1. See Jolly (South Sea Tales, Stevenson in the Pacific), Colley, Reid, and Largeaud-Ortéga (Ainsi Soit-Île. Littérature et anthropologie dans les Contes des mers du sud de R. L. Stevenson) for more comprehensive studies of Stevenson as an anthropologist.

2. Like all Stevenson scholars, “I have treated . . . The Ebb-Tide as [a] work of Stevenson, without reference to the influence of his collaborator [Lloyd Osbourne], which is anyway . . . almost impossible to perceive” (Eigner 99, n. 34).

3. “A palimpsest, literally, is a parchment whose original writing has been scraped off and covered with fresh inscriptions. The original writing, however, having been only partly erased, can still be read through. Figuratively, this shows that any text may conceal another one without hardly ever completely dissimulating it, which calls for the twin reading of – at least – two texts on top of each other, a hypertext and its hypotext” (Genette, back cover, trans. Largeaud-Ortéga).

4. Katabasis: voyage to the underworld. Etymologically: “stepping downward.”

5. My thanks to Robert Louis Abrahamson for this information and his general support for this paper.

6. Pages 124, 125, 144, and 202 in the Oxford World's Classics edition (1999). Further references to this text list page numbers only.

7. Antonomasia: a trope that consists of using a proper noun as a common noun.

8. [S]ortes Virgilianae: “the practice of seeking guidance or attempting to divine the future by randomly selecting passages from Virgil” (Jolly, South Sea Tales 280, n. 124).

9. Further references to the English translation list book and page numbers only. “[R]apido pariter cum flamine . . . [u]t primum alatis [tetigit] magalia plantis” (Virgile, vol. 1, IV: 241 and 259). Further references to the Latin text list book and line numbers only. My thanks to Marie Leyral for her help with the Latin text.

10. “Patris magni” (IV: 238).

11. “Naviget!” (IV: 237).

12. “[F]ata” (IV: 340).

13. “[D]ant clara incendia lucem. . . . [C]um mihi se, non ante oculis tam clare, videndam obtulit et pura per noctem in luce refulsit alma parens” (II: 569, 589–91).

14. “Nate, . . . [n]on prius aspicies ubi fessum aetate parentem liqueris Anchisem, superet coniunxne Creusa Ascaniusque puer? quos omnis undique Graeiae circum errant acies” (II: 594–99).

15. “[O]bmutuit amens,” “atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc in partisque rapit uarias preque aomina uersat,” “quid agat ?” (IV: 279, 285–86, 283)

16. “Umbrarum . . . locus” (VI: 390).

17. “[C]um tabida membris corrupto caeli tractu miseranque uenit, . . . [l]inquebant dulcis animas aut aegra trahebant corpora” (III: 137–41).

18. “[T]um mihi caeruleus supra caput astitit imber noctem hiememque ferens et inhorruit unda tenebris. Continuo uenti uoluont mare magnaque surgunt aequora, dispersi iactamur gurgite uasto; inuoluere diem nimbi et nox umida caelum abstulit” (III: 194–99).

19. “[E]rrore” (III: 181).

20. “Celaeno, infelux uates,” “Furiarum ego maxima pando,” “dira fames,” “nostraeque iniuria caedis ambesas subigat malis absumere mensas” (III: 245–46, 252, 256, 256–57).

21. “Portitor . . . terribili squalore Charon, cui plurima mento canities inculta iacet, stant lumina flamma, sordidus ex umeris nodo dependet amictus” (VI: 299).

22. “Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae; corpora uiua nefas Stygia uectare carina” (VI: 390–91).

23. “[T]ecum me tolle per undas, sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam” (VI: 370–71).

24. “‘[D]ead reckoning,’ originally ‘ded.’ (from ‘deduced’) reckoning; estimating a ship's position using only speed and course steered from the last observed position” (Jolly, South Sea Tales 283, n. 158).

25. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

26. It must be remembered that the real discoverers of the Pacific Islands were not Europeans, but Pacific Islanders originally sailing from South-East Asia.

27. The Discoverers paved the way for imperialism. In 1867, Wallis claimed possession of Tahiti, which he named “The Island of George III,” and in 1768, Bougainville wrote an “Act of Possession” of the same island in the name of King Louis XV. “The British exploration of the South Seas was a deliberately conceived and executed imperial gambit. Voyages were disguised as projects of scientific curiosity, but in fact paved the way for mercantile imperialism and territorial expansion. This effort was enabled and accompanied by colonialism in the domains of culture and knowledge, thought to emerge from a consistent European ideology now often characterised as Enlightenment rationalism.” (Lamb, Smith, and Thomas xvi)

28. “We tenant the shady groves, and dwell pillowed on the velvet banks, or in the meadows fresh with running brooks.” Trans. Jackson.

29. All translations of Bougainville by Largeaud-Ortéga.

30. “[F]ortunatorum nemorum” (VI: 639).

31. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

32. See Tcherkézoff, Tahiti 7.

33. The Falesā spelling is deliberate. See Largeaud-Ortéga, “Stevenson's ‘Little Tale’ is ‘a Library.’”

34. Vahine: proto-Polynesian for woman.

35. Loti's The Marriage of Loti (1879) also presents Papeete as a disease-ridden place, an evil environment for young girls, but in a very different mode. In contrast with The Ebb-Tide, The Marriage of Loti maintains the antique representation of an idyllic Pacific world. As Jolly points out, “The Marriage of Loti is . . . an elegiac acceptance that paradise must be lost. Viaud-Loti mourns the effects of the white man's presence in the Pacific, but does not criticize them” (“South Sea Gothic” 44).

36. Beachcomber: “contemptuous term for a white man with no visible means of support, existing on the fringes of white society and living by charity, odd jobs, or more disreputable means in Pacific ports” (Jolly, “Introduction” to South Sea Tales 265, n. 30.) The word beachcomber seems to have been published first in Melville's Omoo (1847). Melville himself was a beachcomber on the islands of Nuku Hiva, Tahiti, and Eimeo. His Pacific fiction, however, remains in the line of the literary tradition set by Bougainville, adhering to phantasmagorial representations of Pacific islands. “[In 1879,] the themes of the Polynesian paradise and paradise lost had been staple elements of Pacific travel writing for over a hundred years, and both the tropical idyll and the pastoral contrast between urban corruption and natural innocence had featured strongly in Melville's Typee and Omoo” (Jolly, “South Sea Gothic” 31). The same applies to another successful American writer and beachcomber of the time, Stoddard, author of South Sea Idylls (1873). See Largeaud-Ortéga, “Îles mythiques.”

37. It may seem paradoxical to argue that Stevenson depicted Pacific otherness through white men when, unlike Bougainville, he did see the natives as others and not as white men's reflections. Stevenson was indeed acutely sensitive to the islanders’ plight under quasi-colonial rule, as is made clear in his historical survey of Samoa, A Footnote to History (1893), his several “Letters” to the Times (1889–93), and previous Pacific fiction like “The Bottle Imp,” “The Isle of Voices,” and The Beach of Falesā (1893), which denounce abusive white hegemony in the Pacific. The answer to this paradox is that these previous writings had had little impact at home.

38. Isocolon: repetition of phrases of equal grammatical structure.

39. Anaphoric: repetition of a word at the beginning of a clause, line, or sentence.

40. Auxesis: arrangement of clauses in order of increasing dramatic effect.

41. See Sandison 317–35 for the relativity of realism in The Ebb-Tide.

42. Analepsis: return into the past.

43. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

44. Hyperonym: generic term.

45. “This naming . . . places the colony in the same imperial imaginary, or imaginary imperium, that connected the Roman Empire to the British Empire through the study in classical literature and underwrote the education of Britain's imperial administrators” (Jolly, “Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire” 168)

46. There had been fleeting contacts from the seventeenth-century onward, but no settlement in Pacific islands. See James.

47. This allegorical similitude does not take into account the geological difference between high island Tahiti and low atoll New Island.

48. “[D]euenere locos laetos et amoena uirecta fortunatorum nemorum sedesque beatas” (VI: 638–39).

49. “Cerberus haec ingens latratu regna trifauci personat aduerso recubans immanis in antro” (VI: 417).

50. “[P]rior adgreditur dictis atque increpat ultro: ‘Quisquis es, armatus qui nostra ad flumina tendis, fare age quid uenias, iam istinc et comprime gressum”’ (VI: 387–89).

51. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

52. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

53. “[T]umulum capit unde omnis longo ordine posset aduersos legere et uenientum discere uoltus. ‘Nunc age, Dardaniam prolem quae deinde sequatur gloria, . . . nepotes . . . . En huius, nate, auspiciis illa incluta Roma imperium terris’” (VI: 754–57, 781–82).

54. Tapa: Tapa is a piece of barkcloth that was ritually made by women: they would beat the bark of a tree for days into a very thin piece of clothing which was only exhibited on ceremonial occasions. Such an occasion is narrated in Stevenson's The Beach of Falesá (Largeaud-Ortéga, “Stevenson's ‘Little Tale’ is ‘a Library’” 124).

55. Kava: “the pepper plant piper methysticum, the root of which was used to prepare a drink of great social and ceremonial significance in Polynesia” (Jolly, South Sea Tales 271, n.79). It was chewed by young virgins and spat back into a kava bowl for men to drink in sacred ceremonies. It is mentioned in Stevenson's “The Bottle Imp.” See Largeaud-Ortéga, Ainsi Soit-Île 237–38.

56. Unlike Attwater, Wiltshire in The Beach of Falesā marries an islander and will not sail back to Europe. Their mixed-raced children embody a viable future in the Pacific, however hazy. See Largeaud-Ortéga, “Stevenson's ‘Little Tale’ is ‘a Library.’”

57. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

58. See Jolly, “Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire” for a comprehensive study of piracy (including unofficial missions and slavery) in The Ebb-Tide.

59. Trans. Largeaud-Ortéga.

60. “Huc geminas nunc flecte acies, hanc aspice gentem Romanosque tuos. Hic Caesar et omnis Iuli progenies magnum caeli uentura sub axem. . . . Augustus Caesar, diui genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata” (VI: 788–94).

61. “[I]ussa . . . diuom exsequitur,” “si fata meis paterentur ducere uitam auspiciis et sponte mea componere curas,” “Italiam non sponte sequor,” “fata obstant placidasque uiri deus obstruit auris” (IV: 396, 340–41, 361, 440).

62. This quote from Camus and the following ones are translated by Largeaud-Ortéga.

63. At the intradiegetic level is the narrating voice, as opposed to the metadiegetic level, where are the narrated characters. See Genette.

64. “[I]ngentem luctum . . . tuorum” (VI: 868)