My dear Fanny Sitwell,
By now Louis has told Sidney that we will be delayed from returning to England. After four months in Honolulu, it is ever clearer that Louis’s health fares best at sea, and truth be told, the social whirl of Honolulu has worn heavily on us. Belle’s friend King Kalakaua has entertained us royally, but we have simpler needs than ever before, and we long for one more cruise, this time to the Gilbert Islands. Louis found a new trading ship, the Equator, which will take us on and allow us to explore different islands while it’s in port, conducting its trading activities. Copra is the main product the Equator crew wants, and it is plentiful in the South Seas. Copra, by the way, is the dried meat of the coconut that they boil in water to make coconut oil.
The captain of the ship is a fresh-faced boy of twenty-three who wears a tam-o’-shanter and whose speech is heavily sauced with a Scots accent. Can you imagine Louis’s pure joy to have a countryman at the wheel? Mrs. Stevenson will return to Scotland for a while, but Lloyd will go with us, continuing on as photographer for the South Seas book. So will Belle’s husband, Joe, who will photograph also (and hopefully straighten out his life under our watch). Belle and her little boy will go on to Sydney to live for four months until we arrive there.
How we miss you! But we will never have another chance to see this part of the world in this way. And so we go.
With dearest affection, believe me,
Fanny V. de G. Stevenson
“You’re about to get your wish, Mr. Stevenson,” Captain Reid said. The slender young Scot, topped as usual by his tartan bonnet, took a final gulp from a tin cup before returning his attention to the ship’s wheel.
“Which wish is that?”
“For a braw adventure, sir. The Equator shall make for Apemama.”
“Apemama? The home of …”
“Tembinoka, aye.”
Fanny saw Louis’s back straighten and his eyes shoot sparks. “The Napoleon of the Gilberts?”
“The same,” Reid replied.
Louis burst into a jubilant jig.
“Have you met him?” Fanny asked.
“Oh, yes. Several times. You will, too—he does all his own trading. He comes aboard and sometimes stays overnight. Eats our food, which is all for the good, because it means we have something that he wants. He has a huge appetite for new objects.” Reid laughed. “He has a huge appetite.”
“And he has copra …”
“Houses of it. That’s how he sells it. By the houseful.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
Reid’s brows went up. “Well, I don’t cross him. He has killed cold-heartedly in his day. They say he murdered one of his wives who betrayed him. Put her rotting corpse out in front of his palace as a lesson to the others. He won’t let whites stay on his island but for one broken-down old fellow who is a recluse. Oh, he allowed a missionary to stay around long enough to teach him English, then booted him off. He won’t even let traveling natives from other islands stay. No, Tembinoka must be the only man in charge, you see. He has a few chaps as lieutenants, but mostly, he is surrounded by his women. Has a whole harem.” Reid turned to his first mate. “Smarten up the ship. We are headed into Apemama.”
In a few minutes, sailors with mops and buckets were scrubbing decks and overhauling the trading room. In the distance, Fanny could see the slender strip of atoll and its interior lagoon. “So small a kingdom for so great an ogre,” she mused aloud.
The Equator edged carefully through shoals until they dropped anchor. The sun was so glaringly bright upon the beach that the glittering white strip seemed to bore into Fanny’s retinas. Onshore she saw a village smattered with high-roofed huts but no people. Apart from the sound of the waves, the scene was eerily quiet. “Now we wait for our visitor,” Reid said.
Soon enough, a handful of people appeared. A boat carrying the king and a large ladder approached the ship. “He once had a ship’s ladder collapse under him,” Reid explained.
“Now he brings his own.”
Fanny understood the need when she spied the king climbing onto the Equator’s deck. Tembinoka’s large head of black hair came up over the ship’s railing, and then his great brown forearms lifted up a massive body attired in a costume that stole her breath away. It was a cardinal-red velvet uniform so braided and beribboned, she wondered if somehow the king had seen a Gilbert and Sullivan production. If his costume revealed a giddy streak, his face did not. He had a hawkish nose, piercing black eyes, and a fiercely sober mouth. He’s all business, she thought.
After Reid introduced the king to Louis and Fanny, Tembinoka began his appraisal of the trading room’s contents. Bored quickly by the bolts of fabric and appliances, he moved through the ship, poking his head into every cabin. When he got to Fanny’s room, he spied a dressing case that caught his fancy.
“It is utterly worthless,” she whispered to Louis, “certainly useless for a man. I keep my hair combs and such in there.”
“I am afraid we can’t sell it,” Louis piped up.
The king looked at his face for the first time. “How much?” Tembinoka asked in his high voice, clearly having assumed that Louis was starting a round of haggling.
“Gift from a friend,” Louis said, “so sorry.”
The king looked at him wearily, like a man accustomed to a familiar gambit. “Kaupoi.” He smirked. Fanny suspected the word meant “rich man” or, more cynically, “Mr. Important.” Tembinoka took a bag of coins from a retainer and spread out twenty pounds in gold. Twenty pounds!
Louis said, “I don’t sell anything. Please accept this as a gift.”
Fanny emptied the case and Louis put it into the king’s hands. They watched in horror as his features melted with shame. He was accustomed to being cheated by white men but was startled by white generosity. When he prepared to depart the boat with Fanny’s case under his arm, Louis seized the moment. “Might my wife and I stay on your island for a couple of weeks while the Equator makes its rounds to other islands?” he blurted out.
The king dropped his head and did not respond, only descended his kingly ladder. Within a short time, a carved wooden jewel box appeared as replacement for the gift, but no answer to Louis’s question came with it.
“Why do you want to stay on his island?” Fanny asked.
“Because he is a story, I can tell already,” Louis said. “He is like no one else.”
When Tembinoka returned early the next morning, they were seated at breakfast. Upon his approach, Fanny surmised the king was bringing one of his women, for she spied a dress in the distance. In fact, it was Tembinoka himself coming into the saloon, attired in a woman’s green silk frock, a pith helmet, and blue glass spectacles. He sat across from them, and after a few syllables of greeting, proceeded to stare silently at each of them. Fanny squirmed under his inspection and made work of chasing her eggs across the plate with her fork so as not to have to look up again. Louis chatted on gaily as if it were all perfectly normal. Captain Reid interjected that Louis was a knowledgeable man whose main interest in the South Seas was to come to Apemama and report back to Queen Victoria all he’d learned. At that point, Louis’s jaw dropped and he fell silent.
After what seemed an eternity of staring, the king said simply, “You good man, you no lie” and “You good woman. You come my island.”
So it was that they found themselves living in Apemama. Tembinoka ordered that four houses on stilts should be moved to the spot of their choice on the beach. Lloyd and Fanny and Louis watched in amazement as many sets of legs moved together under the big upturned-basket houses they called maniaps. If one of the movers tarried in his work, the king aimed his Winchester just above the offender’s head, and the fellow stepped livelier.
“I can only assume some locals have been displaced because we are here,” Louis worried aloud. “That can’t be too good for neighborly relations.”
When the huts were in place, Tembinoka decreed that his subjects should observe an invisible tapu circle around the group of houses. The king walked the circumference himself so that no misunderstandings might occur. No native was to go inside that circle or disturb the newcomers in any way. Then he made clear his expectations of the Stevensons. He wanted to come to their house when the spirit moved him, to enjoy what they were eating. If he did not come, they were to send a plate of their dinner to his compound. His people would work for Louis and Fanny, but only Tembinoka could give them orders. And one other thing: He liked it quiet. No noise.
The latter prohibition was stunningly evident that first night on the beach. Huddled under a mosquito net with a pot of insect powder burning nearby, Fanny and Louis listened for some sounds of life in the village but heard only the gentle lapping of waves.
In the following days, the king showed them his kingdom. He met them each day in a dazzling new costume fitted carefully to his figure, each garment bearing exaggerated dimensions of features one found in European clothing, and each made up in vibrant fabrics with decorative flourishes unlike any they’d ever seen. Tembinoka had a style distinctly his own. On the morning he was to show them his storehouses, he appeared in a turquoise silk morning coat with tails that fell to his heels.
“That is a lovely color,” Fanny said, and she meant it. “It is the color of the sea.”
Tembinoka nodded at the compliment. He led them to his palace, a collection of rustic buildings surrounded by a fence. Inside the huts, women of every age, shape, and manner of dress moved about, attending to their responsibilities. Some cleaned, some nursed babies. A few slept on mats. Taking them all in with a sweep of his arm, the king said, “My family.” He summoned his first wife and introduced her formally to Fanny and Louis. The oldest of the women, she seemed gracious and on perfectly good terms with the other wives in the household.
The king summoned a woman in charge of firearms, who returned with a case containing a disassembled pistol that he specifically asked for. Then Tembinoka directed a different woman—this one in charge of napery—to show Fanny recently acquired embroidered napkins.
Next he took them to a large building where a grim-faced woman in charge of its contents unlocked the door and ushered them in. Piled from floor to ceiling were the machinery and fripperies of civilization that the king had managed to lay his hands on: bolts of fabric, piles of blue eyeglasses, feathered hats, high-button shoes in every size, barrels of tin cups, jars of ointment with lids gone rusty, axes, Winchesters, cases of tobacco, spittoons, inkpots, clocks, and stoves.
After the tour, they sat on the king’s terrace and drank kava. It soon became clear why the chief was allowing them to stay: He had his own agenda. He pressed them with questions. How many fathoms high is Windsor Castle? the palace builder wanted to know. How much did it cost to buy a schooner in Sydney? Evidently, the king’s choice to preserve the islanders from the influence of other cultures meant he was in quarantine, too.
From navigation and building, his thoughts turned to medicine. The girl in charge arrived as instructed, holding a bottle of laxative syrup.
“You savvy?” he asked Fanny.
“Yes, I know it.”
“Good?”
“I use this.” Fanny wrote down the word Castoria for him.
“Betta?”
“Much better,” Fanny said. “The ship carries it. We will get some for you when the Equator returns.”
The king pulled a meerschaum pipe from his pocket. He signaled a young lady who stayed nearby with matches and tobacco. As all his subjects were required to do when they approached him, she crouched and then crawled over to him.
In his simple English, Tembinoka told the legend of his family’s beginnings—the first parents being a heroic woman and a shark—about the wars his ancestors had waged, the wars he had waged, and the uncle he had to send away from the island for betraying him. He talked of his own power and how he liked things organized. Fanny’s instincts about Tembinoka were confirmed as he talked on. Despite his tight-fisted approach to governing, he talked of how deeply he cared for his people. The king was a smart fellow. He was not only the ruler of some three thousand people, he was their chief poet, architect, historian, philosopher, and inventor.
In the evening, as they left the king’s quarters, Fanny noticed old crones sitting intermittently along the enclosing fence. These were the palace guards, she learned later, who watched through the night for any irregularities. They communicated with one another by throwing stones.
That night Louis and Fanny stayed awake for hours under the mosquito net, scribbling madly into their diaries by the light of a lantern, intent on noting every exotic detail they had witnessed.
“Where are the men?” Fanny wondered aloud.
“They’re out there, in the huts and elsewhere, but they’re invisible, aren’t they? Obviously, they hold inferior positions, except a few of his trusted minions. Did you notice those fellows who came in to confer with Tembinoka about doings in the village? I’m sure they were spies. They must come in every day to fill his ear.”
“The king is keeping a tight lid on his strange little paradise,” Fanny said.
Louis scratched his head. “I suppose Tembinoka thinks he can maintain control of his kingdom by keeping outsiders away, especially whites. You can’t blame him. But his quarantine can’t last. His little cache of Winchesters is nothing against the German or French or American cannons. When one of those countries decides he has something they want, he is going to topple. And along with him will go the identity of the people—their oral history, the legends, the songs. Isn’t that how these things work?”
In the weeks that followed, no native people came across the tapu line to visit them. They named their clutch of huts Equator Town and watched as life went on around them, just beyond the line. Sometimes they saw the king walk past and out into the water with one of his retainers, where they climbed into a fishing boat—for the king liked to fish—untied the boat’s rope from the anchor—which happened to be a sewing machine—and headed out to sea. When they came back, Fanny would likely be presented with a large fish, which meant the king would be joining them for dinner. She planted salad greens that flourished and, in time, delighted Tembinoka.
In the mornings, Louis wrote. In the afternoons he and Lloyd collaborated on a novel set in the Pacific. After, they fantasized about having their own copra trading boat. In the evenings, Louis walked on the beach under the stars, playing his flageolet.
Fanny couldn’t forget her husband’s dire predictions for the future of this little silver crescent of sand sitting out in the vast blue ocean. She had grown fond of Tembinoka. She heard in his conversation the pride of a man who had built up a society that was modern, compared to the world he had inherited from his predecessors.
The Equator was overdue by nearly two weeks, and Fanny expected it would come any moment. They were all ready to go, their provisions were running short, and they were sorely tired of eating wild chicken. She wanted to give the king a gift before they left. Though the man seemed to have one of everything, he lacked a flag for his kingdom. One morning she quickly sketched out a design. She envisioned a banner with three stripes—yellow, green, and red—with a black shark at its center, and below it, the words I bite triply.
“It’s a reference to the shark’s three rows of teeth,” she explained to Louis.
That night a copra trading ship called the Tiernan was in harbor. The king threw a big party with fireworks and dancing but, strangely, did not invite them. Fanny and Louis were inside their hut when they heard a gunshot near the palace.
“Do you think someone has shot the king?”
“The thought hadn’t occurred to me, but now that you say it …”
Louis got up, loaded their pistols, and put them near at hand.
In their hut in Equator Town, they lay awake listening.
Someone shot at a dog, the king explained when he came by the hut the next morning. Fanny was glad to see Tembinoka alive, though he was, uncharacteristically, a little drunk. She showed him her design for the Apemama flag, and he beamed his approval. He didn’t stay long. Louis was not there, and the king seemed like a small, tired child when he said, “I want to go home.”
Louis arrived next, with urgent news. “The captain of the Tiernan says we can take passage with him to Samoa. No one knows what has happened to the Equator.”
“All right.”
“We’ll have to pack quickly. They depart tomorrow.”
The next day, Fanny cast her gaze at their belongings, strewn around the hut, which she couldn’t bring herself to pack. “Captain Reid is expecting us to be here,” she said, but her shoulders sank and she admitted what was on her mind: “I have this dreadful premonition … I don’t want to go.”
“The lady has a premonition.” Louis sighed. But he did not pursue his teasing and canceled their passage.
When the Equator arrived the following week and the Stevensons climbed aboard, Tembinoka wept on the dock.
“DID YOU GET the news about the Tiernan?” Reid asked them over a dinner of octopus and clams on the boat that evening.
Fanny caught her breath.
“Becalmed, they were, just bobbing around with no wind, so everyone went to sleep, I suppose, when up sprang a squall that made the boat turn turtle. It was just a day or two out of Apemama.”
“I can’t believe it,” Louis said. “We just saw them off.”
“Sixteen dead,” Reid reported gravely.
They fell quiet. Fanny remembered the faces of the men they had befriended and wondered who among them had died.
In the coming days, when storms chased the Equator from Apemama to Samoa, Fanny settled her blankets in a narrow galley-way so she wouldn’t be thrown from her bed. Waves came over the prow and poured down below, leaving her in a shallow lake. She was terrified, but she would never admit that to Louis. Instead, she lay fully dressed, with an umbrella over her head, thinking about the lost men on the Tiernan, who went from dreams to death in the flutter of an eye.