Sea Fever

by Sam Jefferson

  It was what is called a good passage, and a feather in the Casco’s cap; but among the most miserable forty hours that any one of us had ever passed. We were swung and tossed together all that time like shot in a stage thunder-box. The mate was thrown down and had his head cut open; the captain was sick on deck; the cook sick in the galley. Of all our party only two sat down to dinner. I was one. I own that I felt wretchedly; and I can only say of the other, who professed to feel quite well, that she fled at an early moment from the table. It was in these circumstances that we skirted the windward shore of that indescribable island of Ua-pu; viewing with dizzy eyes the coves, the capes, the breakers, the climbing forests, and the inaccessible stone needles that surmount the mountains. The place persists, in a dark corner of our memories, like a piece of the scenery of nightmares.

  Eventually they made the shelter of Hiva Oa, but there was little relief to be found here, for the anchorage was exposed and exceedingly rough. Nevertheless, the Stevenson party headed ashore and into the interior, visiting the Atuona Valley where, a few years later, the artist Paul Gauguin was to live out the remainder of his days in a kind of languid daze until his very paintbrush seemed to ooze with the sensuality of the place. Stevenson thought it the ‘loveliest and by far the most ominous spot I have ever visited.’ It was at this point that the aforementioned yacht Nyanza arrived on the scene with Cumming Dewar in command. Dewar, a Scotsman, was actually known to the Stevensons, which makes this chance meeting all the more extraordinary. A yacht cruise through the South Seas was, in 1888, almost, but evidently not quite, a unique experience.

  Nevertheless, the destination that they pointed the bows of the Casco toward next, few had dared to venture before: These were the Tuamotus, also known as the Paumotus or Dangerous Islands and one of the most tricky and treacherous stretches of water you could wish to encounter. The Tuamotus is made up of a huge labyrinth of low atolls and islands barely visible until you are almost upon them. The islands seem to interfere with the regularity of the trade winds, which are often fickle and squally in this area, while strong currents tend to race between the islands. These factors conspire to make navigation extremely difficult, particularly for a sailing yacht like the Casco, which had no auxiliary power to get her out of trouble. In a calm, it was eminently possible for a sailing vessel to simply be swept on to one of these reefs and completely destroyed. Just to make matters that little bit worse, the charts of the time were far from complete and often placed islands where there were none or in a slightly different position. ‘It was not without misgiving that my captain risked the Casco in such waters,’ Stevenson noted.

  The first part of this trip was an unmitigated success; the friendly trade winds were at their best and the Casco was wafted blissfully before them, Margaret Stevenson noting: ‘This truly is pleasure sailing and the ocean has been truly Pacific.’ Stevenson recalled this idyllic sail in more poetic terms in The Wrecker when he wrote:

  I love to recall the glad monotony of a Pacific voyage, when the trades are not stinted, and the ship, day after day, goes free. The mountain scenery of trade-wind clouds, watched (and in my case painted) under every vicissitude of light – blotting stars, withering in the moon’s glory, barring the scarlet eve, lying across the dawn collapsed into the unfeatured morning bank, or at noon raising their snowy summits between the blue roof of heaven and the blue floor of sea; the small, busy, and deliberate world of the schooner.

  Yet the crew would have still looked ahead with dread, and their misgivings soon turned into a full-blown nightmare for Captain Otis. On the fifth day out, poor visibility meant that he was unable to get a decent ‘fix’ of his position with a sextant and was forced to rely on dead reckoning. This essentially means calculating your speed over the ground to work out your position and is fine if you know what the current is doing, but hopeless if you do not. Captain Otis did not and, as darkness closed in, he had to admit he was totally lost. True, he was in the vicinity of the islands of Raraka and Kuahei, but between them was a vast uncertain mass of reefs and shallows, any of which could rip the bottom out of the beautiful schooner. All around came the low boom of surf pounding on jagged reef while the glow of white water perceived by the lookout meant that there were breakers and death in the vicinity.

  The modern yachtsman with his radar, GPS and engine to help him can only imagine the misery of Captain Otis as he peered in to the dark, velvety night, disorientated and helpless. The schooner was in a desperate situation, for the Tuamotus archipelago is essentially a trap and the little vessel had sailed right into the middle of it. Captain Otis recalled the situation later:

  It was a night filled with perils for all, but it turned out to be our lucky night. Only occasionally the look-out could see ahead to advantage; and when the surf could not be seen they had to depend on the sharpness of their ears for the vessel’s safety. One of the crew was kept until midnight with ear to the main-mast, as the water conveys the sound of a threatening surf farther and more clearly than does the air. During the rain-squalls the darkness was intense; and it seemed to the anxious crew that they were picking up the surf dead ahead about every ten minutes. Later on it was learned that the confusion had been caused by the variable currents running through a channel, formed by the two islands, which lay nearly at right angles to each other, and about six miles apart. Happily, when daylight came we found the yacht lying quite in the centre of this channel and out of all danger.

  It is likely that the Stevenson party was only partly aware of the extreme danger that they were in, although Robert certainly had a better conception than the others. It is telling, however, that as darkness drew in and this nightmare closed around Captain Otis, the famous author was enjoying a blissful reverie as he later recalled:

  The night fell lovely in the extreme. After the moon went down, the heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars. And as I lay in the cockpit and looked upon the steersman I was haunted by Emerson’s verses:

  ‘And the lone seaman all the night

  Sails astonished among stars.’

  The contrast in emotions between edgy captain and dreamy owner could not have been more marked. Nevertheless, Captain Otis, through extreme skill and a good deal of luck, had got away with it and the cruise continued along its merry way. The next day, the Casco pointed her knife-like bow through the jagged coral heads of Fakarava, a low atoll with an inner lagoon of glassy water many miles wide. The Casco’s travails were still not at an end, however for entering was not a particularly simple manoeuvre. An atoll contains a huge volume of water ringed in by the low coral that makes up the body of the island. Thus the tide can run with extreme ferocity through the narrow entrances into these atolls and vessels can find themselves literally sucked in if the tide is on the flood. Fortunately, this hazard was successfully negotiated and the schooner dropped her anchor in a stunning stretch of azure water almost entirely surrounded by coral reef, and fringed on all sides by palm trees and water as smooth as a sheet of glass. As the anchor tumbled from the cat head and kissed the virgin white sand many fathoms below, all on board breathed a collective sigh of relief.

  The Casco was now completely off the beaten track, and there was much here that Stevenson learned to love, not least the Tuamotans themselves, who he found far more open and uncomplicated than the Marquesans. Stevenson opted to spend a couple of weeks ashore and rented a small shack. From here, he was able to fully appreciate the strangeness of life on an atoll, as he later recalled:

  So long as I stayed upon that isle these thoughts were constant. I lay down to sleep, and woke again with an unblunted sense of my surroundings. I was never weary of calling up the image of that narrow causeway, on which I had my dwelling, lying coiled like a serpent, tail to mouth, in the outrageous ocean, and I was never weary of passing – a mere quarter-deck parade – from the one side to the other, from the shady, habitable shores of the lagoon to the blinding desert and uproarious breakers of the opposite beach.

  He was also int
oxicated by the peace of the place and it is a great shame that the sojourn in this lonely little slice of paradise was cut short, for after a two-week stay, it was clear that the writer was becoming dangerously ill. He had contracted a cold in Hiva Oa and had never fully shaken it off. Weeks later, his breathing suddenly became laboured. In a panic, Fanny insisted that they leave at once to seek medical aid in Papeete, Tahiti, but this was patently not possible as it was dark and there was very little breeze. To raise the anchor would have meant certain destruction for the Casco and an unpleasant dunking for her crew. No doubt Captain Otis dealt with Mrs Stevenson with all of his usual tact and finesse. Whether she sulked following this encounter is not clear but the upshot was that the Casco did not sail until early the following morning, when the schooner once again threaded the atoll’s narrow entrance and in a little over 48 hours was back in the relatively civilised port of Papeete. Which, as Margaret Stevenson noted, was: ‘A sort of halfway house between savage life and civilisation, with the drawbacks of both and the advantages of neither.’

  Nevertheless, it did have a hospital and the patient was immediately taken ashore. By this time he was at death’s door and many did not expect him to set foot on the Casco again: An interview with Captain Otis gives an indication of the gravity of the situation and also an insight into Stevenson himself and his ambivalent relationship with death:

  That evening, he sent for me. When I arrived at the hotel he sat propped in the bed; he appeared to be quite weak, but he greeted me cordially, and I remember that he was smoking a cigarette as usual. He was, in fact, the only one present who did not seem anxious and distressed – but then, his nerve never deserted him; and he was facing death as he had faced life and sickness, with a smile and a jest.

  He told me in his ordinary tone, and without a flicker of excitement, that he had sent for me, fearing that he might take a turn for the worse; if he did, he said, the doctor had told him he probably would not live until morning. Then he added with a smile, ‘You see, the doctor does not give me much time; so I have divided what there is left into three equal portions, one for each, only reserving the last for Mrs. Stevenson.’ He then proceeded to inform me, as calmly as though he had had a century to spend, how I was to dispose of the yacht and settle the business, if disaster fell – which happily it did not. After that he bade me adieu as quietly as if no danger threatened his life and hopes. The man did not seem to realize that he acted the hero in the little things of his life, as well as where he stood face to face with life’s greatest evil – Death.

  After this brush with mortality, the patient convalesced rapidly, spending a month in a small cottage within the town. He grew to dislike Papeete as much as everyone else in the Casco party. It was noisy, squalid and run by the colonial French in such a high-handed manner that it was impossible not to be infuriated. It is worth noting that the beginning of his rather brutal story The Ebb Tide, which features a trio of down-and-out beachcombers plumbing new depths, is set in Papeete. Thus with the author well on the way to recovery, it was decided that a change of scene was called for, and the decision was taken to run the Casco around to the windward side of the island, where the village of Tavaroa offered good shelter and stunning scenery. The trip proved to be something of an epic, for there was a deeply unpleasant cross-sea running, which, coupled with a fresh gale, made the voyage extremely dangerous for all aboard. At times the gale threatened to overwhelm the Casco and it was with some relief that the entrance to Tavaroa was espied. This was another narrow gap in a long reef and, lying on the windward side of the island, huge swells were rolling on to the reef and hurling themselves with unnerving fury at its base. To aim straight for this must have been a severe test of nerve, and I leave the narration of the entry to Captain Otis:

  The entrance to the harbour is through a narrow break in the reef, marked by beacons placed on the hill behind, while beating up to the passage heavy seas with variable winds were encountered; this made it quite uncomfortable and somewhat risky, as the plunge was to be made through a line of heavy surf. While there was actually little danger to be anticipated from the sailor’s point of view, yet here, as elsewhere, wherever there was a possibility of an accident, the skipper had the boats properly cleared. When the trying moment came and the Casco’s bows pierced the seething belt of spray and fume, she apparently stood on end for a hesitating moment before she leaped, like a thing alive, through and over what seemed certain destruction; and, before the breath could be in drawn, she fell again into the smooth basin inside, hardly having wet her decks in the passage. After a run of half a mile, the yacht was moored in a beautiful land-locked harbour, nearly a mile wide, that was wooded to its shore. When the anchorage was reached, suppressed excitement was still visible among those on board; even Stevenson, who seldom made comment, felt constrained to ask in careless manner, and with the ghost of a smile on his lips, ‘if Captain Otis did not think such yachting gymnastics were rather risky sport for invalid authors to indulge in.’

  You will note that the skipper had the ship’s boats cleared away and ready to launch, which gives some idea of the gravity of the situation. At this point, Fanny Stevenson did little to help the situation by commenting: ‘Isn’t that nice? We shall soon be ashore!’ You can almost hear the grinding of Captain Otis’ teeth as he had to humour such fatuousness in the face of very real danger. Stevenson himself, usually so tolerant, was disgusted at his wife’s witlessness, noting: ‘Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity.’

  The yacht, crew and passengers were safe, but it was soon deemed that Tavaroa, being rather damp and mosquito ridden, was not conducive to Stevenson’s health and it was therefore determined that the Stevenson party should decamp overland to nearby Tautira, a far more suitable spot, which they soon came to love. By now he felt he had completely lost touch with life back home, as he noted in a letter: ‘Whether I have a penny left in the wide world, I know not, nor shall know, till I get to Honolulu, where I anticipate a devil of an awakening. It will be from a mighty pleasant dream at least: Tautira being mere Heaven.’

  The Stevensons stayed in the house of one of the chiefs, Ori-Ori, and awaited the arrival of the Casco. The schooner had enjoyed a lively time of it on the trip round, having been forced to run almost into the breaking surf in order to pass back through the reef. Had Captain Otis got this wrong, the Casco would have stalled out and almost certainly been rolled right over and destroyed by the powerful breaking waves. Once again the smart vessel did not let them down, but it was after this severe thrashing that Otis perceived that the masts were out of line and, once anchored off Tautira, he sent hands aloft to investigate. The news was bad; for it transpired that the masts were far gone with dry rot and it was a miracle that they had withstood the recent heavy battering. There was nothing for it but to head back to Papeete, but, given the Stevensons’ dislike for the place, the decision was taken to leave them in Tautira.

  Captain Otis was furious and blamed the previous master for misleading him about the condition of the vessel. Stevenson, however, was altogether more philosophical and wrote to a friend back home, ‘Our mainmast is dry-rotten, and we are all to the devil; I shall lie in a debtor’s jail. Never mind, Tautira is first chop.’

  Papeete proved a tricky hunting ground for new masts, for it soon became clear that both fore and main were far gone and would need to be replaced. Infuriating delays and dilatory working hours meant that it would be many weeks before the brave vessel was able to put to sea again. If the Casco was ailing, the same could be said of her owner. Stevenson had taken another turn for the worse and spent his days hallucinating with fever. It was at this point that he was visited by the Tahitian princess, Moe, daughter-in-law to the King of Tahiti, who hurried from Papeete to attend to the island’s sickly visitor and plied him with restoring lime juice, coconut and other healthy treats. Soon he was on the mend, and always maintained that this member of the Tahitian royal house had saved his life.

&n
bsp; It was fortunate that the Stevensons got on well with their host, Ori, for otherwise they would have long outstayed their welcome as they waited for the elusive Casco to make her return. In the meantime, the party made themselves comfortable and were very content, Margaret Stevenson describing the experience as ‘camping with none of the drawbacks’. Meanwhile, Robert worked on The Master of Ballantrae, one of his finest novels. Fanned by the warm, soothing trade winds and hypnotised by the glistening palms and verdant emerald slopes of Tahiti, Stevenson’s imagination travelled back to the frosty airs and purple glens of the Highlands of his youth and recalled them with pin-sharp accuracy in a novel viewed by many as his masterpiece. Stevenson’s great friend and fellow novelist Henry James once commented that the South Seas did Stevenson’s writing the power of good when recalling Scotland, but precious little for work he produced which covered his immediate locality.

  The former point may well be true even if the latter seems grossly unfair, for the literature that Stevenson produced in the South Seas was, in many ways, his most innovative and progressive work. He set about portraying the islands as he saw them, warts and all. There was none of the romanticism of his earlier novels. He worked instead on a form of brutalism that looked at the relationship between the rapacious whites and hard-used natives with an unblinking eye. Stories such as The Ebb Tide and The Beach of Falesa, portrayed the colonists in a most unflattering light and were badly received by a Victorian readership obsessed with the glory of empire. A prime example of this can be seen in his short story, The Beach of Falesa, which related a practice used by white traders in the South Seas at the time of ‘marrying’ a native girl with a contract that read thus: ‘This is to certify that Uma, daughter of Fa’avao is illegally married to John Wiltshire for one night, and Mr John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her to hell the next morning.’