Hours later, the boat was still full of islanders, now arranged in silent, watchful groups. Adopting a policy of pacifism, the boat party attempted to go about their ordinary business and, writing up his journal in his cabin, Louis found himself the object of steady observation: ‘three brown-skinned generations, squatted cross-legged upon the floor, and regarding me in silence with embarrassing eyes.[ … ] A kind of despair came over me, to sit there helpless under all these staring orbs, and be thus blocked in my cabin by this speechless crowd: and a kind of rage to think they were beyond the reach of articulate communication, like furred animals, or folk born deaf, or the dwellers of some alien planet.’17
This introduction to the islanders proved deceptive, however, and the very men who intimidated Stevenson by their silence and watchfulness were, on the Casco’s last day at Nukahiva, bidding him an emotional and dignified farewell, plying him with gifts and calling him ‘Ona’ (a pidgin form of ‘Owner’), their tribute to his apparent wealth and importance. In the intervening weeks, the Stevensons had got to know the small communities at Anaho and Tai-o-hae on the opposite side of the island and had begun to understand something of Marquesan manners (which, Stevenson was to admit on further knowledge of the South Seas, were the most difficult in Polynesia for Westerners to fathom quickly). They had been welcomed on shore and given a feast of delicious, novel food (breadfruit mashed with coconut, small green onions, roast pig in banana leaf). They had also seen the former ritual ‘high places’ where that other type of meat – ‘long pig’ – had been prepared, and met the last eater of it, ‘such a mild and benevolent old gentleman’, Margaret Stevenson wrote, ‘that it is difficult to believe he was till quite recently a cannibal’.18 This cheerful carnivore came on board the Casco to experiment with Lloyd’s typewriter, and solemnly tapped out his name over and over.
Margaret was having the time of her life; she was delighted with the taste of coconut juice (which was just as well, as they would all be drinking a lot of it in the coming years) and the native feast spread for them at Atuona, which she ate from a banana leaf while seated on a mat. She had bathed for the first time in twenty-six years, climbed a hill ‘higher than Arthur’s Seat’, met the ex-cannibal chief and seen Marquesan dancers climb on each other’s shoulders and do ‘some other strange things’.19 Her photos of Queen Victoria (whom Margaret, in her starched organdie widow’s cap, somewhat resembled) had been much admired, as had her gloves, which one chief in Atuatua quaintly called ‘British tattooing’. There was something beguiling about the place; even church-going took on a lotus-eating aspect, with the natives crooning like ‘nothing but a gigantic lime-tree full of bees’, so lulling that Mrs Stevenson almost fell asleep. From Fakarava, she described to Jane a perfectly clear day, on which ‘the little, fleecy, white clouds in the sky were exactly mirrored in the water. We could see the white coral reefs at the bottom distinctly, and the sea was a very tender green that was peculiarly beautiful. Then at night there was a superb moon, and Fanny and I sat long on the beach to enjoy it, while Louis walked up and down playing tunes on his pipes.’20 The anniversary of her wedding day brought back thoughts of home, and her ‘dear husband’. Loyalty and love for him would never have allowed her to admit how much better off both she and Louis were now that the slab stone of Tom’s melancholy and inflexibility had been lifted from their shoulders.
Another time, the Casco entertained a Marquesan queen on board, and Fanny, stuck for a gesture of goodwill, taught her how to roll a cigarette, Mexican style (whatever that was). ‘Fanny took a cigarette also to keep her company, and we all sat around and smiled and patted each other in the absence of any mutual language.’21 Polynesian, which had at first seemed such an insuperable barrier, turned out ‘easy to smatter’, being already full of English borrowings. And there were plenty of interpreters on hand too, for every islet seemed to have its share of pale faces – missionaries, traders or the ‘broken white folk’, in Stevenson’s pregnant phrase, who were to people his later fiction.
During these first weeks in the Marquesas, Stevenson was bursting with ideas and excitement at the novelty and ‘incredible’ interest of everything around him, which he could hardly bring himself to share with Colvin or anyone else back in Britain, for fear of spoiling the sensation when he eventually published his articles in Scribner’s. The picturesque aspects of the South Seas, though delightful to him personally, played little part in this; he rather surprised himself by finding the political, cultural and anthropological issues far more riveting. In consequence, his non-fiction was to take on a tone very different from that of the charming, light-hearted essays and travel books with which he had first made his name in the 1870s, a change for which few people were prepared to forgive him.
But that was in the future; the only writing that Stevenson was doing at this time was in his journal. The insidious effects of white settlement, which were clear enough to any passer-through, he itemised and analysed; opium addiction and diseases such as smallpox, TB and syphilis were everywhere, the islands were depopulated, villages deserted, but there was a psychological malaise among the Marquesans too, which he was right to think had been paid little attention before. They suffered from a dispiritedness which Stevenson was to see again and again in the South Seas (Samoa being an exception greatly influenced his eventual choice of a home there). Suicide rates were high: the Polynesian, he believed, ‘falls easily into despondency; bereavement, disappointment, the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures, easily incline him to be sad, and sadness detaches him from life’.22 The usual explanation for this phenomenon was that the islanders were ‘childlike’, weak and fanciful, but Stevenson, no doubt strongly influenced by his reading of Galton as well as Spencer and Darwin, saw them as a race in irreversible decline, their fertility extraordinarily low, their vulnerability to disease high, their capacity for strong feeling of any kind – pleasure or conflict – sapped by lack of use. For someone like himself, whose physical (and mental) frailty had prompted a lifetime of ‘aggressive optimism’, the apathy of these ostensibly more fortunate people than himself was shocking. He was dismayed at the shrugging fatalism of a young mother in Anaho who held out her child and said, ‘Tenez – a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more.’ ‘So tranquil a despair’ in the girl and her husband affected Stevenson deeply: ‘the husband smilingly made his sack; and the unconscious babe struggled to reach a pot of raspberry jam, friendship’s offering, which I had just brought up the den; and in a perspective of centuries I saw their case as ours, death coming in like a tide, and the day already numbered when there should be no more Beretani, and no more of any race whatever, and (what oddly touched me) no more literary works and no more readers’.23 An appalling prospect for this childless man to contemplate, the utter oblivion of ‘no more literary works and no more readers’ – truly a fate worse than death.
‘Childlike’ was one common way of describing Polynesians; ‘apelike’ was the other (as in Stevenson’s impression of the Marquesan in the boat at their first landfall, with his ‘bestial’ consumption of the orange). Stevenson used both analogies freely in his writing about the South Seas, but was wary of both. He realised that the differences between his own culture and that of the Polynesian made judgement of their manners impossible. The chief in Atuona, for instance, had repelled Stevenson on their first meeting with his ‘indescribably raffish’ air and ‘low, cruel laugh, part boastful, part bashful’ when the subject of cannibalism was referred to. But here was an instance where Stevenson’s usual moral instincts could not be trusted. The man, Moipu, presented too many puzzles. This didn’t make him any less repulsive socially, but fascinating to the novelist, as he tried to get the measure of the chief on a visit to Casco:
In his appreciation of jams and pickles, in his delight in the reverberating mirrors of the dining cabin, and consequent endless repetition of Moipus and Mata-Galahis [Lloyd’s ceremonial name in the Marquesas], he s
howed himself engagingly a child. And yet I am not sure; and what seemed childishness may have been rather courtly art. His manners struck me as beyond the mark; they were refined and caressing to the point of grossness, and when I think of the serene absent-mindedness with which he first strolled in upon our party, and then recall his running on hands and knees along the cabin sofas, pawing the velvet, dipping into the beds, and bleating commendary ‘mitais’ with exaggerated emphasis like some enormous over-mannered ape, I feel the more sure that both must have been calculated. And I sometimes wonder next, if Moipu were quite alone in this polite duplicity, and ask myself whether the Casco were quite so much admired in the Marquesas as our visitors desired us to suppose.24
But the thing that struck Stevenson most strongly about the Marquesans was the similarities between their situation and that of the Scottish Highlanders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, his late study at Davos. Like the Highlanders, the Polynesians were persecuted and driven off their land, had customs proscribed (tattooing for the islanders, the wearing of tartan and herding of cattle for the Scots), had chiefs deposed and clans disarmed. ‘The grumbling, the secret ferment, the fears and resentments, the alarms and sudden councils of Marquesan chiefs reminded me continually of the days of Lovat and Struan,’ Stevenson wrote,25 and much of the Marquesans’ current demoralisation seemed to stem, like that of the old Highlanders, from the ‘convulsive and transitory state’ they had been thrown into by interfering, colonising powers. The parallels are illuminating as social history and also as a gloss on Stevenson’s own writing, obsessed as it always had been with the nature of Scottishness. In the South Seas, he became a native ‘makar’, both of Polynesia (his ballads ‘The Feast of Famine’ and ‘The Song of Rahéro’ were written on this voyage) and of Scotland, writing some of his most Scots books under the shade of tropical trees: The Master of Ballantrae (which he had with him, unfinished, on the Casco), Weir of Hermiston, Catriona and his homage to his lighthouse-building forebears, Records of a Family of Engineers.
In September, the Casco travelled on south to the Paumotus in the Low Archipelago, about five hundred miles south-south-east of the Marquesas. The party spent a couple of weeks in Fakarava, then went on to Tahiti, in the nearby Society Islands. Compared with the Marquesas, Tahiti seemed relatively ‘spoiled’, ‘a sort of halfway house between savage life and civilisation’, as Margaret Stevenson described it, ‘with the drawbacks of both and the advantages of neither’. The capital, Papeete, with its French colonial buildings and street lamps, its mercantile shabbiness and human flotsam of white sailors and traders and backwater diplomats, gave Stevenson his first full-scale view of the contemporary Pacific, and became the setting for the start of The Ebb-Tide, his most grimly realistic book. Paul Gauguin, arriving in the same place three years later as a semi-official artist for his government (somewhat like Joe Strong in Hawaii and Samoa), had retreated as quickly as possible from Papeete to a village on the south coast of the island, where he could study paradise lost and the golden body of his thirteen-year-old mistress in peace. For all his startling modernism of technique (which would have shocked Stevenson had he ever seen the pictures), Gauguin’s view of the Pacific was extremely romantic, as the title of his book about it, Noa-Noa (‘Fragrance’), indicates. It was left to Stevenson, the ‘romancer’, to revise the myth of the South Seas.
Stevenson spent much longer than he had intended in and around Tahiti, for he had become ill in Fakarava and by the time they reached Papeete was worse, with threatenings of another haemorrhage. This was ominous, as he had been feeling so much better at sea and in the Marquesas, where his spirits had been as high as it was possible for them to be. Perhaps after three months’ excitement and novelty, he had simply become exhausted; the results, at any rate, were alarming. Otis, called to Louis’s bedside, was impressed by his sang-froid as, between drags on his cigarette, the lessee gave brief, precise instructions about what to do with the charter if he died.
In something of the same spirit, Stevenson sent a letter to Henley along with the flood of outbound post for England. One of his stated reasons for going on the Pacific voyage in the first place had been to get away from the nagging memory of the Nixie affair: ‘folk can’t write to you at sea’. Now the whole party was longing for contact with the old country. Their forwarded mail was waiting in Honolulu, months away, but at least Tahiti had a mail service going out, and Stevenson was able to send his former friend a short, kind note, beginning as in the old days, ‘Dear Lad’, and ending, ‘Yours affectionately’. Stevenson kept on sending Henley cheerful letters from time to time during his remaining years in the South Seas, and was encouraged to think that friendly relations had been re-established. Henley accepted poems and articles from him for the Scots Observer, the Edinburgh-based newspaper of which he became editor in 1888, and sent news of home (the birth of his daughter the same year was an engrossing topic), but the cynicism of Henley’s new feelings towards Stevenson never, mercifully, made itself clear. In private, Henley continued to carp about the quarrel, and what he believed were the ‘Stevensonian’ origins of a falling-off of friendship between him and Colvin, telling his new confidant, Charles Whibley, ‘I don’t give a damn for the whole crowd, of course.’26 In 1889, he wrote a bleak poem about the finality of ending a friendship (‘Friends … old friends …’27), and in 1891 some bitter verses about Time and Change addressed to Stevenson (and titled ‘I.M. R.L.S.’ for its publication later) which ended, cruelly, ‘O, we that were dear, we are all-too near,/With the thick of the world between us.’28
Stevenson’s illness in Tahiti meant the party had to find somewhere to live on shore, and after some determined negotiating by Fanny they were able to hire a horse and wagon (essential to get the invalid quickly to sea if necessary) and make for the village of Tautira, in the south-east of the island. This was a lucky choice; the Stevensons’ memories of Tautira were of a paradisal setting, and the most genial and affectionate people they had yet met, particularly the sub-chief, Ori-a-Ori, a magnificently built Tahitian, ‘more like a Roman Emperor in bronze than words can express’,29 who acted as their host, interpreter and guide. Nursed by Ori and his wife, and a charming local Princess, Moë (who coaxed Louis’s waning appetite back to life with his first taste of raw fish in miti sauce), the patient soon began to recover. Ori’s house was in the middle of the village, and from his sickbed Stevenson could watch the village children playing and the islanders going about their undemanding daily business. He was working on the manuscript of The Master of Ballantrae once more – in how different a place from the deep freeze of Saranac where it was begun. Months of idling and his latest brush with death left him tormentingly aware of the fix his family would be in if he died suddenly in the middle of nowhere. With this in mind, he wrote out for Lloyd instructions about how his literary estate was to be managed. The letter, carefully preserved by Lloyd (who used it as a stick with which to beat Colvin in after years), shows what Stevenson thought of his own status at this juncture. He was confident of deserving a collected edition of his works, a volume of reliquae, including letters, edited by Colvin, and a biographical sketch, also envisaged as being by Colvin.
The interval at Tautira turned out much longer than expected, for news came from the Casco that Otis had discovered dry rot in both masts. This necessitated taking the boat back to Papeete to be patched up (two new replacement masts were not available), and weeks of waiting. Ori’s generous insistence that the Stevensons stay as long as they wanted in his house further cemented the bond between the two families, all of whom wept freely at the offer. More tears were shed when Louis and the chief both gave orations at a present-giving ceremony (though neither quite understood the other’s language), and yet more when the village children processed in ‘the rich one’s’ honour. Safe inside his wing-chair at the Savile, Colvin must have been staggered to read Fanny’s account of these lachrymose occasions and how her husband had taken to wearing only a pareu (a cotton sarong) and
a flower behind his ear. Stevenson had gone native!
Colvin cannot have been pleased to hear, either, that Stevenson’s latest literary ideas were all to do with the South Seas: his book about the islands, and an oddball project, that threatened to take up vast amounts of time for little or no financial reward, the collection and translation of the poems and traditions of Tahiti. Stevenson had been drawn into this, enthusiastically, by an extraordinary Tahitian character, Tati Salmon, chief of the Tevas. Tati was half-Teva and half-Jewish and had been educated in England. ‘He is trying to rescue the literature of his native land from the oblivion, into which but for him, it must fall,’ Fanny explained to Colvin. Here was another analogy with the Scots: a dying language. No wonder Stevenson became engrossed with helping Tati and was thinking of coming back to Tautira the following year to spend at least six months working on the project in collaboration. For, odd though it is to remember, the Stevensons still did think of this Polynesian cruise as a holiday, and expected to be back in Bournemouth in the spring, with Miss Boodle and the Taylors and the overgrown vegetable patch overlooking the Chine. They had told Tati all about Skerryvore, and were expecting him to visit them there.
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