Stevenson printed privately as a pamphlet, in June 1887, a brief and touching sketch of his father. In July he published his volume of lyrical poems called Underwoods. The ties which bound him to England were now severed, and he determined to remove to another hemisphere. He sailed from London, with his wife, mother and stepson, for New York on Aug. 17, 1887. He never set foot in Europe again. His memoir of his friend Pro fessor Fleeming Jenkin was published soon after his departure.
After resting at Newport, he went for the winter to be under the care of a physician at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. In this retreat he was very quiet, and steadily active with his pen, writing both the greater part of the Master of Ballantrae and many of his finest later essays. He had undertaken to con tribute a monthly essay to Scribner's Magazine, and these essays, twelve in number, were published continuously throughout the year 1888. Early in that year was begun The Wrong Box, a far cical romance in which Mr. Lloyd Osbourne participated; Steven son also began a romance about the Indian Mutiny, which he abandoned. His attitude about this time to life and experience is reflected in Pulvis et umbra, one of the noblest of all his essays.
In April 1888 he was at the coast of New Jersey for some weeks, and in June started for San Francisco, where he had ordered a schooner, the "Casco," to be ready to receive him. On the 28th of the month, he started, as Mr. Colvin has said, "on what was only intended to be a pleasure excursion . . . but turned into a voluntary exile prolonged until the hour of his death": he never again left the waters of the Pacific. The "Casco" proceeded first to the Marquesas, and south and east to Tahiti, passing before Christmas northwards to Honolulu, where Stevenson spent six months and finished The Master of Ballantrae and The Wrong Box. It was during this time that he paid his famous visit to the leper settlement at Molokai. In 1889, "on a certain bright June day," the Stevensons sailed for the Gilbert Islands, and after six months' cruising found themselves at Samoa, where he landed for the first time about Christmas Day 1889. On this occasion, however, though strongly drawn to the beautiful island, he stayed not longer than six weeks, and proceeded to Sydney, where early in 189o, he published, in a blaze of righteous anger, his Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu, in vindication of the memory of Father Damien and his work among the lepers of the Pacific. Meanwhile his volume of Ballads was published in London.
The last four years of his unquiet life were spent at Samoa, in circumstances of such health and vigour as he had never pre viously enjoyed, and in surroundings singularly picturesque. In November 1890 he made his abode at Vailima, where he took a small barrack of a wooden box 500 ft. above the sea, and began to build himself a large house close by. The natives gave him the name of Tusitala. He took up the cause of the deposed king Mataafa with extreme ardour, and he wrote a book, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), in the endeavour to win over British sympathy to his native friends.
In the autumn of this year he received a visit at Vailima from the countess of Jersey, in company with whom and some others he wrote the burlesque extravagance in prose and verse, called An Object of Pity, privately printed in 1893 at Sydney. When ever the cultivation of his estate and the vigorous championship of his Samoan retainers gave him the leisure, Stevenson was dur ing these years almost wholly occupied in writing romances of Scottish life. The Wrecker, an adventurous tale of American life, which mainly belonged to an earlier time, was written in collabora tion with Mr. Lloyd Osbourne and finally published in 1892; and towards the close of that very eventful and busy year he began The Justice Clerk, afterwards Weir of Hermiston. In 1893 Stevenson published the Scottish romance of Catriona, written as a sequel to Kidnapped, and the three tales illustrative of Pacific Ocean character, Island Nights' Entertainments. But in 1893 the uniform good fortune which had attended the Stevensons since their settlement in Samoa began to be disturbed. The whole family at Vailima became ill, and the final subjugation of his protégé Mataafa, and the destruction of his party in Samoan politics, deeply distressed and discouraged Stevenson. In a series of letters to The Times he exposed the policy of the chief justice, Mr. Cedercrantz, and the president of the council, Baron Senfft. He so influenced public opinion that both were removed from office. In the autumn of that year he went for a change of scene to the Sandwich Islands, but was taken ill there, and was only too glad to return to Samoa. In 1894 he was greatly cheered by the plan, suggested by friends in England and carried out by them with the greatest energy, of the noble collection of his works in twenty-eight volumes, since known as the Edinburgh edition. In September 1894 was published The Ebb Tide, the latest of his books which he saw through the press. Of Stevenson's daily avocations, and of the temper of his mind through these years of romantic exile, a clear idea may be obtained by the posthumous Vailima Letters, edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin in 1895. Through 1894 he was engaged in composing two romances, neither of which he lived to complete. He was dictating Weir of Hermiston, apparently in his usual health, on the day he died. This was Dec. 3, 1894; he was gaily talking on the verandah of his house at Vailima when he had a stroke of apoplexy, from which he never recovered consciousness, and passed away painlessly in the course of the evening. His body was carried next day by sixty sturdy Samoans, who acknowledged Stevenson as their chief, to the sum mit of the precipitous peak of Vaea, where he had wished to be buried, with the Pacific Ocean at his feet.