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“Our voyage up here was most disastrous — calms, squalls, head seas, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the hurricane season. … We ran out of food and were quite given up for lost in Honolulu.”
That reads like an incident lifted out of a Robert Louis Stevenson adventure story, but it really describes a true-life episode lifted from one of his letters. The downside of sailing in tropical Oceania had been factored in the year before when RLS and Sam McClure planned the cruise in the firelight at Baker’s in Saranac Lake. “But,” said the daring Scot, “the perils of the deep were part of the program.” Stevenson didn’t force his family to go along, and they certainly knew the risks. Even Valentine, their servant, went for the ride, but by landfall in Hawaii, her tolerance reached a tipping point, and she charted her own course back to Europe.