Three mesmerists and medicine men of Apemama (Abemama)

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20280

Title

p. 38, The three mesmerists and medicine men of Apemama (Abemama) - in front of sitting-room, Equator-town

Description

Three mesmerists stand in front of a hut at Equator Town, Abemama. The men are wearing suit jackets and trousers. A folding chair stands outside the hut and in the background palm trees can be seen.

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

18.3 x 22.7 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Abemama is an atoll in the Gilbert Islands, just north of the Equator. Robert Louis Stevenson arrived aboard a ship called The Equator on 30th August 1889 and he stayed there while the ship went on trading visits to other islands. Accommodation was constructed for the Stevenson party, which they called Equator-Town. They stayed there until 25th October, briefly returning to Butaritari before sailing to Samoa.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. He was plagued by ill health all his life, but travelled extensively as he found the warmer climes of the Mediterranean or Pacific more suited to his chest complaints. His writing career took off after his marriage to American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and he produced Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 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 44 years old, leaving what many consider his best work 'Weir of Hermiston' unfinished.

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Related subjects

Homes > Residential buildings > Houses

People > Health and safety > Physicians

Places > Oceania > Gilbert Islands

Plants > Trees > Palms