Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born today 160 years ago in Edinburgh, Scotland.   His father grandfather and great-uncles  were light house engineers and designers, but Robert was too sickly as a child to follow in the family profession.  Instead,  he became a writer, one of the greatest of the Victorian era.  Despite a lifetime of ill health, he was a prolific author, writing numerous classics, including Kidnapped, the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and a book for young adults first called The Sea Cook and later renamed Treasure Island.   The modern image of the 17th century pirate is lifted almost verbatim from Treasure Island published in 1883.   (I suspect that without Long John Silver, it is unlikely that there would ever have been a Captain Jack Sparrow. )

In 1899 Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco and sailed with his family from San Francisco on an almost three year voyage across the eastern and central Pacific.  In 1890 he  settled in in the village of Vailima on Upolu, one of the Samoan islands. He took the Samoan name  Tusitala, meaning “Teller of Tales.” In 1894 Stevenson died, probably of a cerebral hemorrhage, at age 44. He was buried on nearby Mount Vaea on a spot overlooking the sea.

His tomb is marked with the epitath he wrote for himself:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.