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Dare Everything Robert Louis Stevenson followed his heart from Scotland to California—crossing an ocean and a continent to win his lady love. By J. Kingston Pierce Depending on which of his biographers you consult, Robert Louis Stevenson was either a fine romantic or the rashest fool on the planet when, in 1879, he embarked on a 6,000-mile journey from his native Scotland to see his ailing—and married—lover in California. Friends warned him that he was too poor and sickly to make the trip and that it might prove a harmful distraction from his budding literary career. His father, a lighthouse engineer, found the whole idea of his son pursuing someone else's wife a "sinful, mad business." Even Stevenson, who'd often commented cynically about ardor and matrimony, must have realized the recklessness of this venture. There was no guarantee that the object of his affection—Frances (Fanny) Vandegrift Osbourne—would abandon her comfortable life and run off with the then little-known author. Yet he seemed compelled to make the appeal, telling a friend that "No man is of any use until he has dared everything."
It was a noisy Atlantic crossing, as Stevenson described it in his memoir The Amateur Emigrant. Through his cabin's thin walls he could hear the steerage folk "being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement." For a writer curious about the people who were then moving en masse to America, the Devonia was a wellspring of memorable human drama. The snobbery of first-class travelers appalled Stevenson. He preferred the steerage residents, who "formed, upon the whole, an agreeable and well informed society." And he was delighted to encounter stowaways, going so far as to record for future "sea-tramps" some advice about sneaking onto ships and which passenger lines to select. (His editors later excised those sections and many others from The Amateur Emigrant to avoid offending either the steamship companies or the delicate sensibilities of Victorian readers.) Still, Stevenson feared that many of his shipmates, being idle, incompetent, or addicted to drink, were no more likely to succeed in the New World than they had in the Old. "A sea-voyage will not give a man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure," he mused; "emigration has to be done before we climb the vessel; an aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself." Stevenson couldn't help but question his own current aim in life as the ship carried him ever closer to the United States and the woman whose hand he hoped to win. He'd met Fanny Osbourne in 1876 at an artists' colony in Grez, France. Stevenson was traveling with his cousin, the painter Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (usually just called Bob). Fanny was at Grez accompanied by her comely daughter Belle and her younger son Lloyd. She was studying art but was primarily escaping her husband of 19 years: Samuel Osbourne, a Southerner and court stenographer in Oakland, California, whose habitual infidelities had precipitated the couple's separation in 1875. Fanny was petite, dark-complected, strong-willed and rather "mannish," according to sources. Reared in Indianapolis, Indiana, the child of a lumber merchant, she was also subject to severe attacks of psychosomatic and depressive illnesses. Whether or not the future author of Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fell in love with her at first sight is a question that still sparks debate a century later. Yet Fanny was initially smitten with Bob, whom she described as "the most beautiful creature." Only after it became obvious that Bob's passion was reserved for 18-year-old Belle did Fanny turn her eyes, instead, toward his cousin.
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