Beachcombers: Vagrancy, Empire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide

Robinson, Alistair (2019) Beachcombers: Vagrancy, Empire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide. The Review of English Studies, 70 (297). pp. 930-949. ISSN 0034-6551

Abstract

Runaways, castaways and renegades, the beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands, and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century, and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans, and the formal colonization that followed. Roaming from one island to another, trading skills and goods with their inhabitants, the beachcombers were driven further and further afield as Western powers began to annex the Pacific Islands. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by the missionaries and merchants who settled there; however, in spite of this, or rather because of it, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This article examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was ambiguously presented as both an imperial pathfinder and a degraded buccaneer in popular novels and the periodical press, and how these portrayals were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This cultural and historical discussion then provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894). Here the beachcomber, a vagrant figure who captivated Stevenson’s imagination, is shown to be essential to his construction and critique of empire in the Pacific.

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