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 Light, Darkness, and Shadow Stevenson in the South Seas     .       According to the accounts of Stevenson’s missionary acquaintances, the Polynesians gave precedence to the moon over the sun and counted by nights, not by days. The fluctuating moon and its varying play of light and shadow against a background of darkness structured their understanding of the passing of time.1 As if this orientation influenced the perspective of Westerners who sailed to the islands, foreign residents and travelers to the South Seas tended to situate themselves according to the ways in which light—from whatever source—illuminated the pitch-black night. Stevenson was no exception, for in the South Seas his writing, his photographic images, and his sense of place relied upon the manner in which the occasional lamp lights a trackless darkness, how a flash camera reveals a segment of a night dance, or the way a magic lantern’s glow casts shadows across church rafters. From Stevenson’s point of view, darkness serves as the foundation of seeing. In his South Seas writing Stevenson positions both himself and his reader in a landscape oriented by lights shining in the darkness. As if he were still the child admiring the lamps that mapped the city of Edinburgh or the young boy carrying a bull’s-eye lantern so he could illuminate the black night of a Scottish fishing village (“The Lantern Bearers”), Stevenson continues to follow the glow of lanterns or the sight of a young moon on his nocturnal journeys through the islands. These luminous points of reference shine not only upon the dense thickets and rough roads of the islands’ interiors but also upon the “wild, ill-charted and unlighted seas” that lie about their shores (Ltrs : ). In a sense, his coming to the South Seas led him back to the landscape of his childhood where the stars, the oil and gas lamps still held dominion, and where the “old mild lustre” of the lantern illuminated the dark by degrees and not all at once (Stevenson : ). Now in the South Seas his lamp’s rays overspread his manuscript pages, to reappear as scattered beams glowing in a green thicket (Stevenson b: ), as the street lamps’ trembling reflections on the waters of the port (Stevenson : ), and as distant lights from fires and torches of many fishers moving on the reef (Stevenson a: ). In a way, Stevenson’s appreciation for the sight of a light penetrating the darkness forms the very letters of his prose. In the opening passages of In the South Seas, when he describes his first sighting of the Marquesas, it is as if his words, like hieroglyphic silhouettes, emerge from the appearance of a “radiating centre of brightness” within the disappearing gloom of night (Stevenson a: ). The ensuing contrast brings into view the black lines of the horizon upon which stands a “morning bank” as “black as ink” and reveals a prospect in which the dark peaks or needles of Va-pu show themselves in outline against the first rays of the sun (). One of Stevenson’s photographs displays the mountains appearing to write upon the sky, and one of his pencil sketches done on board the Casco illustrates how the contrast of strong, black lines upon a white sheet of paper creates a kind of vocabulary with which to delineate and realize what he sees. These images give Stevenson the lines, the ink, and the letters with which to mark his arrival and to proceed. His ideas and words emerge, bit by bit, as the dawn allows the landscape slowly to take shape “in the attenuating darkness” (). The prospect of light against darkness helps him describe what he has never seen before and to articulate what at that moment was “a virginity of sense” (). On his subsequent journeys through the islands, he is never content to rest in the full whitewashed blaze of day but returns, as if to refurbish his vocabulary, into a landscape where he remarks on “the hour of the dusk, when the fire blazes, and . . . the lamp glints . . . between the pillars of the house” (), and where the fronds of the palm trees “stand out dark upon the distance, glisten against the sun, and flash like silver fountains in the assault of the wind” (). Stevenson’s fiction and imagination thrive upon the alternating, uneven dispersal of light and darkness. His characters seem to step out of the shadows onto the brightness of the page. Like the native women in...

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