"Captain Tom's house", p.13

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19280

Title

p.13, Captain Tom's house

Description

A view of a tropical beach with palm trees at the edge of a lagoon. A house and a hut surrounded by a fence can be seen at the edge of the trees.

The image is from the photograph album entitled 'The Cruise of the Casco' of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels around Hawaii and French Polynesia in 1888.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1888

Size

10 x 12.4 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The Stevensons were in Fakarava from 9th to 25th September, and stayed in a traditional platform house that Taniera Mahinui had found for them to stay in.

The Paumotus Islands are part of the Tuamotu-Paumotu group of atolls in French Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean. Fakarava is the second largest of the atoll and has the best harbour of the group.

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).

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. 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

Homes > Residential buildings > Houses

Landscape > Land > Coastlines

People > Military activities > Sailors

Plants > Trees > Palms

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