The Beach of Falesá was published by Cassell and Company in 1892 as part of the collection Island Nights’ Entertainments. Wiltshire, a white copra trader, arrives on a Polynesian island and discovers that a rival trader, Case, has established a monopoly by using fake supernatural phenomena to terrify the islanders into submission. Wiltshire, who has been tricked into a fraudulent marriage with a local woman, Uma, gradually comes to understand both Case’s corruption and his own complicity in the colonial system.
The novella was Stevenson’s most politically radical work of fiction. Written from his home in Samoa, where he had settled in 1889 and become deeply engaged with Samoan politics, it presented European colonialism in the Pacific not as a civilizing mission but as a system of exploitation sustained by fraud and violence. The missionaries, the traders, and the colonial administrators are all implicated.
Collecting The Beach of Falesá
First edition appears in Island Nights’ Entertainments (Cassell and Company, London, 1893): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition of Island Nights’ Entertainments, fine: $500–$1,500
- Very good: $200–$500
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
The South Seas Story
“The Beach of Falesá” is one of the finest novellas in the English language — a story of a white trader on a South Pacific island who discovers that a rival trader has been exploiting the islanders through fear and superstition. Stevenson’s treatment of colonialism and race is remarkably advanced for 1892: the white narrator’s casual racism is gradually exposed and undermined by the story’s events. The novella was originally published in Island Nights’ Entertainments (1893).
Frequently Asked Questions
What was Stevenson’s connection to the Pacific? Stevenson spent his final years (1888–1894) in the Pacific, first cruising the islands by yacht and then settling in Samoa. The Pacific works — The Beach of Falesá, The Ebb-Tide, In the South Seas — are among his finest writing, informed by direct experience and deep sympathy for the islanders whose cultures he witnessed being destroyed by colonialism.