Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson travelled partly from curiosity, partly from compulsion — he had tuberculosis and followed warmth and dry air across Europe and eventually to the Pacific in search of the climate that might save his life.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) was the first of his travel books, an account of a solo walk through the mountains of southern France with a recalcitrant donkey named Modestine. It is slight but beautifully written — attentive to the specific quality of firelight, the sound of rain on canvas, the particular loneliness of sleeping outside.

The amateur emigrant series (1895, posthumous) documented his steerage crossing of the Atlantic and overland journey across the United States in 1879, including time spent in the mining camps and railway towns of the West. He wrote about poverty and immigration with a sympathy unusual for a Victorian Scotsman of his class.

His Pacific travels, documented in In the South Seas (1896, posthumous), were the most ambitious of his writing life — a serious attempt to understand Polynesian cultures on their own terms. He died in Samoa in 1894 and was buried on Mount Vaea.