3 December 1894: Robert Louis Stevenson dies

On 3 December 1894, Robert Louis Stevenson was talking to his wife while opening a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, “What’s that?” He then asked her, “Does my face look strange?”, and collapsed. Within a few hours, he had died from a brain haemorrhage. He was just 44 years old.

Four years earlier, Stevenson had purchased about 400 acres in Upolu, an island in Samoa. He was enchanted with the South Pacific and convinced his health could not endure another winter in Scotland. The climate of the tropics suited him and the regular postal service meant he could continue easy correspondence with his publishers. Stevenson lived on his estate, Vailima, in the hills of Apia and took the native name ‘Tusitala‘, which is Samoan for “Teller of Tales”. Here he wrote a great deal, completing two of his finest novellas and some short stories.

After his death, the Samoan people stood guard over his body throughout the night, and carried him on their shoulders up the long, steep incline, to nearby Mount Vaea the next morning, where he was buried with great local ceremony in a spot overlooking the sea. William Zinsser called it “probably the most inaccessible grave in English letters.”

“More than forty Samoans, including some chiefs, came promptly the next day and began the seemingly impossible task of clearing the virgin jungle up the mountainside,” writes biographer Claire Harman. The instant roadway, adds Harman, “was a feat of love as well as industry, the latest and greatest mark of the Samoans’ respect and affection for their most sympathetic sojourner.”

Based on Stevenson’s poem Requiem, the following epitaph is inscribed on the eastern side of his tomb:

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will
This be the verse you grave for me
Here he lies where he longed to be
Home is the sailor home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill