The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

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Here in the tropics he might hope to live and work years longer--a
return to a cold climate, he now knew, would be fatal.

Why not turn traders? Often on starry nights, drifting among the low
islands, he and Lloyd and the captain of the _Equator_ had lain out on
deck and planned what a lark it would be to buy a schooner, cruise among
the islands, and trade with the natives. They would write stories, too,
about these strange island dwellers with their many weird superstitions
and of the white men who drifted from all corners of the globe to make
their home there.

Already Captain Reid had told them many such tales which Stevenson wove
into stories. The "Beach of Falesa" and the "Isle of Voices" are
probably the two most famous, while "the strange story of the loss of
the brigantine Wandering Minstrel and what men and ships do in that wild
and beautiful world beyond the American continent" formed a plot for
the story called "The Wrecker," which he and Lloyd Osbourne wrote