Chapter VII: Away to Sunnier Lands (2)

"In reply to your letter to pen any little happenings concerning Mr. R. L. Stevenson while I was with the Stevenson party on board the old _Equator_, I may say that I am very pleased to do so, but I am afraid the results will be meagre, for the length of time I had the pleasure of being with them did not exceed ten weeks. Besides, it is now just twenty-seven years ago. I boarded the _Equator_ while she was among the islands cruising for copra, and in due time we reached Apemama and dropped anchor in the lagoon near the king's boat fleet. Going on shore we found the party hale and much pleased with the ship's arrival. In the evening the king, a fat and clever native, paid a visit and entertained us by telling about his ancestors. On the mother's side they came from a shark, and the father resigned in his favor, as he was not so high a chief as his son, the descendant of the shark.

"Mrs. Stevenson told us she had a garden planted with all kinds of things, but the soil was stubborn and would not yield anything good but cocoanuts; in fact, all the plants seemed to be growing into cocoanut trees. She also told us about her first experience as a medicine man. One day a man came along, sat down, and complained of a severe headache, asking for 'binika,' by which he meant painkiller. The lady thought he meant vinegar, and told him it was useless against a headache, but he persisted. So a generous portion was poured out and handed to him, to be used externally. He received it, smelled it, and suspicion was visible on his countenance, but, being too polite to return it, he swallowed the whole and returned the glass, profusely thanking Mrs. Stevenson. He then rose and left, more sick than when he came.

"The king offered Mrs. Stevenson a sewing-machine, saying he had a houseful of them, and as his arsenal was short of boat anchors he used the sewing-machines as such for his fleet.

"In a few days everything was snug, and we left the moorings to beat through the passage, and from there pointed her head for Maraki. A nice breeze favored us, but gradually it moderated, and as the weary days dragged on a rumor started that there was a Jonah on board. At first we eyed each other with distrust, then it was whispered and at last openly declared that I must be the Jonah. I mildly protested, saying that Mrs. Stevenson was most likely to blame. I told them all sorts of stories to prove that sailors believed that a woman on board would bring bad luck to a ship, but all to no avail. Their idea that the passenger for Maraki was a Jonah had taken firm hold. Worse still, I began to believe it myself, and made up my mind to jump the ship as soon as I had a chance.

"In the meantime we were creeping slowly along until one morning, lo and behold, my island hove in sight. As the sun rose the breeze freshened and I got hilarious. We were drawing nearer our anchorage in good style and could see my station now plainly, and the natives gathering on the beach. I pictured myself already landing amidst their shouts of welcome, when, to my horror--I shudder even now as I pen these lines--the wind died out. I whistled for wind until my lips blistered, but all in vain, for the breeze kept straight up and down. Jonah was at work again. I demanded loudly of the captain to be put on shore, but he only shrugged his shoulders. The argument brought up Mr. Stevenson, who said 'What about that for a boat?' nodding at a certain small deck house. 'It resembles a skiff, and I dare say the trade-room will spare a pair of paddles.' 'The very thing,' said I, and began sharpening my sheath knife to cut the lashings. While I got busy Mrs. Stevenson came to me and I told her what way I was going on shore. 'Why,' she said, 'if you make your appearance in a miserable craft of that kind your reputation on Maraki will be gone forever. Besides they might take you for a Jonah fresh from a whale and turn you right back to sea again. It would be safer to stay on board and make another attempt to reach Maraki, this time via Samoa.' I did not think I was getting quite a square deal, but I stayed. The current had taken us out of sight of land when a strong and fair breeze sprang up and carried us by noon next day to our anchorage in Butaritari lagoon.

"Here the party went ashore, biding the vessel getting ready for sea. In a week we lifted anchor and made for the passage, but the _Equator_ was unwilling to leave. She hung on to a reef, and not until she had parted with her false keel would she push on and gain the open. During the first few weeks we had to beat to the eastward, which brought much calm and rainy weather. Mrs. Stevenson soon found that her berth was not the driest place in the ship. The tropical sun had warped the decks so that the rain found its way into the cabins. So Mrs. Stevenson would emigrate to the galley-way with her couch, and, with the help of an umbrella ingeniously handled, manage to do fairly well for a night's rest.

"One calm morning she called to tell us that sharks were around, and that one of them was wearing the glasses Mr. Osbourne had lost out of a boat at Maraki. Sure enough there were lots of them, and we soon had shark and chain hooks over the side, pulling them in and despatching them quickly and painlessly, but we never caught the one with the glasses on. Mrs. Stevenson said he could probably see a little better than the others. Now it seems that all these sharks stirred the appetite of Mr. Stevenson for shark steak--at least he advocated making a meal of them. Mrs. Stevenson mildly remonstrated, pointing out that it would be gruesome to eat the ancestors of Tembinoka, the man who had sheltered them for weeks. Mr. Stevenson could not see so far back, so the shark steak came on the table, but his wife managed to evade it. At last a breeze sprang up and the sharks took their leave.

"One night it blew stiff and we shortened sail, but with little advantage. The ship capered about till she had her topmast overboard with the jib attached to it. This episode occasioned the composition of the song 'On board the old _Equator_,' by Mrs. Stevenson and Mr. Osbourne, I believe for Mr. Stevenson's birthday. I sang it on that occasion for the first time, and later at Apia at a dinner given for the ship. This was before Mr. Stevenson had given away his birthday,[31] so he was allowed to enjoy it, as did we all. Speeches were made and we drank his health, severally and all together. We felt as happy as any crew on board of a 20,000 tonner."

[Footnote 31: See _The Letters of Robert Louis
Stevenson_, page 279.]

* * * * *

Of this jolly party, gathered together by the _camaraderie_ of the sea, Lloyd Osbourne writes:

"The rousing chorus was sung in unison: 'Captain darling, where has your topmast gone, I pray? Captain darling, where has your topmast gone?' Such things sound foolish years afterwards, but at the time are gay and funny. Now, looking back, it seems as though the incongruity of the party was the funniest thing about it--Louis, my mother, myself, the boyish young Scotch captain, the big Norwegian mate, the Finnish second mate, Rick, a Russian ex-sea-captain, Paul Höflich, Joe Strong the artist, all the very best of friends, who had lived a month together crowded to suffocation, and yet were better friends than ever when they left the ship."

* * * * *

To continue the story of Paul Höflich:

"On the twenty-sixth morning out Mrs. Stevenson called from the deck: 'Come up and see Samoa!' Proudly the vessel cut her way towards the mountainous island covered with dark green forest from peak to beach. We were all struck with its beauty and elated with expectations as to its hidden shadowy secrets. Inside of an hour we dropped anchor in the port of Apia, and a friend came off and took the party on shore. The vessel's stay was five days, and then we up sails and pointed her head for Maraki, to get rid of the last passenger, the Jonah of the voyage. Before our departure Mr. Stevenson gave a dinner, where we gathered for the last time around the hospitable board. Needless to say, I was in love with the island and acquired a piece of land to bring me back for sure.[32]

[Footnote 32: Mr. Höflich returned to Samoa a year or
two later to remain, and was always a valued friend of
the Stevensons.]

"As I look back now I cannot help admiring Mrs. Stevenson for her bravery and endurance in her resolution to remain with her husband. For us men this life was right enough, but for a refined woman it meant great hardship. When Mr. Stevenson, in his birthday speech on board, said with moist eyes that he had never enjoyed a voyage and company so well as ours, Mrs. Stevenson deserved the largest share of that praise. I remember how she took care of him. A doctor in Tahiti, who apprehended his early end, gave his wife a vial of medicine, which she carried sewn in her dress for three years to have it handy. I have a much-prized photograph of her on which she wrote 'Dear Paul. This is to remind you of the days when we were so happy on board of the old _Equator_.' This gives me a sad pleasure in recalling the old times when the South Seas seemed to us so much brighter than now. Civilization is coming to the natives at the rate of geometrical progression, and soon their good qualities will be swept away by greed and false education.

"I have the honor to remain,

Yours faithfully,

P. Höflich."

That the voyage was a rough one is clear from Mr. Stevenson's description in a letter to Sir Sidney Colvin:

"On board the _Equator_, 190 miles off Samoa. We are just nearing the end of our long cruise. Rain, calms, squalls, bang--there's the fore-topmast gone; rain, calms, squalls--away with the staysail; more rain, more calms, more squalls; a prodigious heavy sea all the time, and the _Equator_ staggering and hovering like a swallow in a storm; and the cabin, a great square, crowded with wet human beings, and the rain avalanching on the deck, and the leaks dripping everywhere; Fanny, in the midst of fifteen males, bearing up wonderfully." She rejoiced, nevertheless, that her mother-in-law had not accompanied them on this voyage, with its extreme discomfort and hardship, but adds, "and yet I would do it all over again."

In the early part of December, 1889, they arrived at the Navigator Islands--so called by Bougainville because of the skill with which the natives managed their canoes and sailed them far out to sea--and, as related above by Paul Höflich, dropped anchor in the harbour of Apia. They were not especially attracted to this place at first, the scenery being of a softer and less striking character than that of Tahiti, but as time passed the charm of the place grew upon them more and more, and finally they decided to make it their permanent headquarters between cruises. To this end they bought four hundred acres in the "bush," as the great tropical forests are called, and after making arrangements for the erection of a temporary cabin during their absence, they sailed on the steamer _Lubeck_ for Sydney, with the intention of going on from there for a visit to England.

It was during this stay in Sydney that Mr. Stevenson wrote his famous defense of Father Damien. When he realized that its publication might result in a suit for libel and the loss of all he had in the world, he thought it only right to ask for a vote of the family, for without their concurrence he would not take such a step. The vote was unanimously in favour of the publication. When the pamphlets were ready, his wife, with her son and daughter, set to work addressing them and sending them far and wide. It was certain that he would not appeal in vain in such a matter to his wife, for in their sympathies with the unfortunate and unjustly used they were as one.

Their hopes of going to England, based on the long respite of eighteen months during which Mr. Stevenson had been free from his old trouble, were dashed to the ground by a severe cold caught in Sydney and a return of the hemorrhages. His only chance seemed to lie on the sea--in fact, the doctor said nothing would save him but the South Seas--but when his wife went to the water-front to secure passage she found that, owing to a sailors' strike, only one ship, the _Janet Nichol_, an iron-screw steamer of about six hundred tons, was going out. She went to the owners and asked to be taken, but they refused, on the ground that they didn't want women on board. Nevertheless she went right on, with pitiful persistence, with her preparations, and finally had the sick man carried down to the landing-place and rowed out to the ship. She had won out, but they received her very reluctantly. And such a ship! It must have looked fine, however, to Mrs. Stevenson, after the _Equator_, for she writes: "Think of two bathrooms and only one other passenger besides ourselves, a nice long wide deck to walk on, steam to run away from squalls with, and no flopping about in calms." But when her daughter went on board to see them off she was horrified at the sight of it--black with coal dust, manned by Solomon Island "black boys," and just as they stepped on deck Tin Jack (Jack Buckland[33]) came up the gangway drunk and fell off into the water. It was pandemonium, but very exciting, and in the midst of it Mrs. Stevenson was calmly looking after her husband and keeping up a smiling, courageous face.

[Footnote 33: Tin is the equivalent in the islands for
Mr. Jack Buckland was the living original of Tommy
Haddon in _The Wrecker_.]

As soon as they were at sea Louis recovered, and after stopping off at Apia for a look at their new property, they went the rounds of the "low islands," visiting thirty-three in all. Although they confessed to a certain monotony in these islands, their adventures, of which Mrs. Stevenson kept a regular diary, were many and exciting. These notes were written for her husband's benefit, but as it happened that he made but slight use of them, she prepared them for publication herself in a volume called _The Cruise of the Janet Nichol_. "This diary," she says in her preface, "was written under the most adverse conditions--sometimes on the damp up-turned bottom of a canoe or whale-boat, sometimes when lying face downward on the burning sands of the tropic beach, often in copra sheds in the midst of a pandemonium of noise and confusion, but oftener on board the rolling _Janet_, whose pet name was the _Jumping Jenny_, but never in comfortable surroundings."

It was on this voyage, during which they were well tossed about by the frisky _Janet_, that the ship was set on fire by the spontaneous combustion of some fireworks in one of the cabins. In the midst of the excitement some native sailors were seen by Mrs. Stevenson about to toss overboard a blazing trunk. She stopped them in time and was thankful to discover that she had saved all her husband's manuscripts.

At the end of the cruise, from which his health did not benefit as much as had been hoped, they returned to Sydney, meeting there a reception which, while irritating enough at the time, afterwards afforded them much amusement. They went directly from the ship to the most fashionable hotel, but, not being known there, their queer appearance, with their Tokalu buckets, mats, shells, straw hats, etc., brought upon them a severe snubbing. Then they went to the Oxford, a little old inn on George Street, where they were courteously received and given the whole first floor, without being asked to show their credentials. The next morning every paper in Sydney had their names on the front page, and all the clubs, societies, churches, and schools sent cards to the fine hotel, whose proprietor had to send a messenger three times a day to the Oxford with a basketful of letters for the Stevensons. The proprietor, now aware of what he had done, came in great chagrin to beg them to come back, and offered them the rooms for half price--for nothing--but they refused; and, besides, they were too comfortable at the Oxford to be willing to leave. After that, whenever Mrs. Stevenson went to Sydney she always stayed at the Oxford, for she was always loyal to those who showed her consideration.

During their stay in Sydney at this time Mr. Stevenson was so ill that he was compelled to keep his room, and all thought of a return to England was now definitely abandoned. Plans were set on foot for establishing a permanent residence in Samoa, and while Lloyd Osbourne went to England to bring the furniture from Skerryvore, the Stevensons returned to Apia and camped in a gate lodge on their place until the new house should be built.