Quotes of the Day

Under the wide and starry sky,/ Dig the grave and let me lie..." You know you're on a true literary pilgrimage when your taxi driver can recite Robert Louis Stevenson's Requiem in the time it takes to wind five kilometers up the hill from Apia to the old plantation home of Vailima. It was here that the Scottish writer (1850-1894) - who blended boy's-own adventure with psychological insight and a sense of history in such tales as Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Body Snatchers - came to die. "Our place is in a deep cleft of Vaea Mountain, some 600 feet above the sea, embowered in forest, which is our strangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars," he wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin at the British Museum in 1890.

These days Vailima is itself a museum, and literary curiosity beats a path to its door. The house Stevenson and his American wife Fanny carved into the mountainside recently made it into Patricia Schulz's bestselling 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and each year up to 12,000 Stevensonians, tourists and scholars climb the hill to peer into the world of a man who has kidnapped the imagination of generations. Devoted pilgrims will hike a further hour to the author's final resting place on the peak of Mount Vaea. Here, under the breadfruit trees, they can wonder about his death at 44 from a brain hemorrhage, whose suddenness turned his life "into a fable as strange and romantic as one of his own," Henry James wrote to the distraught Fanny. "There have been … for men of letters few deaths more romantically right." .

For many of the 115,000 Samoans who live on the main island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson is still very much alive. From his office on the sixth floor of the Central Bank of Samoa building, Deputy Prime Minister Misa Telefoni points out the window to Tusitala's mountain tomb: "See, it's up under those trees - right on top. That's an indication of how much the Samoans cared for him, because they had to hack the road up there and carry his heavy coffin." Telefoni's memory of Tusitala, or "Writer of Tales," as he was known locally, is entwined with his own family history: "He had a very close relationship with an old uncle of mine." That man was Harry Moors, an American trader who helped secure the lands of Vailima for Stevenson, and whose daughter married Telefoni's grandfather. .

Stevenson is also entwined in the country's political history. Arriving only months after the signing of the Berlin Treaty of 1889, which gave control of Samoa jointly to Germany, Britain and the U.S., the famous Scotsman put his weight behind the non-aligned chief Mata'afa. Former Prime Minister Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi says Stevenson's sympathies were with "indigenous people - their aspirations, their problems trying to hold their own against outsider influences, whether they were missionaries, colonial or business people." Nearly a quarter of a century after they gained independence, Samoans are relaxed in the author's presence. Each afternoon, shop keeper Henry Nickel jogs up Mount Vaea, takes off his flip-flops and does stretches by Stevenson's grave. "I just come here to exercise," he says. . The myth of Tusitala has also undergone a workout. But you'd expect nothing less from the story of how one of the world's tallest tale-tellers came to an island of natural yarn-spinners (fagogo is the Samoan word for their rich and digressive oral tradition). Setting out from San Francisco in 1888 with wife Fanny, 11 years his senior, Stevenson sought both material for his writing and warm weather for his ailing lungs. After stops along the way, Stevenson began to pine for "an island with a profile," and found it in the natural peaks and waterfalls of Samoa. Regular steamer connections with Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. meant the bestselling author could keep up serial publication of his writings. As well as novels and short stories, there were travel pieces, political reportage, poetry and prayers. Stevenson never thought small. "His wish to be buried on Mount Vaea was in keeping with that largeness," says Samoan-born writer Albert Wendt. But somewhere along the way, the writer got lost. "When we came to the scene, the memory of Tusitala was becoming almost mythical," says RLS Preservation Foundation president James Winegar, a former Mormon missionary from the U.S. who helped set up the Vailima museum with aloe vera millionaire Rex Maugham in 1994. Not only the memory of the writing had faded - Vailima, too, had seen better days. After a 1990 cyclone all but destroyed what had become the official residence of Samoa's head of state, the foundation assumed responsibility for Vailima's restoration. Its mission: "to make this guy come alive again," explains Winegar. .

Today, one can hover over Stevenson's single bed in his upstairs study (Fanny disliked the aquamarine walls almost as much as his coughing), gaze into his man-sized safe, and pace the verandas where the writer would listen to the distant surf crashing on the reef. But Samoa's climate hasn't been kind to his writing. A set of first editions in the museum has almost perished. "The cockroaches got to the books," says museum manager Lufilufi Rasmussen. "The covers aren't legible now, so we have to get them restored." Until recently, the reputation of Stevenson's Pacific writings was in similar tatters. Growing up in Apia as a boy, and later on scholarship in New Zealand, Albert Wendt recalls reading Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde "like every other young person, but I never considered him an important writer." Seeking to reposition his work as rich and revelatory, Wellington University's Roger Robinson last year published Robert Louis Stevenson: His Best Pacific Writings. "Together they form a contribution to the literature in English of the Pacific, in five genres, that still stands unmatched," he concludes. So in this postcolonial age, are we ready to revisit Stevenson? A rereading of his novella The Beach of Falesá (1892), the only completed work in a planned series on cross-cultural encounters, suggests so. Peopled with dyspeptic traders, white-suited missionaries and superstitious Samoan villagers, it blends mythical tales with sea stories, achieving a heightened realism that critiques the colonial experience. An earlier story completed before his travels is thought to have provided Joseph Conrad with his famous last words for Kurtz, "The horror! The horror!" and The Beach of Falesá is Stevenson's Heart of Darkness. .

But it is his nonfiction that Wendt, the first Polynesian professor of New Zealand literature, believes will last. "As I write these words … the sound of that vexed harbour hums in my ears," writes Stevenson in A Footnote to History (1892), his journalistic account of the cultural friction that greeted his 1889 arrival in Apia. Samoa was shaping up as the site of a naval conflict between Germany and the U.S., backed by Britain, but war was averted when a hurricane sank several battleships in Apia's harbor. Stevenson prophetically saw the disaster - which led to the signing of the Berlin Treaty - as a historical turning point. With its personal reportage, using fictional techniques, A Footnote was also a pioneering work of journalism. .

But Stevenson's biggest legacy was to build a path toward Pacific literature. While printing presses were established as early as 1817 in Tahiti, books were slow to take hold in an oral society. In the early 1970s, when he returned to Apia to teach, Wendt concluded: "Samoa has no need of writers. It is waiting for tourists." But the writer persevered - and became one of the Pacific's best-known novelists. Wendt's 2003 epic The Mango's Kiss dramatizes the encounter between a village girl, Pele, loosely based on Wendt's grandmother, and a Scottish novelist called Leonard Roland Stenson. Is he a sympathetic character? "Hell, yes," says Wendt. "In the novel, he leaves his library of books to the young Samoan woman - it didn't actually happen in real life." Instead, metaphorically at least, he bequeathed them to a nation.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Robert Louis Stevenson lies buried on a Samoan hilltop, but his legacy lives on in the country's people and their stories