White Trader and Family, Majuro, Marshall Islands

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19819

Title

p. 54, White trader and family - taken at Majuro, Marshall Islands

Description

A white trader and his wife are sitting on the outrigger of canoe at Majuro in the Marshall Islands. The woman is wearing white dress and a fitted hat and has a monkey on her lap. The trader is leaning on a canoe and has dog under his right arm and holds a hat in his left. In the background palm trees can be seen.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1890

Size

19.7 x 22.8 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Majuro is the capital of the Marshall Islands, a Micronesian nation of atolls and islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is situated west of the International Date Line and slightly north of the Equator.

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

Animals > Mammals > Dogs

Animals > Mammals > Monkeys

Clothing and dress > Accessories > Hats

Clothing and dress > Garments > Dresses

People > Adults > Men

People > Adults > Women

Places > Oceania > Marshall Islands

Plants > Trees > Palms

Transport > Water > Canoes

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White trader and family, Majuro, Marshall Islands