Everyone’s favorite author of pirate stories, Robert Louis Stevenson, once wrote to Henry James that he, J.M. Barrie, and Rudyard Kipling “are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. And you and Barrie don’t write enough.”

Stevenson was writing from Samoa during this time. His letters have been published in various collections, but his correspondence with J.M. Barrie has lacked Barrie’s letters until now.

Dr. Michael Shaw of the University of Stirling found the letters in a cardboard box at Beinecke Library in Yale University, not realizing they were unpublished until later when he followed up his research with the published correspondence.

“I just assumed that they had been published and I didn’t know about them,” he said. “I was judging myself, thinking I really should have read these.”

Apparently Stevenson told Barrie how to get to his Pacific island, a little over 4,800 miles southwest from the San Francisco bay, in this way: “You take the boat at San Francisco, and then my place is second to the left.”