I never heard anything about Edgar Fergins again and, even though I endured a number of passages through the South Seas over my years at the mast and later as a captain, I would never return to that island colony to see what became of him. I have presumed he died years ago, orphaning that ragtag settlement. But, for all I know, he remains there, a little ancient man amassing hunchbacks from exotic islands and dreaming of a living state of literature. Sometimes, in my nightmares, I see myself trapped among them in that palace, babbling to myself for eternity, like a man hypnotized.
Today, I am still the reader I was in my youth. Every book I pick up, I pause to wonder whether it was the one behind the glass, the one intended to transform me. I also wonder about other things. Whether his tropical experiment really was the result of a sort of madness that had seized him, or whether it was the rational end of a man with a passion for stories who refused to feel his soul disappear with the end of his calling. I think of Don Vincente, the Spanish bookseller who stalked and killed his customers. He could not bear a life apart from his books, and Mr. Fergins could not die before seeing his own books come to life.
But I try not to think of how I saw him last. It makes me feel too great a loss. I like to think of him with both his hands clamped on one of mine in the giant train shed in New York, just after I’d help him down with his green cart filled with colorful books of all sizes, being careful not to rattle the cargo.
THE END.
THE STORY BEHIND THE LAST BOOKANEER
When Robert Louis Stevenson moved his family to Samoa, he indeed styled himself as a kind of chief of Vailima. As much as possible, the characteristics and details of the Stevenson family and the natives associated with them derive from history. As shown in this novel, Stevenson’s role in island politics, particularly his opposition to the German consular and commercial activities, provoked both respect and animosity. Of her stepfather’s various tangles, Belle Strong later remembered that authorities “attempted to deport him from the island, to close his mouth by regulation, to post spies about his house and involve him in the illicit importation of arms and fixed ammunition.” Toward the end of his life, Stevenson believed his book on the Samoan situation, A Footnote to History, would have an impact, and to some extent it did—placing a magnifying glass on the actions of the German Firm and prodding the American and British governments to make changes in the leadership of their sometimes corrupt and complacent consulates. But the conflicts and civil wars still escalated.
In 1900, the Germans would claim Vailima as the residence of their colonial governor. It is currently a museum and still the only house in Samoa with a fireplace. One of Stevenson’s short stories, completed in Vailima, became the first original piece of literature ever printed in Samoan.
Stevenson’s hand-drawn map for Treasure Island really was lost, though it is my invention to suggest a bookaneer swiped it. Still, Stevenson, like all popular authors of his day, was affected by literary piracy throughout his career, and was keenly aware of that. “I have lost a great deal of money through the piracy of my works in America,” he wrote, “and should consider it quite fair to use any means to defeat the lower class of American publishers, who calmly appropriate one’s works as soon as they are issued.” Rudyard Kipling, a younger contemporary of Stevenson’s, who at one point planned to visit Vailima, merged the two senses of pirate when he put the situation this way (paraphrased in the letter recited by Fergins): “The high seas of literature are unprotected, and those who traffic in them must run their chance of being plundered.” Stevenson’s writing habits also set up a uniquely vulnerable scenario, with a British visitor to Vailima later recalling how the novelist’s compositions often “were flung on the floor or allowed to drop into the waste paper basket; indeed a rummager in this sun-baked little room might have culled many riches from the scraps of paper carelessly flung aside and forgotten.” At the time of his death, he left behind several unfinished and abandoned novels, including one of those mentioned here, The Shovels of Newton French.
Did bookaneers really exist? A few years ago, I stumbled on a stray detail indicating that nineteenth-century publishers would hire agents to obtain valuable manuscripts that were fair game under the laws. Because of their shadowy place in history, I could not find much else about this group, but I was intrigued. Building on this fragment of legal and publishing history, I tried imagining more fully these freelance literary bounty hunters—the history of their profession, what they might be called on to do, who they were, their backgrounds, how their lives would bring them to this unusual profession and how the profession would shape their personal lives. As far as historical fiction goes, it fit one of my ideals: a bit of gray-area history that cannot be explored very far without the help of fiction. In this case, it seemed to me to call for informed speculation—what I’d refer to as research-based fiction—plus plenty of imagination. I applied the term bookaneer, one I had noticed had been used in a generic sense in the nineteenth century about literary piracy (the earliest use I find is in 1837 by poet Thomas Hood). I cast a few bookaneers in supporting roles in an earlier novel, The Last Dickens, in which we encounter Pen’s mentor-lover, Kitten, and hear about Whiskey Bill.
I realized I wanted to see more of these and other bookaneers, and reader feedback on this front encouraged me. This led me to create Pen Davenport and his assistant Edgar C. Fergins, whom I decided to follow on a journey that would test them professionally and personally. I envisioned my fictional characters crossing paths with a number of prominent authors in history, but my compass pointed them to Stevenson. I had been fascinated by Stevenson’s time in Samoa. It was intriguing and mysterious to his contemporaries to think of a European author at the far reaches of the known world, and I had to imagine it would have been an irresistible quest for my bookaneers—a kind of moment of destiny for both sides in the (still raging) battle over creative property.