case, be cast out into outer darkness". He had "seen these judgments of God", not only in Hawaii where abandoned native churches stood like tombstones "over a grave, in the midst of the white men’s sugar fields", but also in Ireland and "in the mountains of my own country Scotland".These were a fine people in the past brave, gay, faithful, and very much like Samoans, except in one particular, that they were much wiser and better at that business of fighting of which you think so much. But the time came to them as it now comes to you, and it did not find them ready... Five years after Stevenson's death, the Samoan Islands were partitioned between Germany and the United States. Last works Stevenson wrote an estimated 700,000 words during his years on Samoa. He completed The Beach of Falesá, the first-person tale of a Scottish copra trader on a South Sea island. Wiltshire is heroic in terms neither of his actions nor a preoccupation with his own soul. Rather he is a man of limited understanding and imagination, comfortable with his own prejudices: where, he wonders, can he find "whites" for his "half caste" daughters. The villains are white, their behaviour towards the islanders ruthlessly duplicitous. Stevenson saw "The Beach of Falesá" as the ground-breaking work in his turn away from romance to realism. Stevenson wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin: The Ebb-Tide (1894), the misadventures of three deadbeats marooned in the Tahitian port of Papeete, has been described as presenting "a microcosm of imperialist society, directed by greedy but incompetent whites, the labour supplied by long-suffering natives who fulfil their duties without orders and are true to the missionary faith which the Europeans make no pretence of respecting". It confirmed the new Realistic turn in Stevenson's writing away from romance and adolescent adventure. The first sentence reads: "Throughout the island world of the Pacific, scattered men of many European races and from almost every grade of society carry activity and disseminate disease". No longer was Stevenson writing about human nature "in terms of a contest between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde": "the edges of moral responsibility and the margins of moral judgement were too blurred". As with The Beach of Falesà, in The Ebb Tide contemporary reviewers find parallels with several of Conrad's works: Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'’, Heart