I’ve been reading about Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, widely credited with keeping the writer alive to the age of 44. The author battled illness all his short life, spent months at a time in bed. Perhaps that was the inspiration for one of his delightful poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses, “The Land of Counterpane,” about playing with toy soldiers on his bedcovers.

Fanny made it her life’s work to find an environment that would allow her husband to live a full and creative life — even it meant long and ardulous sea voyages. She was as sickened by sea air as RLS was invigorated by it.

Prone to queasiness myself, I thought about the sacrifices she made, the discomfort all travelers used to endure. We think a delayed and crammed-full flight is bad; try weeks at sea in steerage! Adventurers of yore either dealt with the pitch and roll … or they stayed put. I wonder, how many of us would have toughed it out?

(The schooner Casco carried the Stevensons from San Francisco to Hawaii in 1888. Photo courtesy the RLS website.)