“Near the sea”: Maritime kinship and oceanic kinship in Stevenson’s Treasure Island

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay argues that depictions of small craft sailing in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) indicate an underlying crisis in the kinship structures of the age of sail as wrought by industrial capitalism’s rising reliance on steamships. Theorizing an older form of “maritime kinship” and its continuation in “oceanic kinship,” this essay re-evaluates the gap between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century seafaring fiction and bridges the two through a continued connection to the sea and maintained sailing heritage. Countering a rhetoric of loss, it presents Treasure Island’s nearness to the sea as highlighting an environmental interconnection that might allow us to reimagine how we relate to oceans and provide key approaches to confronting the current climate crisis.