Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  The wind and the wild seas, now vastly swollen, indefatigably hunted us. I stood on deck, choking with fear; I seemed to lose all power upon my limbs; my knees were as paper when she plunged into the murderous valleys; my heart collapsed when some black mountain fell in avalanche beside her counter.68

  More extraordinary still is Lloyd’s attribution to himself of ‘the fight and the murders on the Currency Lass’. This explosively violent chapter seems at first to have no place in Stevenson’s oeuvre; it is brutal and graphic (‘a face, that of the sailor Holdorsen, appeared below the bulkheads in the cabin doorway. Carthew shattered it …’69), and dwells on the mechanics of killing a dozen or so men in cold blood with an aggressive insistence that the reader shares the experience in full. But there is something brilliant about it too: the quick succession of trigger events plummeting the situation out of normality and into horror, the inevitability and unstoppability of the consequences, and the work involved in the massacre, the persistence it requires. When the crew of the Currency Lass realise that one man remains of the witnesses, Hadden begs for him to be spared: ‘One man can’t hurt us [ … ] We can’t go on with this. I spoke to him at dinner,’ and the narrator adds, ‘The sound of his supplications was perhaps audible to the unfortunate below.’ Carthew, determined to finish the business, goes below but cannot bring himself to shoot:

  A sense of danger, of daring, had alone nerved Carthew to enter the forecastle; and here was the enemy crying and pleading like a frightened child. His obsequious ‘Here, sir,’ his horrid fluency of obtestation, made the murder tenfold more revolting.

  Carthew flees, but Wicks goes down instead; the victim, thinking it is Carthew again, begins to emerge from his hiding place, and Wicks ‘emptied his revolver at the voice, which broke into mouse-like whimperings and groans’.

  The extra clause in that sentence is symptomatic of the whole chapter: nothing is left to the imagination. How different this is from the invisible violence of Edward Hyde, the fight in the round-house in Kidnapped, or the murder of Israel Hands in Treasure Island (a book with many echoes in The Wrecker). Stevenson and Osbourne separately couldn’t have done this; in collaboration, and with the sole responsibility removed from either man, they turned up with a scene like nothing else in nineteenth-century fiction, a scene from a twenty-first-century gangster film.

  One scene stands out biographically, and that is the confrontation between Dodd and Pinkerton following the loss of their investment in the Flying Scud. It is interesting for the characterisation of Mamie Pinkerton and for the depiction of the rapid breakdown of relations between two old friends once a third party – the wife of one – is involved. Mamie herself is the nearest to a portrait of Fanny Stevenson that we ever get in Stevenson’s works – far more like life than the Countess von Rosen in Prince Otto or the Fair Cuban in The Dynamiter. She is a flat, conventional character until the quarrel scene, where she slowly reveals her teeth; stung by the troubles visited on her husband, she launches into a harangue against Dodd which seems to capture exactly the tone and excesses of the Vandegrifter:

  ‘You think you can do what you please with James; you trust to his affection, do you not? [ … ] But it was perhaps an unfortunate day for you when we were married, for I at least am not blind [ … ] It makes me furious! His wages! a share of his wages! That would have been your pittance, that would have been your share of the Flying Scud [ … ] But we do not want your charity; thank God, I can work for my own husband!’[ … ]

  Heaven knows to what a height she might have risen, being, by this time, bodily whirled away in her own hurricane of words.70

  Mamie’s loyalty to her husband, and his to Dodd, and Dodd’s to him, make it impossible that all three of them can know all the facts of the case; the resulting meltdown seems to replay the agonies of the break with Henley in miniature form. But, pathetically, Stevenson awards his characters the chance to acknowledge the forces at work in their disagreement (marriage, mostly), and includes a coda in which Pinkerton chases after his friend on the street to excuse his wife’s anger against him: ‘Don’t think hard of Mamie [ … ] It’s the way she’s made; it’s her high-toned loyalty.’ Dodd’s response, heavy with Brutus-Cassius overtones, is a fantasy finale to the Nixie affair, the noble utterance Stevenson craved from Henley, or Bob, and was never going to hear:

  ‘It never can [blow over]’, I returned, sighing: ‘and don’t you try to make it! Don’t name me, unless it’s with an oath. And get home to her right away. Good-bye, my best of friends. Good-bye and God bless you. We shall never meet again.’71

  The voyage on the Equator helped change the whole basis of Stevenson’s future plans for remaining in the Pacific. When his pipe-dream of the private island and the private yacht passed, his new objective became to find a place to live that had good communications with the outside world and a modicum of civilised life. This narrowed the choice down to Suva, Papeete, Honolulu or Apia, of which the last, in Samoa, was the most appealing on several counts; Samoa was one of the few independent island groups left in the region and its people were renowned for being, in Lloyd’s phrase, ‘attractive and uncontaminated’.72 And when the Equator finally turned up at Apemama, several weeks late, it was to Samoa that it and the Stevenson party were bound.

  * * *

  *Twain and Stevenson met in Washington Square during the week (at the end of April 1888) Stevenson spent in New York City. Twain, another writer who habitually had a multiplicity of works in progress and was subject to writer’s block, was also obsessed by doubles and the idea that he had a ‘dream self’ that seemed to lead a separate life. Jekyll and Hyde had affected him profoundly. In 1910, when the writer lay dying, his last continuous speech was on this very subject, ‘about “the laws of mentality”, about Jekyll and Hyde and dual personality’.5

  *The European laws against the sale of alcohol all round the Pacific, which sought to ‘protect’ natives from the demon drink to which they seemed particularly susceptible, did not apply to whites, and no laws on drink whatever pertained in American-influenced Micronesia.

  *They started off with at least two cameras, but one went overboard almost as soon as they reached the Marquesas in July 1888.

  †As it was, the illustrations used in the Black and White magazine edition (1 February 1891) were engravings of the photographs, quaintly antiquing the images of Stevenson’s travels instead of presenting them in the newer, more realistic form. The picture of Nan Tok’ and Nei Takauti with the Stevensons is labelled ‘Arcadian life at Butaritari’.

  13

  TUSI TALA

  The mode of life, so far as it affects growth or health, would, if known, throw light on the effect of nurture over nature.

  Francis Galton, Record of Family Faculties

  ON 7 DECEMBER 1889, a clergyman called Clarke, working for the London Missionary Society in Samoa, was making his way along the main street of Apia, a long sandy track that followed the curve of the harbour, when he came across an odd party of Europeans, two men and a woman, apparently just landed from the schooner in the bay. The woman wore a print gown, large gold earrings, a straw hat with shells decorating the brim, and had a guitar slung across her back. The younger man carried a banjo and was wearing striped pyjamas, a slouch straw hat ‘of native make’ and dark blue sun-spectacles, while the other man was dressed in white flannels ‘that had seen many better days, a white drill yachting cap with prominent peak, a cigarette in his mouth, and a photographic camera in his hand. Both the men were bare-footed. [ … ] My first thought was that, probably, they were wandering players en route to New Zealand, compelled by their poverty to take the cheap conveyance of a trading vessel.’1 So the Stevenson family appeared to a passer-by. Clarke only realised that they were ‘gentlefolk’ when he met them again in the town’s main hotel, the Tivoli, the following week; he was to become Stevenson’s closest friend among the missionaries.

  Another significant meeting that first day in Samoa was with Harry Jay Moors, an
American trader who had settled on the main island, Upolu, in the early 1880s. Moors boarded the Equator on business and recognised Stevenson immediately (presumably from newspaper articles); characteristically he lost no time in making acquaintance, and asked the newcomers back to his house. ‘[Stevenson] appeared to be intensely nervous, highly strung, easily excited,’ Moors remembered, noticing how, once ashore, the author ‘began to walk up and down [the sand] in a most lively, not to say eccentric, manner. He could not stand still. When I took him into my house, he walked about the room, plying me with questions, one after another, darting up and down.’2 Moors supposed the whole party were unnerved by their long trip from the Gilbert Islands. He didn’t yet realise that, for Stevenson, this was quite normal behaviour.

  The Stevensons had arrived in Samoa at an important moment in its history. The Germans had exercised significant power in the islands since the establishment of successful copra, cocoa and banana plantations in the 1850s, and ‘the German firm’* had been responsible for building Apia harbour and establishing regular steamship communications between Samoa, New Zealand, Australia and San Francisco. German interference in Samoan affairs, however, had aroused British and American objections, and after the deposition by Germany of the Samoan king, Malietoa Laupepa, in 1887, and the installation of a pro-German puppet ruler, Tupua Tamasese, all three powers sent warships to the islands. Seven were in Apia harbour when a hurricane struck in March 1889 (just a month after Stevenson had been writing to The Times from Hawaii about the exile of Laupepa), and the wrecks of the Vandalia, the Trenton and the Olga, the first two American and the last German, were still cluttering the bay when the Stevensons arrived on the Equator in December.

  The sudden loss of the warships by act of God did what no earlier diplomacy had effected, and in the summer of 1889 representatives of Germany, Britain and the United States met in Berlin to work out a plan for Samoa, eventually agreeing to grant the islands free elections. But no date was set for this reform, and in the interim the powers (Germany was by far the dominant one) decided that the former native king should be brought back from exile. Laupepa was not unpopular among his countrymen, but was in an almost impossible position: during his absence most Samoans had transferred their allegiance to Mataafa Iosefo, the man who had led a violent insurgence against Tamasese and who had the backing of some British and American residents (Moors was one). The reintroduction of the ousted king became the trigger to all the civil unrest during Stevenson’s residence in Samoa. Mataafa was represented by the Germans as a ‘rebel leader’, but as even Laupepa supported him and the stooge Tamasese was now discarded, there was no logical reason why the elections could not take place immediately and confirm in office Mataafa, whom almost everyone (Samoan) wanted as king.

  The fact that Laupepa had appealed to Britain for help (‘offered to accept the supremacy of England’ is how Stevenson put it4) before the 1887 crisis and had been refused had been one of the main complaints in Stevenson’s letter to The Times from Honolulu (at which time, of course, he knew nothing of Samoa first-hand). It was clear to him then that ‘encroachment on the one side [Germany’s] and weakness on the other [Britain, and to a lesser extent, the US]’ had conspired to create a situation for the Samoans soluble, if at all, only by revolt. When Stevenson reached Apia, full of curiosity to see what progress had been made on this issue which had gripped him from afar, he can only have been discouraged (and at the same time, of course, fired up) by the sight of the scrap-metal in the bay and the news that two days before his arrival Laupepa had been formally recognised as king.

  Moors was a useful informant on this and all Samoan affairs. In fact Moors was a force to be reckoned with: his success as a trader and planter (he exported large amounts of copra) had made him wealthy and influential on Upolu, where ‘everyone’ owed him money on mortgage.5 He had married a Samoan wife and had a daughter by her, and was fairly independent of the ‘Beach’ and its besetting vices of drink and dissipation. For a white man in the tropics, he was remarkably reliable and effective, but ‘a curious being’, as Stevenson told Baxter, ‘not of the best character’. Stevenson was told that Moors had taken a ‘great though secret’ part in the recent war; in later years, he was suspected of being the motive force behind what had looked like a purely Samoan-based petition to transfer the islands to American control. The senior surviving native leader at the time (1919) was described by the German administrator as ‘simply a tool of H.J. Moors’.6

  So it was just as well that Stevenson quickly made an ally of the American. He came to rely on him (with his usual readiness to delegate business matters) for most of the duties of a banker, agent, broker and even literary adviser. Within days of their arrival, Moors had invited the writer to come and stay at his house on Beach Road, right by the sea, while Fanny, Lloyd and Ah Fu went inland, trying to find a higher and more sheltered location. Moors is the man who described Stevenson’s eyes as penetrating ‘like the eyes of a mesmerist’ on first acquaintance, ‘not a handsome man, and yet there was something irresistibly attractive about him’.7 For his part, Stevenson’s first impression of Moors had been one of ‘repulsion’, which he imagined was mutual, and he told Baxter that he had been ‘forced’ to be Moors’ guest on Beach Road, ‘rather against my will, for his looks, his round blue eyes etc. went against me’.8 Quite what it was in Moors’ round blue eyes that alarmed the writer must be left to the imagination: ‘we both got over it’, Stevenson continued, ‘and grew to like each other; and it’s my belief he won’t cheat me’. Indeed, Moors immediately began the process of making himself indispensable to Stevenson by offering to provide him with detailed information on Samoan history for his book, and soon manoeuvred himself into the position of devoted but critical lieutenant. Critical, mostly, of Stevenson’s entourage, whom Moors came to despise heartily.

  The Equator left Apia on 10 December, without the Stevensons. They were staying on for a month or so, and would travel to Sydney via the monthly German steamer service, the Lübeck. The run took only nine days – an astonishingly easy connection with the ‘civilised’ world; it meant that post (and visitors) could be sent from Samoa to Britain in a matter of weeks rather than months, an important factor in the decision Stevenson was coming to. Joe Strong had been packed off on the Lübeck already; thought to be dying from cardiac disease, he was being returned to the arms of his wife and child. Stevenson felt it impossible either to desert or support the ‘lovable’ cormorant, but the prospect of being saddled with Belle the Widow was even more alarming. His liabilities seemed to be increasing by the minute.

  So it was not very surprising (especially given the help, example and encouragement of Harry Moors) that within weeks of arriving in Upolu, Louis and Fanny decided to set up home and start a plantation in Samoa. They had found an estate for sale, four hundred acres on the slopes of Mount Vaea, entirely overgrown and virtually inaccessible except for a stony track that connected it to Apia, three miles away, but it was hoped that a house could be built and a plantation formed within the year. ‘At least’ fifty head of cattle were thought to roam on the estate (property of the landowner) and probably as many pigs, of the delightful, many-coloured, boar’s-nose variety common to the islands. The estate had two waterfalls and several streams running through it (hence the name they gave it, ‘Vailima’, ‘five waters’) and a wonderful view of Apia harbour and the sea from its elevated position. It is unlikely that either Fanny or Louis had yet attempted to climb the mountain to the little plateau from which there is a spectacular view inland as well as north to the ocean; in fact, from what Louis says, he may not even have inspected the land he bought for $4000: it was, after all, only ‘an impassable jungle’ at this time. Everything was left in Moors’ hands: the making of a path, the initial clearance work and a temporary cottage for the Stevensons to live in while a proper house was built. Even the money was being put up by Moors to expedite the transaction.

  So Stevenson was not going home again, except on an imm
ediate errand to pack up and sell Skerryvore. On the way to Sydney in early February 1890 he began writing his explanatory letters, to Colvin, Baxter, Lady Taylor, Miss Boodle, Anne Jenkin, giving the reasons for his decision. He loved the Pacific, he told them; the climate and the change of life had transformed him from a pallid tapeworm to a tanned, active, productive (if still very thin) man. The estate, when functioning, would provide some income and an inheritance for his many dependants; he could, most importantly, write best when free from the chronic ailments that haunted him in Europe and the States. It was more explanation than anyone needed; few of his friends can have imagined that Louis would ever be cured or comfortable at ‘home’ – a place he had spent most of his life away from. Yet the sense of guilt on one side and abandonment on the other was palpable; Henry James wrote to tell Stevenson of the ‘long howl of horror’ that had gone up among his friends. Colvin, the worst hit, seemed to take the news as a personal reproach, an indication that his role as adviser and critic was being spurned. In a frank passage in Memories and Notes, Colvin admits, ‘I persuaded myself that from living permanently in that outlandish world and far from cultivated society both [Stevenson] and his writing must deteriorate.’9 The thought was to colour all Colvin’s subsequent dealings with his friend, as he struggled to be appreciative of the South Seas essays (‘overloaded with information and the results of study’) and the new ‘outlandish’ turn of Stevenson’s fiction.