The cruise of the Janet Nicoll came to an end in New Caledonia on 26 July 1890. While Stevenson remained in Noumea for a week, Fanny and Osbourne stayed only a day before sailing back to Sydney. In August, the family reunited in Sydney and, in early September, they sailed for their new home in Sāmoa. But, before reaching New Caledonia, Stevenson, Fanny, and Osbourne had already gotten a sneak peek of what would eventually become their estate.
“Bush round Vailima” (Album LSH 151/91)
“Another view of R.L.S. house height of trees and general backwood appearance” (Album LSH 151/91)
[Isobel’s sketch of Vailima property] (Album LSH 151/91)
When nineteenth-century Samoan beliefs in spirits known as aitu converged with the violence of German colonial plantations, a new kind of spirit emerged. To trace the spectral presence that haunted the colonial Samoan landscape of bush and plantations, I turn to the Stevenson family’s literary depiction of their settlement at the Vailima estate. The Stevensons not only planned on building a house, but they had every intention of establishing a profitable cacao and coffee plantation. In 1890, Stevenson happily assumed the identity of “a landholder and a farmer with paths to hew in tropical bush, weeds to deracinate, weeders and diggers to supervise” (Letters, 7: 18). His intense focus on the agricultural expansion of Vailima returns in a letter to Burlingame in which he explains that he is consumed by “black boys, and planting and weeding, and axes and cutlasses.” By reading selections of Stevenson’s and Fanny’s personal correspondence alongside local newspaper coverage (from the Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette [1877–1881], the Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser [1888–1896], and the Samoa Weekly Herald [1892–1900]) about plantation violence, I highlight Stevenson’s Gothic vision of Sāmoa in which colonial violence gave rise to new forms of aitu.2
1
Although the Stevensons faced a largely uncleared bush, Fanny was undaunted by the formidable task that lay ahead. She experimented with different seeds and crops and kept a detailed record of her horticultural activities, including the planting of melon, tomato, lima beans, celery, cabbage, sweet corn, peas, onions, radish, lettuce, and alfalfa. Fanny’s extensive gardening projects relied on the exchange of seeds, plants, and horticultural information with other settlers in the area such as Captain Kurt Hufnagel, the German manager of the neighboring plantation of Vailele, who supplied her with orange, breadfruit, mango, and cacao (OSA , 45), as well as coffee beans, rose seeds, and Indian beans (96).3 The Apia-based lawyer, Mr. Hetherington Carruthers also proved to be a useful source of information: for example, he taught her how to identify wild turmeric (39), and, on a separate occasion, he presented her with an “odd variegated variety” of pineapple (73).
When Fanny reached Levuka, she encountered an Englishman (Mr. Sketchly) who was currently “experimenting with tobacco” and “seem[ed] confident of success.” She adds that Mr. Sketchly “gave me a lot of valuable information about cacao and India rubber planting” (103).5 Fanny’s importation of new plant species and “valuable information” to Vailima lay behind Stevenson’s confession to Colvin that, perhaps in “five or six years,” Vailima might “support us and pay wages” (Letters , 7: 202). In this regard, cash crops like coffee and cacao were vitally important.a trade secret: if cauliflowers get an occasional watering with sea water they will hold up in any climate. I was told of seeds that produce a radish which, when older, may be used as a turnip. I shall probably get a few. An Indian in a shop divided some Indian melon seeds with me and told me how to plant them. (100)
Despite Margaret Stevenson’s confidence in her son’s cleverness, Moors stresses that the author’s “schemes were always impracticable ones. Starting to grow cocoa [cacao], he wanted to do it in a way that nobody else had ever heard of, and very little grist came to his mill” (48). Moors goes on to specify that Stevenson’s failure with cacao stems from a “want of proper care and attention, for Mr. Carruthers, whose property adjoined Vailima, had very good success with his plantation” (1910, 114).Yesterday we had a visit from Captain [Hufnagel], who is the manager of the largest German plantation here. He went all over the cacao plantation, and was delighted with it, and thinks it will turn out splendidly. You must know that the usual way here is to clear away all the bush, and then plant the young cacaos, each with a ‘shade-tree’ beside it, that will grow faster than the cacao and shelter it from the violence of the sun. When Louis was told this he said at once, ‘What is the use of cutting down the bush and then planting shade-trees? Why not just leave the bush and plant the cacaos in it?’ This is what we have done, therefore, only clearing away the undergrowth, of which there is not much among high trees. (134)
Although such a procedure for planting was, in Moors’ opinion, utterly disastrous, the latter was hardly surprised since Stevenson “though he farmed, was no farmer; and as for Joe Strong, who for some time held the position of Overseer-in-Ordinary to the Vailima King—well he might have made a very good landscape-gardener, but he was too esthetic for cacao growing. And Lloyd Osbourne, who was a sort of general manager of the place, just liked to sit down and ‘watch things grow’; and if they didn’t grow, they didn’t” (1910, 115).Lloyd has first of all to superintend the boys clearing space in the bush for [the trees] on the other side of the stream. … When an alley or strip has been cleared sufficiently, holes are dug fifteen feet apart, and a basket with its plant placed in each; a coconut is planted at each end of the row to serve as a sort of guide-post. In this manner … eighty-three cacaos have already been set up. … The planting of the seeds [in the baskets] is done by Fanny herself. … She and Louis went to one of the German plantations to beg for more seeds, and she has been promised another two thousand. (106)
Moors’ retrospective account of the Vailima plantation is in stark contrast to Strong’s claim, from 1892, that Stevenson’s decision to plant cacao trees in the shade “is a success” (Huntington, MS. 38035). In June 1892, Strong boasted to his friend Charles Warren Stoddard that “next season,” Vailima would be “the largest cacao plantation in Samoa.” In the same letter, he specifies that during the “first season” he had “planted 8000 trees which in five years will bring in an income of £800. … Next season we will double the force of men and plant 20000 trees.” In a letter to her sister, Margaret Stevenson (1906) records a similar figure: “There are now 7766 cacao plants out, which is pretty well for a single season’s work” (172). This was certainly a leap from the “1575 cacaos” which she refers to in her letter from 13 January 1892 (172). Strong’s intimations of success, at least, were ironic, given that, like with the fiasco of the magic-lantern tour, the plantation plan fell to pieces seemingly because of him.
Roughly a month after Strong’s boast to Stoddard about the success of the Vailima plantation, Isobel filed for divorce. In her private correspondence to Stoddard she mentions Strong’s “adultery and wilful neglect” as the grounds for divorce (Huntington, MS. 37995). A few months later, in September 1892, Strong also informed Stoddard of the “great change in our lives” and insists that he had been ill-treated at Vailima where he had “labour[ed] like a slave planting 8000 coco [sic] trees—7000 of which are thriving beautifully and which will bring in Stevenson an income in 4 years of £600 a year.” Strong emphasizes that the sole reason he had become “manager” of the plantation was because nobody else would take the job “on account of that awful woman Mrs. R.L.S and Osbourne got sick trying to run it. … I stepped in and have started a plantation for them” (Huntington, MS. 38036).
Strong’s hopes—and complaints—for Vailima revolve around the potential money to be derived from the cacao crops. Both he and Margaret Stevenson, however, obscure the role of the labor of others in the planting scheme: in response to Stevenson’s unorthodox seed-sowing, Margaret writes in her letter that this is what “we have done” (emphasis added). Strong, in even more powerful language—especially from an American—compares his debasement (and lack of profit) with that of a slave. During their initial survey of Vailima after the cruise of the Janet Nicoll, Fanny complains that Sāmoa will prove a difficult place to live because “I shall be able to get no servants but cannibal black boys, runaways, and discontents from the German plantations” (Letters, 6: 407–408). Labor was crucial to the Vailima enterprise. Just as the photographs of the empty landscape of Vailima omit the “crowd of black boys ,” Joe Strong, Margaret Stevenson, and Fanny write as though the family single-handedly planted the seeds and reaped their harvest. Instead, like other British and German settlers in colonial Sāmoa, the Stevenson family relied on indentured laborers for the success of their agricultural enterprise.
Although this is not the place to reconstruct the history of the indentured labor trade in the Pacific Islands, a brief overview of the main aspects of the system are necessary to highlight Stevenson’s experience in Sāmoa.6 The abolition of slavery across the British Empire in 1833 and the spread of capitalism abroad commodified the labor of Pacific Islanders. From the 1860s until the early twentieth century, Islanders were contracted, acquired through deceptive means, or kidnapped outright to work on foreign-owned plantations in Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia, Tahiti, and Sāmoa. In the trade’s early years, kidnapping, or “blackbirding,” was widespread throughout the southwestern and central Pacific (Moore, Leckie, Munro 1990, xxxi). The British government’s response to illegal recruiting was the institution of the Pacific Islanders’ Protection Act in 1872, which effectively established Queen Victoria’s “jurisdiction over her subjects within any islands and places in the Pacific Ocean not being within Her Majesty’s dominions, nor within the jurisdiction of any civilized power.” While the Act covered the labor-trading activities of British subjects, it also provided a legal definition for kidnapping and supplied navy officers with instructions on what measures to take when they encountered a slaving vessel (Docker 1970, 92–93). The appointment of the first Pacific High Commissioner for the Western Pacific in 1877 was a further attempt to control trade in areas of British commercial interests (Scarr 1967, xvi).
In Sāmoa, although few in number and relatively small by comparison with German estates, British plantations still imported labor. In all, Sāmoa’s British plantations employed 210 I-Kiribati between 1877 and 1886 (MacDonald 2001, 56; Munro 1989, 174). In the late 1870s, most of these Islanders worked for the former LMS missionary Frank Cornwall, who, with the help of H. J. Moors, ran the Magia (on Upolu) and Lata (on Savai’i) plantations. Cornwall’s plantations were notorious, and Moors was at the heart of the controversy.7 In 1877, Cornwall had recruited 135 I-Kiribati, half of whom were sent to the Lata plantation where they were denied adequate amounts of food and water. At the time, Moors was Lata’s overseer and had a nasty reputation for being “driving and callous” and frequently using “corporal punishment” (Munro and Firth 1993, 111). The conditions at Cornwall’s plantations were so well known that nearly 20 years later the Samoa Weekly Herald reminded readers that 130 “colored laborers” had been kept at Lata “for five months … upon miserably bad and insufficient food … [and] that men and women were alike cruelly flogged at the caprice of the manager [Moors]” (2 September 1899).
Although Magia and Lata’s deplorable living and working conditions led to an official inquiry and eventually to Moors’ dismissal, the latter’s participation in the labor trade was by no means over. By 1879–1880, Moors was working as a recruiting agent for the Jaluit-based firm of Hernsheinm in the Marshalls (Bennett 1976, 15). During the same period, he also worked for the Hawaiian government as a recruiting agent for which the Hawaiian Evangelical Association recognized “his conscientious efforts in fairly engaging his recruiters” (Churchward 1907, 88). Based on his experiences as a labor recruiter in Micronesia, Moors wrote two novels in the 1880s, both unpublished , entitled The Tokanoa: a plain tale of some strange adventures in the Gilberts and Tapu: a tale of adventure in the South Seas. Both texts purport to be compilations from the diary of the fictional “John T. Bradley, labor agent” and belong to the popular genre of “South Seas” adventure fiction featuring labor recruiters confronted by hostile and violent Islanders.8 While his fiction leaves much to be desired, Moors is best remembered by literary historians as the author of With Stevenson in Samoa, a biography of Stevenson’s final years at Vailima.
Stevenson was all too familiar with Moors’ unsavory associations with “‘blackbirded’ labour” (McLynn 1994, 368), and in a March 1890 letter he acknowledges that Moors is “not of the best character” since he “has been in the labour trade as supercargo; [and] has been partner with Grevsmuhl, the most infamous trader in these waters” (Letters, 6: 381). E. A. Grevsmuhl spent four years recruiting laborers for J. C. Godeffroy und Sohn and Moors was his junior partner for three years (Churchward 1907, 100). Despite Stevenson’s discomfort with Moors’ connections to the labor trade, the latter was certainly up to the task of helping Stevenson settle his plantation. Moors (1910) explains that while Stevenson was undertaking the cruise of the Janet Nicoll, he hired laborers to clear the overgrown property (22). When Stevenson returned to Sāmoa he found that the road leading to his new estate “had been widened and improved” and that “a crew of Melanesian laborers , who were employed by Moors, were hard at work cutting and burning trees and bush” (Holmes 2001, 204). Land clearing, however, was only the first step toward establishing a working plantation. In time, Stevenson turned to his German neighbors from the Vailele plantation to purchase trees and other species of vegetation such as coconut seeds.
The ultimate success of the plantation depended on reliable manpower: “black boys” were indispensable to Stevenson’s ambitions as a small planter in Sāmoa. While the exact number of workers that were employed at Vailima has not been established, looking at the figures for Sāmoa’s German plantations provides a good sense of the scale of imported labor: between 1867 and 1894 over 2000 workers were engaged from the Carolines, Kiribati, and the Marshalls (Firth 1974, 309), while roughly the same number were recruited from Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and the Bismarck Archipelago between 1878 and 1885 (Munro and Firth 1987, 27); between 1887 and 1912 another 5000 were recruited from the Bismarck Archipelago and German Solomons (Firth 1982, 179); between 1883 and 1886, 30 laborers were recruited from the Cooks (Firth 1974, 12); and during the same time period, another 20 were engaged from Tuvalu (Munro 1982, 276–77).9
The Stevensons’ experience as planters in Sāmoa combined experimentation with orthodox practices. While their inexperience (or ineptitude) with agriculture led them to adopt apparently unsuccessful methods like the cacao-planting scheme or an unorganized division of labor overseen by ineffective managers (i.e., Osbourne and Strong), in other regards, the family acted very much like colonial planters. Fanny , like many other colonial travelers, obtained seeds and samples of plants that she tried to adapt to the local climate. Most importantly, while the organization of labor may have been somewhat chaotic, the Stevensons nonetheless used the expertise of disreputable characters like Moors , and the plantation landscape at Vailima, like that of Cornwall and the German planters, prominently featured the imported labor of Pacific Islanders.
2
Stevenson’s A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892) includes a poignant critique of German-run plantations, and, in particular, depicts the cruel and callous treatment of indentured laborers at the hands of the German overseers. Stevenson insists that the Germans’ impressive plantations are built on the sweat of “seven or eight hundred men and women” who “toil for the German firm on contracts of three or five years.” The duration of the contract, however, is not always honored by the Germans since, as a form of “punitive extra labour,” the “thrall’s term of service is extended” so that, “even where that term is out, much irregularity occurs in the repatriation of the discharged” and abuses “flourish” (FH, 115–16). While A Footnote to History criticizes German overseers and unscrupulous plantation owners, it also highlights the figure of the “black boy,” that is, the indentured Melanesian laborer, who, according to an American Consular Report (1882), is “treated more like [a] slave than anywhere else,” and thus feels compelled to “fle[e] into the bush” (Dawson 1882, 19). Despite opposing the practices of the Deutsche Handels und Plantagen Gesellschaft (DHPG), Stevenson was, nevertheless, integrated into a colonial plantation culture and profited from having Vailele as a neighbor: not only did the Stevensons acquire specialized knowledge, but they also relied on the labor of indentured workers who had run away from the German plantation.
The German labor trade was closely aligned with Germany’s political interests in the Pacific. In 1884, when Germany annexed northeastern New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, the Samoan branch of the DHPG gained exclusive right to recruitment in these areas. German plantations were managed by notoriously strict overseers who made liberal use of corporal punishment (Munro and Firth 1990, 20). Since the German consul in Sāmoa backed the interests of the DHPG, abusive methods for instilling discipline went unchecked, a state of affairs which both the British and American consuls repudiated.10 But indentured laborers did not only have to contend with plantation managers and overseers; large numbers of Samoans had been dispossessed of their lands—which were now under German control—and took steps to express their resentment.
A series of natural disasters in the 1860s and the civil war of 1869–1873 had induced Samoans to part with large tracts of traditional land in exchange for food supplies, guns, and ammunition (Hempenstall and Rutherford 1984, 21; Munro and Firth 1987, 26). Many Samoans, displaced by this “mad rush” (Hempenstall and Rutherford 1984, 21) or “land grab” (Meleiseā 1987, 35), did not hesitate to express their displeasure, including, for example, “three Samoans who were charged with having been guilty of riotous conduct on the plantation of Mr. von Gertz, Vaitele, and also with using threatening language towards that gentleman.” Each man was forced to pay a fine and spend 18 days in prison (Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, 24 July 1880). Others organized themselves into raiding parties, a striking phenomenon which prompted the British consul Churchward (1887) to accuse Samoans of being “addicted to thieving [food] from the plantations,” which they justify by claiming that the crops originate from “stolen” land (391).
Additional supplies were not, however, all that Samoans encountered on the plantations. Relations between Samoans and foreign workers were rarely cordial and often resulted in the injury or death of either party (Gilson 1970, 287; Munro and Firth 1993, 107).11 Conflicts were sparked when Samoans threatened to steal from the laborers’ own food crops, or when laborers attempted to stop Samoans from trespassing into the plantation. For example, the Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette reported that “some plantation laborers got roughly handled by some Samoans. It appears, from what we can learn, that some of the hands of the plantation, in taking a ramble over the grounds, came upon Samoans stealing vegetables” (20 October 1877). In more extreme cases, Samoans targeted laborers to divert attention away from raiding missions (Firth 1974, 78–79). As the Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser observes, indentured workers were the plantations’ sentries because it was necessary “to keep a watch on Samoans, to prevent them from stealing the produce” (2 May 1891). According to local newspaper coverage, most violent conflicts were instigated by Samoans that trespassed upon the plantations. For example, Oba and Kauai were severely beaten by Samoans wielding cricket bats (Samoa Weekly Herald, 11 March 1893); the face of an anonymous “black boy” was sliced open by Samoans on the Vaivase plantation when he tried to prevent them from stealing breadfruit (Samoa Weekly Herald, 16 September 1899); and there was the case of the Samoans Vagai and Levi who had assaulted Tomu, a worker, with an axe while they stole from the plantation (Samoa Weekly Herald, 9 March 1895). On 4 October 1890 an article described “one of the most disgraceful riots” that had taken place between Samoans and “black boys” from the Matafele plantation. After a laborer had been jailed for being inebriated, his friends, “who were also under the influence of liquor,” assembled 20 more laborers and marched to the jail. Then 100 Samoans arrived on the scene, “armed with clubs and stones,” and began to fight with the laborers. The article claims that “one of the most inhuman acts we have ever witnessed” ensued: roughly 20 Samoans began “clubbing and dragging [an] unfortunate wretch in the most inhuman manner.” When a group of European bystanders asked the Samoans to stop, they responded that it “was none of their business” (Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 4 October 1890).
Such news reports offer us a rare glimpse into the daily violence of plantation culture, but they also reveal the warped expectations of some colonial settlers concerning the behaviors of the different ethnic communities. While crimes committed by Samoans were recognized as expressions of resentment and restlessness, Melanesian violence was posited as a fundamental and biological “savage” trait.12 In her discussion of 1880s Queensland plantation violence, Tracey Banivanua-Mar (2007) observes that “Melanesian violence … was seen to be located deep within Islanders’ racial programming, and in inquiries into the most serious of violent incidents, motive was frequently subsumed by reference to innate characteristics” (151). Samoan newspapers relied on the same essentializing discourse by implying that Melanesians were indiscriminate in their choice of victims and became “desperate through jealousy or ill-treatment, and … under their temporary fit of madness, slaughter any person they meet, black or white” (Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 12 July 1890). The Melanesian regression to blood-thirsty “madness” is reiterated in an article describing opposing factions of workers: “one party attacked another and killed three of them in the most brutal manner, cutting their throat, cutting off their limbs and disemboweling them” (Samoa Weekly Herald, 8 December 1894).
The workers’ hyperbolic violence disrupts the ostensibly rational setting of the colonial plantation . A particularly shocking case involved the discovery of the remains of an old plantation worker named Taro: “the bones of the body were almost bare with the exception of the left arm which was considerably shrunk up, and the head lying several yards away.” Upon examining Taro’s remains, Apia’s German doctors, Dr. Stuebel and Dr. Funk, speculated that Taro had been decapitated “by some sharp instrument”; however, they could not understand how his “flesh disappeared from the bones within the short period of four or five days.” If the colonial doctors were befuddled by Taro’s remains, the locals were not. The report remarks that the nearby community insisted that either Taro was “eaten by some of the escaped black fellows from the German plantations” or that Taro’s companions were themselves the “murderers and cannibals” (Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 26 April 1890). Taro’s death suggests a perversion of plantation labor: the skinning of his flesh evokes the husking of a coconut in the production of copra and the “sharp instrument” that decapitated him was, in all likelihood, a farming instrument. In this case, bodily desecration and cannibalism reveal the inherent violence of the plantation system, and the shift of the object of violence—from coconut to human body—exposes the total dehumanization of everyone implicated in the plantation culture.
According to colonial logic, the violence of plantation overseers was a necessary requirement for the disciplining of “primitive” bodies, while the violence that resulted from such excesses was perceived as the laborers’ regression to animalism. In fact, violence and dispossession begat violence and dispossession. While the newspaper accounts underscore the intersection between corporal punishment and discursive violence, they obscure the inescapable brutality of the plantation system. Melanesian and Samoan “counter-violence” is recast as the natural traits of “savages” rather than the logical response and consequence of a system predicated on violence.13
Like Sāmoa’s colonial newspapers, Stevenson’s writings identify the ever-lurking threat of plantation violence; however, his writings also offer an alternative depiction of Melanesian laborers. According to one biographer, Stevenson not only “befriended” laborers but also helped them “whenever their paths crossed” (McKenzie 1979, 162–163). Regardless of Stevenson’s true feelings about them, he recognized their literary potential; in fact, the system of organized labor gave him privileged access to a race of supposed “cannibals” who, he claimed in a January 1892 letter, “cook and eat men’s flesh,” are “ugly as sin,” and are “shabby and small … like sick monkeys” (Letters, 7: 227). Stevenson’s degrading portrayal of laborers echoes a leitmotif in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writing that depicted Melanesians as bestial. In Sāmoa, Stevenson came face to face with the embodiment of a literary trope.14
As he walks up and down the side of the road, Stevenson narrates the visual spectacle of the exotic and strangely attired “black boys” by identifying an array of curios. The passage highlights the way in which organized labor functions as a framing device: the laborers are spatially organized in rows and “squads of two” and become accessible to the planter’s gaze. Among Sāmoa’s “black boys,” however, some were more interesting than others: the “thralls, many of them wild negritos from the West, have taken to the bush, harbour there in a state partly bestial. … Further in the bush, huts, small patches of cultivation and smoking ovens have been found by hunters” (FH, 16).many of the boys had a very queer substitute for a pocket. This was nothing more than a string which some of them tied about their upper arms and some about their necks, and in which they stuck their clay pipes … some had feathers stuck in their hair, and some long stalks of grass stuck through the holes in their noses. (Letters, 7: 427–28)
The fugitives were both “wild” and capable of domestication: they establish a makeshift civilization by growing “small patches of cultivation,” constructing “little shed[s],” and planting “little gardens.” Not only is their means of existence “small” and “little” but their vegetarian diet contrasts with the tired trope of flesh-eating. In addition to their diminished existence, the runaway “black boys” live in complete isolation. “I do not think,” laments Stevenson in a melodramatic tone, that “there can be anywhere in the world people more wretched than these runaways. They cannot return, for they would only return to be punished. They can never hope to see again their own land or their own people” (Letters, 7: 370). Although the runaways adapt to their new circumstances by mimicking the markers of settlement—they build homes and cultivate the land—their status is that of unwanted and unclaimed refugees.[B]lack boys sometimes run away from the plantations, and live behind alone in the forest, building little sheds to protect them from the rain, and sometimes planting little gardens of food, but for the most part living the best they can upon the nuts of the trees and yams that they dig with their hands out of the earth. (Letters, 7: 370)
The pathetic portrait of the “black boy” refugee veers again toward melodrama in an 1892 letter in which Stevenson retells the sudden and tragic appearance of two young runaways who arrive on his doorstep seeking shelter. The first “poor rogue” shows him the “marks on his back” and a second boy pleads for compassion. Although he cannot bear to turn the boys back “into the drenching forest” he is unable to “reason with them, for they had not enough English, and not one of our boys spoke their tongue.” Instead, he offers them food and shelter for the night and concludes that “tomorrow I must do what the Lord shall bid me” (Letters 7: 241–42). Here, the reader assumes that Stevenson will turn the boys in to the authorities. The scene’s heightened pathos, compounded by the sheer onslaught of human violence (the whip “marks”) and elemental forces (the “drenching” rain) culminates in the insurmountable barrage of language: Stevenson’s compassion remains unspoken and the boys, in turn, cannot articulate their grievances. Stevenson’s melodramatic depiction of runaways as the uprooted and marginalized victims of the system of indenture effectively subverts colonial discourse: he stresses a fundamental humanity—shelter and protection, the longing for one’s homeland and people—rather than absolute difference.
3
Stevenson’s humanitarian rhetoric undergoes a radical shift when he depicts the fugitives from the Samoan perspective. Indeed, the myth of “the ignoble Melanesian savage” is not only present in the European imagination but also in “Pacific Islander minds” and is “reflected in the languages, perceptions, and relationships among Pacific Islanders” (Kabutaulaka 2015, 122). Tarcisius Kabutaulaka (2015) gives the example of the Samoan phrase “mea uli,” which is used to describe darker-skinned Melanesians: “Uli is the word for ‘black,’ and one of the most common meanings of mea is ‘thing.’ Hence, one could argue that the use of the term mea uli … reduces him or her to a ‘thing’” (122).
While Kabutaulaka focuses on Pacific Islanders’ current perception of Melanesians, his observations belong to the history of nineteenth-century representations of the “true savage” (Brawley and Dixon 2015, 59). Nineteenth-century Samoan prejudices were largely influenced by European missionary teachings. The “literal scriptural interpretation of human history” (Samson 2001, 112) included the biblical parable of Noah’s curse upon Ham’s descendants, the Canaanites, as an etiological explanation for black skin and slavery. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European missionaries identified the consequences of Noah’s curse among the populations of Melanesia. For example, in 1890 the Scottish missionary John Inglis wrote that in Vanuatu “we see this curse lying in all its crushing weight. The Papuans, the poor descendants of Ham, are lying in the lowest state of degradation” (10). Samoans, as lighter-skinned Polynesians, were spared such intense racialized condemnation and generally embraced the teachings of the Old Testament. Based on the history of encounter between Samoan missionaries in Melanesia, Sione Latukefu (1996) argues that Samoans “had no doubt whatsoever of their physical, mental, and cultural superiority to the Melanesians” and adds that Samoans “tended to look down on others, particularly the Papua New Guineans and Solomon Islanders” (28). Meleiseā (1987) confirms that Samoans “had been taught to despise them as inferiors by the colonial authorities and by Samoan missionaries” (111). In the plantation context, the Samoan discourse of “cultural superiority” was reinforced “by the menial work performed by Melanesians on the plantations” (Steinmetz 2008, 306).
Stevenson’s rhetorical flourishes lend this case of desertion an air of romance. For the novelist, the laborers are more than runaways; in fact, they are “melancholy warriors” who defend their freedom to the death and rise above the miserable conditions of the plantations. The romantic slave heroes and the alleged kidnapping of a Samoan virgin reappear in A Footnote to History where Stevenson observes that it is one of the numerous “tales that run the country” that makes “the natives shudder about the evening fire” (16).At the time of their landing, the refugees had a leader, a man from the Gilberts of great stature and courage; as long as he lived, they maintained a fierce front and raided the inhabited lowlands; but so soon as he was shot down, in the act of carrying off the maid of a village, the survivors shrank into the forest. There, in the rains, in the rude thickets, they await age and death. Stress of hunger occasionally goads them from their woods to steal bananas; in all else, since the death of the Gilbert Islander, they are quite harmless; but the fear of them is not the least abated. (Beinecke, GEN MSS. 664, 996–997)
In both passages, Samoan rumor is akin to the stuff of ghost stories: stories about the “occasional disappearances and the occasional discovery of bones” generate “in the minds of the [Samoan], a profound terror of these black skinned and cannibal alien refugees” (Beinecke, GEN MSS. 664, 996–997). Stevenson’s fascination for local gossip resonates with a column from the Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, which observes that “there was a report current that a dead labour boy had been discovered in a swamp at the back of Vaiala. We can obtain no reliable information on the point; having its origin perhaps in the death of certain black boys at Malifanua lately. Samoans have a lively imagination” (15 December 1894). Here, oral culture, in the form of “a canard” (Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 15 December 1894), replaces the authority of colonial knowledge: with no discernible source of origin, rumor and personal narratives spread and become indistinguishable from folktales. In fact, the wild and irrepressible rumors about runaways who raid villages to kidnap and eat men, children, and virgins are so pervasive that they penetrate into Samoan folktales and prevent people from sleeping at night lest they be taken and eaten (Letters 7: 227; 370–371). The fear in some Samoans’ minds of these runaways may have stemmed from a combination of missionary teachings—as mentioned previously—and of Samoan beliefs that forests were places inhabited by aitu (spirits or ghosts).hate and fear them because they are cannibals, sit and tell tales of them about their lamps at night in their own comfortable houses, and are sometimes afraid to lie down to sleep if they think there is a lurking black boy in the neighbourhood. (Letters, 7: 371)
As the Samoan proverb e a‘oloa le vao (be careful the forest is haunted) suggests, the bush was a place to avoid because it was the haunt of aitu. In pre-Christian Samoan religion, aitu were ancestral spirits who existed in a spirit world whence they could return—in the form of animals or natural phenomena—to interfere in the lives of their descendants (Meleiseā and Meleiseā 1987, 35–36). Although the extent to which the nominally Christian Samoans to whom Stevenson spoke truly believed in aitu is impossible to gauge, in present-day Sāmoa, taulesa (traditional healers) continue to play a vital role among certain communities in addressing the physical and physiological injuries caused by mai aitu (ghost sickness). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that Samoans in the 1890s would have believed in their traditional practices, including the existence of aitu. The conflation of runaway laborers and aitu was reinforced by the belief that both Melanesians and the supernatural beings practiced cannibalism and committed acts of extreme violence.15 A selection of traditional Samoan legends recorded by the LMS missionary George Pratt in Some Folk-Songs and Myths from Samoa (1890) and Stevenson’s own notes on Samoan vocabulary refer to the “cannibal aitu from Apolima,” one of the islands in the Samoan archipelago (Beinecke GEN MSS. 664, 6827).
Vailima itself was, according to Fanny, “thronged with devils” (OSA, 86), probably because, a long time ago, the two chiefs who inhabited the land that it was built upon had been cannibals and the “ghosts” of their victims, “not having received proper burial[,] walk to this day” (86). The result was that Lafaele, for instance, was too afraid to go near Fanny’s beloved banana patch since, as Fanny explains, “there are devils everywhere in the bush … but our banana patch is exceptionally cursed with the presence of these demons” (34). Not only Lafaele, but Osbourne and Isobel were afraid to visit the banana patch. As Isobel’s label on her drawing of Vailima indicates, the banana patch, reaching through “dense jungle,” was a place of terror and strange noises.
Several months later, Fanny reports that Vailima’s “stable seems to be the particular abiding place of the devils. I certainly heard very strange noises there at night during the storm” and[i]n the forest, the dead wood is phosphorescent; some nights the whole ground is strewn with it, so that it seems like a grating over hell; doubtless this is one of the things that feed the night fears of the natives; and I am free to confess that in a night of trackless darkness where all else is void, these pallid ignes suppositi have a fantastic appearance, rather bogey even. (OSA, 60)
Emma [a Samoan servant] says the kitchen is as bad as the stable, and worse, for the devils openly appear to her. Every night at about four o’clock a woman with two children comes in to her, demands a cigarette, and then the three intruders lie down beside her and apparently go to sleep. She says too many people have been slain here, too many heads cut off, and that the whole place is thronged with devils. (OSA, 85)
The Stevensons’ preoccupation with aitu was not uncommon among European settlers in Sāmoa. In his 1896 article entitled “Jottings on the Mythology and Spirit-Lore of Old Samoa” the LMS missionary John B. Stair confessed to having “strange and unaccountable” experiences “that I could not understand” and “thinking of them in connection with many statements of the natives I was forced to the conclusion that they were the results of other than ordinary agencies” (50). Stair tells of a period when “[n]ight after night, our sleep … was disturbed by the most uncanny noises.” The missionary concludes after the “most cautious inspection” that the noises could not have been caused by “human agency” (50).
The parallel narrative of aitu and runaway laborers reoccurs when Stevenson, mistaking the sounds of “birds” for those of “runaway blacks,” imagines the presence of a “black boy.” The mistaken nut and birdsong force the author to confess his fear of “black boys” and he launches into a lengthy exposé about the phenomenon of foreign labor, which brings him back, in turn, to the supernatural tales of “women-devils” who are said to inhabit the forest.[A]ll these noises [of nature] make him feel lonely and scared, and he doesn’t quite know what he is scared of. Once when he was just about to cross a river, a blow struck him on the top of his head and knocked him head-foremost down the bank and splash into the water. It was a nut, I fancy, that had fallen from a tree … but at the time he thought it was a black boy. (Letters, 7: 226–27)
Like the aitu that lie in wait for vulnerable victims, Stevenson remarks in “Malaga Tutuila” (Beinecke GEN MSS. 664, 996–997) that during his walks in the bush, predatory “blacks” are forever watching him with their “bright eyes.” Here, the terror of being cannibalized is reimagined as a fear of the supernatural. Sometimes, reports Stevenson to Adelaide Boodle, the runaways become “bad and wild and come down on the villages and steal and kill; and people whisper to each other that some of them have gone back to their horrid old habits, and catch men and women in order to eat them”; likewise, the aitu “go down out of the woods into the villages” to seduce the young “out of their wits … and go mad and die” (Letters, 7: 227–28).
Stevenson’s Gothic narratives of aitu and runaway “black boys” are analogous. The juxtaposition of recent and ongoing cases of plantation fugitives with supernatural accounts of ghosts highlights Stevenson’s Gothic vision of Samoan plantation workers: both are imagined as “Polynesian stories” which are “generally pretty grim” (Letters, 7: 228).16 The spectral threat that permeates Sāmoa’s jungle echoes Stevenson’s remark from A Footnote to History that the German plantations possess the “allurement of a haunted house, for over these empty and silent miles there broods the fear of the negrito cannibal” (20). Stevenson’s Gothic rendering of the plantation with its accompanying ghostly “negrito cannibal” effectively blurs the boundary between the pastoral plantation and the nightmarish jungle: the vulnerability of Germany’s all-powerful colonial machine is exposed by the “negrito cannibal” who penetrates the plantation.
Prior to European settlement, Sāmoa’s forests were imagined as the haunts of ghostly aitu. With the importation of Melanesian workers and the syncretic Christian/Samoan understanding of Melanesians as “savages” and descendants of the “race of Ham,” the plantation system on Sāmoa infested the land with new ghosts—runaway Melanesian workers—whose presence accompanied Samoan dispossession and the other effects of colonization and settlement. For Stevenson, however, the Melanesina-cum-aitu was a visceral source of actual fear, and provocative raw material for Gothic romance.
4
The reporter adds that “in case of no such chance coming in their way, they would kill and eat the weakest of their number” (24 January 1891).for many years there have been from 40 to 90 escaped laborers from German plantations living as they can in the bush, and as these people in their own country look upon human flesh as their ordinary food, it is not surprising that when they get an opportunity to kill a man and eat him, they would take it.
The representation of laborers in Apia’s local newspaper articles confirmed, or gave voice to, the suspicions and widespread convictions that plantation laborers were unalterably alien, savage, and dangerous. Fanny alludes to this fact when she reports that a distant Samoan acquaintance “has been eaten by black boys. They are trying to hush it up but I think there is no doubt about the business. At the plantation, where it occurred, they say that they only ate one of themselves, as though the fact of cannibalism going on at our door is of no moment unless some of ourselves are eaten” (OSA, 74). Their complete Otherness, in turn, supported the pervasive rhetoric of the plantation as a site to civilize and modernize a supposedly “savage” and “primitive” people. Runaway laborers represented both an ideological and a physical threat to colonial settlers: by absconding from the plantations, fugitives undermined the civilizing mission and regressed into “savagery” and “cannibalism.”
Such racial ideologies, however, were not fixed, but capable of shifting in form and meaning; Stevenson engaged in a complex rethinking of the prevailing representations of Melanesian Otherness. He understood the figure of the plantation “black boy” in various terms: as the victim of German brutality, as the boogeyman of Samoan nightmares, and as a “savage.” Nowhere was his indeterminacy about the laborer’s identity more evident than in his account of Arrick, a “black boy” who came to live temporarily at Vailima in 1892.
Upon his arrival, Stevenson remarked that Arrick, although malnourished and sickly, possessed an enchanting smile, “the sort that makes you half wish to smile yourself, and half wish to cry” (Letters, 7: 369). The emotional response provoked by Arrick appears to have made him a family favorite. Once the young man had regained some strength he befriended young Austin , Stevenson’s adopted grandson. Together, they built forts and played music on the instrument that Arrick made (Letters, 7: 369). Arrick’s gentleness prompted Stevenson to remark, tongue in cheek, that “of all the dangerous savages in this island Arrick is one of the most dangerous.”
Instead, however, of debunking the trope of the “savage,” Arrick’s presence demanded a sophisticated analysis. For example, while Arrick played his instrument for Austin, Stevenson conjectures that his foreign songs were most “likely all about fighting with his enemies … and killing them, and I am sorry to say cooking them in a ground oven and eating them for supper when the fight is over.” But Arrick could not help being a “savage” since his defining childhood experience of being wounded by a poisoned spear had initiated him into savagery (Letters, 7: 370). He clarified that although “Arrick is really what you call a savage,” a “savage is a very different sort of person in reality, and a very much nicer, from what he is made to appear in little books.” For Stevenson, popular literature—the “little books”—had distorted the “reality” of what savagery actually was and that Arrick, “for all his good nature,” remained a “very savage person” (Letters, 7: 370).17 What exactly Stevenson meant by Arrick being a “savage person” is, of course, impossible to know (needless to say, Stevenson never witnessed Arrick consuming human flesh); however, the question of Arrick’s “savage” identity highlights the slippage between the literary discourse of Otherness and Stevenson’s domestic life with Pacific Islanders. The discrepancies in Stevenson’s remarks about Arrick are reminders that although hard scientific racism emerged during the nineteenth century, racial identities were malleable, subject to manipulation and modification, especially in particular circumstances.
[John Davis group of family and household on Vailima verandah] (Album LSH 151/91)
Leonard Bell (2002) compares the portrait to a “tableau vivant” where the verandah functions like a stage and the sitters are carefully posed holding props (99). Building on Bell’s close reading of the image as a performance intended to showcase, albeit unsuccessfully, the Vailima household as a “stable, cohesive group” (99), I focus on the figure of Arrick. If, as Bell argues, several of the sitters seem to be “performing a kind of charade” (100)—for instance, Osbourne seems to be “ham acting” (100) the role of plantation manager and Strong’s parrot instantly evokes Long John Silver’s own parrot—then what role is Arrick playing? Certainly, there is a disjunction between the caption’s claim that he is a “cannibal ” and his appearance. In fact, Arrick is far from appearing as the most “savage” or threatening native figure in the portrait (after all it is Tomasi who wields an axe); nor does his skin look particularly darker—a key marker of ideological difference between Melanesians and Polynesians—than that of the Samoan staff. Moreover, as the “pantry man,” Arrick appears comfortably ensconced in the domestic sphere; Arrick is figured as a sort of domestic cannibal or, in other words, as a banal feature of household life on the imperial fringe. Cannibalism has migrated from the haunted Samoan bush to feature in the Stevensons’ own domestic melodrama.
Arrick, however, also seems to be outside what one might call the circle of performance (delineated by Tomasi on the far right and by Strong on the far left).20 No one is directly seated to Arrick’s right, and Elena (on his left) is looking away from him. While he may be flanked by performers, Arrick does not appear to be acting the prescribed role of “black boy cannibal”: his shoulders fold inward (is he meek? bored?) and his hands are clasped together in his lap. Through his indifferent posture, Arrick resists playing the role of the “cannibal” and in doing so recalls my discussion in Chap. 1 of the Marquesan monarch Vaekehu and her son Stanislao. In that context, Stevenson explained that he relied on the term “savage” because of Stanislao’s attempt to preempt “a taunt that he had heard too often” (ISS, 59). The question, then, is whether Arrick’s caption (“cannibal”) carries the same subversive sense as Stanislao’s phrase “we savages.” Does Stevenson desire Arrick to adopt the role of “cannibal” to exorcise the stigma of colonial discourse? Is Stevenson negotiating between what he conceives as an authentic cannibal identity and a discursive savage identity that is evinced by the “little books”? To be sure, there are important social and political differences between Stanislao and Arrick, and there is no evidence to suggest that Arrick was aware of, or a participant in, Stevenson’s cannibal charade. The possibility remains, however, that Stevenson’s way of elevating Arrick out of the colonial discourse of savagery was, paradoxically, to recover the identity of the “cannibal savage.”
* * *
While Stevenson may have decried the abuses of the labor trade in the Pacific and, more specifically, German brutality in Sāmoa, his personal interests relied on an ideological flexibility that legitimated his own participation in a colonial system of exploitation. His writings evoke the potential of Melanesian laborers to become a civilized people if they are treated benignly. Repeatedly, he depicts laborers as existing in an early, primitive stage of progress: runaways can survive in the bush but they are always at risk of killing one another, and Arrick may possess the ability to construct and play an instrument although he can only sing of cannibalism. Unlike the colonial plantations “in Queensland, Fiji, New Caledonia and Hawaii,” where the “labour traffic” has “been either suppressed or placed under close public supervision” (FH, 15), German plantation owners not only failed to promote their laborers’ moral development but also exacerbated their savage tendencies by driving them into the literal and moral darkness of Sāmoa’s bush. In the context of the colonial plantation system, Vailima emerges as an eccentric site in which local folklore and colonial exploitation cannot be disentangled. The presence of aitu, like that of the “black boys,” provided the Stevensons with the frisson of the Gothic, but the family also constructed Vailima to be a site free of the haunted past—and present. The early photographs of the estate and Isobel’s sketch frame Vailima as wild, untamed, and dangerously Other. Yet, as Stevenson reminds Henry James in a letter from 29 December 1890, Vailima was never empty: as he worked, the author was surrounded by the “sounds of men, beyond those of our own labourers … the conch-shell calling the labour boys on the German plantations” (Letters, 7: 65).