Between 1888 and 1890 Stevenson and his family travelled widely across the Pacific. During their first period of voyaging, between June 1888 and December 1889, they visited the Marquesas Islands, the Paumotus (Tuamotus), Tahiti, Hawai‘i, and the Gilberts (Kiribati). Then, after deciding to settle in Samoa, they went on another journey between February and September 1890, this time visiting Australia, New Zealand, Penrhyn (one of the Cook Islands), the Marshall Islands, and New Caledonia. Stevenson observed carefully while he was on the move and he talked with local leaders, traders, missionaries, and other inhabitants of the islands in order to learn about them. Although he did not remain for longer than a few months in any one place, he was able to visit more of the Pacific than other visitors of his time. He felt confident enough to write to his friend Charles Baxter in September 1888 that he would be able to ‘tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done’. In Samoa, from September 1890, he revised the journal of his Pacific travels for serial publication in Britain and the United States. In spite of the fact that he did not complete ‘The South Seas’, the larger synthetic work that he had planned at the outset of his journey, these published literary South Seas Letters contain valuable information about the region and are the focus of the present chapter.

Scholars of this body of Stevenson's writing have sought to position it within the context of the history of anthropology. However, rather than seeking to obtain for him a place alongside the discipline's Victorian founders, they have tended to highlight instead Stevenson's problematic relationship to that genealogy. Taking his fiction and non-fiction together, Julia Reid assesses that ‘a sustained ambivalence towards anthropology's progressive narrative unites his oeuvre’. In particular, she notes that Stevenson's posthumously published volume of travel writing, In the South Seas, ‘draws on Darwinism to challenge the Spencerian laissez-faire evolutionism which underlay the new science of anthropology’. Reid finds that, although Stevenson was highly interested in the work of Victorian anthropologists, he was sceptical of their optimistic claims about human development and resisted theories emphasising cultural progress.