Tom Day - a trader on Nukanau (Nikunau) Island,

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19843

Title

p. 76, Tom Day - a trader on Nukanau (Nikunau) Island, - Kingsmills

Description

The trader, Tom Day sits on the centre of bridge of the Janet Nicoll. He has a big moustache and is wearing a paisley-pattern neck-chief, white shirt and trousers and is holding a wide-brimmed hat. Behind him the tall funnel and two ventilators can be seen.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1890

Size

22.5 x 19 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The Gilbert Islands (formerly known as the Kingsmill Islands) are a chain of 16 atolls and coral islands in the Pacific Ocean. Nikunau is a low coral island in the Gilbert Islands.

On 11th April 1890 Robert Louis Stevenson his wife Fanny and her son Lloyd Osbourne set off aboard the steamer Janet Nicoll from Sydney for a three-month trading voyage through the Pacific. The ship was under charter to Messrs Henderson and Macfarlane of Auckland, a well known trading firm The travelled through the Cook, Gilbert, Ellice and Marshall Islands, arriving at Noumea, New Caledonia on the 26th July.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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Related subjects

People > Adults > Men

Places > Oceania > Gilbert Islands

Transport > Water > Ships

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