Penryn (Penrhyn), Traders Verandah with Figure-head

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19787

Title

p. 25, Penryn (Penrhyn), Traders verandah with figure-head from wreck

Description

A group of Cook Islanders stand around a ship's figurehead on a verandah. The figurehead represents a woman in late 19th century dress. A group of children are looking in over railings whilst four men with straw hats are standing next to the figurehead.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1890

Size

19.2 x 23.8 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Penrhyn (also known as Tongareva, Mangarongaro, Hararanga or Te Pitaka) is the largest of the 15 Cook Islands situated in the South Pacific Ocean. It was visited by the Stevensons on 9-10th May 1890.

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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Architecture > Monuments > Sculptures

Homes > Residential buildings > Houses

Places > Oceania > Cook Islands

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