In Rule of Darkness Patrick Brantlinger observes that much late-Victorian and Edwardian writing has an elegiac quality, ‘mourning the loss of adventure, heroism, [and] true nobility’. The late stories of Robert Louis Stevenson and those of Conrad, for example, consistently express the diminution of chances for heroism in the modern world. There is ‘a felt contradiction between trade and the heroic, aristocratic significance of adventure’, resulting in narratives that link together ‘imperial domination, the profit motive, moral degeneracy, parasitism, and ultimately murder or attempted murder’. Brantlinger is describing what amounts to a repudiation of adventure and imperialism from within. In his late stories, such as ‘The Beach of Falesa’ and ‘The Ebb-Tide’, Robert Louis Stevenson is still writing from within the adventure tradition, but the ‘romance’ of Treasure Island has collapsed under the ‘realism’ – and the imperial politics – of life in Samoa. The collapse of the heroic attitude to adventure, and with it the ideology of imperialism, is like the return of the repressed – and the repressed in adventure, as Joseph Bristow observes, is realism.

This final chapter of Writing the Colonial Adventure deals with the apparent collapse of the adventure mode from within as the symptom of a profound malaise in imperialism that would culminate in World War I.