At first Stevenson was not greatly struck either by 101
the place or by the natives; the island was “ far less beautiful than the Marquesas or Tahiti; a more gentle scene, gentler acclivities, a tamer face of nature; and this much aided, for the wanderer, by the great German plantations, with their countless regular avenues of palms.” Nor was he “specially attracted by the people; but they are courteous; the women very attractive, and dress lovely; the men purposelike, well set up, tall, lean, and dignified.”
In the end of December he made a boat expedition with Mr. Clarke some dozen miles to the east, partly on mission business, and partly on his own account to visit Tamasese, the chief whom the Germans had formerly set up as king; not long afterwards he made a similar journey to the west to Malua, where the London Mission have long had a training college for native students. It was on this latter occasion that he was first introduced to the natives by the Rev. J. E. Newell as “ Tusitala,” “ The Writer of Tales” the name by which he was afterwards most usually known in Samoa. Here he gave an address which was translated for their benefit;1 and a few days later he delivered a lecture in Apia upon his travels, on behalf of a native church, Dr. Stuebel taking the chair.
From his notes made on the first expedition I draw one or two passages, descriptive of Samoan customs and of Samoan scenery, which is nowhere more beautiful than in the inlet he then visited.
“Dec. ji, ‘89.
“At the mission station, the most enchanting scene: troops of children and young girls in that enchanting 1 Appendix A.
diversity of bright attire which makes a joy to the eye of any Samoan festival; some in tapa1 crinolined out, some in gaudy tabards, some in the sleeveless bodice of black velvet; one little girlie in a titiof russet leaves, herself crowned with the red flower of royalty, for all the world like a pantomime fairy, only her lendings were not of tinsel, but still glittered with the raindrops of the morning. They came in a certain order, one standing by to let another pass, these singing as they came, those as they waited. The strains were almost as pleasant to the ear as the colours and the bright young faces to the eye; the words were now conventional and applicable to any malaga, now composed or prepared against the present occasion. Each little gaudy band of choristers approached the open apse of the mission-house, where we sat installed, walking in loose array, their gifts of taro, or sugar-cane, shouldered gallantly like muskets, one girl in special finery leading with a chicken in her arms, and every foot in time; they paused some paces off, ending their compliment with more boisterous enunciation, rose to a last high note, and suddenly with a medley of shrill shouts hurled all their offerings one upon another in front of us, broke up their ranks with laughter, and dispersed. One of our boat’s crew gathered up the offerings, and a high voice like a herald’s proclaimed the name of the village and the number and nature of the gifts. And before he had well spoken a fresh troop was drawing near, with a new song. . . .
1 Tapa, native cloth made of mulberry bark; titi, something between a girdle and a skirt; malaga, excursion, visiting party; taro, the edible root of the Arum esculentum. “ Fagaloa, Dec. 31st.
“Past Falefa, where the reef ends and the coaster enters on the open sea, all prettinesses, as if they were things of shelter, end. The hills are higher and more imminent, and here and there display naked crags. The surf beats on bluff rocks, still overhung with forest; the boat, still navigated foolishly near the broken water, is twisted to and fro with a drunken motion, in the backwash and broken water of the surf; and though to-day it is exceptionally smooth, another boat that crosses us appears only at intervals and for a moment on the blue crest of the swells. At last, rounding a long spit of rocks on which the sea runs wildly high, the bay, gulf, or rather (as the one true descriptive word) the loch of Fagaloa opens. The oarsmen rest awhile upon their oars. ‘Thank you for your rowing,’ says Mr. Clarke — the conventional allocution: the conventional answer comes, ‘ Thank you for your prayers’; and then, with a new song struck up, which sings the praise and narrates with some detail the career of Mr. Clarke himself, we begin to enter the enchanted bay; high clouds hover upon the hill-tops; thin cataracts whiten lower down along the front of the hills; all the rest is precipitous forest, dark with the intensity of green, save where the palms shine silver in the thicket; it is indeed a place to enter with a song upon our lips.
“... Fagaloa is the original spot where every prospect pleases. It was beautiful to see a vast black rain- squall engulf the bottom of the bay, pass over with glittering skirts, climb the opposite hill, and cling there and dwindle into rags of snowy cloud; beautiful too was a scene where a little burn ran into the sea between groups of cocos and below a rustic bridge of palm-stems; something indescribably Japanese in the scene suggested the idea of setting on the bridge three gorgeously habited young girls, and these relieved in their bright raiment against the blue of the sky and the low sea-line completed the suggestion; it was a crape picture in the fact. We went on further to the end of the bay, where the village sits almost sprayed upon by waterfalls among its palm-grove, and round under the rocky promontory, by a broken path of rock among the bowers of foliage; a troop of little lads accompanied our progress, and two of them possessed themselves of my hands and trotted alongside of me with endless, incomprehensible” conversation; both tried continually to pull the rings off my fingers; one carried my shoes and stockings, and proudly reminded me of the fact at every stoppage. They were unpleasant, cheeky, ugly urchins; and the shoe-bearer, when we turned the corner and sat down in the shade and the sea-breeze on black ledges of volcanic rock, splashed by the sea, nestled up to my side, and sat pawing me like an old acquaintance. . . .
“Jan. ist, 1890. — On our way back along the most precipitous and seemingly desert portion of the coast, we were startled by a sudden noise rising above the continuous sound of the breaching surf which hangs along the shore incessant and invariable in pitch. At first we supposed it to be the sound of some greater wave exploding through a blow-hole of the rocks; but presently the sound was repeated, our eye was caught by a growing column of blue smoke arising in the
shore-side forest, and we were aware that in that bay, where not a roof appeared to break the continuous foliage, a not inconsiderable village must sit secret, whose inhabitants were now saluting the New Year with a field-piece, some relic of the war.”
But Stevenson was now to take a step that proved more decisive than for the moment he imagined. The winter home he had once projected at Madeira was to be transferred to Samoa; he purchased some four hundred acres in the bush, two miles behind and six hundred feet above the level of the town of Apia. The ground was covered, not exactly with virgin forest, for it had formerly been occupied (according to tradition) by a Samoan bush town, but with vegetation so dense that on her first visit his wife had been quite unable to penetrate to the spot where the house afterwards stood. The land, however, was to be cleared, and a cottage erected, which would at any rate shelter the family during such intervals between their cruises as it should suit them to spend in Samoa. But the real reason for the selection of this island for a settlement lay principally in the facilities of communication. An author, and especially a writer of novels, can dispense with many of the blessings of civilisation; the one thing absolutely indispensable is a regular and trustworthy mode of communicating with his printer and his publisher. Now in the matter of mails Samoa was exceptionally fortunate. The monthly steamers between Sydney and San Francisco received and deposited their mail-bags in passing, and very soon after began to call at the port of Apia. A German steamer, the Lilbeck, ran regularly between Apia and Sydney, and the New
Zealand boat, the Richmond, called on her circular trip from Auckland to Tahiti. Of all the other islands which Stevenson had visited, Tahiti itself was the only possible rival, but its mail service was much less frequent and less trustworthy; and, moreover, Stevenson was not anxious to place himself under the control of a French colonial government.
So the ground was bought, the money paid, and orders were left to begin the necessary operations. Early in February the party sailed for Sydney, where Mrs. Strong was now waiting to see them on their way home to England for the summer.
Soon after reaching Australia, Stevenson found in a religious paper a letter from Dr. Hyde, a Presbyterian minister in Honolulu, depreciating the labours of Father Damien at Molokai, and reviving against his memory some highly unchristian and unworthy slanders. The letter was written in a spirit peculiarly calculated to rouse Stevenson’s indignation, and when he heard at the same time a report, which may or may not have been true, but which he, at any rate, fully believed, to the effect that a proposed memorial to Damien in London had been abandoned on account of this or some similar statement, his anger knew no bounds. He sat down and wrote the celebrated letter to Dr. Hyde, which was forthwith published in pamphlet form in Sydney, and subsequently in Edinburgh in the Scots Observer. He had the courage of his opinions, and realised the risks he was taking: “ I knew I was writing a libel: I thought he would bring an action; I made sure I should be ruined; I asked leave of my gallant family, and the sense that I was signing away all I possessed kepi me up to high-water mark, and made me feel every insult heroic.”
But in place of the news for which his friends were waiting, that he had started upon his homeward voyage, there came a telegram to Mr. Baxter on the ioth April: “Return Islands four months. Home September.”
He had taken cold in Sydney, and after the lapse of eighteen months having again started a hemorrhage, was very ill and pining for the sea. Mrs. Stevenson heard of a trading steamer about to start for “the Islands,” applied for three passages and was refused, went to the owners and was again refused, but stating inflexibly that it was a matter of life or death to her husband, she carried her point and extorted their unwilling consent.
This vessel was the steamship Janet Nicoll, an iron screw-steamer of about six hundred tons, chartered by Messrs. Henderson & Macfarlane, a well-known South Sea firm. There was a dock strike in Sydney at the time, but with a “ black-boy “ crew on board, the Janet got away, carrying a full complement of officers and engineers, and the trio to whom Island Nights’ Entertainments was afterwards dedicated — Mr. Henderson, one of the partners; Ben Hird,1 the supercargo; and “Jack” Buckland, the living original of Tommy Haddon in The Wrecker.
Unwelcome guests though they had been, no sooner had they started than they met with the greatest kind-
1 In a brief sketch in Macmillan’s Magazine for November, 1896, I endeavoured to do justice to the memory of some of Hird’s many admirable qualities.
ness and cordiality from every one on board, and when they reached Auckland the invalid was himself again. They left that port under sealed orders, but were not yet clear of the lighthouse before some fireworks, left in Buckland’s berth, set his cabin on fire. The saloon was filled with dense smoke and a rosy glow “ Let no man say I am unscientific,” wrote Stevenson. “ When I ran, on the alert, out of my stateroom, and found the main cabin incarnadined with the glow of the last scene of a pantomime, I stopped dead. ‘ What is this? ‘ said I. ‘ This ship is on fire, I see that; but why a pantomime?’ And I stood and reasoned the point, until my head was so muddled with the fumes that 1 could not find the companion. By singular good fortune, we got the hose down in time and saved the ship, but Lloyd lost most of his clothes, and a great part of our photographs was destroyed. Fanny saw the native sailors tossing overboard a blazing trunk; she stopped them in time, and behold, it contained my manuscripts.”1
After this episode all went well; the course of the steamer may be traced on the accompanying map. She put in to Apia, and stayed there long enough to enable the party to visit their new property and see what progress had been made. After that she went to the east and to the north, calling at three-and-thirty low islands; their stay in almost every case was limited to a few hours, and, as Stevenson wrote on this cruise, “hackney cabs have more variety than atolls.” They saw their friend King Tembinok’ again, and received a welcome from him almost too pathetic to be hearty.
1 Letters, ii. 185. He had been ill, and the whole island had been attacked by measles, a disaster which was apparently attributed by the victims to the sale of their “ devil-box.” In the centre of the big house was a circular piece of “ devil-work “ in the midst of a circle of white shells, and the worship of “Chench,” the local deity, had obviously received an impetus from recent events.
The circumstances of this expedition were, of course, very different from their former leisurely and more local voyages in schooners. Stevenson greatly enjoyed the company on board, for two at least of his fellow-voyagers were probably unrivalled by any white man in their experience of these regions, and were possessed besides of remarkable ability and character.
The altered conditions of navigation were a great interest to him, and he was never weary of admiring the captain’s skill in handling the steamer, one specimen of which he has recorded in the account of his first visit to a pearl-shell island, such as, to his great disappointment, he had failed to visit from Fakarava.
“Nearly two years had passed before I found myself in the trading steamer Janet Nicoll, heading for the entrance of Penrhyn or Tongarewa. In front, the line of the atoll showed like a narrow sea-wall of bare coral, where the surges broke; on either hand the tree-tops of an islet showed some way off: on one, the site of the chief village; the other, then empty, but now inhabited, and known by the ill-omened name of Molokai. We steamed through the pass and were instantly involved amidst a multiplicity of coral lumps, or horses’ heads, as they are called by sailors. Through these our way meandered; we would have a horse’s head athwart the bows, one astern, one upon either board; and the tortuous fairway was at times not more than twice the vessel’s beam. The Janet was, besides, an iron ship; half the width of the Pacific severed us from the next yard of reparation; one rough contact, and our voyage might be ended, and ourselves consigned to half a year of Penrhyn. On the topgallant forecastle stood a native pilot, used to conning smaller ships, and unprepared for the resources of a steamer; his cries rang now with agony, now with wrath. The best man was at the bridge wheel; and Captain Henry, with one hand on the engine signal, one trembling towards the steersman, juggled his long ship among these dangers, with the patient art of one fitting up a watch, with the swift decision of a general in the field. 1 stood by, thrilling at once with the excitement of a personal adventure and the admiration due to perfect skill.
“We were presently at anchor in a singular berth, boxed all about; our late entrance, our future exit not to be discovered; in front the lagoon, where I counted the next day upwards of thirty horses’ heads in easy view; behind, the groves of the isle and the crowded houses of the village. Many boats lay there at moorings: in the verandah, folk were congregated gazing at the ship; children were swimming from the shore to board us; and from the lagoon, before a gallant breeze, other boats came skimming homeward. The boats were gay with white sails and bright paint; the men were clad in red and blue, they were garlanded with green leaves or gay with kerchiefs; and the busy, many-coloured scene was framed in the verdure of the palms and the opal of the shallow sea. “It was a pretty picture, and its prettiest element, the coming of the children. Every here and there we saw a covey of black heads upon the water. . . . Soon they trooped up the side-ladder, a healthy, comely company of kilted children; and had soon taken post upon the after-hatch, where they sat in a double row, singing with solemn energy.”
But on the whole Stevenson did not benefit greatly by the voyage. He now turned to the “ letters “ upon his experiences for the American syndicate; from the first they failed to satisfy him, although he regarded them, even in their final form, as only the rough material for the book. The heat of the steamer, driven before the wind, was often intolerable; he had another hemorrhage, and remained languid and unfit for work. On the return journey the Janet turned off to New Caledonia, and thence w
ent direct to Sydney. Stevenson, however, landed at Noumea, where he spent a few days by himself, observing the French convict settlement, and learning something of the methods of dealing with natives. It was the only time he was ever among Melanesian tribes, although occasionally he met with isolated individuals, especially in Samoa, where they are frequently imported as labourers for the German firm.
He followed his wife and stepson to Sydney, whence Mr. Osbourne left for England, finally to arrange their affairs, and bring out the furniture from Skerryvore for the “yet unbuilt house on the mountain.”
All idea of this journey had been given up by Stevenson himself in the course of the past voyage, and indeed, having reached Sydney, he was confined to his room in the Union Club, and left it only to return to Samoa. From this time forth, although he formed various projects, never realised, of seeing his friends, and especially Mr. Colvin, in Egypt, Honolulu, or Ceylon, he never, so far as I know, again looked forward to setting foot upon his native shores.
With his wife he left for Apia, and on their arrival they camped in gipsy fashion in the four-roomed wooden house which was all, except a trellised arbour, that had yet been erected on the property. Here for the next six months they lived alone with one servant, until the ground was further cleared and the permanent house built.
Into the details of Stevenson’s life at this time there is no need to go; it was a period of transition, and it is sufficiently described in the Vailima Letters. Most of his material difficulties were crowded into it; but even from them he derived a great deal of enjoyment. There were daily working on the land a number of labourers, partly Samoans, partly natives of other groups, superintended for most of the time by a Samoan who figures largely in the first part of the letters to Mr. Colvin. After a while, as soon as the lie of the ground could be more clearly seen, the site of the new house was selected on a plateau a couple of hundred yards higher up the hill, and the building itself was begun by white carpenters.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 840