by Nancy Horan
Louis said, “I don’t sell anything. Please accept this as a gift.”
Fanny emptied the case and Louis put it into the king’s hands. They watched in horror as his features melted with shame. He was accustomed to being cheated by white men but was startled by white generosity. When he prepared to depart the boat with Fanny’s case under his arm, Louis seized the moment. “Might my wife and I stay on your island for a couple of weeks while the Equator makes its rounds to other islands?” he blurted out.
The king dropped his head and did not respond, only descended his kingly ladder. Within a short time, a carved wooden jewel box appeared as replacement for the gift, but no answer to Louis’s question came with it.
“Why do you want to stay on his island?” Fanny asked.
“Because he is a story, I can tell already,” Louis said. “He is like no one else.”
When Tembinoka returned early the next morning, they were seated at breakfast. Upon his approach, Fanny surmised the king was bringing one of his women, for she spied a dress in the distance. In fact, it was Tembinoka himself coming into the saloon, attired in a woman’s green silk frock, a pith helmet, and blue glass spectacles. He sat across from them, and after a few syllables of greeting, proceeded to stare silently at each of them. Fanny squirmed under his inspection and made work of chasing her eggs across the plate with her fork so as not to have to look up again. Louis chatted on gaily as if it were all perfectly normal. Captain Reid interjected that Louis was a knowledgeable man whose main interest in the South Seas was to come to Apemama and report back to Queen Victoria all he’d learned. At that point, Louis’s jaw dropped and he fell silent.
After what seemed an eternity of staring, the king said simply, “You good man, you no lie” and “You good woman. You come my island.”
So it was that they found themselves living in Apemama. Tembinoka ordered that four houses on stilts should be moved to the spot of their choice on the beach. Lloyd and Fanny and Louis watched in amazement as many sets of legs moved together under the big upturned-basket houses they called maniaps. If one of the movers tarried in his work, the king aimed his Winchester just above the offender’s head, and the fellow stepped livelier.
“I can only assume some locals have been displaced because we are here,” Louis worried aloud. “That can’t be too good for neighborly relations.”
When the huts were in place, Tembinoka decreed that his subjects should observe an invisible tapu circle around the group of houses. The king walked the circumference himself so that no misunderstandings might occur. No native was to go inside that circle or disturb the newcomers in any way. Then he made clear his expectations of the Stevensons. He wanted to come to their house when the spirit moved him, to enjoy what they were eating. If he did not come, they were to send a plate of their dinner to his compound. His people would work for Louis and Fanny, but only Tembinoka could give them orders. And one other thing: He liked it quiet. No noise.
The latter prohibition was stunningly evident that first night on the beach. Huddled under a mosquito net with a pot of insect powder burning nearby, Fanny and Louis listened for some sounds of life in the village but heard only the gentle lapping of waves.
In the following days, the king showed them his kingdom. He met them each day in a dazzling new costume fitted carefully to his figure, each garment bearing exaggerated dimensions of features one found in traditional clothing, and each made up in vibrant fabrics with decorative flourishes unlike any they’d ever seen. Tembinoka had a style distinctly his own. On the morning he was to show them his storehouses, he appeared in a turquoise silk morning coat with tails that fell to his heels.
“That is a lovely color,” Fanny said, and she meant it. “It is the color of the sea.”
Tembinoka nodded at the compliment. He led them to his palace, a collection of rustic buildings surrounded by a fence. Inside the huts, women of every age, shape, and manner of dress moved about, attending to their responsibilities. Some cleaned, some nursed babies. A few slept on mats. Taking them all in with a sweep of his arm, the king said, “My family.” He summoned his first wife and introduced her formally to Fanny and Louis. The oldest of the women, she seemed gracious and on perfectly good terms with the other wives in the household.
The king summoned a woman in charge of firearms, who returned with a case containing a dissembled pistol that he specifically asked for. Then Tembinoka directed a different woman—this one in charge of napery—to show Fanny recently acquired embroidered napkins.
Next he took them to a large building where a grim-faced woman in charge of its contents unlocked the door and ushered them in. Piled from floor to ceiling were the machinery and fripperies of civilization that the king had managed to lay his hands on: bolts of fabric, piles of blue eyeglasses, feathered hats, high-button shoes in every size, barrels of tin cups, jars of ointment with lids gone rusty, axes, Winchesters, cases of tobacco, spittoons, inkpots, clocks, and stoves.
After the tour, they sat on the king’s terrace and drank kava. It soon became clear why the chief was allowing them to stay: He had his own agenda. He pressed them with questions. How many fathoms high is Windsor Castle? the palace builder wanted to know. How much did it cost to buy a schooner in Sydney? Evidently, the king’s choice to preserve the islanders from the influence of other cultures meant he was in quarantine, too.
From navigation and building, his thoughts turned to medicine. The girl in charge arrived as instructed, holding a bottle of laxative syrup.
“You savvy?” he asked Fanny.
“Yes, I know it.”
“Good?”
“I use this.” Fanny wrote down the word Castoria for him.
“Betta?”
“Much better,” Fanny said. “The ship carries it. We will get some for you when the Equator returns.”
The king pulled a meerschaum pipe from his pocket. He signaled a young lady who stayed nearby with matches and tobacco. As all his subjects were required to do when they approached him, she crouched and then crawled over to him.
In his simple English, Tembinoka told the legend of his family’s beginnings—the first parents being a heroic woman and a shark—about the wars his ancestors had waged, the wars he had waged, and the uncle he had to send away from the island for betraying him. He talked of his own power and how he liked things organized. Fanny’s instincts about Tembinoka were confirmed as he talked on. Despite his tight-fisted approach to governing, he talked of how deeply he cared for his people. The king was a smart fellow. He was not only the ruler of some three thousand people, he was their chief poet, architect, historian, philosopher, and inventor.
In the evening, as they left the king’s quarters, Fanny noticed old crones sitting intermittently along the enclosing fence. These were the palace guards, she learned later, who watched through the night for any irregularities. They communicated with each other by throwing stones.
That night Louis and Fanny stayed awake for hours under the mosquito net, scribbling madly into their diaries by the light of a lantern, intent on noting every exotic detail they had witnessed.
“Where are the men?” Fanny wondered aloud.
“They’re out there, in the huts and elsewhere, but they’re invisible, aren’t they? Obviously, they hold inferior positions, except a few of his trusted minions. Did you notice those fellows who came in to confer with Tembinoka about doings in the village? I’m sure they were spies. They must come in every day to fill his ear.”
“The king is keeping a tight lid on his strange little paradise,” Fanny said.
Louis scratched his head. “I suppose Tembinoka thinks he can maintain control of his kingdom by keeping outsiders away, especially whites. You can’t blame him. But his quarantine can’t last. His little cache of Winchesters is nothing against the German or French or American powers. When one of those countries decides he has something they want, he is going to topple. And along with him will go the identity of the people—their oral history,
the legends, the songs. Isn’t that how these things work?”
In the weeks that followed, no native people came across the tapu line to visit them. They named their clutch of huts Equator Town and watched as life went on around them, just beyond the line. Sometimes they saw the king walk past and out into the water with one of his retainers, where they climbed into a fishing boat—for the king liked to fish—untied the boat’s rope from the anchor—which happened to be a sewing machine—and headed out to sea. When they came back, Fanny would likely be presented with a large fish, which meant the king would be joining them for dinner. She planted salad greens that flourished and, in time, delighted Tembinoka.
In the mornings, Louis wrote. In the afternoons he and Lloyd collaborated on a novel set in the Pacific. After, they fantasized about having their own copra trading boat. In the evenings, Louis walked on the beach under the stars, playing his flageolet.
Fanny couldn’t forget her husband’s dire predictions for the future of this little silver crescent of sand sitting out in the vast blue ocean. She had grown fond of Tembinoka. She heard in his conversation the pride of a man who had built up a society that was modern, compared to the world he had inherited from his predecessors.
The Equator was overdue by nearly two weeks, and Fanny expected it would come any moment. They were all ready to go, their provisions were running short, and they were sorely tired of eating wild chicken. She wanted to give the king a gift before they left. Though the man seemed to have one of everything, he lacked a flag for his kingdom. One morning she quickly sketched out a design. She envisioned a banner with three stripes—yellow, green, and red—with a black shark at its center, and below it, the words I bite triply.
“It’s a reference to the shark’s three rows of teeth,” she explained to Louis.
That night a copra trading ship called the Tiernan was in harbor. The king threw a big party with fireworks and dancing but, strangely, did not invite them. Fanny and Louis were inside their hut when they heard a gunshot near the palace.
“Do you think someone has shot the king?”
“The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but now that you say it …” Louis got up, loaded their pistols, and put them near at hand.
In their hut in Equator Town, they lay awake listening.
Someone shot at a dog, the king explained when he came by the hut the next morning. Fanny was glad to see Tembinoka alive, though he was, uncharacteristically, a little drunk. She showed him her design for the Apemama flag, and he beamed his approval. He didn’t stay long. Louis was not there, and the king seemed like a small, tired child when he said, “I want to go home.”
Louis arrived next, with urgent news.”The captain of the Tiernan says we can take passage with him to Samoa. No one knows what has happened to the Equator.”
“All right.”
“We’ll have to pack quickly. They depart tomorrow.”
The next day, Fanny cast her gaze at their belongings, strewn around the hut, which she couldn’t bring herself to pack. “Captain Reid is expecting us to be here,” she said, but her shoulders sank and she admitted what was on her mind: “I have this dreadful feeling … I don’t want to go.”
“The lady has a dreadful feeling.” Louis sighed. But he did not pursue his teasing and canceled their passage.
When the Equator arrived the following week and the Stevensons climbed aboard, Tembinoka wept on the dock.
“Did you get the news about the Tiernan?” Reid asked them over a dinner of octopus and clams on the boat that evening.
Fanny caught her breath.
“Becalmed, they were, just bobbing around with no wind, so everyone went to sleep, I suppose, when up sprang a squall that made the boat turn turtle. It was just a day or two out of Apemama.”
“I can’t believe it,” Louis said. “We just saw them off.”
“Sixteen dead,” Reid said gravely.
They fell quiet. Fanny remembered the faces of the men they had befriended and wondered who among them had died.
In the coming days, when storms chased the Equator from Apemama to Samoa, Fanny settled her blankets in a narrow galley-way so she wouldn’t be thrown from her bed. Waves came over the prow and poured down below, leaving her in a shallow lake. She was terrified, but she would never admit that to Louis. Instead, she lay fully dressed, with an umbrella over her head, thinking about the lost men on the Tiernan, who went from dreams to death in the flutter of an eye.
CHAPTER 65
1889
When Fanny first clapped eyes on their future homestead in the South Seas, she was standing on the side of a mountain, two and a half miles above the town of Apia, on the island of Upolu in Samoa. The sighting of the property lacked the thrill she’d felt upon first seeing the house in Bournemouth, or the chalet in Hyeres, or even the little cottage in Oakland where she had raised her children. She wasn’t even looking for a place in Samoa. They had merely gotten off the Equator for a couple of weeks while Louis researched the history of the place for his newspaper letters. His best source was a local trader, one Mr. Harry J. Moors, who promptly offered his home as the place they should stay during their visit. He happened to be the local land agent as well.
“Moors wants to show us some land this afternoon,” Louis said after breakfast.
“He’s enterprising, I’ll give him that. We’ve been here all of three days,” Fanny replied. They were taking an afternoon stroll through Apia, looking it over. On its main street, where drinking shops alternated with churches and houses, sin and salvation appeared to be tied in the contest for Apia’s souls. Pouring out of tavern doorways came the deafening whine of hurdy-gurdies. Within, they spied tawdry-looking women drinking with sailors.
The town was full of whites—some four hundred, Moors had told them—mostly British, with about ninety Germans and fewer than twenty Americans. “The whites you’ll see are missionaries, expatriate farmers, traders, sailors, and beachcombers who washed up in Upolu and never left,” Moors said. Fanny noticed the whites had mixed enough with natives that there were plenty of “half-castes” on the streets of Apia. Moors himself had a native wife.
“Would you seriously consider living here?” she asked Louis.
He shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to live in town. But you heard the doctor. If I am to remain well, I’ll have to stay in this area for the bulk of my time. And you need a place to land, Fanny. I just don’t know if Samoa is the right spot. We might be better off near Sydney. Bigger port, more culture.”
“It can’t hurt to look at it, I suppose,” she said.
Standing on the hill in the tropical sun that afternoon, with Mount Vaea climbing up in the distance, Fanny’s eyes scanned some three hundred acres of tangled forest and undergrowth, a mess of impenetrable branches and liana vines.
“Upolu and Savii are the biggest of the islands in Samoa, but we get the most contact with the outside world here in Upolu.” Mr. Moors swept a hand across the treed landscape. “Look at it! Five rivers, all of ’em full of freshwater prawns; a high waterfall and a smaller one that has a bathing pool below it. It’s nigh-hand to paradise.” He kicked the toe of his boot into the soil. “You can grow anything here, the year round. Oh, there’s the occasional cyclone, but that’s about it. You might consider a plantation of a couple of crops; people do that to help pay for the cost of the land. Locals will keep it going while you’re away.” The trader took off his straw hat, wiped his forehead with a sleeve. “Folks call this place Vailima, which is Samoan for ‘five rivers.’” He pointed to a spot on the hillside. “Right there would be the best place for a house,” he said. “That’s where I’d put ’er. You’ll know exactly when a mail ship comes in.”
Sweating profusely, Fanny stared in wonder at Louis, who seemed excited by the land and infused with new energy now that the temperature was well into the nineties. “You are the only person I know who perks up in a heat wave,” she said.
“How many mail deliveries?” Louis asked Moors.<
br />
“Four a month. You can’t beat that.”
As they dressed for dinner at Moors’s house that evening, Fanny said, “Did you notice how filthy the beach in Apia was? What kind of town would allow animal carcasses and offal to remain there? I don’t know what to think of this place.” Nor did she know what to make of Mr. Moors, a brawny Michigander whose heart appeared to retain a nook of sentimentality and whose fingers were in a lot of Samoan pies. He was mainly a trader, with a post in Apia and a string of trading posts on other islands. But he was also the person who would sell them the land on Upolu, arrange to have it cleared, build the cottage for them, and act as their banker, since he had considerable money to loan until their funds could get to the island. He was a big financial force in town. She suspected his enthusiasm for having them as neighbors had something to do with Louis’s fame but more to do with his money.
What the people of Apia thought of them on first sight was apparent in the face of a missionary who happened to be at the harbor when the Equator pulled into port. She and Louis and Lloyd disembarked from the boat barefoot. Fanny wore a holoku, bracelets, big gold hoop earrings she had acquired in Tahiti, a straw hat on her head, and her guitar slung over her back. Lloyd wore hoop earrings, blue glasses against the sun, and carried a battered fiddle. Louis, she supposed, was strange-looking simply for the slender figure he cut, but with his somewhat seedy cotton trousers and shirt, and the flageolet in his hand, and a twenty-five-cent white cotton yachting cap on his head, he might have been a beachcomber. All of them were smoking.
The missionary man, Reverend Clarke, had looked puzzled and then hopeful when he saw them tromping along the coral-and-sand main street of Apia. He approached Louis and asked, “Are you folks minstrels?”
“After a fashion, sir,” Louis replied cheerily. “Have you work for us?”