Robert Louis Stevenson gave us
Treasure Island.

I love what he wrote to his friend, Charles Baxter, in 1888 while sailing to the Marquesas aboard the Casco…
“I shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done – except Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese.” Melville wrote Moby Dick. “Howling cheese.”
I love that.

Stevenson died, just 44 years old in 1894.

A Scotsman living in the South Seas because of his tuberculosis,
Stevenson was buried on the summit of Mount Vaea in Western Samoa.

He wrote his own epitaph 14 years before his death.

 

 

 

 

photos courtesy of the
National Library of Scotland