When I read this short essay by Robert Louis Stevenson, I recognised a man who loved islands, since there are references to different islands that he had either explored or invented.
I have created a few versions of this wonderful essay from RLS, partly from an interest in islands, but also because there are many opportunities to make cross references to other material from RLS himself. I have also travelled to the island described and I have included some photographs within the book.
Back in 2001, I created a Quicktime VR movie and had included this in a PDF version of this eBook. Including this in the ePub version seems impossible for the moment. Even putting a link to the QTVR online is a bit risky because recent versions of Quicktime from Apple no longer supports this format.
Robert Louis Stevenson completed ‘The Merry Men’ when he lived in Bournemouth, England between 1884 and 1887. It was first published in 1887 with other short stories as ‘The Merry Men and Other Tales’.
First published in the IDLER, August 1894 and then later in a collection of essays titled ‘The Art of Writing’.
He started the first draft of “The Merry Men’ when he stayed in Scotland during the summer of 1881 and in his essay about the writing of ‘Treasure Island’ he mentions this fact.
The story takes place on the fictional Eilean Aros which Stevenson based on Eilean Earraid, a small islet near to the Ross of Mull and Iona. ‘The Merry Men’ are, in fact, the dangerous reefs known as the Torran Rocks.
This essay was first published in Putnam's Magazine in 1854. It was collected in The Piazza Tales, Dix & Edwards in 1856.
The Encantadas are actually the Galapagos Islands. There are ten sections that Melville calls 'Sketches'. Some of them refer to individual islands in the group and some sketches cover some general points, such as pirates and castaways.
Each sketch is prefixed with a quotation from Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene which was published in 1590.
This story was written in 1926 but then not published until 1928, after the author's death. The story was published as one of a collection of short stories; The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, Knopf, New York.
This ebook is delivered to you in the ePub format. The epub is optimised for the iPad, but will work equally well on a number of ereaders.
