“Yeah,” he said. “But we can still find them.”
Upolu is said to be the bustling heart of modern Samoa. Most of its people reside in Apia, the capital, which lies below the imposing summit of Mount Vaea. It is a town where wooden buildings from the colonial era still stand amidst a smattering of garish office buildings and a peculiar parliament that seems to have been lifted straight from the desert in Abu Dhabi. Land disputes seemed to be the issue of the day, as they are on most islands, their very nature causing one to value dirt above all else.
“No one wants to farm anymore,” a Samoan woman told me. “They want to work in an air-conditioned office. But what happens to the village boys? Some chief gets them drunk and sends them off to burn property in a land dispute. Samoans, they often take things too far.”
Walking around town, I find it difficult to imagine Stevenson settling here. There were plenty of palagis in Apia during that era, playing the colonial game, which Stevenson wrote about extensively in his A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. In 1889, seven ships from Great Britain, the United States, and Germany played a game of naval chicken in the harbor, daring each other to leave and seek safety in the open seas as a typhoon bore down on them. Six ships were sunk during the storm, killing more than two hundred sailors. That was the sort of continental nonsense that Stevenson scorned. True, by living here, on an outpost on the far side of the world, he avoided the petty backbiting of literary society, for which he had even more contempt, but Samoa was hardly untouched by Western concerns. Combine the meddling of imperial powers with a rapacious cast of palagi beachcombers, deserters, and felons, and Apia featured the very worst of the social orbit he’d known in the West. Indeed, his son-in-law, Joe Strong, would soon join this dissolute mob, having robbed and cajoled Stevenson out of every penny he could find, and eventually settling in town with a local woman, leaving his wife and child to fend for themselves in Vailima.
Some, Paul Theroux among them, maintain that Stevenson settled in Samoa because of its excellent, for the time, links to the outside world. There were regular mail ships that called on Apia, linking it to London, San Francisco, and Sydney, no small thing for a writer. And Stevenson needed to keep working. He was supporting a large family now, and once he purchased Vailima, building the grandest home in Samoa, its upkeep demanded a steady flow of funds. From time to time, he entertained the idea of giving up the pen to become a South Seas trader. In more melancholic moods, he wished he’d followed the family tradition and become an engineer. “Were it not for my health,” he wrote in a letter, “which made it impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace trade . . .” But write on he did, continuing the prodigious output that had become his habit.
And yet, the presence of a mail ship casts Stevenson in a practical light that he himself rarely displayed. Certainly, he took his responsibilities seriously, but he had always had an air of improvisation about him. He made do, no matter what the circumstances. Something as prosaic as the convenient presence of a mailbox or a telegraph seemed an unlikely justification for building his hearth.
Misa Telefoni, the affable former deputy prime minister of Samoa and a Stevenson aficionado, advanced another theory as to why the author chose to remain here, in the temperate hills above Apia.
“I believe Stevenson was influenced by H. J. Moors,” he said. We were sitting inside Aggie Grey’s, an illustrious hotel from the 1930s once frequented by James Michener and Marlon Brando. “He was very persuasive and he had his own interests in wanting Stevenson to stay.”
Misa’s grandfather had worked for the postal service and helped introduce the telephone to Samoa, which is how he acquired the family name. We had a mutual friend, and what I liked about the Pacific is that this alone is enough to elicit an invitation for coffee from a highfalutin official. Imagine if you knew someone who went to high school with Joe Biden, and then visiting Washington, DC, you get a call from the vice president inviting you for a ride in his Camaro. Misa was speaking about H. J. Moors, an American trader and businessman who soon befriended Stevenson and provided the building materials that would go into Vailima. He sold the timber to Stevenson for a premium, marking up the price substantially, causing the author much stress and worry over the ever-escalating costs of his home. Moors, I thought, saw Stevenson as an easy mark, a meal ticket, another palagi to be charmed and cajoled into spending money he could ill afford.
“I think Moors viewed his relationship with Stevenson as a way to ensure that he will always be remembered. Stevenson was famous; Moors was not. By establishing a deep connection with Stevenson, Moors knew that he too would be written about.”
This hadn’t occurred to me. I couldn’t imagine anyone seeking a claim to fame through their acquaintance with a writer. But Stevenson lived in a different era, of course, one that predates radio, television, and movies, a time when the only popular entertainment available was that which was found between the covers of a book. Today, of course, people are famous for doing nothing at all. I’m looking at you, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. Back then, you needed to earn it, and fame was gifted or cursed to very few. Stevenson, at the peak of his career, was the proverbial shiny object, a designation that ill suited him. The crowds that followed him in New York and Sydney, while massaging his ego, stifled him and made him uncomfortable. He was most at home on a poorly charted island, wearing pajamas and a dapper sailor’s cap, free in his anonymity, the only calling card his wit and curiosity. His renown baffled him. The only person who didn’t know he was famous was Stevenson himself.
“Once he settled here, he began to love this place,” Misa continued. “He became ensconced in the local culture. And this was very unusual for a foreigner. The Samoans grew to love Stevenson, and when he died, they worked all night to clear a path to the summit of Mount Vaea. Can you imagine?”
I couldn’t since I had not yet been to the gravesite. I was still trying to get inside Stevenson’s head, to try to figure what had made him hang his hat here, in Samoa, rather than in Hawaii or New Zealand or Timbuktu. My own personal theory was that he simply grew tired, that on the cusp of forty he became weary of even the sweet rigors of travel, and that with this temperament it was only a matter of time until he found the right circumstances to furl the sails and settle down. He felt healthier in the tropics than he did in more distant latitudes, but that still encompasses a large swath of this planet. That he settled in Samoa, I thought, was coincidental. If he had sailed the Indian Ocean, I felt, he might have called Madagascar home.
And yet, the moment I approached Vailima I sensed something else. The house is exceedingly large, nestled on a tended lawn a couple of miles up into the hills above Apia. There is a grand luster to the manse, which was painted white with a red corrugated-iron roof. There is Stevenson’s room, the single bed, the writing desk, and a window that opened to the verandah and a lawn where a couple of banded rails happily wandered. Next to it was Fanny’s room. They did not sleep together, apparently. Was it the hacking and coughing? No, for there was a sick room too, with mosquito nets and bottles of potions and medicine, where Stevenson convalesced. It was a house of bedrooms. His mother had the grandest, next to that of young Austin, Fanny’s grandson, who would be the last to carry the Stevenson name. On the wall was an etching of RLS teaching Austin a history lesson, as well as many photos of him hosting kava ceremonies or elaborate feasts with the Samoans he’d adopted as his extended clan. Perhaps this house, this life, satisfied Stevenson’s cravings for both the Bohemian and the homespun. There were personal touches like a sewing machine, a few engravings from his days in France and England, as well as a lion skin hoisted onto the wall, near his safe. Vailima had the only fireplace in Samoa as well as a library and a piano.
He would live here on the hillside for four years, long enough to make it home, and as I looked at the photos of Stevenson, his eyes intensely alive,
I couldn’t help but feel that this was the only place for him. There was nothing calculating about his decision to remain in Samoa. It was intuitive. He knew, seemingly from the moment he stepped ashore, that this was the place for him, finally, after all those years of roaming the seven seas. Here, the restless gleam in his eyes gave way to an air of contented bemusement. Like all islanders, he was attached to his land, and it was here, in faraway Samoa, that he felt the pulse of his ancestral roots, the Scotsman’s bond with the soil. In a letter to a novelist, he wrote: “For the first time, near my fortieth year, I find myself a landholder and a farmer: with paths to hew in tropical bush, weeds to deracinate, weeders and diggers to supervise. You at least will sympathize when how I tell you that this work seizes and enthralls me; I would rather do a good hour’s work weeding sensitive—our deadliest enemy—than write two pages of my best.”
For all his adult years, Stevenson lived separately, in an ethereal universe of his own creation, detached from the toils and pleasures of conventional life, floating airlessly from story to story, island to island, never alighting long enough to be anything more than a wanderer, a visitor among worlds. It is not without its allure, such an existence. The world is ceaselessly interesting when no day resembles another. But invariably, the bliss of the novel gives way to the yearning for the familiar. It was as if Stevenson had awoken from a dream, and now he seized the morning in gratitude, anxious to be back among the real, the tangible, the finite, the small daily connections that bond us with life. He took to the land with the zeal of the newly converted. In a few years, he hoped, his plantation would earn enough and he would “be released from the obligation to write.” Nowhere else would this be possible than on a South Seas island. Stevenson, the famous Robert Louis Stevenson, would never be allowed to retire wordlessly to a farm in upstate New York or Yorkshire. The world would clamor on his gates. In Samoa, he could write “The End” and make it so.
As these thoughts occurred to me, I felt a bond with Stevenson. I understood the siren song of the itinerant traveler, followed its tune to distant shores and faraway lands. It is what drew me to Stevenson. Here, I thought, is a fellow traveler. But now, wandering among the grounds of Vailima, I felt an even greater affinity still. I can’t swing a four-hundred-acre farm, perhaps the bottle cost me that too, but if I could, I would. Every journey has its end. The trick, of course, is to recognize it. I followed the lure of the drink for far too long, never seeing that, invariably, it always took me to the same miserable place. Finally, hopping off that steamer to nowhere, I felt the same profound need to make up for lost time, to establish a root somewhere, to put a declarative end to one life and to immerse myself, both feet in, into another. I wanted the clean slate and the fresh start. It takes a lot of weeding and tilling of the soil to create a Vailima, but I knew how to do that. You do it one day at a time.
I stood on the lower verandah and breathed the scented air and listened to the songs of birds. It was here that Stevenson suddenly turned to Fanny. “Do I look strange?” he asked, and then he collapsed unconscious, dying shortly thereafter from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was forty-four.
The climb to his grave leads through a tangle of rain forest, then up a steep promontory, where foot-long lizards scampered over roots among foliage so dense that not even a passing burst of rain punctured the canopy. I emerged from the forest and beheld the tomb. It stood on the edge of a ridge. Below was a sweeping panorama encompassing all of Apia, the harbor, and beyond the ocean that had carried Stevenson for so long. The grave site is made of white cement blocks, upon which a plaque displays his epitaph, written fifteen long years earlier, when, as so often with his sickness, he was confronted with the potential imminence of his own demise:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
The tomb was extensively defaced by people who had carved their names into the stone. HOWARD said the most prominent etching. I spent a moment looking for a sharp rock so I could add IS A FUCKWIT, but then, with a sigh of regret, let it be. Here, my travels would end. I rested for a few moments at the base of the tombstone and marveled at the view, the cascade of hills tumbling toward the sea, a hint of mist swirling around their ramparts. The air was clamorous with birdsong and carried the scent of hibiscus. Of course, Stevenson felt at home here, I thought. I could not think of a more enchanting place to lie. This was no desolate memorial. It was, in its own way, a pinnacle to a life well lived, a reflection of Stevenson’s quest for the transcendent, a place that called to mind faraway adventures and tropical fairy tales. Stevenson could only be here on an island in the South Seas. Anyplace else would be wrong, an affront to the natural order of things. And as I stood and began my journey onward, I felt alive to the possibilities of life, alive to the turn of a good yarn, alive to the long voyage, alive to home, alive.
Notes, Sources, and Flotsam
The author would like it to be known that he is not a scholar. He, in fact, relied heavily on the work of others, in particular Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Philip Callow (see, especially, Chapter Seven), Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Frank McLynn, and Robert Louis Stevenson by Claire Harman. The introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of In the South Seas, written by Neil Rennie, was invaluable. Many of the quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson were lifted from Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, edited by Ernest Mehew.
The author is also aware that the map provided herein is an old map, that the New Hebrides are now known as Vanuatu, that Abaiang is spelled with a b and not a p, and that Tonga is no longer Friendly. He decided to include the old-timey map because he felt that it would lend the whole enterprise an air of gravitas. It would make the book seem classy. He may have been mistaken about this. And so to the citizens of the Navigator Islands, he apologizes. He acknowledges your modernity.
Also, as seasoned travelers to the South Pacific may have surmised, it’s not possible to visit the islands in the order described herein when traveling commercial. For organizational purposes, the author decided to structure the book so that it followed, more or less, the guiding principles of In the South Seas. The author also changed a few names. Just because.
Acknowledgments
To the good people at Gotham Books: my very patient editor, Lauren Marino, Emily Wunderlich, Susan Barnes, and Bill Shinker.
My agent, BJ Robbins, for sticking through thick and thin.
For all those who helped me out on a long journey: John Cox, Joe McClean, Lelei Lelaulu, Eric Weiner, Misa Telefoni, Nynette Sass, Linda Uan, John Anderson, Jack (“I did not order the Long Island Iced Teas”) St. Martin.
And my family, of course.
Headhunters on My Doorstep Page 24