"Interested onlookers", p. 3

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20112

Title

p. 3, Interested onlookers

Description

Lloyd Osbourne, Robert Louis Stevenson's step-son with a group of Butaritari islanders. Osbourne seems to be demonstrating to the group his spectacles. The group of eight islands looks at him wtih various facial expressions of confusion and wonder. Osbourne seems to be aiming his prank at on man in a white shirt and a rimmed hat. In the background can be seen the gable end of a hut and palm trees.

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

Unknown

Date

1889

Size

9.2 x 11.9 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The Stevenson party stayed on Butaritari from 13th July to 17th August 1889. During their visit, they stayed within the American Wightman Brothers trading compound in a house of a Hawaiian missionary, Robert Maka, and his wife. Stevenson writes in his 'In the South Seas' of the influence of the European traders on the people of Butaritari. Easy access to alcohol led to drinking binges, looting and violence among the islanders which Stevenson only avoided by passing as an 'intimate personal friend' of Queen Victoria, ('soon promoted to be her son'), thereby ensuring he would be treated with appropriate respect.

Butaritari is an atoll and part of the Gilbert Islands archipelago. It is part of the island nation of Kiribati. In the 19th century, the Gilbert Islands were known as the Kingsmill Islands, a name now applied to the southern part of the group. Butaritari was made a British protectorate in 1892.

Robert Louis Stevenson spent the latter years of his life both travelling and resident in the Pacific. The family chartered the 'Casco' in San Francisco and spent several weeks travelling in French Polynesia, including an extended stay in Tahiti where Stevenson recovered from a bout of illness. After this the Stevenson group continued to Honolulu, Hawaii, where they landed in January 1889. In the summer of 1889 Stevenson embarked on a six month voyage through the Gilbert Islands to Samoa aboard the 'Equator'. It was here that Stevenson bought an estate he named Vailima. After another voyage, aboard the trading steamer the 'Janet Nicoll', Stevenson returned to Vailima where he was to spend the remaining four years of his life.

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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