The Travelogues of Robert Louis Stevenson

An Inland Voyage - Travels with a Donkey - The Amateur Emigrant - Across the Plains - The Silverado Squatters

Author

Clara Lim
December 27, 2024 • Reading Time: 8 minutes

I met Robert Louis Stevenson late in life. I should probably have read his rollicking adventure stories, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped and Jekyll and Hyde, as a kid. But I didn’t until I was 37, and they were of course not exactly appropriate for my life stage.

Bored halfway through yet another fight scene in Kidnapped, I flipped to the front of the book and read the introductory biography of the author. 

... Damn, this guy had a genuinely interesting life. That's something you can't say for a lot of writers. This sickly, gangly, weird-looking guy - too weird-looking for his genteel Scottish background, surely - was raised to be a good Christian engineer just like his father, but he decided to be an atheist writer instead. He chose the path of obstacles, of conflict with family, of poverty.

The weird-looking one on the right

Stevenson wasn’t exactly stout in constitution. He had weak lungs and was prone to coughs and fevers. Yet he decided to travel in the manner of a much more robust lad: canoeing around Belgium and France (An Inland Voyage), hiking and camping in French mountains (Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes), and travelling the hellish path of emigrants to America (The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains).

In Travels with a Donkey, he describes his first night under the stars:

What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes her rest, she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all the outdoor world are on their feet. It is then that the cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but like a cheerful watchman speeding the course of night. Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night. […] At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of Nature, are all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour to life?

And then his experience during this magical hour:

When that hour came to me among the pines, I wakened thirsty. My tin was standing by me half full of water.  I emptied it at a draught; and feeling broad awake after this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to make a cigarette. The stars were clear, coloured, and jewel-like, but not frosty. A faint silvery vapour stood for the Milky Way. All around me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By the whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine walking round and round at the length of her tether; I could hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. [...] A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chasseradès and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close rooms.

In spite of all its “horrors”, it is the hot noisy world of humanity that enthralls Robert Louis Stevenson, for he spends most of his travelogues greedily observing what people ate, what they said, how they behaved.

Class pervades the pages of An Inland Voyage and The Amateur Emigrant. In the first, Stevenson, a young gentleman "roughing it" for a lark, is taken for a pedlar and treated as such. Dining and living with other commoners rather than in the private quarters reserved for the genteel, he realises:

There is no doubt that the poorer classes in our country are much more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth. And I fancy it must arise a great deal from the comparative indistinction of the easy and the not so easy in these ranks.  A workman or a pedlar cannot shutter himself off from his less comfortable neighbours. If he treats himself to a luxury, he must do it in the face of a dozen who cannot. […] But at a certain stage of prosperity, as in a balloon ascent, the fortunate person passes through a zone of clouds, and sublunary matters are thenceforward hidden from his view. He sees nothing but the heavenly bodies, all in admirable order, and positively as good as new.  He finds himself surrounded in the most touching manner by the attentions of Providence, and compares himself involuntarily with the lilies and the skylarks.

By the time he boards the transatlantic steamer in The Amateur Emigrant - opting for a second class (steerage) ticket - Stevenson identifies more with the working-class people in his part of the ship than with his fellow gentlefolk in first class. The latter interrupt a typically convivial morning in steerage:

Through this merry and good-hearted scene there came three cabin passengers, a gentleman and two young ladies, picking their way with little gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bountiful air about nothing, which galled me to the quick. I have little of the radical in social questions, and have always nourished an idea that one person was as good as another. But I began to be troubled by this episode. It was astonishing what insults these people managed to convey by their presence. They seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongruities. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hearing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the saloon, and then hear how wittily they would depict the manners of the steerage.

Robert Louis Stevenson at The Writers’ Museum in Edinburgh

Ah, I should mention that Stevenson made the long journey across the Atlantic in pursuit of his lover, Fanny Osbourne (11 years older than he, and married with children). He made it in the end, but just barely. Even at the time Fanny got divorced so that she could marry Robert, he was, self-professedly:

a mere complication of cough and bones

He wrote The Silverado Squatters based on his and Fanny's “honeymoon” in America: a summer spent squatting in a derelict house in an abandoned silver mine in California. Along the way, the family (Robert, Fanny, and dog Chuchu) meet the local Poor Whites:

As a family, the Stevensons spent 3 years exploring the Pacific, including places like Hawaii, Tahiti, New Zealand and Samoa. He settled in Samoa, where the tropical climate suited his constitution, and eventually died there. The records of these were published posthumously as In the South Seas.

Almost as if Robert Louis Stevenson anticipates the pragmatic reader's question - "why give up your respectable life to travel as a vagrant and suffer these hardships, especially with your poor health?" - he offers an apologia for his lifestyle:

‘Out of my country and myself I go.’  I wish to take a dive among new conditions for a while, as into another element. 

In An Inland Voyage, he meets a hotel bus driver who envies his freedom:

How he longed to be somewhere else, and see the round world before he went into the grave! ‘Here I am,’ said he. ‘I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My God, is that life?’ I could not say I thought it was—for him. He pressed me to tell him where I had been, and where I hoped to go; and as he listened, I declare the fellow sighed.  Might not this have been a brave African traveller, or gone to the Indies after Drake? But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory.