, John 120 Douglass, Frederick 31 Dundas, Henry 1, 2, 14 Dunedin 16 Dutch East Indies 82 Easter Island. See  Rapa Nui Edinburgh 1, 3, 4, 6, 13, 14, 16, 29, 29, 30, 77 Edinburgh Review 54, 55 Edward I 62 Elsinore 158 emblem literature 120, 121, 123, 124, 126 Empire imperial 16–18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27–30 Endeavour, The 47 Enlightenment 81 enlightened 47, 53 Erromango 164 Fanny Stevenson 131, 138 Farrell, Andrew 155, 156, 159, 161, 166 Father Damien De Veuster 9 Father Laval 137 Fleming, Sandford 76 Forster, Johann Georg 47 France 9, 72 Furneaux, Captain Tobias 47 Galt, John 6, 46, 51 Gardiner, Michael 17–19 General Seigel 159, 160 George IV 6, 45, 50, 52 Gilbert Islands 77, 86, 132 Gilbertese 132 Ginzburg, Carlo 7, 10, 92, 94 Glasgow 27, 46, 49, 79 Glengarry, Alasdair Ranaldson Macdonell of 50, 57 Goodrich. See  Samuel G. Goodrich Gorodé, Déwé 10 Grace, Patricia 20 Gray, Alasdair 17, 19, 22, 25, 26, 28 1982, Janine 25 Graeme Morton 20 Gramsci 25 Greenvoe. See  Brown, George Mackay Greenwich 9, 76, 81, 82, 83 Grendi, Edoardo 95

Index Gruinard Island. See  Anthrax Island Hamlet 110, 127 Harrison, John 84 Hau’ofa, Epeli 10 Hawai‘i 2–5, 7-9, 12–15, 26, 45, 56, 58, 72, 129, 156, 158, 165 Hawaiian. See  Hawai‘i Hawaiian Renaissance 4 Hawaiians. See Hawai‘i Highland Clearances 5 Highlanders 143, 145 Highlands 9, 143, 150 Hinewehi Mohi 20 Hiro, Henri 10 Hogg, James 7 Honolulu 5, 8, 58, 84, 155, 156, 159 Honolulu Advertiser 156, 157, 160, 161, 164 Hulme, Keri 20, 24 imperialism 29, 81, 82, 92, 93, 96–99, 100, 101, 117, 149, 154 independence 16–19, 21, 23, 25, 27 India 60, 66, 67, 78 Indigeneity 58 See Greenwich Ireland 37, 50, 51 Isla Alejandro Selkirk 41 Jackson, George Gressly 156, 157 Jacobite 58, 60, 69 James, Henry 78, 98, 117 James I 62 Janet Nichol 131, 138, 140, 141, 154 Jenks, Captain 158 Johnson, Samuel 49, 56, 120–122 Jorgensen, Adoph 155, 159–162, 165 Juan Fernandez 31, 36, 41, 43 “Kanaka” 130 Kaho‘olawe 9, 11 Ka‘iulani, Princess Victoria 3, 5, 13 Kalākaua, King David 3–5 Kalaupapa. See  Moloka‘i kanaka 130, 133, 135, 137, 139, 141 Kerrigan, Jimmy 158, 159 King Solomon’s Mines 135, 140 Kiribati 21, 27, 137 Lanark 25 Laupepa, King Malietoa 82

171

Index Levi, Giovanni 7, 10, 92, 94 Likelike, Princess 3 Lili‘uokalani, Queen 3, 4, 59 literary piracy 33, 42 Liverpool Poets 28 Lockhead, Liz Lochhead, Liz 17, 19, 22–26, 28–30 London 16, 22, 25, 26, 28, 45, 46, 49, 50, 78, 81, 83, 85, 87–89, 111, 115, 129, 135 London, Jack 137, 141 Lowlander 144 Macpherson, James 12 Ossian 49, 57 Mahican 46 Mai 45–50, 53, 55, 56. See  Omai Malinowski, Bronislaw 104 Mangareva 129, 137 Manihiki 131 Manning, John 120, 124–127 Manutahi, Charles 10 Māori 10, 16–18, 20, 21, 24, 29 Marquesas 129 Marshall Islands 9 Mary Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off 23, 30 Mary Queen of Scots 23, 30 Mataafa 93, 99, 102 Maui. See  Hawai‘i metaphysical poetry 111, 120–122, 126 Midway Island 72, 155, 159–162 miscegenation 3, 5, 131–133, 135, 145 mise-en-abyme 110 Moloka‘i 8. See Hawai‘i Mumbai 78 Native American 66, 67, 128 NATO 10 naturalism 108, 118, 119, 126 New Caledonia 26 New York 16, 60, 63, 65 New Zealand 1, 78. See  Aotearoa noble savage 45–47 Norma 160, 161 North, Christopher, 8, See Wilson, John 55 Oahu 8, 13. See Hawai‘i Ohtere, Ralph 10 Omai 6, 7, 12, 45, 46, 48–51 Orkney 10 Osbourne, Lloyd 72, 107, 108, 119

“Oscar and Malvina” 12 Otago 16, 29 Otaheite 45, 48, 51, 53, 54 Outer Hebrides 10 Panama 2 pantomime 48 Pape‘ete 83, 85, 107, 113-115, 118, 138, 139 parabolic literature 122–124 Peter Pan. See  Barrie, J. M. Philippines, The 82 pirate 32, 36, 37, 41,63, 112, 113, 116, 161, 164 Pitman, Henry 36, 44 Pitman. See  Henry Pitman Point Venus 83 Pomare 155–159 post-colonialism 11, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 28, 29, 92, post-structural 11 Prime Meridian 76. See also Greenwich Pringle, Thomas 51 Quarles, Francis 111, 116, 117, 119–124, 126, 127 Queensland, Australia 155, 157, 158, 165, 166 Queen Victoria 1 Raiatea 47 Ramsay, Allan (painter) 6, 49 Rapa Nui 88 Rawiri Paratene 20 referendum referenda 1, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27 refugee 27, 47, 48 Reynolds, Joshua 6, 49, 56 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 6 Robertson, James 1, 21 Robert the Bruce 51 Robinsonade 32, 34 Robinson Crusoe 6, 31–44, 161, 166 Rogers, Woodes 37, 38, 44 Rogers. See  Woodes Rogers Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48 Said, Edward 148 Sāmoa 4–7, 9, 12, 81, 92, 98, 100, 101, 130, 131, 143, 153, 159, 164 Sāmoans 99, 102, 129, 130 Sāmoan Civil War 92, 101 Samuel G. Goodrich’s 31 San Francisco 13, 72 Scottish Gaelic 16, 53, 149

172 Scott, Sir Walter 4, 49, 51, 57, 58 Scott, Sir Walter, works Redgauntlet 5, 58–64, 68, 69 Ivanhoe 4 The Pirate 6 Waverley 4, 8, 13, 49, 58, 62 Waverley Novels 8 Selcraig, Brian 31, 32, 37, 38, 41, 42 Selkirk, Alexander 6, 31–33, 36-42 Seven Years War 59 Shakespeare, William 7, 24, 110 Sharp, Granville 47, 57 Shuggie Bain 28 Skelt’s Juvenile Drama 111, 112, 116 Skeltery 113–115 slave trade. See blackbirding Smith, Ali 10 Social Darwinism 129 Solway Firth 63 sovereignty 1, 5, 7, 9, 58–70, 135 Spitz, Chantal 10 stadial stadialism 46 Stevenson, Fanny 78, 159–162, 164, 166 The Cruise of the Janet Nichol 160, 162 Stevenson, Fanny de Grift 78 Stevenson, Robert Louis 2–15, 58, 72, 161 Stevenson, Robert Louis, works A Child’s Garden of Verses 74–77, 80, 86 A Footnote to History 7, 92–94, 96, 97, 99–104 In the South Seas 154, 164–166 Prince Otto 164 A New Form of Intermittent Light 78 David Balfour 3 Kidnapped 3, 6, 11, 59, 142–147, 149, 150, 152 Markheim 7 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin 79 Records of a Family of Engineers 79 Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 2, 3 The Beach of Falesá 3, 6, 10, 11, 107, 128, 131, 133, 136 137, 138, 139, 140, 142–149, 152 The Body Snatcher 7 The Bottle Imp 3, 7, 104, 108 The Ebb-Tide 8, 10, 83, 85–87, 107–115, 117–120, 122, 124–126, 128, 130, 136, 139, 140, 149

Index The Isle of Voices 3, 8, 107 The Master of Ballantrae 5, 13, 58–60, 63–65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 87, 107 The Silverado Squatters 80 In the South Seas 51, 129, 133, 143, 154, 157, 164, 165, 166 The Sun’s Travels 75, 76, 82, 86, 90 The Tropics Vanish 77 The Wrecker 2, 72, 73, 78, 83, 88, 107, 160, 161 To Princess Kaiulani 3 Treasure Island 3, 6, 164 Where Go the Boats? 75–77, 86, 90 St. Kilda 10 Stormbird 156, 157 Stromness 11 sugar plantations 1, 134, 154–156, 158, 163, 165 Sydney 72 Tahiti 83–86, 107, 113, 137, 138, 148 Tamasese 93 Tanna 163 tartan tartanry 50, 52, 146 Thatcher, Margaret 11 The Coral Island. See  Ballantyne, R. M. The Fall of Kelvin Walker 25. See Alasdair Gray The Tempest. See  Shakespeare, William The Wandering Minstrel 2, 154, 155, 159–162, 164 Thomas, Nicholas 158 Thomas Stevenson, Thomas 115 Tolstoy, Leo 103, 104 Treaty of Paris 60, 67 Treaty of Union 19, 20 Treaty of Waitangi 18, 20 Tripp, Captain 155 Tuamotus 8 Tupaia 47, 57 Uma 3, 128, 132-135, 144, 145, 146, 152 Under Dana, R. H. 130 Vailima 5, 129 Waitangi Tribunal tribunal 20 Walker, Captain Frederick Dunbar 159–162 Wappinger 46

173

Index Washington Conference, 1884 9, 76 Washington, George 61 Waterloo 50 Wawn, William 157, 158 Welsh, Irvine 1 Wendt, Albert 5, 6 Whig 54

Wilde, Oscar 130 Wilder, Samuel 157 Williams, John 164 Wiltshire. See  Alan Wiltshire Witi Ihimaera 20 World War II 9, 89 Wylie, Robert Crichton 2

Brill_SCRL35.qxp_SPINE=20mm 12-12-2024 18:05 Pagina 1

Scottish Cultural Review of Language and Literature

While Robert Louis Stevenson was the principal Scottish author who shaped these early discussions, other prominent Scottish authors are also analyzed. Several chapters examine Scottish engagement with the South Seas, before and after Stevenson’s involvement with Pacific cultural and political affairs. The book lends weight and understanding as to why Pacific Islanders – both immigrant and indigenous – often claim affiliations with Scotland, and in the case of Hawaii and Samoa, to Stevenson in particular.

richard j. hill received his Ph.D. in English from Edinburgh University and is Professor of English at Chaminade University of Honolulu. He is the author of Picturing Scotland through the Waverley Novels (Routledge, 2010), and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Pictorial Text (Routledge, 2017). allison e. francis received her Ph.D. in English from Washington University in St. Louis, and is a Professor of English, Theater and Performing Arts at Chaminade University of Honolulu. She co-edited South Seas Encounters: Nineteenth-Century Oceania, Britain, and America (Routledge, 2018), and co-authored a poetry collection, Mulatta – Not So Tragic (Dodsworth Books, 2022).

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ISBN 978-90-04-68216-0 ISSN 1571-0734 brill.com/scrl

Scottish Literature of the South Seas Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis (Eds.)

This volume, edited by Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis, explores literary connections between Scotland and the Pacific. The contributors, including some of the world’s foremost scholars in Scottish and Pacific studies, examine how Scottish writing about the Pacific, and Pacific engagement with Scottish culture, generates a cultural examination of Scotland’s place in the British colonizing hierarchy.

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Scottish Literature of the South Seas Critical Studies of Scotland and the Pacific

Edited by Richard J. Hill and Allison E. Francis

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