Robert Louis Stevenson's The Merry Men: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis
- M. Grant Kellermeyer
- Jul 17, 2018
- 12 min read
Updated: Oct 15
Stevenson was obsessed with the duplicity of man, as each of his horror stories will aptly illustrate. He was fixated on the concept of hypocrisy – the man who loudly 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 Presbyterian background: with its stern emphasis on predestination, the unconditional perseverance of the Elect, the unavoidable damnation of the lost, the passionate rejection of so-called “works righteousness” (the belief that your salvation has something to do with how you treat others or honor God), and the implied incongruity between public deeds and internal, Calvinist theology provides glowing peace to those who consider themselves Elect (they can never lose their salvation, no matter what they do or fail to do), but can inspire terror in those unsure of their eternal status (if they are damned, no prayer, choice, or change can save them). On the other hand, the narcissistic confidence of the Elect can justify truly hellish behavior (murder, for instance, can’t keep them out of heaven), which – paradoxically – could, in turn, cause them to suddenly wonder: “while my salvation isn’t dependent on my behavior, is this truly the action of one of the Elect?” – suddenly catapulting them into the second group of neurotic self-doubters. This specific theological tension is dealt with head on in “The Merry Men.” The story, which takes place on the rugged Scottish coast – where shipwrecks are coolly witnessed on shore, and their sunken treasures poached on starless nights – shares much with Stevenson’s adventure novels (cf. Treasure Island and Kidnapped) but maintains a much darker and more philosophical atmosphere stepped in Scotland’s theological history.
II.
Since the Reformation, the rugged Lowland countryside was a hotbed of Calvinist fervor which often flirted with fanaticism. Strict Calvinists rejected prayers for the souls of the dead and even gravestones as being idolatrous sins. Catholics – who flourished in the Highlands – were viewed as depraved heretics, and Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ill-starred return from exile – viewed romantically even by the English – was the stuff of bogeyman stories.
At the time of the story, the Killing Time of the 1680s (when Calvinist rebels clashed with and were persecuted by Catholic King James’s soldiers) is still a matter of local memory, the invasion of James’s son Charlie’s army still fills Presbyterian hearts with terror, and the satisfying thought of Anglicans, Papists, Lutherans, and Jacobites burning in Damnation was a rare and soothing consolation to the (often destitute) rural, Presbyterian peasants.
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 their beautiful possessions which hardly befits a severe Calvinist – not to mention the crime of murder.
SUMMARY
The narrator, Charles Darnaway, begins his account on a “beautiful morning in late July” as he journeys to the lonely Hebridean isle of Aros, home of his uncle Gordon Darnaway. Born of Lowland stock, Charles has no kin left but this uncle, a former sailor who settled on the island after marrying a Highland woman who died young, leaving him a daughter, Mary Ellen. Though Aros is poor and desolate, it has become Charles’s refuge during university vacations, and now that his studies are done, he returns “with a cheerful heart” to the home he calls his own.
He paints a vivid picture of the Ross of Grisapol: a promontory of cliffs and reefs, overhung by Ben Kyaw, “the Mountain of the Mist,” forever veiled in cloud and rain. Most striking is the nearby tidal current called the Merry Men, a roaring, dancing turmoil of breakers where “the tide, here running like a mill race, makes a long belt of broken water—a Roost we call it—at the tail of the land.” The sea there “shakes with their shouting,” and no ship can live in it. Local legend says the name comes from their leaping, laughing motion or from their thunderous cry “about the turn of the tide.”
Aros, half islet, half peninsula, is perilous and isolated, “the House of God,” named for an early Irish saint who landed there. The coast is strewn with tales of sea-kelpies, talking seals, and mermaids; yet one story haunts Charles most—the wreck of the Spanish galleon Espirito Santo, lost in the time of the Armada and said to lie buried in Sandag Bay, laden with treasure. Having found a royal memorandum about this same ship among old Edinburgh papers, Charles has convinced himself that Aros hides the sunken galleon and that its recovery might restore his family’s fortunes. His desire, however, is not greed but love: “If I desired riches, it was not for their own sake, but for the sake of a person who was dear to my heart—my uncle’s daughter, Mary Ellen.”
II.
Arriving at Aros, Charles finds Rorie, his uncle’s elderly servant, rowing him across the bay in a patched coble made from strange foreign wood. The old man peers uneasily into the water, muttering, “It will be a great feesh,” as though something follows the boat. At the house, Charles discovers the once plain kitchen filled with costly furnishings—brocade curtains, silver candlesticks, a brass lamp—all salvaged from a recent shipwreck. “Mary, girl,” he cries, “this is the place I had learned to call my home, and I do not know it.” Mary answers darkly, “I neither like these changes, nor the way they came, nor that which came with them.”
Her father appears—a hard, gloomy man with “dark eyes like old stained ivory,” steeped in scripture but twisted by fear. He tells how the brig Christ-Anna was wrecked in February and how he and Rorie found her cargo. Yet as he speaks, his talk turns from practical to dreadful. “It’s a braw thing, the land,” he says, “but the sea—a muckle yett to hell! … I wad whiles be temp’it to think it wasnae the Lord, but the muckle black deil that made the sea.” His voice grows wild as he recounts sea-devils and omens, crying out, “O, sirs—the horror, the horror o’ the sea!”
Later, he shows Charles strange markings in the still water of Aros Bay—“sea-runes,” as he calls them—that resemble letters. “Yon scart upo’ the water … it’ll no be like a letter, wull it?” When Charles says it looks like a C, the uncle mutters, “Ay, for the Christ-Anna,” and when another mark forms an M, he sighs, “I would say naething o’ thae clavers to Mary.” Then, suddenly, his composure breaks: “Ye think there’s naething there? … The deid are down there—thick like rattons!” Terrified by his manner, Charles suspects madness or guilt.
That evening he declares his love to Mary, who trembles and begs for time: “Let me be the way I am; it’ll not be you that loses by the waiting.” She confesses her anxiety about her father—“he is not well and not like himself”—and says she knows nothing of the wreck’s spoil, only that “the poor souls are gone to their account long syne.” She also recalls that a “little, black-avised body with gold rings on his fingers” came asking about the Espirito Santo. Charles concludes that this must be the Spaniard connected with his Edinburgh research, now on the same treasure hunt, and resolves to begin his own search in Sandag Bay.
III.
Next morning he sets out under a heavy sky. The sea seems uneasy and the wind foreboding. On reaching Sandag Bay he finds, to his shock, a grave freshly made near the wreck of the Christ-Anna. “Here was a grave,” he says, “and I had to ask myself … what manner of man lay there … in that solitary, sea-beat resting-place?” The broken brig lies “high and dry on the sands, her back broken, her masts gone, and her poor noseless angel of a figurehead staring to the sky.”
Haunted yet determined, Charles strips and dives in search of the sunken galleon. Beneath the clear water, the bay gleams “like a great transparent crystal.” In five fathoms he spies a tangle-grown terrace that might conceal a hull. Diving again, he tears away the weeds—and when he climbs out, something rings at his feet. It is “an iron shoe-buckle, crusted with red rust.” As he holds it, the drowned sailor’s image rises before him: “His weather-beaten face, his sailor’s hands, his sea-voice … haunted me in that sunny, solitary place.” Diving once more, his hand seizes “something hard and cold—the bone of a man’s leg.”
The revelation horrifies him. “The full horror of the charnel ocean burst upon my spirit.” He flees ashore, prays “for all poor souls upon the sea,” and vows to meddle no more with the treasures of the dead. As he climbs the hill, the weather breaks into a storm; the sea darkens “to an ugly hue of corrugated lead.” Looking back, he sees something extraordinary: a boat and several men at the wreck site, taking compass bearings and examining the very relics he left. They hurry back to their ship—a large schooner anchored near Aros—just as the gale begins to roar. Charles realizes they must be Spaniards searching for the Armada treasure and rushes home to warn his uncle and cousin.
IV.
He finds Gordon Darnaway watching the weather, pipe in hand. When Charles gasps, “There were men ashore at Sandag Bay—” the old man collapses white as chalk and whispers, “Had he a hair kep on?” The words confirm Charles’s worst fear: the buried sailor had come ashore alive, and his uncle had killed him. “The dead sleeps well where you have laid him,” Charles says bitterly. “I stood this morning by his grave; he will not wake before the trump of doom.”
Speechless and broken, Gordon follows him up the hill. The storm has fully risen; the wind drives the sea into mountainous rollers, and the schooner below is struggling desperately to beat to sea. “Good God! they are all lost,” cries Charles. “Ay,” says Gordon with ghastly glee, “a’ lost.… Eh, man, but it’s a braw nicht for a shipwreck! … The Merry Men’ll dance bonny!” His eyes shine with demented joy as he watches the vessel’s doom: “He was lying on his belly on the summit, with his hands stretched forth and clutching in the heather.” Horrified, Charles flees down the hill.
He finds Mary kneading bread and pleads with her to leave Aros. “You had better be anywhere but here.… For your own sake, and for mine, ay, and for your father’s too, I want you far—far away from here.” She refuses: “I’ll be where my duty is.… While the breath is in his body, I’ll be with him. He’s not long for here either—the mark is on his brow.” She urges Charles to save himself: “There’s sin upon this house and trouble.… Take your things upon your back and go your ways to better folk.”
V.
The storm intensifies into a full tempest; the Roost roars “like a battle,” and thunder shakes the island. At dawn Charles ventures out to search for Mary and her father. He finds Rorie terrified, muttering of devils “walking on the waters.” Through the spray he sees a man clinging to the rocks—the sole survivor from the doomed schooner. Struggling through the surf, Charles drags him ashore and carries him to the house, where he collapses in exhaustion.
The survivor—dark, foreign, and bearded—recovers enough to speak in broken English: “You save my life. You are good man.” But when he glimpses Gordon Darnaway at the door, he recoils in terror. The old man’s guilt has now ripened into frenzy; he mistakes the shipwrecked stranger for the ghost of the man he murdered. “Back, spawn of the sea!” he screams. “The Lord hath delivered thee into my hand!” Before Charles can stop him, Gordon rushes upon the Spaniard, who falls dead on the hearth.
Lightning flashes; the house shakes under the wind. Mary rushes in just as her father’s mind and strength give way. Laughing wildly, he seizes his bonnet and runs out into the storm, shouting, “The Merry Men! the Merry Men!” Charles follows to the cliff’s edge, where he sees the old man standing with arms outstretched above the raging sea. “I saw him leap,” he says simply, “and the blackness of the storm received him.”
***
By morning the gale has spent itself; the Merry Men roar no more. Wreckage lies along the shore, and only the three at Aros remain—Charles, Mary, and old Rorie. The survivors bury the dead Spaniard beside the first grave in Sandag Bay. Charles concludes his tale quietly, his ambition and youthful dreams drowned with the storm: “Since I became the witness of a strange judgment of God’s, the thought of dead men’s treasures has been intolerable to my conscience.”
ANALYSIS
So many of Stevenson’s horror stories float around the karmic debts accrued by a life of hypocrisy, and “The Merry Men” – perhaps even more so than “Jekyll” – demonstrates the sickening depths to which a man can bifurcate his own soul. Jekyll, after all, was misguided. Vain, perhaps; egoistical, perhaps; childish, pompous, and indulgent, even. But at the heart of his experiment lay an ungerminated grain of nobility: the hope that a man might be able to extract and contain his weaknesses – to channel them away from his Ego and use the excess energy in the name of good.
His execution was obviously flawed (he underrated the power of the Id), but Gordon’s sins are far baser those of Jekyll – and Gordon’s murder is accomplished with the help of a far commoner libation than the potion which raises Hyde from Jekyll: whiskey. He is no handwringing socialite: even when he is as sober as a judge he relishes fantasies of human suffering, gloats in notions of divine punishment, and practically tingles with repressed arousal at the idea of sinners being dragged to death and hell.
Stevenson was disgusted by what he saw as the two-faced hypocrisy of his family’s Calvinist background – one which was fundamentally pessimistic, lorded punishment over the remorseful, and found delicious refreshment in the concept of hellfire, but allowed its adherents to privately nurture a smug, self-satisfaction and a deep sense of superiority to other men.
Gordon hates Catholics, loathes Jacobites, and has no mercy for the dead. He ignores his complicity in the death of the sailor, has no pity for the floundering crews of shipwrecks, and sees all human suffering as God’s justice – and yet he considers himself above punishment because he is one of the Elect (those chosen by God to be saved).
II.
Herein lies another problem that Stevenson harbored towards Calvinism: the concept of election. Calvinists believed that God chose whom to save and whom to damn. Salvation was less a matter of faith or grace and repentance, and more one of predestined superiority. There was no way to tell for sure whether you were among the Elect: it wasn’t faith or good works that determined salvation, merely God’s capricious selection.
Indeed, a Calvinist could be an unrepentant sinner their whole life, but if God had chosen them, they were assured salvation over – say – a devout Catholic who tended to the poor tirelessly. The Catholic would burn in hell for lack of being selected and the Calvinist would ascend to heaven despite their wickedness. To avoid being judged or considered un-elected by the members of their church, Calvinists would work strenuously to cultivate a good public image (think Jekyll), to make their neighbors think that the good behavior signaled a natural member of the Elect.
This was not done as a means of gaining salvation (after all, good works meant nothing in and of themselves; they were but an important symptom of election), but rather in hopes of convincing others of their election. But behind closed doors, actions did not matter and whatever wickedness had been pent up during the daytime could be unleashed without a care (think Hyde).
Calvinists believed that there was no good in man (see: the doctrine of Total Depravity), so wickedness was to be expected, and as long as a person was a predestined member of the Elect, no amount of evil could derail them: it was just the human condition and there was no use restraining it (except to avoid gossip).
III.
Herein, now, lies the problem of Gordon: he does not remotely regret his murder: if he has been elected, it cannot prevent his salvation, and what else is expected of mankind besides evil? Stevenson, however, holds him to a higher standard of self-regulation: to strive to become good and to avoid acts of evil (again impossible: humans only do evil, except when God manipulates their actions).
Gordon is finally struck with fear when the Black Man (a famous representation of Satan in Calvinist lore) comes for him, suggesting that he is not one of the Elect. Stevenson beautifully refuses to clarify whether the sailor is a mere foreigner or the genuine devil, and the supernatural nature of the tale is ambiguous.
But regardless of his otherworldly origins, the Black Man represents far more to Gordon than a paranormal visitor: he represents the ramifications of his sin. No longer can Gordon say “it’s not my fault; the devil made me do it,” because the devil has manifested outside of him, and the fault falls squarely on his shoulders. Terrified at the prospect that the murder, the selfishness, the lust for finery, and the delight in suffering was internalized by his own soul (not externalized by Satan) – that sin could have been avoided, and that it was his conscious choice – Gordon consigns himself to the Merry Men (the symbolic realm of a wrathful God), hoping to receive mercy.
Alas, the Black Man follows him into the water, and it becomes clear: to him that shows no mercy, no mercy shall be allotted (Matthew 5:7), and both the terrified Calvinist and the strange Black Man are consumed in the mystical waters that crash into the Merry Men.