In the South Seas: Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises on the Yacht "casco" (1888) and the Schooner "equator" (1889)
In the South Seas: Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the Course of Two Cruises on the Yacht "casco" (1888) and the Schooner "equator" (1889)
A failing body and a restless spirit drove Robert Louis Stevenson to the South Seas in 1888. Tuberculosis was killing him in Scotland; he chose to die in the sun. What he found instead was a second life. This book chronicles his voyages through the Marquesas, the Paumotus, and the Gilbert Islands aboard the yacht Casco and the schooner Equator, capturing a Pacific that existed before the twentieth century remade it entirely. Stevenson writes with the eye of a novelist and the soul of a poet. He records the beauty of coral atolls rising from impossible blue water, the complex customs of peoples he came to know intimately, and the slow tragedy of European contact already unfolding. This is not adventure fiction but something rarer: a great writer finding his truest subject in the world itself, in landscapes and lives that had no place in Edinburgh or Bournemouth. The prose shimmers. The melancholy runs deep. For readers who believe travel writing can be literature, who want to feel the salt wind and hear the lapping of lagoon water on distant shores.
