Читать книгу The Cruise of the "Janet Nichol" Among the South Sea Islands: A Diary - Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson - Страница 4

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It is always necessary to make certain elisions in a diary not meant for publication at the time of writing. For many reasons "The Cruise of the Janet Nichol" has been pruned rather severely. It was, originally, only intended to be a collection of hints to help my husband's memory where his own diary had fallen in arrears; consequently, it frequently happened that incidents given in my diary were re-written (to their great betterment), amplified, and used in his. I have deleted these as far as possible, though not always completely; also things pertaining to the private affairs of other persons, and, naturally, our own. I fear the allusions to the Devil Box may seem obscure. It happened that my husband wrote a complete description of the purchase of the Devil Box in his own diary, so it seemed necessary for me to note further references to it, but nothing more. In the minute description, almost like a catalogue, of the articles in the different buildings in the island of Suwarrow, I must appear to have gone to the opposite extreme. At that time my husband had an idea of writing a South Sea island romance where he might wish to use such pathetic and tragic flotsam and jetsam from wrecked ships and wrecked lives. At the risk of tedium I have let it stand, hoping that some one else may see the intangible things I beheld.

One reason I have hesitated a little to give for publishing this diary, is the extraordinary number of books now being printed purporting to give accurate accounts of our lives on board ship and elsewhere, by persons with whom we were very slightly acquainted, or had never consciously met. I have read, among other misstatements, of the making of the flag for Tembinoka, by the writer and my daughter on the beach at Apemama. The flag was designed by me, on board the schooner Equator, and made, in the most prosaic manner, by a firm in Sydney. No one, outside our immediate family, sailed with us on any of our cruises. All the books "With Stevenson" here, and "With Stevenson" there, are manufactured out of "such stuff as dreams are made on," and false in almost every particular. Contrary to the general idea, my husband was a man of few intimate friends, and even with these he was reticent to a degree.

This diary was written under the most adverse conditions—sometimes on the damp, upturned bottom of a canoe or whaleboat, sometimes when lying face down on the burning sands of the tropic beach, often in copra sheds in the midst of a pandemonium of noise and confusion, but oftener on board the rolling Janet (whose pet name was the Jumping Jenny) to the accompaniment of "Tin Jack's" incessant and inconsequent conversation—but never in comfortable surroundings. For such inadequate results the labour required was tremendously out of proportion, giving my diary a sort of fictitious value in the eyes of my husband, who wished to save it from oblivion by publication. The little book, however dull it may seem to others, can boast of at least one reader, for I have gone over this record of perhaps the happiest period of my life with thrilling interest.

Fanny V. de G. Stevenson.