Mark's Pages

"Farther back from the water stood a tiny stucco lighthouse, with an enigmatic plaque quoting Robert Lewis Stevenson: 'Great were the feelings of emotion as I stood with my mother by my side and we looked upon the edifice designed by my father when I was sixteen and worked in his office during the summer of 1866.' Stevenson's father designed lighthouses in Scotland, and the writer didn't visit Tahiti until 1888, twenty years after a French engineer built the edifice we were looking at."

— Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes

This odd little plinth in the foreground is the only monument to James Cook in all of French Polynesia. As Horwitz notes, despite its plaque the lighthouse in the background was not designed by the father of Robert Lewis Stevenson.