In August 1890 Henry and John La Farge, accompanied by the latter’s Japanese valet, Rioza Awoki, embarked on a yearlong tour of the southern tropics. In setting out for Oceania, they broke from the traditional pathways of Brahmin tourism, and even of their earlier journey to Japan. “We wished to go very far,” La Farge wrote. “Japan is too near. They have the telegraph there. The Pacific always means two months without news.” Visiting, in a more or less leisurely succession, Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Rarotonga, Fiji, Australia, Indonesia, and Singapore, they ventured into a host of puppet kingdoms whose barely century-old contacts with the West were largely confined to merchants, militaries, and missionaries. Herman Melville’s popular Polynesian tales, Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847), sentimentalized the region, offering Americans what Nathaniel Hawthorne blithely called, in a review of the former, a “picture of barbarian life.” This is the life that Henry, the tame cat, now sought to sample and one that promised a much-needed rest following his intense labors wrapping up the History. That project averaged 416 pages per volume, though the final three volumes dock in at a comparatively svelte 344 pages per, possibly hinting at their author’s fatigue. Adams now bid the Jeffersonians adieu by circling the globe and keeping an old promise. “I hope to finish the whole [History] on or about January 1889,” he had told Gaskell several years earlier. “We [he and Clover, of course] mean then to go round the world.”1
Henry’s lengthy voyage might be read as a new twist on an old tradition: the Grand Tour. Reaching its peak in the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour promised its upper-class male clientele an advanced immersion in language, history, and the various arts (if not drinking, gambling, and the occasional sexual congress). A host of post-Oxbridge-ites might, on this educational rite of passage, spend several months or even years sampling a variety of European cultural cuisines, all the while making important contacts for future use. Some variation of cooks and coachmen, valets and guides would likely tag along. Henry enjoyed his own truncated version of the Grand Tour when tramping about Germany and Italy in his early twenties. By this time, anyway, the concept, in its classical sense, had lost its old meaning. The decline of aristocracy and commensurate rise of the middle class undermined the idea of the Tour as the traditional ruling caste’s particular prerogative. Advancements in rail and ocean transportation further eroded the Tour’s exclusiveness by making it affordable to a growing, if still quite slight, number.2
By trading the Atlantic Tour for a South Pacific swing, Henry joined a small number of European and American elites, intellectuals, and artists. Tahiti attracted Melville as well as the French novelist and naval officer Pierre Loti and the postimpressionist Paul Gauguin, while Samoa drew Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and the American landscape artist Joseph Dwight Strong Jr. The civilizations, cultures, and customs of Oceania challenged Henry’s fastidious Yankee sensibilities, while La Farge’s untidy intellect and bohemian tastes further complicated his more conventional manner. Adams chose wisely in bringing the artist along. “Of all of [my] friends,” he later wrote, “La Farge alone owned a mind complex enough to contrast against the common-places of American uniformity.”3
By distinguishing his island hopping as, in some sense, a response to the flat homogeneity of home, Henry could turn his travels into an implicit rebuke of Western modernization. The paramount forces pulling this colossal enterprise along—industry and empire—were to receive increasingly negative attention in his writings. One need not look deeply for parallels to notice that in exoticizing the South Seas, a place of “disappearing” peoples and practices, Adams anticipates the Education’s sentimentalization of Quincy as a pastoral holdout from metropolitan Boston’s inescapable encroachments. That he extrapolated further while on his journey and felt some kinship with other peoples who were, like him, “endangered” by the restructuring of global economic, military, and political systems, is a credible guess. His extended stay, unexpected devotion to a dynastic Tahitian ruling family, and “adoption” into that family, intimate as much.
Certainly traveling in the lower Pacific gave Adams greater insight into imperialism’s contemporary complexion. An earlier model of colonization (1492–1650), fueled by the Renaissance and the emergence of nation-states, saw a number of European countries move into the Western Hemisphere. A fresh round of expansionism (1880–1914), propelled by industrialization and technological advances, brought about the conquest of much of Africa and Asia. Europe again joined in this empire-making, though additional actors, including Japan and the United States, did so as well. In due time these new conquistadors—interested in accessing hitherto unexploited harbors and coaling stations—looked with interest to distant Oceania. France’s 1880 annexation of Tahiti preceded an 1889 standoff between Britain, Germany, and the United States for control of the Samoan archipelago. Hawaii, Henry and La Farge’s jumping-off point to the South Seas, was in its last years as a kingdom. The pressure of Western business interests—evident in Honolulu’s simmering stew of antimonarchists, annexationists, and reformers, many of European and American citizenship—led to the January 1893 deposition of Queen Lili‘uokalani and Hawaii’s annexation by the United States in 1898. If Henry’s search for paradise sometimes resulted in a romanticization of modernization’s holdouts, his assumption that the weight of Westernization moved against these older Pacific civilizations nevertheless is accurate.
Despite an eagerness to flirt with the “simple” life of the South Seas, Adams and La Farge traveled in some decided luxury. Native (or French) chefs prepared their meals, local potentates smoothed their search for “managed adventure,” and they remained in touch with the outside world through a web of complex shipping lines. In writing a family friend while in transit that the Greek poet Homer “is constantly before me,” Adams signaled the limits of his willingness to go local. His interactions were typically with island elites, some of whom, with Western educations (and Western Grand Tours), may have hoped to meet the prominent American on a relatively comparable social or intellectual plane. Everyone else he tended to dismiss as “the simple savage” or “the simple native,” dark faces that he found anthropologically interesting as “types” or “races” but not as individuals. While in Samoa Henry wrote to Hay, “We have associated only with the first society—the families of the powerful chiefs—and I know nothing of the common people except as I see them pass by.”4
Despite such deliberate insulation, occasional leveling moments predictably arose. One occurred in Samoa when Adams, given with La Farge the run of a residence, discovered that they shared the space with several Samoans. “We could count ten men and women sleeping on the floor of our house,” he reported. The nearly circular structure lacked interior walls, making privacy impossible. “There was room enough,” Henry conceded, “but at first I felt rather awkward in putting on my clothes with at least six women, young and old, looking on, and very curious about the process.” He perhaps understood the relative powerlessness of his situation best when, tiring of Tahiti, he discovered the difficulty in convincing the few sea captains on the island to take him and La Farge to Fiji; his efforts to buy a boat were equally frustrating. This complication he sardonically commemorated in a letter to a fourteen-year-old nephew: “My dear Arthur.… If you ever come here, you had better bring your own boat, for you can’t get away without it.” Only when Adams agreed to pay $2,500 (some $70,000 in current dollars) did the Richmond’s captain agree to make the ten-day journey.5
Perhaps the thing that Henry least controlled in Polynesia was his awakening senses. Accustomed to a sartorial norm of stiff collars and three-piece suits, he now encountered an altogether different approach to both exhibiting and employing the human body. Observing traditional Samoan Siva dancers, in particular, coaxed from Adams long epistolary descriptions of their performances—the most vivid of which he recorded for the edification of Elizabeth Cameron. The extent to which he may have sublimated his feelings for Lizzie into such graphic recitations is an open question, but Henry James, privy to reports of the dance Adams wrote for Hay, found them illuminating and commented, “What a power of baring one’s self hitherto unsuspected in H A!”6 The subjects of sex and sensuality were rendered wooden in Adams’s Victorian novels Democracy and Esther, but the indulgence of distance, the implied permission to gaze on the “outrageous,” and the temptation to communicate on an erotic level with Lizzie behind the screen of ethnographic interest may explain the suggestive accounts he forwarded to her. Approaching his fifty-third birthday and now widowed for five years, he never neared again this type of colorful carnal expression. The following passage from an October 1890 letter to Lizzie, in which Henry chastely plays the passive observer to La Farge’s “excitement,” is worth quoting at length:
The girls disappeared; and after some delay, while I was rather discouraged, thinking that the Siva was not to be, suddenly, out of the dark, five girls came into the light, with a dramatic effect that really I never felt before. Naked to the waist, their rich skins glistened with cocoanut oil. Around their heads and necks they wore garlands of green leaves in strips, like seaweeds, and these too glistened with oil, as though the girls had come out of the sea.… La Farge’s spectacles quivered with emotion and gasped for sheer inability to note everything at once. To me the dominant idea was that the girls, with their dripping grasses and leaves, and their glistening breasts and arms, had actually come out of the sea a few steps away.… La Farge exploded with enthusiasm.… You can imagine the best female figure you ever saw, on about a six foot scale, neck, breast, back, arms and legs, all absolutely Greek in modelling and action, with such freedom of muscle and motion as the Greeks themselves hardly knew, and you can appreciate La Farge’s excitement.… We were all sprawling over mats, smoking, laughing, trying to talk, with a sense of shoulders, arms, legs, cocoa-nut oil, and general nudeness most strangely mixed with a sense of propriety. Anyone would naturally suppose such a scene to be an orgy of savage license.7
Later that month Henry chronicled for Lizzie his interactions with Fa-auli, the young (he guessed seventeen—“may be”) daughter of Lauti, a Samoan chief. Though he thought she lacked a fine face, her physical beauty and grace attracted him enormously: “I never tire of watching her, especially when she lies stretched at full length on the mats in the dusk, and rolls from one position to another.” One afternoon he recorded the girl’s proportions (“Taking her round the chest, including the arms, she measures fortyfive inches”) and discovered that, at twenty-three inches, the circumference of her head matched his exactly.8
Adams cast Fa-auli as the healthy, innocent creation of a remarkably voluptuous world so different, so distant from anything in his proper Brahmin purview. The glistening bodies that charmed the evening Sivas hinted at a freedom and ease of female expression that impressed him deeply. Attracted to the inaccessible Cameron, he commented at length on the fine figures and perfect illustrations of “muscles and motion” he daily encountered.
Henry’s interview with the convalescing Robert Louis Stevenson at the Scottish writer’s Vailima estate proved less satisfying. Stevenson and his American wife, Fanny, were living in dire poverty and could entertain in only the most constrained fashion. “They, I believe, would come oftener to see me,” Stevenson wrote of Adams and La Farge, “but for the horrid doubt that weighs upon our commissariat department; we have OFTEN almost nothing to eat; a guest would simply break the bank; my wife and I have dined on one avocado pear; I have several times dined on hard bread and onions. What would you do with a guest at such narrow seasons?—eat him? or serve up a labour boy fricasseed?” Henry, no doubt aware of his host’s penury, apprised Cameron of Stevenson’s obvious ill health (“Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag”) and resort to pajamas. Throughout their travels Adams, the scion of an old and respected political family, typically enjoyed a certain notoriety over La Farge. But his golden pedigree meant little to Stevenson. In a letter to James, the Scot referred to a recent visit by “La Farge the painter,” but inattentively referred to the painter’s appendage simply as “your friend Henry Adams.”9
From Samoa Adams and La Farge journeyed to Tahiti, where Henry forged a lasting friendship with Arii Taimai, the seventy-year-old matriarch of the Teva clan. A widowed chiefess, she spoke no English but discovered in Adams a chronic scholar eager to document her history as the titular head of a dead island aristocracy. Henry befriended as well a few of her nine “half-caste” sons and daughters whose father was a Jewish London-born banker named Alexander Salmon. “Hebrew and Polynesian mix rather well,” he patronizingly observed of Arii’s forty-year-old son, Tati, “when the Hebrew does not get the better.”10 Tati and most of his siblings were educated in England and Australia and thus facilitated communication between their mother and Adams.
Henry learned that the Teva had once dominated southern Tahiti’s Papara district. There, a full generation before John Adams became president, Amo of Papara and his wife Purea, the great-great-grandparents of Arii Taimai, greeted the arrival of Capt. Samuel Wallis, the British “discoverer” of Tahiti. Wallis’s 1767 voyage inspired Capt. James Cook, who journeyed there two years later. Arii Taimai’s dynastic pretensions were furthered when, in youth, the widow of King Pomare II adopted her. She later advised Queen Pomare IV while maintaining her separate role as chiefess of the Papara district. These aristocratic connections heightened her cosmopolitan outlook, apparent in her children’s international education and marriages. Her daughter Marau became the wife of Pomare V, the last Pomare king of Tahiti, while others wed British and Americans typically involved in diplomacy or finance. Impressed with this contemporary island nobility, Henry called Arii Taimai “the last pure native princess of Tahitian blood.”11
If Henry valued the Teva clan’s high rank, the Teva clan appreciated his possible use to them as a member of a famous American family. Here were two fading houses finding various kinds of support in the other. For Arii Taimai and her children, a close association with Adams would bring yet another distinguished Westerner into their orbit. Accordingly, in April 1891 both Henry and La Farge were ceremoniously adopted into the Salmon clan. Adams, already in possession of an acclaimed name, took on, in a manner, yet another: Tauraatua I Amo, “Bird Perch of God.” Aside from a tiny plot of land that accompanied the investiture, he received various gifts and curios, including a stone “brainer,” a nearly ten-inch poi grinder probably used to prepare food but that could be passed off to credulous Westerners as an ancient instrument of human sacrifice. That Henry identified strongly with the dimming grandeur of his new family is evident in a sentimental note written to a niece: “Tahiti is melancholy even when the sun is brightest and the sea blue as glass.… [It] has retired a long way out of the world, and sees only her particular friends, like me, with the highest introductions; but she dresses well, and her jewels are superb.”12 As the years passed Adams remained close to the Salmons, occasionally servicing the clan’s debt and introducing his “brother” Tati to several powerful Americans, among them Theodore Roosevelt.
During the final weeks of his four-month stay in Tahiti, Henry, obviously growing bored, undertook to write the history of the Teva clan with Queen Marau at the story’s center. The project, he informed one correspondent, came about “by way of excitement or something to talk about.” He proceeded to interview Arii Taimai with Marau and several of her siblings serving as translators. With too much history to pack into a few sessions, the project remained unfinished until 1893, when Adams privately published a small edition of Memoirs of Marau Taaoro Last Queen of Tahiti. Working on the manuscript, he assured Hay, deepened his respect for Tahitian civilization: “It shows me… why I loathe American history. Tahiti is all literary. America has not a literary conception. One is all artistic. The other is all commercial.”13
Henry’s history told the old and familiar story of a once great family’s and people’s decline before modern pressures—the same saga he later recited in Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and the Education. All of these works utilize to some degree art, history, tradition, and ritual to assess exhausted if culturally rich civilizations. And all are filtered through Adams’s tragic historical sensibility. Consequently, some have argued that Henry imposed too much of himself in the tropics, surrendering too little to his surroundings. The distinguished New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman, for one, had no patience for Adams’s Polynesian fantasies. In a 1967 communication to J. W. Davidson, author of Samoa Mo Samoa, Freeman remarked, “I know the Samoans… a shade too well to stomach the effusions of Adams and [the English poet Rupert] Brooke. What was it that they wrote of? Themselves, surely, themselves, and the ill-understood tumult of their own emotions—and not the Samoans.”14
After the intensities of the Samoan Siva and the quick dip into Tahitian dynastic history, Fiji, Adams and La Farge’s next destination, proved to be an altogether different, briefer, and less satisfying stay. A British colony since 1874, the archipelago operated in a more race-conscious way, with distinct social barriers separating whites and blacks. Imported Indian contract laborers worked on sugar plantations and heightened racial and caste divisions. Henry, though he interacted little with the locals, took a dim view of this conspicuous colonialism. After a three-weeks’ journey through Viti Levu, Fiji’s largest island, he sarcastically reported to Hay that even the remotest tribes were now peopled by “good churchmen.” He more favorably observed that such conversions were superficial and praised the tribes for their “heathen practices,” which included “pray[ing] to their grandfathers to come back” from the grave, a Lazarus-like wish for resurrection that brought down the governor’s enlightened wrath.15
In Fiji, as on his other stops, Adams habitually complained of monotony. One can chart in his letters a litany of references to dead and dragging time: “The boredom has not been small”; “The Polynesians are a singularly superficial people”; “Taïti… is lovely and comfortable enough, but easily exhausted”; “Up and down the Pacific for many grey weeks, my friend La Farge and I have paraded our ennui”; and so on.16 One might read into such sighs the false quality of Henry’s posthumous pose. The immense energy, expense, and planning that went into his extended journey suggest a man still eager for fresh experiences and open to new relationships. Clearly he wanted more rather than less.
And what he wanted now was to be near Elizabeth Cameron, his attraction for her having failed to burn off in the tropical sun. Leaving Fiji in late July, Adams and La Farge dropped anchor in Sydney, Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon along their return voyage home. At the last location Henry sat under the sacred fig tree in Anuradhapura, planted some two thousand years earlier and said to be a branch from the Bodhi tree under which Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment and became the spiritual teacher known as Gautama Buddha. But Adams had now his fill of “managed adventure.” As his ship neared Europe in September he made arrangements to visit Lizzie in Paris. Their meeting would constitute the real ending of his journey. When it had begun over a year earlier he had written to her from Honolulu, “I enjoy myself, and the sense of living, more than I had done in five years.”17 That calendrically attuned line evoked the transit of lost time since Clover’s fatal act and may have inferred Henry’s emotional availability. He returned to Lizzie slightly older and a bit grayer, but certainly redolent of “exotic” and “romantic” exploits. He returned with a younger man’s song in his heart.