Stevenson wrote this in the cabin of the Casco, in the summer of '88. His always delicate health had broken completely under the San Francisco climate. Friends had urged a cruise to the South Seas, he had gladly acquiesced, and looked around for a ship. There was a subtle romantic call for the author of "Treasure Island" in a voyage on a ship of his own choosing and direction under the soft skies of the tropics.
The Casco had been built by an eccentric California millionaire, Dr. Merritt, for cruising along the coast, and no money had been spared in her fittings. She was a seventy-ton fore-and-aft schooner, ninety-five feet long, with graceful lines, high masts, white sails and decks, shiny brasswork, and a gaudy silk-hung saloon. She was not perhaps too staunch a cruiser. "Her cockpit was none too safe, her one pump was inadequate in size and almost worthless; the sail plan forward was meant for racing and not for cruising; and even if the masts were still in good condition, they were quite unfitted for hurricane weather."
Nevertheless, negotiations were opened with Dr. Merritt. That gentleman had read of Stevenson. He had conceived him as an erratic, irresponsible soul who wrote poetry and let everything else go to the devil. He'd be blamed, he said, if he'd let any scatter-brained writer use his precious yacht. Finally, a meeting between the two was effected; and, speedily charmed by Stevenson's manner, he decided to let him have the Casco. Therefore, with Capt. Otis as skipper, four deck hands, "three Swedes and the inevitable Finn," and a Chinese cook, the Stevensons sailed June 28, 1888, for the Marquesas.
Stevenson's health rapidly improved in the first weeks of the voyage. He was charmed by the Southern islands and began making notes and gathering data from the natives for later books. He wrote parts of "The Master of Ballantrae" and of "The Wrong Box," and spent much of his time studying the intricate personality of his skipper, whose portrait afterward appeared in the pages of "The Wrecker."
After months of idle cruising, it was discovered that the Casco's masts were dangerously rotten. Repairs were immediately necessary. Meantime Stevenson became less and less well. When the ship was again in commission and took them to Hawaii, he realized the impossibility of his returning to America, and, sending the Casco back to San Francisco, started upon the exile that was to terminate in his death.
Thereafter, the Casco changed hands frequently, exploring the mysteries of seal-hunting, opium-smuggling, coast-trading and gold-adventure, among other things. In the early nineties, she was known, because of her swiftness, quickness and ease of handling at the wheel, to be the best of a hundred and twenty ships engaged in the extinction of the pelagic seal. But when, in 1898, the sealers found themselves impoverished by their own ruthlessness, the Casco, her decks disfigured with blood and her hold rotten from the drip of countless salty pelts, was discarded and left to rot on the mud flats of Victoria. Too much of the spirit of adventure, however, lurked in the tall masts of the Casco to let her waste away to such an ugly ending. When the smuggling of Chinese and opium was at its height, up and down the coast there were whisperings of the daring work of the smuggler Casco. The revenue officers knew positively that she was laden with illicit Oriental cargo, and with Chinese immigrants; but she escaped them again and again, her old speed and lightness returning. Once, however, the wind failed her, and the revenue launch hauled alongside. Search for contraband was instituted; but not a Chinaman appeared, not a trace of opium. Fooled!—and they climbed down sheepishly into their launch. Later it developed that while the revenue men were still far astern, the crew had weighted the sixty Chinamen and dumped them overboard along with the opium!
The Casco, Just Before It was Wrecked on King Island
Kind permission of Mr. L. W. Pedrose
From the swift romance of opium running the Casco turned drudge. She carried junk between Victoria and Vancouver; she was a training ship for the Boy Sea Scouts of Vancouver; she was a coasting trader in 1917 when the shipping boom gave value to even her little hulk; and in between times she lay on mud flats.