The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 18

In 1887, tuberculosis consigned Robert Louis Stevenson to seek salvation in the Pacific. He-boarded the schooner Casco and sailed into the South Seas, and what began as a desperate quest for health became something far more profound: one of the nineteenth century's great acts of witness. This volume collects Stevenson's luminous travel writing from the Marquesas, Paumotus, and Gilbert Islands, where he encountered worlds that had never been described in English with such immediacy and empathy. He watched the tattooed warriors of Nuka-hiva, traded tales with pearl divers, meditated on the slow death of indigenous cultures under colonial pressure, and found in island life a sensuality and honesty that his native Scotland had long denied him. The prose carries the ache of a dying man who discovers he is more alive than ever, watching sunsets of impossible color and writing with feverish clarity about what it means to be foreign, to be ill, to be strangely at home where one least expects it.