Stevenson in Paradise
SAMOA, DECEMBER 1894 — Beneath a scorching sun, several burly, bare-chested men drag a coffin up a steep jungle slope. Grunting and straining, they finally top the mountain. A few gaze at the blue Pacific while others begin digging. Their Tusitala, “teller of stories,” has come to rest. But the rest of the world is still telling his stories.
In “Treasure Island,” “Kidnapped,” and “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Robert Louis Stevenson created worlds of adventure and mystery. His travelogues recounted romantic journeys for Victorian readers. But how did this Scottish nomad come to rest “under the wide and starry sky” of Samoa? The journey started in childhood.
Born in Edinburgh in 1850, Stevenson was a sickly boy, often bedridden. Breathing was hard work. Imagination alone set him free. By the age of ten, he was dictating stories to his mother at his bedside. So when he later wrote “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” dreams were his portals to distant worlds.
In Stevenson’s garden, poem after poem called to the wanderer in every child. “Foreign Lands.” “My Ship and I.” “My Bed is a Boat.”
Stevenson’s father, a lighthouse engineer, told him to “give up such nonsense.” Yet two romantic worlds — one of letters, the other of foreign lands — called to him. He dropped out of engineering school, let his hair grow, donned a velveteen jacket and befriended fellow Bohemians in Edinburgh. Between bouts of sickness, he followed his boyhood dreams.
He traveled throughout Europe, sometimes by canoe, sometimes with a donkey. He took a steamship across the Atlantic, then rode the Transcontinental Railroad across the buffaloed Plains. Gravely ill when he arrived on the West Coast, he spent months recuperating, then reunited with an American woman he had courted in France. A journalist and divorced mother of three, Fanny shared his wanderlust. They soon married and began wandering together.
Fortunately for readers, Stevenson’s health grounded him in England. There, confined again to the bed that was his boat, he wrote his masterpieces, the children’s tales of pirates and the high seas but also his psychological study of split personality — Jekyll and Hyde.
By the late 1880s, Stevenson was widely read and admired, but he could not sit still. A dozen years earlier, a traveler had stirred him with tales of the South Seas. One more time, he had to “rise and go.”
“The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe of granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”
In the summer of 1888, the Stevensons chartered a yacht out of San Francisco. The Casco "plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help." In Hawaii, he and Fanny booked another boat and spent two years wandering from Tahiti to New Zealand. Finally, they came to Samoa.
They planned just a short stay, but Stevenson was intrigued and appalled by “horrid white mismanagement.” Germany, Britain, and the U.S. were struggling for control of Samoa. Rival chiefs were choosing sides and threatening war. Stevenson decided to stay and write about this “dismally stupid production of modern diplomacy.”
Settling into Samoa, Stevenson learned the local language and soon met with tribal chiefs. “There is but one way to defend Samoa,” he told them. “Hear it before it is too late. It is to make roads, and gardens, and care for your trees, and sell their produce wisely, and, in one word, to occupy and use your country. . . If you do not occupy and use your country, others will.”
In 1891, the couple bought 314 acres and built a spacious home. Villa Vailima, with its balcony overlooking the ocean, was Samoa’s first two-story building. There Stevenson turned to non-fiction, writing a scathing account of imperialist pillage.
A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa led to British officials being recalled to London. Stevenson’s incendiary letters to the London Times almost got him deported. With Brits seeing Samoans as “backward savages,” one biographer wrote, “his stance was considered eccentric, bizarre, unaccountable, and potentially dangerous.” But he stayed on, writing stories about “greedy but incompetent whites” busy in exploiting paradise.
Perhaps he would have stayed a few more years, then wandered on. Perhaps he would have stayed for decades. He asked to be buried at the top of Mount Vaea, towering behind his home. But one December evening, while talking to his wife, he suddenly said, “What’s that?” And collapsed. A cerebral hemorrhage claimed him. He was 44.
Fanny soon left Samoa. Villa Vailima was used by German and American diplomats who, in 1899, claimed the islands as territories. Stevenson’s home gradually fell into disrepair, the roof caving in, the walls left to rot.
Then a generation ago, two Mormon missionaries began working with the Samoan government to restore the house. In 1994, the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum opened to the public. Some visitors may have read Treasure Island or heard of Jekyll and Hyde. Only a few, however, make the steep climb from the backyard up to the mountaintop.
There, overlooking the sea, Robert Louis Stevenson still rests. His gravestone is etched with his own “Requiem.”
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 longed to be
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.
