Chapter Eighteen

Why Samoa?

This is a question that has vexed readers and biographers since Stevenson first planted his flag in the hills above Apia, building what would become the only true home he’d ever know as a grown man. Reading through his letters, one searches in vain for a clue, some foreshadowing of his decision to settle here, far away from the bustle and glare of the continental world, on an island stirred by little else than trade winds and rumors. On board the Equator, as he toppled down the latitudes from Kiribati to Samoa under a glaring sun so hot that the wood on the ship’s deck buckled, Stevenson betrayed no hint or promise of his fateful decision to remain in the South Seas. Indeed, from his pen, one senses a longing for London. “I can hear the rattle of the hansom up Endell Street and see the gates swing back, and feel myself out upon the monument steps—Hosanna home again.” And yet, a few weeks after writing those words he will have purchased four hundred acres of land and begun work on what would become Vailima, his haven, abounded by five streams, where he would become known as Tusitala, the teller of tales, in a place where “headhunting, besides, still lives on my doorstep.”

I spent a few weeks in Samoa, traveling between Upolu and Savai’i, the less populated of the two islands, where I hoped to encounter the fa’a Samoa, or Samoan Way. It is a pious country, with speed bumps enforcing a go-slow mandate in front of churches belonging to Congregationalists, Methodists, Mormons, and Seventh-day Adventists. The buses are painted in trippy colors and have God-fearing names such as Kingdom Transport, Paradise in Heaven, God Bless Samoa, Forever Strong, and Jesus—I Trust in You. Then there is the Bon Jovi bus, which together with the It Wasn’t Me bus, prowl Samoa like a couple of young hoodlums playing hooky. Invariably, the buses are crowded and it is common to see passengers sit in each other’s laps. Samoans are among the largest people on earth, and it is no wonder that buses seek divine protection, because God only knows how they manage to roll without shattering the suspension.

On Savai’i, near the village of Manase, I found a small beach fale with a thatched roof and walls of flapping mats, modernized only by the presence of a mosquito net, where I watched the squalls lining up on the horizon like tornadoes on the Great Plains. Samoans fear the water. You rarely see kids swimming or men fishing from canoes. Life seems very much turned inward here. The myth about the South Pacific is that it is a great, open expanse where escapism can run amok. But it’s not like that at all. The appeal of the South Seas is really about how small you can make your world. It’s not about broadening your possibilities; it’s about reducing them until all that is left is sustenance and family.

The beach fale was owned by the high chief of Manase, who every evening would drive on the sand in his pickup and offer a regal wave. I liked him. I could only speak a few words of Samoan but despite the language barrier I sensed he was a wise and sagacious chief. I know this because in an act of dictatorial might, he had banned dogs and so I ran freely from village to village, past tin-roofed shops featuring murals of Jesus and Bob Marley, and designated bus stops where locals left clusters of bananas to be eaten by any with a hankering for a snack. It was a runner’s paradise. In the village of Avao, I came across some men building a church and a stone monument and as I paused to have a look, I was joined by a barefoot man in a lavalava who spoke as if his voice box was stuck on fast-forward.

“ItistocommemorateJohnWilliams,” he said all at once. “He- waswiththeLondonMissionary-Society. HecometoSamoain1830. In1844hegaveusthefirstBibleintheSamoanlanguage.”

I absorbed this. “Do you drink kava here?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Ohyes. ItisSamoansfavoritebeverage.”

Obviously, he didn’t drink enough of it.

The hyperkinetic kava drinker aside, Savai’i seemed as sedate an island as any I’d ever visited in the South Pacific. Life moved easily between church and farming, where people cultivated land so lavishly bountiful that everything grew here, from coffee to cocoa to vanilla to taro to coconuts. I hiked deep into the hills, to the summit of Mount Matavanu, a volcano that had last erupted in 1911, burying forty square miles and a few villages under lava flows so thick that in some places they measure nearly four hundred feet in depth. Near the top, a path had been cleared by Da Craterman, a bushy-headed guy with a massive wart on his chest, who bedecked his trail with a plethora of signs commemorating all those who had sojourned here.

“I have been visited by people from one hundred and twenty countries,” he said.

“So which countries are you missing?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I have no map.”

Near the top, Da Craterman’s signs displayed a touching concern for the hiker’s well-being. 3RD WARNING. VERY DEEP DOWN. VERY DANGEROUS. At the edge of the crater, I beheld a Lost World, a steep and lushly overgrown cavern alive with the songs of birds. It was difficult to imagine that this had once been a lively and active volcano. It was difficult to imagine that anything on Savai’i was once lively and active at all.

On the ferry to Upolu, I met an Australian fishing captain on his way to Pago Pago in American Samoa, where his boat was being prepped for another run. He had a license to fish the Cook Islands until May, he said.

“We’re going to fish the snot out of it until our papers expire,” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen more fish in the past four years than I’ve seen at any point in my life. But the bloody greens closed the fishing grounds around Australia and New Zealand. Bloody prancers.”

“But aren’t rising ocean temperatures changing fish migratory patterns?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But we can still find them.”

Upolu is said to be the bustling heart of modern Samoa. Most of its people reside in Apia, the capital, which lies below the imposing summit of Mount Vaea. It is a town where wooden buildings from the colonial era still stand amidst a smattering of garish office buildings and a peculiar parliament that seems to have been lifted straight from the desert in Abu Dhabi. Land disputes seemed to be the issue of the day, as they are on most islands, their very nature causing one to value dirt above all else.

“No one wants to farm anymore,” a Samoan woman told me. “They want to work in an air-conditioned office. But what happens to the village boys? Some chief gets them drunk and sends them off to burn property in a land dispute. Samoans, they often take things too far.”

Walking around town, I find it difficult to imagine Stevenson settling here. There were plenty of palagis in Apia during that era, playing the colonial game, which Stevenson wrote about extensively in his A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. In 1889, seven ships from Great Britain, the United States, and Germany played a game of naval chicken in the harbor, daring each other to leave and seek safety in the open seas as a typhoon bore down on them. Six ships were sunk during the storm, killing more than two hundred sailors. That was the sort of continental nonsense that Stevenson scorned. True, by living here, on an outpost on the far side of the world, he avoided the petty backbiting of literary society, for which he had even more contempt, but Samoa was hardly untouched by Western concerns. Combine the meddling of imperial powers with a rapacious cast of palagi beachcombers, deserters, and felons, and Apia featured the very worst of the social orbit he’d known in the West. Indeed, his son-in-law, Joe Strong, would soon join this dissolute mob, having robbed and cajoled Stevenson out of every penny he could find, and eventually settling in town with a local woman, leaving his wife and child to fend for themselves in Vailima.

Some, Paul Theroux among them, maintain that Stevenson settled in Samoa because of its excellent, for the time, links to the outside world. There were regular mail ships that called on Apia, linking it to London, San Francisco, and Sydney, no small thing for a writer. And Stevenson needed to keep working. He was supporting a large family now, and once he purchased Vailima, building the grandest home in Samoa, its upkeep demanded a steady flow of funds. From time to time, he entertained the idea of giving up the pen to become a South Seas trader. In more melancholic moods, he wished he’d followed the family tradition and become an engineer. “Were it not for my health,” he wrote in a letter, “which made it impossible, I could not find it in my heart to forgive myself that I did not stick to an honest, commonplace trade . . .” But write on he did, continuing the prodigious output that had become his habit.

And yet, the presence of a mail ship casts Stevenson in a practical light that he himself rarely displayed. Certainly, he took his responsibilities seriously, but he had always had an air of improvisation about him. He made do, no matter what the circumstances. Something as prosaic as the convenient presence of a mailbox or a telegraph seemed an unlikely justification for building his hearth.

Misa Telefoni, the affable former deputy prime minister of Samoa and a Stevenson aficionado, advanced another theory as to why the author chose to remain here, in the temperate hills above Apia.

“I believe Stevenson was influenced by H. J. Moors,” he said. We were sitting inside Aggie Grey’s, an illustrious hotel from the 1930s once frequented by James Michener and Marlon Brando. “He was very persuasive and he had his own interests in wanting Stevenson to stay.”

Misa’s grandfather had worked for the postal service and helped introduce the telephone to Samoa, which is how he acquired the family name. We had a mutual friend, and what I liked about the Pacific is that this alone is enough to elicit an invitation for coffee from a highfalutin official. Imagine if you knew someone who went to high school with Joe Biden, and then visiting Washington, DC, you get a call from the vice president inviting you for a ride in his Camaro. Misa was speaking about H. J. Moors, an American trader and businessman who soon befriended Stevenson and provided the building materials that would go into Vailima. He sold the timber to Stevenson for a premium, marking up the price substantially, causing the author much stress and worry over the ever-escalating costs of his home. Moors, I thought, saw Stevenson as an easy mark, a meal ticket, another palagi to be charmed and cajoled into spending money he could ill afford.

“I think Moors viewed his relationship with Stevenson as a way to ensure that he will always be remembered. Stevenson was famous; Moors was not. By establishing a deep connection with Stevenson, Moors knew that he too would be written about.”

This hadn’t occurred to me. I couldn’t imagine anyone seeking a claim to fame through their acquaintance with a writer. But Stevenson lived in a different era, of course, one that predates radio, television, and movies, a time when the only popular entertainment available was that which was found between the covers of a book. Today, of course, people are famous for doing nothing at all. I’m looking at you, Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton. Back then, you needed to earn it, and fame was gifted or cursed to very few. Stevenson, at the peak of his career, was the proverbial shiny object, a designation that ill suited him. The crowds that followed him in New York and Sydney, while massaging his ego, stifled him and made him uncomfortable. He was most at home on a poorly charted island, wearing pajamas and a dapper sailor’s cap, free in his anonymity, the only calling card his wit and curiosity. His renown baffled him. The only person who didn’t know he was famous was Stevenson himself.

“Once he settled here, he began to love this place,” Misa continued. “He became ensconced in the local culture. And this was very unusual for a foreigner. The Samoans grew to love Stevenson, and when he died, they worked all night to clear a path to the summit of Mount Vaea. Can you imagine?”

I couldn’t since I had not yet been to the gravesite. I was still trying to get inside Stevenson’s head, to try to figure what had made him hang his hat here, in Samoa, rather than in Hawaii or New Zealand or Timbuktu. My own personal theory was that he simply grew tired, that on the cusp of forty he became weary of even the sweet rigors of travel, and that with this temperament it was only a matter of time until he found the right circumstances to furl the sails and settle down. He felt healthier in the tropics than he did in more distant latitudes, but that still encompasses a large swath of this planet. That he settled in Samoa, I thought, was coincidental. If he had sailed the Indian Ocean, I felt, he might have called Madagascar home.

And yet, the moment I approached Vailima I sensed something else. The house is exceedingly large, nestled on a tended lawn a couple of miles up into the hills above Apia. There is a grand luster to the manse, which was painted white with a red corrugated-iron roof. There is Stevenson’s room, the single bed, the writing desk, and a window that opened to the verandah and a lawn where a couple of banded rails happily wandered. Next to it was Fanny’s room. They did not sleep together, apparently. Was it the hacking and coughing? No, for there was a sick room too, with mosquito nets and bottles of potions and medicine, where Stevenson convalesced. It was a house of bedrooms. His mother had the grandest, next to that of young Austin, Fanny’s grandson, who would be the last to carry the Stevenson name. On the wall was an etching of RLS teaching Austin a history lesson, as well as many photos of him hosting kava ceremonies or elaborate feasts with the Samoans he’d adopted as his extended clan. Perhaps this house, this life, satisfied Stevenson’s cravings for both the Bohemian and the homespun. There were personal touches like a sewing machine, a few engravings from his days in France and England, as well as a lion skin hoisted onto the wall, near his safe. Vailima had the only fireplace in Samoa as well as a library and a piano.

He would live here on the hillside for four years, long enough to make it home, and as I looked at the photos of Stevenson, his eyes intensely alive, I couldn’t help but feel that this was the only place for him. There was nothing calculating about his decision to remain in Samoa. It was intuitive. He knew, seemingly from the moment he stepped ashore, that this was the place for him, finally, after all those years of roaming the seven seas. Here, the restless gleam in his eyes gave way to an air of contented bemusement. Like all islanders, he was attached to his land, and it was here, in faraway Samoa, that he felt the pulse of his ancestral roots, the Scotsman’s bond with the soil. In a letter to a novelist, he wrote: “For the first time, near my fortieth year, I find myself a landholder and a farmer: with paths to hew in tropical bush, weeds to deracinate, weeders and diggers to supervise. You at least will sympathize when how I tell you that this work seizes and enthralls me; I would rather do a good hour’s work weeding sensitive—our deadliest enemy—than write two pages of my best.”

For all his adult years, Stevenson lived separately, in an ethereal universe of his own creation, detached from the toils and pleasures of conventional life, floating airlessly from story to story, island to island, never alighting long enough to be anything more than a wanderer, a visitor among worlds. It is not without its allure, such an existence. The world is ceaselessly interesting when no day resembles another. But invariably, the bliss of the novel gives way to the yearning for the familiar. It was as if Stevenson had awoken from a dream, and now he seized the morning in gratitude, anxious to be back among the real, the tangible, the finite, the small daily connections that bond us with life. He took to the land with the zeal of the newly converted. In a few years, he hoped, his plantation would earn enough and he would “be released from the obligation to write.” Nowhere else would this be possible than on a South Seas island. Stevenson, the famous Robert Louis Stevenson, would never be allowed to retire wordlessly to a farm in upstate New York or Yorkshire. The world would clamor on his gates. In Samoa, he could write “The End” and make it so.

As these thoughts occurred to me, I felt a bond with Stevenson. I understood the siren song of the itinerant traveler, followed its tune to distant shores and faraway lands. It is what drew me to Stevenson. Here, I thought, is a fellow traveler. But now, wandering among the grounds of Vailima, I felt an even greater affinity still. I can’t swing a four-hundred-acre farm, perhaps the bottle cost me that too, but if I could, I would. Every journey has its end. The trick, of course, is to recognize it. I followed the lure of the drink for far too long, never seeing that, invariably, it always took me to the same miserable place. Finally, hopping off that steamer to nowhere, I felt the same profound need to make up for lost time, to establish a root somewhere, to put a declarative end to one life and to immerse myself, both feet in, into another. I wanted the clean slate and the fresh start. It takes a lot of weeding and tilling of the soil to create a Vailima, but I knew how to do that. You do it one day at a time.

I stood on the lower verandah and breathed the scented air and listened to the songs of birds. It was here that Stevenson suddenly turned to Fanny. “Do I look strange?” he asked, and then he collapsed unconscious, dying shortly thereafter from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was forty-four.

The climb to his grave leads through a tangle of rain forest, then up a steep promontory, where foot-long lizards scampered over roots among foliage so dense that not even a passing burst of rain punctured the canopy. I emerged from the forest and beheld the tomb. It stood on the edge of a ridge. Below was a sweeping panorama encompassing all of Apia, the harbor, and beyond the ocean that had carried Stevenson for so long. The grave site is made of white cement blocks, upon which a plaque displays his epitaph, written fifteen long years earlier, when, as so often with his sickness, he was confronted with the potential imminence of his own demise:

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 long’d to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

The tomb was extensively defaced by people who had carved their names into the stone. HOWARD said the most prominent etching. I spent a moment looking for a sharp rock so I could add IS A FUCKWIT, but then, with a sigh of regret, let it be. Here, my travels would end. I rested for a few moments at the base of the tombstone and marveled at the view, the cascade of hills tumbling toward the sea, a hint of mist swirling around their ramparts. The air was clamorous with birdsong and carried the scent of hibiscus. Of course, Stevenson felt at home here, I thought. I could not think of a more enchanting place to lie. This was no desolate memorial. It was, in its own way, a pinnacle to a life well lived, a reflection of Stevenson’s quest for the transcendent, a place that called to mind faraway adventures and tropical fairy tales. Stevenson could only be here on an island in the South Seas. Anyplace else would be wrong, an affront to the natural order of things. And as I stood and began my journey onward, I felt alive to the possibilities of life, alive to the turn of a good yarn, alive to the long voyage, alive to home, alive.