Interior of 'Sans Souci' bar-room at Butaritari

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20215

Title

p. 14, Interior of 'Sans Souci' bar-room at Butaritari

Description

A group of people fill the Sans Souci bar-room at Butaritari on the Gilbert Islands. Robert Louis Stevenson sits in between two native women wearing a circlet on his head. Lloyd Osbourne is sitting at bar wearing stripy jacket and holding a small glass. The other customers are a mixture of natives and Europeans. The walls of the bar are covered with advertising posters.

The image is from the photograph album entitled 'The Cruise of the Equator' of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels around the Gilbert Islands and Samoa in 1889.

Artist / maker

Strong, Joseph D

Date

1889

Size

18.5 x 23.6 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The San Souci was the bar-room in the Wightman compound, run by Adolf Rick, a Prussian by birth but a naturalised US citizen and also manager (1880 to 1891) of the Wightman Brothers trading store. His wife was American, and the only white woman on the island. The Sans Souci was popular with the officers of visiting ships. The rival pub was The Land We Live In, in the neighbouring Crawford compound.

Butaritari is an atoll in the Pacific Ocean and is part of the island nation of Kiribati. Kiribati is made up of 32 atolls and includes the main island chain, the Gilbert Islands (of which Butaritari is part).

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 > Entertainment and sports > Authors

Places > Oceania > Gilbert Islands

Sport and leisure > Activities > Eating and drinking

Sport and leisure > Eating and drinking facilities > Restaurants and bars

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