Robert louis stevenson modestine5/10/2023 One can imagine the whoops around the Edinburgh tea-tables when this was read aloud to Jane’s cronies. Here was a ‘strange, and to us, rather alarming’ sight for Margaret Stevenson to report home! ‘The display of legs was something we were not accustomed to but as they were all tattooed in most wonderful patterns, it really looked quite as if they were wearing open-work silk tights’, she wrote to her sister. Soon the Casco was swarming with natives ‘stalwart, six-foot men in every state of undress some in a shirt, some in a loin-cloth, one in a handkerchief, improperly adjusted’. On board was the local chief and a white trader called Regler, the advance party for dozens of small boats that followed. They bore along the shore, looking without success for signs of life, and eventually reached Anaho Bay, where no sooner had they anchored than a canoe was spotted on its way out from the shore. ‘The first experience can never be repeated’, Stevenson wrote in In the South Seas ‘the first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart and touched by a virginity of sense’. Towards dawn on 28 July, the magical moment arrived when land was sighted the distant volcanic peak of Ua-huna. EXTRACT FROM ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: A BIOGRAPHY The yacht Casco on which Stevenson and his family made their first voyage of the South Seas in 1888
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