Island Nights' Entertainments (also known as South Sea Tales) is a collection of short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1893. It would prove to contain some of his final completed work before his death in 1894.
It contains three stories:
The dedication was written in January 1892 in a letter to Charles Baxter, Robert Louis Stevenson's friend and adviser, and the book finally published in 1893. [1] The dedication reads:
To three old shipmates among the islands,
- Harry Henderson,
- Ben Hird,
- Jack Buckland,
- their friend
- R.L.S.
All three were Robert Louis Stevenson's fellow cabin passengers on the 1890 Janet Nicholl voyage. [2] [3] Harry Henderson was a partner in the firm Henderson and Macfarlane (died 1926, Melbourne); Ben Hird, the supercargo and trader; Jack Buckland a copra trader and original of the Tommy Hadden character in The Wrecker. [4] Jack Buckland’s dedication copy of Island Nights’ Entertainments was inscribed by Stevenson to "Jack Buckland, from Robert Louis Stevenson". [1]
Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped and A Child's Garden of Verses.
Robert Michael Ballantyne was a Scottish author of juvenile fiction, who wrote more than a hundred books. He was also an accomplished artist: he exhibited some of his water-colours at the Royal Scottish Academy.
Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, telling a story of "buccaneers and buried gold". It is considered a coming-of-age story and is noted for its atmosphere, characters, and action.
William Ernest Henley was an English poet, writer, critic and editor. Though he wrote several books of poetry, Henley is remembered most often for his 1875 poem "Invictus". A fixture in London literary circles, the one-legged Henley might have been the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's character Long John Silver, while his young daughter Margaret Henley inspired J. M. Barrie's choice of the name Wendy for the heroine of his play Peter Pan (1904).
Niutao is a reef island in the northern part of Tuvalu. It is one of the nine districts (islands) of Tuvalu. It is also one of the three districts that consist of only one island - not counting the three islets inside the closed lagoon. Niutao has a population of 582.
Suwarrow is an island in the northern group of the Cook Islands in the south Pacific Ocean. It is about 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) south of the equator and 930 kilometres (580 mi) north-northwest of the capital island of Rarotonga.
Abemama (Apamama) is an atoll, one of the Gilberts group in Kiribati, and is located 152 kilometres southeast of Tarawa and just north of the Equator. Abemama has an area of 27.37 square kilometres and a population of 3,299 as of 2015. The islets surround a deep lagoon. The eastern part of the atoll of Abemama is linked together by causeways making automobile traffic possible between the different islets. The outlying islands of Abatiku and Biike are situated on the southwestern side of the atoll.
Samuel Lloyd Osbourne was an American author and the stepson of the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he co-authored three books, including The Wrecker, and provided input and ideas on others. Osbourne also wrote a number of stories and essays on his own, including An Intimate Portrait of R L S By His Stepson (1924).
Frances "Fanny" Matilda Van de Grift Osbourne Stevenson was an American magazine writer. She became a supporter and later the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the mother of Isobel Osbourne, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, and Hervey Stewart Osbourne.
The Wrecker (1892) is an ocean adventure novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne that was used sixty-five years later as the basis for an episode of the television series Maverick (1957) starring James Garner and Jack Kelly.
Tembinok', or Tem Binoka, was the Uea of Abemama, Aranuka and Kuria, in the Gilbert Islands, during the late 19th century.
"The Beach of Falesá" is a novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in the Illustrated London News in 1892, and later published in book form in the short-story collection Island Nights' Entertainments (1893). It was written after Stevenson moved to the South Seas island of Samoa just a few years before he died there.
There was widespread belief in ghosts in Polynesian culture, some of which persists today. After death, a person's ghost would normally travel to the sky world or the underworld, but some could stay on earth. In many Polynesian legends, ghosts were often involved in the affairs of the living. Ghosts might also cause sickness or even invade the body of ordinary people, to be driven out through strong medicines.
"The Isle of Voices" is a short story written by Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in his collection Island Nights' Entertainments in 1893.
John Wilberforce "Jack" Buckland (1864–1897), also known as "Tin Jack", was a trader who lived in the South Pacific in the late 19th century. He travelled with Robert Louis Stevenson and his stories of life as an island trader became the inspiration for the character of Tommy Hadden in The Wrecker (1892).
Fred Whibley abandoned a career as clerk in a London bank to escape from the constraints and social expectations of respectability in the Victorian era. He ended up as a copra trader on Niutao in Tuvalu in the central Pacific Ocean.
In British history, a remittance man was an emigrant, often from Britain to a British colony, supported by regular payments from home on the expectation that he stay away.
Alfred Restieaux (1832–1911) was born in Somers Town, London, England and came from a family of French descent. His grandfather was a French nobleman who escaped the guillotine during the French Revolution. At the age of 16 he migrated to Australia and later he travelled to South America and North America. He later became an island trader in the central Pacific. From 1867 to 1872 he had dealings with Ben Pease and Bully Hayes, two of the more notorious captains of ships and blackbirders that operated in the Pacific at that time.
George Wylie Hutchinson (1852–1942) was a painter and leading illustrator in Britain and was from Great Village, Nova Scotia, Canada. He illustrated the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Hall Caine, Robert Louis Stevenson and Israel Zangwill. His paintings inspired the poem "Large Bad Picture" and "Poem", both by Elizabeth Bishop, his great grand niece. Hutchinson was a contributor to and subject of the novel The Master (1895) by Israel Zangwill, with whom he was a close friend.
Island Nights' Entertainments public domain audiobook at LibriVox  | This article about a collection of short stories is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
