"What did he die of?" I inquired. "Some kind of sickness," says the captain. "It appears it took him sudden. Seems he got up in the night, and filled up on Pain Killer and Kennedy's Discovery. No go -- he was booked beyond Kennedy. Then he had tried to open a case of gin. No go again -- not strong enough. Then he must have turned to and run out on the veranda, and capsized over the rail. When they found him, the next day, he was clean crazy -- carried on all the time about somebody watering his copra. Poor John " "Was it thought to be the island?" I asked. "Well, it was thought to be the island, or the trouble, or something," he replied. Stevenson saw "The Beach of Falesa" as the ground-breaking work in his turn away from romanticism to realism."