STEVENSON ROBERT LOUIS Autograph Manuscript unsigned 38 line

Sale 2628 - Lot 151

Price Realized: $ 3,250

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 2,500 - $ 3,500

ORIGINAL DRAFT FROM "THE SOUTH SEAS" STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS. Autograph Manuscript, unsigned, 38-line fragment of original draft of South Sea Letters (first published serially in 1891 in the New York Sun and elsewhere, published posthumously as The South Seas). The fragment, a continuous passage from the end of chapter II in South Seas, including a paragraph discussing the symbolism of Venus in relation to the seasons of death in the Tuamotus Islands which does not appear in the published book. 3 pages, oblong 8vo, written on rectos, each cut from a single folio sheet formed by pasting together two smaller sheets; few scattered short closed tears repaired verso with paper, ink identification written vertically in left margin of two pages, faint scattered soiling. Np, circa 1890

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"Either beach, I have said, abounds with life. . . .
"Venus, being the Paumotuan star of Hades and time-keeper of the dead, was perhaps not unnaturally saddled with this responsibility; the light that chases spectres might well be thought to sicken fish. By all accounts besides, the periodicity is, for each island, regular. The difficulty is that it should vary and be even reversed from isle to isle. Touched with a sense of this, Monsieur Wilmot, conseiller-général, an able man--the author, at least, of an able pamphlet on the archipelago--made a number of well considered experiments. Catching wholesome fish on the outside, he had them sunk . . . to different depths and over different bottoms in the lagoon. Over pearl shell, it appears they remained innocuous; but the proximity of certain sorts of coral, above all in the season of its flowering, poisoned them in an exposure of twelve days. . . ."