The Beach of Falesá

"The Beach of Falesá" is a short story, first published in the Illustrated London News in 1892. The story is told in the first person by John Wiltshire, a British copra trader on the fictional South Sea island of Falesá. Upon arriving on the island, he meets a rival trader named Case, who (in an apparently friendly gesture) arranges for him to be "married" to a local girl named Uma in a ceremony designed to impress the natives but to be completely non-binding in the view of Europeans. "The Beach of Falesá" was written after Stevenson moved to the South Seas island of Samoa just a few years before he died there.