Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  The idea that Tautira (and the whole Polynesian experience) was temporary enhanced the idyll for both Louis and Fanny, who were never so enraptured by Samoa, where they ended up living, as they were by this Tahitian backwater. Fanny loved the ‘fairy story’ aspects of their life there: the beauty of the people, their easy sensuality and grace. She was thrilled to exchange names, in native fashion, with the princess, went barefoot everywhere and partook of ceremonies that Margaret Stevenson probably did not entirely understand: ‘[Fanny] lies on a pillow in the chief’s smoking-room,’ she wrote to Jane, ‘and can even take a whiff of a native cigarette and pass it on to the other members of the company in the approved way.’30 Gone were the endless ailments of Davos, the hysterical alarms of Hyères. ‘I could live and die in beautiful Tautira,’ she told Colvin.

  On Christmas Day 1888, the whole population of the village came down to the beach to see the Casco leave on its long journey north to Hawaii. A French gendarme on shore fired a salute, which the Casco’s Winchester answered in melancholy echo. ‘I anticipate a devil of an awakening,’ Stevenson wrote to Baxter, ‘from a mighty pleasant dream.’31 The passage to Honolulu almost cured the whole party of yacht-cruising; it took a month and was very rough and dangerous. Rations were short, tempers frayed, and when the sea conditions became perilous north of the equator, with a spell becalmed followed by the tail-end of a hurricane, Otis decided to make a run for it rather than risk a protracted voyage with dwindling resources. ‘The yacht was soon under double-reefed fore and main sails, with the bonnet off the jib,’ he told Arthur Johnstone later, ‘flying from a gale that swept her like a toy across the sea.’32 All the rest of the way, the passengers were kept below decks, the hatches were fastened and the crew lashed to their posts to save them from being knocked overboard: ‘the cut of the spray on the exposed face was sharp and unpleasant’, as Otis recalled. Asked years later how Stevenson had taken it, the captain replied, ‘Why, man, he never turned a hair; in fact, I am convinced that he enjoyed it.’33

  When the Casco flew into Honolulu harbour in late January 1889, Belle and her eight-year-old son Austin came out in a small boat to greet them. She was struck by how well Louis looked, despite his recent illness. The whole party was starving hungry and ate a huge dinner that night at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel: ‘But, oh dear me, this place is so civilised!’ Margaret complained to her sister. Honolulu had roads and street lamps, electric lighting and one of the world’s most advanced telephone systems. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel was staggeringly large and luxurious, and the city also boasted a racecourse and an opera house. This was the work of the king, David Kalakaua, a charming, cultivated man who had travelled the world and brought back from his meetings with Queen Victoria, the Tsar and the Emperors of Germany and Japan a desire to modernise his country and a taste for court procedure and regalia. He had a white palace with landscaped grounds, splendid carriages and horses, and was only ever seen in Western-style clothes, with a dress uniform that was almost absurdly cluttered with chains, ribbons and medals. His power, however, had been considerably reduced in the previous two years by the rise of the Reform Party (backed by American business interests), and soon after Kalakaua’s death in 1891 the Sandwich Islands were to fall entirely into American hands.

  Once the Casco had dropped anchor, Kalakaua lost little time in cultivating the acquaintance of his distinguished visitor, much lauded in advance by the Strongs and Stoddard. He invited Stevenson to the palace and was in turn entertained on the yacht, where his capacity to consume champagne surprised even the bibulous Scot; Kalakaua downed five bottles in three and a half hours, rather ‘too convivial’ for a monarch, perhaps.34 The king was fascinated by Stevenson’s planned book on the South Seas, and probably saw political advantage in it for himself, for he often, in the five months the author spent in Hawaii, tried to persuade Stevenson to make a permanent home there. But of all places in the Pacific, Hawaii was the least attractive to any of the party.

  Having arrived with little idea of what they wanted to do next – or could afford to do, rather – the Stevensons had many decisions to make. The question was not whether they were going back to Britain, but whether the return would be almost immediate or in another year, after a further Pacific cruise. A missionary ship called the Morning Star was getting ready for a comprehensive tour of Micronesia, and Stevenson thought it would be an ideal opportunity to gather more material for his book – the limitations of his first tour were only just becoming clear. The proposed trip would be arduous and possibly dangerous: Margaret Stevenson, due to go home to see her ageing sister, was not going to join in. Fanny, however, was ready for anything: ‘I hate the sea,’ she told Colvin, ‘and am afraid of it (though no one will believe that because in time of danger I do not make an outcry – nevertheless I am afraid of it, and it is not kind to me), but I love the tropic weather, and the wild people, and to see my two boys so happy.’

  The new cruise would need financing, and though seven months’ post waited for Stevenson in Honolulu, none of it contained any money. There was nothing with which to pay off Otis and the Casco, and Stevenson had to fall back on the desperate expedient of drawing on Scribner’s in the hope that they would be prepared to pay $5000 for The Wrong Box, Lloyd’s comic novel, now (almost) ready for the press. That Stevenson thought of it as Lloyd’s rather than his own is evident in his insistence that the book was ‘screamingly funny’, a wholly uncharacteristic phrase describing a kind of writing he couldn’t do himself. $5000 was far more than it was worth, to Scribner’s or anyone (McClure, it might be recalled, had turned the book down in Saranac), but Stevenson was steely about it, and insisted on keeping the British rights, too. The only concession that Scribner’s got for their five thousand was to put Stevenson’s name first on the title page.

  In moments of clear sight, Stevenson admitted that Lloyd was still an utter novice: ‘Lloyd is learning to make a rude shot at story telling; he will get on,’ he wrote to Colvin on 9 May 1889. ‘As soon as he has done his first draft of The Pearlfisher [a new story, begun in Honolulu], I shall put him on to do and to elaborate all by himself short stories; there he must learn his art. But I doubt he will ever be very much of a stylist; it is, as yet, rather the root of the matter that he shows: a great knack at certain characters, some sound comedy, and an eye for the picturesque.’35 Colvin of course did not include this letter in his edition; its tone of resignation is too damning: Lloyd ‘will get on’, and – with a little luck – might one day be able ‘to elaborate all by himself’. The moment had passed when Lloyd’s abilities might be challenged to a fair test. The tall, handsome, unintellectual twenty-year-old had given up all thought of a university degree or a regular job. And in truth, it was hardly his fault if he got the impression that his contribution to the works of RLS was invaluable, and that he was a true heir, not just to his stepfather’s semi-miraculous money-making capacity, but to the genius.

  Lloyd had become, in J.C. Furnas’s phrase, a sort of ‘kinsman-retainer’, something between a son and a brother to Stevenson. On the whole, it was a satisfactory relation (remarkably much more so than most stepfather-stepson scenarios), and certainly kept Fanny happy. But to some extent, Louis’s hands were tied: he had been so conspicuously dependent on his own family until well into middle age that he was in no position to object now the tables were turned. He was devising a plan for Lloyd and Joe ‘to start a little money, honestly got’ on the forthcoming cruise: Joe would paint island scenes onto magic lantern slides, and take photographs, while Lloyd would gather materials for a series of lectures. They could later tour together with their ‘diorama’ and possibly produce a book. ‘It should be the making of poor Joe; for whom my affection is very lively,’ Stevenson wrote to Colvin. Still, it irked him to be responsible for such a ‘Skimpolian’ household, as he made clear in an exasperated letter to Baxter from Honolulu: ‘This family has been a sore trouble to me.’ A sentence later, he was calling the same ‘Skimpolians’ ‘truculent fools
who do not know the meaning of money. It is heartbreaking; but there – the burthen is on the back.’36

  Joe and Belle’s marriage, which the Stevensons had never seen much of before, seemed to be in crisis. That Joe had huge debts, drank too much and was semi-addicted to opium cannot have struck anyone as news, depressing though it was. But for some reason, it was Belle who earned the opprobrium of her mother and stepfather, whereas she might have been expected to get their support against a feckless and dissolute husband. They thought Joe was ‘a good fellow’, ‘likeable’, even ‘lovable’, and the elaborate diorama plan was intended to help him recover a sense of purpose and become more ‘forrit-gaun’ as Stevenson described it.37 But Belle was going to be excluded from the next cruise altogether, was being ordered, in fact, to go to Sydney with Austin and wait for the rest of the family there. Stevenson gave humane instructions to a Sydney lawyer to use his discretion if Belle needed slightly more than the £15 he was going to give her a month, but all the same, the arrangement was clearly intended as a form of punishment, or containment. One can only conclude that Belle could not be trusted in Honolulu on her own. What her misdemeanours were have been eroded from the record, but Colvin, who obliterated some remarks about the Strongs from at least one letter, must have had some reason to complain to Baxter that Belle was ‘a really degrading connection’ for their mutual friend.38 And perhaps there is a clue to at least one of her weaknesses in the anecdote she tells in her memoirs of the boat trip to Australia, on which she was ‘persuaded’ to join a card game. She told the players that she only had one Honolulu dollar, and would only play until she lost it. ‘I was still in the game when we reached Sydney,’ she recalled proudly.39

  When the Casco headed back to California, the Stevensons moved to a cottage on the beach at Waikiki, about three miles from the centre of Honolulu, with an outbuilding for the photographic equipment and a large garden where Ah Fu, the Chinese cook they had picked up in Tahiti, kept poultry and grew vegetables. Margaret Stevenson did not stay there long: she was booked to return to San Francisco on 10 May. Valentine Roch was also leaving the group, under some sort of cloud. Fanny, who later never had a good word to say about Valentine, despite her years of service, was convinced that she had been pilfering, but from what Stevenson said to Baxter, that it had been ‘the usual tale of the maid on board the yacht’,40 it sounds as if the reason for her dismissal may have been some sexual misconduct. Perhaps Valentine was pregnant; she never went back to Europe, but settled in California with a husband called Brown. Her reminiscences of RLS, solicited by Rosaline Masson in the 1920s, have a plaintive and aggrieved air, harp on the happy days at Skerryvore and conclude that Stevenson’s ‘teachings’ helped her ‘to bear many injustices which nearly broke my heart’ at their parting.41

  Towards the end of his stay in Honolulu, Stevenson made a trip on his own, lasting twelve days, to the island of Molokai, the leper settlement made famous by the work of ‘Father Damien’ (Joseph de Veuster), the Belgian missionary who had devoted twenty-six years to the care of the sick there. Damien, who had died less than two months before Stevenson’s arrival, had been a controversial figure in the Sandwich Islands, and the subject of gossip, but everything that Stevenson saw on Molokai convinced him that the priest had been ‘superb with generosity, residual candour and fundamental good humour. [ … ] A man, with all the grime and paltriness of mankind; but a saint and a hero all the more for that.’42 What was Stevenson doing on Molokai? He hardly knew himself, apart from satisfying a morbid curiosity to see the outcasts and perhaps get an interesting chapter for his book (he did write some articles about the colony for the New York Sun, but they were not included in In the South Seas). But he could no sooner have resisted the chance to visit the lepers than he could have withheld his complete attention and sympathy from patients and staff when he got there. ‘Highly strung organization and temperament, quick to feel, quick to love – a very affectionate disposition,’ is how the settlement doctor – clearly too busy to expand his notes – saw the visitor, whom he knew only as ‘some writer’.43 Molokai made a revealing brief episode in Stevenson’s life, and shows him at his most greedy of experience. Here was the ex-Covenanter having to endure the religiose pipings of Catholic nuns, but admiring to the full their ‘moral loveliness’, the gloved invalid refraining from shaking hands with the lepers, yet who gave the impression to the doctor that he was considering Molokai as a place to live; the man with a ‘horror of the horrible’ putting himself to the test. ‘I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories that cannot be repeated: yet I never admired my poor race so much, nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement.’44

  Robert Louis Stevenson and party leave today by the schooner Equator for the Gilbert Islands. [ … ] It is to be hoped that Mr Stevenson will not fall victim to native spears; but in his present state of bodily health, perhaps the temptation to kill him may not be very strong.

  Thus some wag on the staff of the Honolulu Pacific Advertiser noted the departure of Stevenson and his companions (Fanny, Lloyd, Joe and Ah Fu) from Hawaii on 24 June 1889. The Equator was both the name of the boat they had chartered and their destination, for the Gilbert Islands, about 1500 miles south-west of Hawaii, lie almost exactly ‘on the line’. The Equator was a small trading schooner of sixty-two tons, owned by Wightman Brothers of San Francisco, and was bound initially for the firm’s trading station on the atoll of Butaritari, due to go on eventually to Samoa in the Navigator Islands. Stevenson had come to an ingenious agreement with the company to pay a lump sum for a four-month cruise, with an extra fee for any unscheduled stops he might request of the captain – a congenial Scots-Irishman called Dennis Reid – and the right to stay up to three days in any of the scheduled stops. This way, he hoped to see as many islands as possible in the allotted time. After Samoa they wanted to press on to Sydney in order to be back in England, via China, Ceylon and Suez, by May or June 1890.

  It was a very different berth from the Casco; a working ship, to begin with, with a motley crew of Americans, Hawaiians, a Swede, a couple of Scots, a Prussian – fifteen men (as Belle observed) to one woman. There was a teenaged stowaway, a nine-year-old cabin boy and a ‘colonial lad’ called Sir Charles Selph (not an aristocrat but, ridiculously enough, christened ‘Sir Charles’ by hopeful parents). Captain Reid was a lively, humorous man, and the atmosphere on board was comradely; Stevenson’s thirty-ninth birthday was celebrated by the whole crew, with speeches, champagne, merriment and impromptu musical entertainment by the family on the hurdy-gurdy, guitar and fiddle which they had brought along. No doubt the terrible flageolet also played its part. The Stevensons were coming to resemble more and more a sort of itinerant vaudeville routine.

  Rains, calms, squalls, bang – there’s the foretopmast gone; rain, calms, squalls, away with the staysail; more rain, more calms, more squalls; a prodigious heavy sea all the time, and the Equator staggering and hovering like a swallow in a storm; and the cabin, nine feet square, crowded with wet human beings, and the rain avalanching on the deck, and the leaks dripping everywhere.45

  So Stevenson described the voyage to Colvin. On 13 July they arrived in the Gilberts, unfrequented atolls very different from the islands they had visited in Polynesia; these were flat, featureless and constantly exposed to the glaring equatorial sun. ‘Life on such islands is in many points like life on shipboard,’ Stevenson remarked,46 acknowledging perhaps a sense of disappointment with their destination. They were unprepared for what awaited them in Butaritari; the Gilberts, being so far out of the way for most traders, might have been expected to be more simple and ‘unspoilt’ than Tautira even, but here were one after another of the native open houses, with everyone stretched out asleep. The people looked dead – they turned out to be dead drunk: Butaritari was in the middle of a communal binge of epic proportions, nine days of revelling and mayhem. The nominal excuse for the celebration, the fourth of July, gives an indication of the influences at wor
k in the Gilberts at the period; the reason for the drunkenness was that the local king, Tebureimoa, had, for the occasion, lifted the taboo on selling spirits to natives. This taboo was much more effective than any outsider-imposed laws, as it was broken at the risk of one’s life.* When the king lifted the taboo, therefore, the rush to contravene the usual ban was overwhelming.

  Hence the Butaritarans were mostly dead to the world when the Equator’s crew came ashore, and when Stevenson arrived at the king’s house (a shed of corrugated iron, recognisable as a palace because there was a flag flying outside and a European-style privy surrounded by a tinsel curtain) there lolled his majesty Tebureimoa himself: ‘He wore pyjamas which sorrowfully misbecame his bulk; his nose was hooked and cruel, his body overcome with sodden corpulence, his eye timorous and dull; he seemed at once oppressed with drowsiness and held awake by apprehension.’47 The last of four brothers to hold the throne, this comatose monarch had, in a former life, been known as ‘Mr Corpse’ for his brutal suppression of enemies, but in recent years his warlike spirit had been considerably subdued ‘by opium and Christianity’, as Stevenson remarked.

  The more they saw, that first day in the Gilberts, the more anxious the party became for their safety. Not only was everyone on the island intoxicated (and, when they began to wake up, got worse), many of the king’s guards were tipsily handling firearms. One courtier performed an obscene pantomime with a woman of the court; elsewhere, Stevenson was truly shocked to see two half-naked, drunken women fighting: ‘The first was uppermost, her teeth locked in her adversary’s face, shaking her like a dog; the other impotently fought and scratched. For a moment we saw them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then the mob closed and shut them in. [ … ] The harm done was probably not much, yet I could have looked on death and massacre with less revolt.’48 Despite these disheartening scenes, Stevenson decided not to retreat to the Equator for the night but to stay ashore, as planned. The revolvers were sent for from the ship, and Louis, Fanny, Lloyd and Adolf Rick, the Prussian store-manager who was acting as their liaison, all established their self-defence credentials by ostentatiously carrying out some target-practice on the public highway, picking off bottles in as swaggering a manner as they could muster. Stevenson went to bed ‘agreeably excited’ by this latest risk to his life, buoyed up as usual by an enormous dose of adrenalin.