“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.”

– Robert Louis Stevenson, 
in a letter written “with a dreadful pen” 
to his friend Charles Baxter in 1888
while sailing to the Marquesas Islands
aboard the Casco