A Footnote to History

A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa is an 1892 historical non-fiction work by Robert Louis Stevenson describing the contemporary Samoan Civil War.

Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in Samoa in 1889 and built a house at Vailima. He quickly became passionately interested, and involved, in the attendant political machinations. These involved the three colonial powers battling for control of Samoa – America, Germany and Britain – and the indigenous factions struggling to preserve their ancient political system. The book covers the period from 1882 to 1892.

The novel is presented as the memoir of one Ephraim Mackellar, steward of the Durrisdeer estate in Scotland. The novel opens in 1745, the year of the Jacobite rising. When Bonnie Prince Charlie raises the banner of the Stuarts, the Durie family—the Laird of Durrisdeer, his older son James Durie (the Master of Ballantrae) and his younger son Henry Durie—decide on a common strategy: on