The Cruise of the "Janet Nichol" Among the South Sea Islands: A Diary — Reading Notes

A Diary Written Against the Clock

The preface establishes the diary’s peculiar origins. Stevenson notes that she wrote “sometimes on the damp, upturned bottom of a canoe or whaleboat, sometimes when lying face down on the burning sands of the tropic beach, often in copra sheds in the midst of a pandemonium of noise and confusion.” This physical context matters: the text is not a polished travelogue but a hurried, sensory record. She also reveals that she has deleted incidents that her husband later used, as well as “things pertaining to the private affairs of other persons.” The reader is thus encountering a curated document, one that preserves certain details—like the near-catalogue of objects in Suwarrow—because Stevenson hoped they might serve a future romance. The preface is a warning and an invitation: what remains is what she chose not to let go.

The Body as a Site of Exchange

One of the most vivid excerpts describes an encounter with women on an unnamed island. Stevenson is surrounded, examined, and measured. The women “turned up my sleeves to the shoulders,” compared hands and feet, and called her “pickaninny hands and feet.” One woman “kissed my feet (the island kiss) and sniffed softly up and down my arms.” The passage is striking for its reciprocal gaze: Stevenson notes that her own white arm looked “cold, ugly” beside their brown skin, while the women admired it. The scene escalates when the women try to remove her clothes, and Stevenson begins to cry, at which point the men disappear. The episode ends with a young girl climbing aboard to exchange a ring for a blue-bead necklace. The diary here captures a moment of physical curiosity, power, and negotiation, with Stevenson both subject and object.

Conjuring and the Devil Box

Another excerpt records an evening of magic tricks aboard the ship. Mr. Henderson performs conjuring for islanders watching through the port-holes: making money disappear, tearing paper that vanishes, catching a silver dollar from the air. The audience’s reaction is immediate: “Tiaporo! (the devil!)” cries one man. The diary also alludes to a “Devil Box,” which Stevenson says her husband described fully in his own diary, so she only notes further references. The conjuring scene and the Devil Box motif suggest a running interest in how islanders interpreted European objects and actions—and how the Stevensons themselves navigated that interpretation. The diary does not explain the box, but the fragments hint at a larger story about belief, trade, and performance.

Correction and Authenticity

Stevenson’s preface includes a sharp rebuttal to other accounts of her husband’s life. She writes that “all the books ‘With Stevenson’ here, and ‘With Stevenson’ there, are manufactured out of ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ and false in almost every particular.” She corrects one specific error: the flag for King Tembinoka was designed by her on the schooner Equator and made by a Sydney firm, not on the beach at Apemama as others claimed. This defensive note reveals the diary as a corrective document, one that stakes a claim to firsthand authority. The reader is reminded that this is not a neutral record but a response to misrepresentation, written by someone who was present and who insists on the difference between memory and invention.

Reading the diary as a first-time visitor to the text, it helps to keep the preface’s framing in mind: these are notes, not a finished narrative. The gaps—the deleted passages, the unexplained Devil Box, the incidents that appear only in fragment—are part of the experience. Stevenson’s eye for material culture and her willingness to record her own discomfort make the diary a valuable counterpoint to her husband’s more polished South Sea writings. Approach it as a document of witness, not a travel guide.

There are days when reading Fanny’s diary feels like sitting beside someone turning pages in the lamplight, each scrap of cloth or curious phrase a small handhold on a place half-remembered. That same tenderness for the unfinished, the provisional, came back to me in Travels in Nubia — Edition Insights, where the margins of history seem to whisper their own quiet annotations. Both books trust the fragment.