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THE APPIN
MURDER
WHEN Robert Louis Stevenson
collapsed and died whilst opening a bottle of wine
in the early morning of 3 December 1894, the Samoan
islanders whose cause he had championed insisted on
standing guard outside his home until daybreak.
As dawn broke over the island of Upolu, Western
Samoa, they lifted the man they called Tusitala - or
teller of tales - upon their shoulders and carried
him several miles to the top of Mount Vaea, where he
was buried overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Carved on one side of his tomb is a poignant elegy
taken from one of his own works, Requiem, ending
with the lines:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The lines are touching and reflect Stevenson's
constant state of fear and dread about his own
mortality. But although he may have immersed himself
in Samoan culture during the last years of his life,
the remote Pacific island was not the place where he
"longed to be". He had for years harboured a
desperate desire to return to his native Scotland
but was ultimately prevented from ever seeing his
homeland again by the one thing which had plagued
him throughout his tragically short life – ill
health. Stevenson was only 44 when he died in his
island home, most likely of a cerebral haemorrhage.
His beloved wife Fanny had suffered a mental
breakdown a year earlier. The couple, along with
Fanny's son from her previous marriage, had moved to
Samoa in 1890 in the hope that the mild climate
would ease his health problems. His literary output
was prolific but he wrote to friends of his longing
to return home. To writer Samuel Crockett
acknowledged:
I shall never see Auld Reekie.
I shall never set my foot again upon the heather.
Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried.
The word is out and the doom written.
Stevenson had always been melancholic - not
surprising given that he was a frail and sickly
child who struggled for most of his life against
illness. He was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and spent
much of his young life "in the land of counterpane"
being attended to by his faithful nanny Alison
Cunningham, who read him grim, morbid stories about
the Covenanters and drilled into him biblical tales.
His own family were respectable and God fearing. His
father and grandfather were responsible for building
many of the lighthouses round Scotland's coast. The
plan for young Robert was to get him well enough to
attend university so he could study engineering and
follow in the family tradition. Young Robert
certainly became well enough to get a place at
Edinburgh University but, once there, he threw off
the stiff middle-class values his family had tried
to impress and became a rebel. Robert Lewis became
the more fashionable Robert Louis. He adopted a
bohemian appearance and lifestyle, his floppy
wide-brimmed hat, cravat and long coat earned him
the nickname "Velvet Jack" and he spent as much time
in the arms of women of the night and propping up
bars as he did studying. RLS was, in effect, a 19th
century version of a 1960s hippie. He fell out with
his father Thomas over a number of issues. His lack
of interest in engineering, his rejection of the
Church and finally his romance with Fanny Van de
Grift Osbourne, an already married American woman he
met while on a trip to a French artists' colony in
1876. His wife-to-be was 10 years older than him but
the romantic Scot fell passionately in love with
her. He followed her to California, almost dying of
starvation in the process, waiting until she
divorced her husband before marrying her.
Everything Stevenson had done in his life was turned
into a literary work. His journeying in France
became the famous Travels With a Donkey in the
Cevennes; his trip across the Atlantic and America
became An Amateur Emigrant; even his honeymoon on
Silverado mountain was turned into The Silverado
Squatters. When he and Fanny lived in Scotland they
visited Braemar with Fanny's son Lloyd. On a rainy
day he drew a map for the 12-year old boy and the
two imagined a pirate adventure which grew into
Treasure Island. It was followed by Kidnapped, The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Black
Arrow. Scotland, however, was no place for his
ailing health and he eventually set sail on Pacific
cruises before settling in Samoa. He almost
certainly suffered from tuberculosis but it was
never diagnosed during his lifetime. Stevenson
excelled in virtually every form of writing; poems,
plays, travelogues, adventure stories, essays,
romances, fantasies, literary criticism and more. In
Scotland he is ranked with Robert Burns and Sir
Walter Scott as the "big three" of Scottish
literature. Yet when the Oxford Anthology of English
Literature was published in 1973, it failed to give
Stevenson a single mention. Many modernist writers,
including Virginia Woolf, criticised him for being
not quite serious enough. Thankfully outlooks have
changed, Stevenson remains one of the world's
top-selling authors and millions of readers continue
to find his work fascinating and charming.
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