Chapter 6 - Beachcombers

Summary

Beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans and the formal colonisation that followed. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by white missionaries and merchants; however, despite this, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This chapter examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was presented in popular novels and the periodical press as both an imperial pathfinder and as a degraded ‘white savage’ destined for extinction; and how these alternative representations were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This analysis provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894), a novella in which the beachcomber serves as an essential figure in Stevenson’s critique of empire.