South Pacific Dreams Vignettes

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”
 — Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

For the first blog on South Pacific Dreams, a series on art and life in the South Pacific, famed Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from tuberculosis and looked for a warm climate to ease his respiratory distress. He visited Hawaii in 1888 and befriended David Kalakaua, the Hawaiian King, and his niece Princess Victoria Kaʻiulani. After a couple of years, he and his family set sail for Tahiti, the Marquesas, and New Zealand. They finally settled in Samoa. He established his residence there around 1890. Stevenson purchased about four hundred acres of land and built his final home near the village of Vailima outside Apia in Western Samoa. He became embroiled in politics, befriended the locals, helped them with political problems, and wrote extensively. Stevenson died suddenly four years later, in 1894, from an apparent cerebral hemorrhage. He was 44 years old. This was less than fifty years before South Pacific artist Ralph Burke Tyree was deployed in Samoa as a US Marine, chronicled in my book, Tyree: Artist of the South Pacific, and the forthcoming biography, Beauty in the Beast: Flora, Fauna, and Endangered Species of Artist Ralph Burke Tyree.

Originally published at https://www.southpacificdreams.com .

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