In 1887, after the death of his father, Stevenson again went to America, sailing for New York in August of that year, and sojourning for short periods among and with friends in the East.
In the spring of 1888, when in his thirty-eighth year, Stevenson accompanied by members of his family, accepted an offer to cruise among the islands of the South Seas and write the story of his voyagings in a series of letters to a syndicate of newspapers. Arrangements were made for the charter of the schooner Casco, Captain Otis, in which he set sail from San Francisco, early in the spring, bound ostensibly for the “Marquesas.” The cruise covered six months. During the voyage northward the Stevensons stayed some months at Honolulu and while there a visit was paid to the leper settlement on the island of Molokai, which ultimately called forth the “open letter” to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, wherein that Reverend gentleman received an unmitigated scathing from Stevenson’s incensed pen, an incident which is only too readily recalled for one to linger over it at this time.
From Honolulu the cruise was continued southward for another six months on a trading schooner called the Equator which arrived at Apia, in Samoa, about Christmas time (1889). Here the company remained for some weeks, and here Stevenson purchased an estate of some hundreds of acres, lying on the mountainside overlooking the sea, which he called Vailima. The Stevensons went to Sidney, N. S. W. soon after, but again in the month of April steamed away in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, visiting Auckland and the Penrhyn Islands, thence to the Ellis, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands and via New Caledonia, Sydney, and Auckland to Apia where they arrived again in the early autumn. They settled here upon their estate and the following spring Mrs. Stevenson, the elder, joined the household, as also Stevenson’s step-daughter, Mrs. Strong; thus began the four remaining years of Stevenson’s life, amid the ties of kith and kin surrounding him as he worked in his exile in a far away land.
Amid these pleasant surroundings Stevenson pursued his constant and daily work, and rode about his island home entertaining the population, both native and European. He became actively interested in the political life of the islands, and when international complications came upon them in 1891, he dignified the whole proceedings by his impartial letters to the London Times, and later by the publication of the “Footnote to History,” a monograph published in 1892.
Meanwhile he was applying himself to his writing with ardous persistancy, and quoting his own words from a letter written in 1893, he was seriously overworked, “I am overworked bitterly, and my hand is a thing that was, and in the meanwhile so are my brains.”
In January of the same year he suffered from an attack of influenza from which he never fully recovered. While yet ill in bed he had begun to dictate “St. Ives” and “Weir of Hermiston.”
From the Dictionary of National Biography is taken the following description of the sad end. “On the afternoon of the Fourth of December he was talking gaily with his wife, when a sudden rupture of a blood-vessel in the brain laid him at her feet and within two hours all was over.”
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Out across the pearly Pacific on the lonely mountainside at Samoa, lies all that once was mortal of “Tusitala, the Teller of Tales.”