Pretty girl in Ellice Islands

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19804

Title

p. 40, Pretty girl in Ellice Islands

Description

A native girl wearing a grass skirt and top and floral head-dress stands on the port side of the bridge of the Janet Nicol. Beside her stands a bearded man (probably a crew member) wearing a pill-box hat, white shirt and trousers. He has his hand on her shoulder.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1890

Size

9.6 x 11.8 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The Ellice Islands are situated in the Southwest Pacific Ocean. They have been linked to Britain since 1892, becoming first a British Protectorate and later a colony. In 1975 their name changed to Tuvalu, meaning 'eight standing together' .

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

Clothing and dress > Garments > Skirts

People > Adults > Women

People > Military activities > Sailors

Places > Oceania > Ellice Islands

Transport > Water > Boats

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