Amazon.com description: Product Description: "I first encountered my fellow-passengers on the Broomielaw in Glasgow.
Thence we descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit, but looking
askance on each other as on possible enemies. A few Scandinavians, who
had already grown acquainted on the North Sea, w ere friendly and
voluble over their long pipes; but among English speakers distance and
suspicion reigned supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind
freshened and grew sharp as we continued to descend the widening
estuary; and with the falling temper ature the gloom among the
passengers increased. Two of the women wept. Any one who had come
aboard might have supposed we were all absconding from the law. There
was scarce a word interchanged, and no common sentiment but that of
cold united us, until at length, having touched at Greenock, a pointing
arm and a rush to the starboard now announced that our ocean steamer
was in sight. There she lay in mid-river, at the Tail of the Bank, her
sea-signal flying: a wall of bulwark, a street of white deck-houses,
an aspiring forest of spars, larger than a church, and soon to be as
populous as many an incorporated town in the land to which she was to
bear us."


From the The Amateur Emigrant

In July 1879, Robert Louis Stevenson left Scotland for California to be
with his future American wife (Fanny Vandegrift) whose divorce was
almost final but she was seriously ill.

The Amateur Emigrant is the first part of Stevenson's travel memoir of
his trip to California from Scotland in 1879-1880. It is the first leg
of the journey by ship from Europe to New York City. The middle leg of
the trip is described in Across the Plains (1892) with the final leg in
The Silverado Squatters (1883). The Amateur Emigrant was written in
1879-80 and was not published in full until 1895, after his death a
year before.

Additional short materials from Stevenson's travels are included in this
volume.