Robert Louis Stevenson

The Merry Men Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson was ever obsessed with the duplicity of man, as so many of his horror stories aptly illustrate. He was fixated on the concept of hypocrisy - the man who espouses a nobler worldview but fails to live up to his own lofty standards. Much of this could be said to emanate from his family's religious background, and in few stories is this religious tension better dealt with than "The Merry Men." The story will please fans of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, for while it is not set on shipboard, it takes place on the rugged Scottish coast where shipwrecks are witnessed and sunken treasure reclaimed on becalmed nights. Southern Scotland - particularly its rural expanses - was a hotbed of Calvinist furvor which sometimes bordered on fantaticism. Gravemarkers were eschewed as being idolatrous, as were prayers for the souls of the dead. Catholics - who flourished in the Highlands - were viewed as little more than demons, and the tragic Romanticism of Bonnie Prince Charlie's ill-starred return from exile was a source of godly horror rather than one of wistful reveries (he was after all a Papist). When this story is set, the Killing Time - when religious rebels called Covenanters hid in the moorland to avoid the King's soldiers - is still a matter of local memory, the invasion of Charlie's army still fills Presbyterian hearts with terror, and the satisfying thought of Anglicans, Papists, and Jacobites burning in Damnation cooled the stormy imagination of many a devoted Covenanter. The character of Uncle Gordon in "The Merry Men" is one such fundamentalist. He is quick to pronounce judgement, eager to proscribe hellfire, and sadistic in his delight of watching sailors drown off the coast. And yet he harbors a secret lust for beautiful possessions that hardly befit a severe Calvinist, not to mention the crime of murder.