Having secured the Casco, she telegraphed to her anxiously waiting husband for a positive decision, to which he sent back an instant and joyous “Yes.”
It is now thirty years since Robert Louis Stevenson passed that winter in the snows of the Adirondacks, and the little logging-camp, as he knew it, has grown into a great sanatorium, but his spirit still seems to hover over the place, and those who seek the healing of its crystal air have set up a shrine and made of him a sort of patron saint. The Baker Cottage has been converted by the Stevenson Society into a memorial museum, where many objects commemorative of him have been collected. Among these are the woodcuts with which he amused himself at Davos, and which were given to them by Lloyd Osbourne. Here Mr. and Mrs. Baker, whose hair has been whitened by the snows of many winters since the Stevenson days, receive the visitors who come to reverently examine the relics left by the man who fought so bravely and so successfully against the same insidious enemy with whom they themselves are struggling. On the veranda, where, in that time so long past, his slender figure might often have been seen walking up and down, a beautiful bas-relief by Gutzon Borglum, representing him in the fur cap and coat and the boots that he was so boyishly proud of, has been set up. Just as the mantle of Stevenson fell upon Cummy and Simoneau, so now it has fallen upon this most amiable and delightful old couple, the Bakers, making them in a way celebrities; and to the patients his memory is like that of a dear departed elder brother, to whom they are linked by the strong bond of a common suffering and a common hope.
As soon as they could make ready the family set out, and by June 7 their train was rolling down the western slope of the Sierras into California. At Sacramento they were met by their “advance agent,” who, as her mother-in-law remarks, “was looking so pretty in a new hat that we were grieved to hear that it belonged to her daughter.”
Immediately on reaching San Francisco they were plunged into a bustle of preparation for the long cruise. While he rested from the fatigue of the long overland trip Mrs. Stevenson went on with the work, including, among other things, vaccination for all hands except the sick man. Lymph was taken with them so that his wife could vaccinate him if it should become necessary. The burden of these preparations, including the winning over of Doctor Merritt, who was not inclined to rent his yacht at first, fell upon the shoulders of Mrs. Stevenson. Sending the others here and there on errands, getting the burgee to fly at the masthead, purchasing all the multitudinous list of supplies necessary for the long voyage, making sure that nothing that might be needed by the invalid should be forgotten, with flying runs between times to report to him at the hotel — these were busy days for her.
While they were in San Francisco Mrs. Stevenson had a strange and dramatic meeting with Samuel Osbourne’s second wife, a quiet, gentle little woman whom he married soon after his divorce from Fanny Van de Grift. Within a year or two after the marriage Osbourne mysteriously disappeared, never to be heard of again, and his wife dragged out a pitiful existence at their vineyard at Glen Ellen, in Sonoma County, hoping against hope for his return. Finally her faith failed, and when she met Mrs. Stevenson in San Francisco she fell on her knees before her and burst into bitter weeping, saying: “You were right about that man and I was wrong!” She was then taken in to see Louis, and the two women sat hand in hand by his bedside and talked of the trouble that had darkened both their lives. Both Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson felt great compassion for the unhappy woman and did what they could to relieve her financial needs.
The Casco was a beautiful racing yacht, with cabin fittings of silk and velvet, and was kept so shiningly clean by her crew that in the islands she came to be known as the Silver Ship. At last all was ready, and, with a cabin packed with flowers and fruit sent by admiring friends, early in the morning of June 28, 1888, as the first rays of the sun glinted back from the dancing water, the Casco was towed across the bay, amid salutes from the ferry-boats and the trains on shore, and out through the narrow passage of the Golden Gate. Then the Silver Ship, shaking out her snowy sails, turned her prow across the glittering expanse straight towards the enchanted isles of which Louis Stevenson had dreamed since he was a boy of twenty.
The women had already provided themselves with their old solace of knitting for the slow-passing days at sea, and all settled down for the long voyage. All through the story of their three years of wandering among the islands of the South Seas runs the thread of the wife’s devotion; of how she took upon herself the fatiguing details of preparations for the voyages, searching for ships and arranging for supplies; of how she walked across an island to get horses and wagon to move the sick man to a more comfortable place; of how she saved his trunk of manuscripts from destruction by fire on shipboard, of how she cheerfully endured a thousand discomforts, hardships, and even dangers for the sake of the slight increase of health and happiness the life brought to the loved one. She was not a good sailor and suffered much from seasickness on these voyages. Some of the trials of life on the ocean wave under rough conditions are described in a letter to her friend Mrs. Sitwell:
“As for me, I hate the sea and am afraid of it (though no one will believe that because in time of danger I do not make an outcry), but I love the tropic weather and the wild people, and to see my two boys so happy.... To keep house on a yacht is no easy matter. When I was deathly sick the question was put to me by the cook: ‘What shall we have for the cabin dinner, what for to-morrow’s breakfast, what for lunch, and what about the sailors’ food? And please come and look at the biscuits, for the weevils have got into them, and show me how to make yeast that will rise of itself, and smell the pork, which seems pretty high, and give me directions about making a pudding with molasses, etc.’ In the midst of heavy dangerous weather, when I was lying on the floor in utter misery, down comes the mate with a cracked head, and I must needs cut off the blood-clotted hair, wash and dress the wound, and administer restoratives. I do not like being the ‘lady of the yacht,’ but ashore — oh, then I feel I am repaid for all!”
Even Louis himself, lover of the sea though he was, was forced to acknowledge that under some circumstances his capricious mistress had her unpleasant moods. “The sea,” he writes to Sidney Colvin, “is a terrible place, stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper — the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the passengers.” Again he remarks concerning the food: “Our diet had been from the pickle tub or out of tins; I had learned to welcome shark’s flesh for a variety; and an onion, an Irish potato, or a beefsteak had been long lost to sense and dear to aspiration.”
But the glamour of romance and the joy of seeing her husband gaining strength hour by hour made all these annoyances seem things of small account, and, just as the time spent at Hyères was the happiest in Louis’s life, so these South Sea days were the best of all for her.
It had been decided that their first landfall should be at the Marquesas, a group which lay quite out of the beaten track of travel, three thousand miles from the American coast. Peacefully the days slipped by, with no event to record, until, on July 28, 1888, their first tropic island rose out of the sea and sent them in greeting a breeze laden with the perfume of a thousand strange flowers. They first dropped anchor in Anaho Bay, Nukahiva Island, which, except for one white trader, was occupied solely by natives, but lately converted from cannibalism. As both Stevenson and his wife were citizens of the world in their sympathies, it was not long before they were on terms of perfect friendliness with the inhabitants. Soon after landing, Mrs. Stevenson’s housekeeping instincts came to the front, and she set to work to learn something about the native cookery. Her mother-in-law writes:
“Fanny was determined to get lessons in the proper making of ‘kaku,’ so went ashore armed with a bowl and beater. Kaku is baked breadfruit, with a sauce of cocoanut cream, which is made by beating up the soft pulp of the green nut with the juice, and is delicious.”
Although the Casco had been originally built solely f
or coast sailing, and was scarcely fit for battling with wind and wave on the open sea, it was decided to take the risk and lay their course for Tahiti through the Dangerous Archipelago. After taking on a mate who was thoroughly acquainted with those waters, and a Chinese named Ah Fu to serve them as cook, they sailed away from the Marquesas. Ah Fu had been brought to the islands when a child, a forlorn little slave among a band of labourers sent by a contractor to work on the plantations, although, as the contract called for grown men, it was fraudulent to send a child. On the islands the boy grew up tall and robust, abandoned the queue, and no longer looked in the least like a Chinese. He became one of the most important members of the Stevenson family, remaining with them for two years. He was intensely attached to Mrs. Stevenson, carrying his devotion so far that once during a storm, when the ship was apparently about to go to the bottom, he appropriated the signal halyards, for which she had expressed an admiration, to give her as a present, explaining that “if the ship went down they wouldn’t want them, and if it were saved they would all be too grateful to miss them.” When the time came for him to leave the Stevensons and return to his family in China, it nearly broke his heart to go. Mrs. Stevenson writes of him:
“Ah Fu had as strong a sense of romance as Louis himself. He returned to China with a belt of gold around his waist, a ninety dollar breech loader given him by Louis, and a boxful of belongings. His intention was to leave these great riches with a member of his family who lived outside the village, dress himself in beggar’s rags, and then go to his mother’s house to solicit alms. He would draw from her the account of the son who had been lost when he was a little child, and, at the psychological moment, when the poor lady was weeping, Ah Fu would cry out: ‘Behold your son returned to you, not a beggar, as I appear, but a man of wealth!”
On September 8 they ran into the lagoon of Fakarava, a typical low island forming a great ring some eighty miles in circumference by only a couple of hundred yards in width, and lying not more than twenty feet above the sea. Their experiences during a fortnight’s stay on this bird’s roost in the Pacific are thus described by Mrs. Stevenson:
“Leaving the yacht Casco in the lagoon, we hired a cottage on the beach where we lived for several weeks. Fakarava is an atoll of the usual horseshoe shape, so narrow that one can walk across it in ten minutes, but of great circumference; it lay so little above the sea level that one had a sense of insecurity, justified by the terrible disasters following the last hurricane in the group. Not far from where we lived the waves had recently swept over the narrow strip of coral during a storm. Our life passed in a gentle monotony of peace. At sunrise we walked from our front door into the warm, shallow waters of the lagoon for our bath; we cooked our breakfast on the remains of an old American cooking stove I discovered on the beach, and spent the rest of the morning sorting over the shells we had found the previous day. After lunch and a siesta we crossed the island to the windward side and gathered more shells. Sometimes we would find the strangest fish stranded in pools between the rocks by the outgoing tide, many of them curiously shaped and brilliantly coloured. Some of the most gorgeous were poisonous to eat, and capable of inflicting very unpleasant wounds with their fins. The captain suffered for a long time with a sort of paralysis in a finger he had scratched when handling a fish with a beak like a parrot....
“The close of the placid day marked the beginning of the most agreeable part of the twenty-four hours; it was the time of the moon, and the shadows that fell from the cocoanut leaves were so sharply defined that one involuntarily stepped over them. After a simple dinner and a dip in the soft sea, we awaited our invariable visitor, M. Donat Rimareau, the half-caste vice-president. As it was not the season for pearl fishing, there were no white men on the island, though now and again a schooner with a French captain would appear and disappear like a phantom ship. The days were almost intolerably hot, but with the setting of the sun a gentle breeze sprang up. We spent the evenings in the moonlight, sitting on mattresses spread on the veranda, our only chair being reserved for our guest. The conversation with M. Rimareau, who was half Tahitian, was delightful. Night after night we sat entranced at his feet, thrilled by stories of Tahiti and the Paumotus, always of a supernatural character. There was a strange sect in Fakarava called the ‘Whistlers,’ resembling the spiritualists of our country, but greater adepts. When M. Rimareau spoke of these people and their superstitions his voice sank almost to a whisper, and he cast fearful glances over his shoulder at the black shadows of the palms. I remember one of the stories was of the return of the soul of a dead child, the soul being wrapped in a leaf and dropped in at the door of the sorrowing parents. I am sure that when my husband came to write The Isle of Voices he had our evenings in Fakarava and the stories of M. Rimareau in mind. I know that I never read The Isle of Voices without a mental picture rising before me of the lagoon and the cocoa palms and the wonderful moonlight of Fakarava.”
It was the Fakaravans who gave the name of Pahi Muni, the shining or silver ship, to the Casco.
Here the two ladies of the Stevenson party took lessons from the niece of a chief in plaiting hats of bamboo shavings and pandanus, and Mrs. Louis learned how to make them beautifully. This hat-making is the constant “fancy-work” of all Tahitian women, and serves in lieu of the tatting and embroidery of civilized lands. The best hats are made of the stalks of the arrowroot plant.
In the last week of September, bidding a regretful farewell to M. Rimareau and his delightful moonlight talks, they set sail for Papeete, the capital and port of entry of the Society Group — most beautiful of all the islands of the Pacific. But, though they were entranced with the grandeur and charm of its scenery — its towering cliffs, leaping cascades, and green, palm-fringed flat land of the coast — Papeete did not treat them well, and their old enemy, which had forgotten them for some happy months, again found them out there and Louis had a severe relapse, with a return of the hemorrhages. It was clear that Papeete did not agree with him, and it was decided to remove him to a more suitable place. After a perilous trip around the island in the Casco, during which the ship was twice nearly lost on the reefs, they reached Taravao, but found it hot and full of mosquitoes. Mr. Stevenson was now very ill, and it was imperatively necessary, not only to find a more salubrious spot, but also some means of transporting him to it. His wife, equal to the occasion, as always, set out on foot across the island, following a trail until she reached the shanty of a Chinese who had a wagon and a pair of horses. “These she hired to take them to Tautira, the nearest village of any size, a distance of sixteen miles over a road crossed by one-and-twenty streams. Stevenson was placed in the cart, and, sustained by small doses of coca, managed, with the help of his wife and their servant, to reach his destination before he collapsed altogether.”
They found a house and made him as comfortable as possible. It was not long before Princess Moë, ex-queen of Raiatea, and a most charming person, heard of their arrival and came to see them. “I feel,” writes Mrs. Stevenson, “that she saved Louis’s life. He was lying in a deep stupor when she first saw him, suffering from congestion of the lungs and a burning fever. She made him a dish of raw fish salad, the first thing he had eaten for days; he liked it and began to pick up from that day. As soon as he was well enough she invited us to live with her in the house of Ori, the sub-chief of the village, and we gladly accepted her invitation.” There they lived as “in fairyland, the guests of a beautiful brown princess.”
When the Casco had been brought around to Tautira it was discovered in a peculiar way that their danger in the recent trip from Papeete had been greater than they had realised. The elder Mrs. Stevenson gave a feast on board to a number of native women, and during its progress one of the women offered a prayer for their deliverance from the perils of the sea, praying especially that if anything were wrong with the ship it might be discovered in time. The elder Mrs. Stevenson had tried in vain to persuade Captain Otis to go to church at the places where they stopped. This t
ime the church came to him and he couldn’t escape, but stood leaning disgustedly against the mast while the prayer was said. After the visitors left he made some impatient exclamation against “psalm-singing natives,” and struck the mast a hard blow with his fist. It went through into decayed wood, and the captain was aghast. Mrs. Stevenson, on her part, was triumphant, and she always loved to tell that story and dwell on the expression of the scoffing captain’s face as he saw a prayer answered. Both masts were found to be almost entirely eaten out with dry-rot, and if either had gone by the board off the reefs of any of the islands nothing could have saved the Casco from going to the bottom. The ship was at once sent to Papeete for repairs, but as it was impossible to obtain new masts of a proper size there, they were obliged to be content with patching up the old ones. This let the party in for a long stay at Tautira, at which none repined, for the scenery and climate were delightful, and their new friends hospitable and interesting.
Following island custom, Mrs. Louis Stevenson and the Princess Moë exchanged names — each taking the name of the other’s mother — that of Mrs. Stevenson being Terii-Tauma-Terai, part of which meant heaven and part gave her a claim to some land in the neighbourhood.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson Page 897
