The Cruise of the Janet Nichol Among the South Sea Islands

In April 1890 the steamer Janet Nicoll set off from Sydney for a three-month trading voyage through the central and western Pacific. Aboard were seven white men, a crew of forty islanders, and one woman: a short-haired, barefoot, cigarette-smoking American, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, wife of the famous novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. The Cruise of the 'Janet Nichol' is her account of her journey with her husband and grown son through the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands." "Fanny Stevenson's spirited personality led her into scenes and situations few Europeans, and fewer European women, had experienced. Her diary and its accompanying photographs offer unique glimpses of life in some of the last independent Pacific kingdoms and those just coming under colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth century. This book, with an introduction by Roslyn Jolly, is the story of an unconventional woman, her unusual marriage, and her adventurous journey through a rapidly changing Pacific world.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.