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

Of this SWANSTON EDITION in Twenty-five Volumes of the Works of ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Two Thousand and Sixty Copies have been printed, of which only Two Thousand Copies are for sale.
This is No. ............

The following chapters are selected from a series which was first published partially in ‘Black and White’ (February to December 1891), and fully in the New York ‘Sun’ during the same period. The voyages which supplied the occasion and the material for the work were three in number, viz. one of seven months (June 1888 to January 1889) in the yacht ‘Casco’ from San Francisco to the Marquesas, the Paumotus, Tahiti, and thence northward to Hawaii; a second (June to December 1889) in the trading schooner ‘Equator,’ from Honolulu, the Hawaiian capital, where the author had stayed in the intervening five months, to the Gilberts and thence to Samoa; and a third (April to September 1890) in the trading steamer ‘Janet Nicoll,’ which set out from Sydney and followed a very devious course, extending as far as Penrhyn in the Eastern to the Marshall Islands in the Western Pacific.
Before setting out on the first of these voyages, the author had contracted to write an account of his adventures in the form of letters for serial publication. The plan by and by changed in his mind into that of a book partly of travel and partly of research, which should combine the results of much careful observation and enquiry upon matters of island history, custom, belief, and tradition, with some account of his own experiences and those of his travelling companions. Under the nominal title of ‘Letters’ he began to compose the chapters of such a book on board the ‘Janet Nicoll,’ and continued the task during the first ten months of his residence in Samoa (October 1890 to July 1891). Before the serial publication had gone very far, he realised that the personal and impersonal elements in his work were not very successfully combined, nor in proportions that contented his readers. Accordingly he abandoned for the time being the idea of republishing the chapters in book form. But when the scheme of the Edinburgh Edition was maturing, he desired that a selection should be made from them and should form one volume of that edition. That desire was carried out. The same selection is here republished, with the addition of a half-section then omitted, describing a visit to the Kona coast of Hawaii and the lepers’ port of embarkation for Molokai.