In Search of Tusitala
SynopsisPlot
Gavin Bell, for many years an admirer of Stevenson and his work, retraces Stevenson's passage through the more remote communities of French Polynesia, Hawaii, Kiribati, and Samoa. On his tour through Polynesia and Micronesia, he finds haunting echoes of a fading culture that enchanted Stevenson, and in Hawaii finds a man who possesses one of the finest private Stevenson collections.
Story
About this book
Gavin Bell, a long-standing admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, follows the Scottish writer's Pacific voyages of the late 1880s and early 1890s. The title comes from the Samoan name given to Stevenson, Tusitala, meaning teller of tales. Bell travels to the same scattered island communities, more than a century after Stevenson passed through them. Stevenson settled in Samoa in his final years.
The route covers French Polynesia, Hawaii, Kiribati, and Samoa, crossing both Polynesia and Micronesia. These are places separated by long stretches of open ocean, where atolls sit only a few metres above sea level and travel between islands still depends on boats and infrequent flights. Kiribati, which straddles the equator, remains among the hardest of these places to reach.
In Hawaii he meets a man who owns one of the finest private collections of Stevenson material. Elsewhere he listens for traces of the island cultures that once fascinated the writer, and finds them fading rather than fixed. The book works as travel account and literary search at once, setting Stevenson's later years against the landscapes and communities Bell records on the way.
