Pacific portraits; Robert Louis Stevenson

Pacific portraits radio sketches of men and women whose lives illustrate times and places south of the equator in the Pacific. Seeking health Robert Lewis Stevenson came to the Pacific in 1888. After 20 months in the South seas he had plumbed its paradoxes as completely as any white man could. The 19th century exists in the Pacific only in spots. All round it is a no man's land of the ages. A stir about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes. The Pacific is a strange place. Robert Lewis Stevenson Program 7, a series of Pacific portraits produced by Radio Station

WHO of the University of Wisconsin under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center in cooperation with the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. Now speaking to you from Auckland New Zealand, here is the planner and writer of this series, Professor John Reed. In earlier programs in this series we watched the white man bring to the Pacific his vices and his virtues, his greed and his idealism. At this stage we paused to consider how matters stood between the white men or pucky hars and brown men on the threshold of the 20th century, 130 years after Captain Cook opened the doors of the southern ocean. And there are no better eyes to which we can look than those of Robert Lewis Stevenson, that sensitive observer who came to end his days in the Pacific at a critical time in its history. The ocean had become

an arena for underclared war between the great powers. The pucky hars had undermined the native's traditional patterns of living. In the breakdown of tribal life, the porn shifting powers saw the chance to extend their influence. Tribe was set against tribe as instruments of policy. Little was known of this in Europe, but when the fine sensibility of a great novelist responded to the Pacific, the results were not only piercing analysis of its problems, but a formidable contribution to the reshaping of European attitudes towards the islanders. And at the same time, that sensibility itself matured. The sensibility of the last great romantic, Robert Lewis Stevenson, we have drawn upon his own books and letters, but what you are now to hear. Stevenson was 38 years old when his greatest adventure began, his life in the South Seas.

He had managed to write in Traveille the books which carried his name around the world, travels with a donkey, jekyll and hide, treasure island. Yet in his middle 30s, his sands seemed to have run out. I believed that I was come to the afterpiece of life and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect. Stevenson resolved in 1888 to seek strength and a more active life in the South Seas. His books had been his vicarious adventures. Perhaps the Pacific could translate them into reality. For 14 years, I have not had a day's real health. I have awakened sick and gone to bed weary. I have written in bed and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in coughing, written when my head swam for sickness. I was made for a contest and the powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy in glorious one of the bed and the physics bottle. In a mood then more resigned than hopeful,

Stevenson ventured out from San Francisco in a chartered schooner, the casco. The goal he told himself was health, but in his heart he knew it was something else as well. A quest for the deep mature Stevenson so far hidden under self-conscious tushery. What he did not expect to find was a quite new physical world in whose destiny he would play a not-important part. With him was his American wife, Fanny. The first South Sea island we saw was Nukahiva in the Marquesis, the island which had been the scene of Herman Melville's adventures with the cannibals of Taipei. This mere speck in an immensity of water aroused all Louis's awe and wonder. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island are memories apart. They touch a virginity of sense. At his first staggering ecstatic Pacific landfall, Stevenson knew that in these waters he was destined

to die. Yet his eyes were too sharp for romantic mists to veil them for long. He soon realized that for all the Pacific's physical beauty, all was far from well underneath. Wherever the white man's hand had grasped at the islands, germs had bred in the smear. The tribe of Heppa numbered 400 when the smallpox came and reduced them by one-fourth. Six months later, a woman developed tuberculosis, the disease spread like a fire through the valley, and in less than a year, two survivors, a man and a woman fled from that new created solitude. Today everywhere we find the races perishing like flies, where there have been fewest changes there the race survives, where there have been most varied perishes. The Marquesisn beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race, the thought of death sits down with him to meet and rises with him from his bed. He lives and

breathes under the shadow of a mortality offer to support. The Romantic novelist was beginning to be drawn into the complex problems of colonization, to sense the pangs of hurtful adaptation. His deepest instincts were challenged by the sight of primitive peoples undergoing a basic cultural transformation. Yet, he recognized that such changes could not be halted. We had been but three days in a naho when we received the visit of the chief of Hatahel, a man of weight and fame. Not many years have he lapsed since he was seen striding across the beach, a dead man's leg over his shoulder. So does Koamua, to his enemies, he roared to the passers-by and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, paying us a visit in European clothes, his manners were genial and decisive, his face rugged, astute, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone's. With Stevenson alternately excited and thoughtful, running about the

decks in bare feet and trousers, the casco swung on its long voyage to the Paumotus or the low archipelago. And all the time his mind grappled with a pathos of the disparity between the beauty of the islands and the degeneracy of their inhabitants. On the one hand- Lost in the blue sea and sky, a ring of white beach, green underwood and tossing palms, gem-like in color, of a fairy, of a heavenly prettiness. And on the other hand- Commerce, like politics, here shows its ugly side. Close at the white man's elbow, in all this contention, stands the native looking on. Like a child he observes, apprehends, misapprehends. He looks on at the rude career of the dollar hunt and wonders. Meanwhile, the rigors of the voyage began to tell on him. Lewis has been terribly ill since we left Fakarava. A few days ago, he sent for the captain and gave orders about his burial and about the ship and charter, in case he died. The dreadful fatal hemorrhage did not appear.

So on to Tahiti and Hawaii, where Stevenson waged a war on two fronts, against the disease and against his growing sense of desolation. He made friends with King Calakakua, who initiated him into the tangled politics of the south seas. But still, he had not found his center. The wanderlust drove him farther afield, this time to the Gilbert's. We met lepers, we met beach comers, we met chiefs in pajamas, their consorts in hula skirts. We dined with suspected murderers. We exchanged signs with happy brown ladies, smoking corn cob pipes. We rubbed shoulders with white men who had become totes to petty chieftains. We saw fine-bodied men with flowers in their hair, laughing naked children, bearded missionaries in yellow boots and faded helmets. We basked in the sun, and ate such food as we never dreamed existed. One afternoon, in the Gilbert's, the Stevenson's encountered the most colorful of all

the Pacific characters, the ruthless King Tembinok, whom only British warships kept from being the Napoleon of the Gilbert's. In this ripe personality, was incarnated the conflicting cultures of the Pacific, whose dialectic Lewis was slowly mastery. A beaked profile like Dante's in the mask, a mane of long black hair, the eye brilliant, imperious and inquiring. His voice was shrill, powerful and uncanny, with a note like a sea bird's. Now he wears a woman's frock, now a naval uniform, now figures in a masquerade costume of his own design, trousers and a singular jacket with shirt-tails, sometimes green velvet, sometimes cardinal red silk, in the woman's frock he looks ominous and weird beyond belief. A figure out of Hoffman. He is a thorough tyrant, very much a gentleman, a poet, a musician, a historian. His description of one of his own songs, which he sang to me himself, as about sweethearts and trees and the sea, and no true,

all the same lie, that seems about as compendious a definition of lyric poetry as a man could ask. In Tembinok, Stevenson first came to grips with a curious mixture of sophisticate and savage, of child and adult, which he was reveal in the native characters in his specific stories. The king is greedy of things new and foreign. The palace is already crammed with cloaks, musical boxes, blue spectacles, umbrellas, midded waskets, tools, rifles, medicine, sewing machines, and what is more extraordinary, stoves. Still his lust is unabated. He took a fancy to my wife's dressing bag, battered by years of service. I told him, I sold nothing, whereupon he drew out a bag of sovereigns and began to lay them, one by one, in silence, on the table. In vain, I continued to protest, I was no trader. There must have been 20 pounds on the table,

when a happy idea came to our delivery. Since his majesty thought so much of the bag, we said, we must beg him to accept it as a present. It was the most surprising turn in Tembinok's experience. He hung his head a while in silence, and then lifting up a sheepish countenance, I shamed, said the tyrant. After 20 months in the south seas, Lewis had plumbed its paradoxes as completely as any white man could. The Pacific is a strange place. The 19th century exists here only in spots. All round, it is a no man's land of the ages. A stir about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes. His character ripened like wheat in the tropic sun. Always a changeling, he buried under Pacific skies, the gifted boy, the well-that-jacketed Bohemian genius. The smell of men, the vigor which gleamed in some natives like embers and a fading

fire, the cruelty and tenderness, the violence and the courtesy of the Polynesians, drove a stiffening rod of experience through his writing. So at length he made landfall at his last home, Samoa, for one of the happier races dwelt. Here he purchased 400 acres of heavy high bush on a mountain shelf. The place is beautiful beyond dreams. Some 50 miles of the Pacific spread in front, deep woods all round. A mountain making in the sky, a profile of huge trees upon our left, about us the little island of our clearing, studded with brave old gentlemen whom we have spared. They are really majestic trees, creepers winding about the trunks and orchids growing in the forks of their branches. They are alive with birds, who chatter night and morning with rich, throaty voices. Perhaps for the first time in his adult life Lewis was fully happy, planning, drawing designs for his house and supervising the friendly native boys. The Samoans are easy,

merry, pleasure-loving, chased and temperate. They are God's best, at least God's sweetest works. Fine dress is a passion and makes us Samoa and festivity a thing of beauty. The song is almost ceaseless. The boatman sings at the ore, the family at evening worship, the girls at night in the guesthouse, the workman at his toil, fishing the daily bath, flirtation, courtship, which is gone upon by proxy. The delights of public oratory, conversation which is largely political, all fill in the long hours. Conversation which is largely political. As Stevenson established himself as a benevolent Samoa and feudal lord, he became aware that these happy islands lay under the grim shadow of power politics. The seven sleepers of Polynesia stand in the midst of the century of competition. And the island races, comparable to a shop full of crockery, launched upon the stream of time,

now make their desperate journey among pots of brass and adamant. Here is a distracted archipelago of children, set upon by a clique of fools. The tribal system of Samoa was based upon allegiance to chiefs holding names granted to Abelman by groups of villages. This defied attempts at Western centralization, but gave great scope to the powers wishing to stir up dissension. I tell you something will have to be done about the Germans. They're pulling strings everywhere, playing politics through all the Pacific islands. Our American arrogance is beyond belief. We have treated and cultivated these islands. We have brought work and security to the sheepless nations. We know what is best for them, both the Germans and the Americans go too far. After all, it was the British who first realized the possibilities of the Pacific islands and now to begin.

I was vice consul in Samoa in 1889 and will never forget the tragedy of March. Things had come to a head between the powers and it seemed that a shooting war was about to break out. We in Apia were sick with apprehension as we watched the warships lined up in the bay. Three Germans, the Adler, the Aeber and the Olga, three Americans, the Nipsik, the Vandalia and the Trenton and one British, the Calapi. Unshore, two groups of partisan natives contented for supremacy. It was a powder magazine ripe for exploding, but none of us expected what did happen. The terrible hurricane, which Robert Louis Stevenson described so vividly in his footnote to history. At daybreak, a hurricane blew straight up the harbor mouth. Seas that might have awakened terror in the Atlantic, ranged without diminution into the belly of the flask-shaped harbor.

At daylight, the Trenton still held her position in the bottleneck, but three ships had already been in collision. Then the Aeber had struck the front of the coral and went down stern foremost into the gaping hollow of the reef. Of her complement of nearly 80 only four survived. By seven, the Nipsik beached upon a space of sand where she was immediately deserted by her crew. By eight, it was the turn of the Adler. The ship was lifted by the huge seas and cast upon the summit of the reef. The hurricane was merciless as if nature were imposing her own sanction of wind and wave. When it died down, an almost unparalleled scene of devastation was revealed. The Adler, high, dry and wrecked. The Olga and Nipsik beached. The Trenton partly piled on the Vandelia and herself sunk to the gondack, no sail afloat. And the beach piled high with a debris of ships.

Within a single day, the sword arms of the two angry powers were broken. Their formidable ships reduced to junk. Both paused a gas. Both had time to recognize that not the whole Samoan archipelago was worth the loss in men and costly ships already suffered. The hurricane of March 16th, thus made a marking epoch in world history. Directly, it brought about the Congress of Berlin. Indirectly, it founded the modern navy of the United States. To the present day, the wrecked German Adler holds together in apia above high water. Out of this act of God came the Treaty of Berlin. And out of the treaty came a tripartate agreement to govern Samoa jointly. Stevenson speedily became a power in the archipelago. Tussi Tala, chief white information, the natives called him, counselor as well as storyteller.

In his footnote to history, RLS produced a classic document on Pacific politics which also pointed away to the solution of Samoan problems. But the ears of officialdom were plugged. In 1893, Matta Afer, a deposed chieftain, provoked beyond endurance, rebelled against the German appointed native king. Stevenson wrote to Mark Twain. War has broken out. They have been long making it. And here it is with its concomitants of blackened faces, severed heads and men dying in hospital. The government troops have started a horrid novelty, taking women's heads. He arranged use of the up here public hall as a hospital. He and Fanny assisted long hours at operations on the wounded. The war was bloody, but brief. Matta Afer is routed. His own son was killed with a hatchet, and the son's wife, whose head was one of those brought into the government. Depression and gloom lies all over the town.

I think the victors are shocked at having killed so many of their friends. This war is the war of the three consuls, where I, as Simone, and I would, and I believe successfully, agitate for a massacre of the whites. With the triumph of the German's puppet, Stevenson made himself patron of the imprisoned chiefs, to whom he sent food and clothing, and whose welfare he guarded carefully. At Christmas, 1893, a feast of thanks was given in his honor in the up here jail itself. About 18 chiefs, gorgeously arrayed, stood up to greet us. When we went into the other house to eat, we found we were seated alternately with chiefs about the floor. Dinner over, our ila gave us the presence, a pieces of tapa, fans of every shade and color, a kava cup, and so on. He called me their only friend, and said that as they had no money, all the presence had been made by the hands of their families. No such feast was ever made for a single family, and no such present ever given to a single white man. When released, the Simone showed their gratitude further by building a road from the main highway

to Stevenson's house, Vailema. The road of the loving heart, they called it, and a board was erected which said, considering the great love of his excellency to sitala in his loving care for us in our tribulation in the prison, we have made this great gift. It shall never be muddy. It shall go on forever. Our LS had found the fullness of his personality among the warm-hearted Simone's. Not by trying to become a native, but by understanding them through love. In Simone, he abandoned his egocentricity, living vitally at the center of a family and servants dependent on him for a livelihood, weaving with his own hands a new pattern of pacific life. He was now able to divorce his personality from his work, to jettison merely decorative fiction. The Simone years were years of great productivity. Here at the summit of his achievement, he wrote almost a million printed words.

He had four books, all excitedly on the boil, on December 3, 1894. At six o'clock, he was helping make a mayonnaise sauce. When suddenly he put both hands to his head and said, oh, what a pain. And then added, do I look strange? I was there in a minute, but he was unconscious when I reached his side and remained so for two hours until all was over. He was lifted onto a bed in the hall. The boys gathered about him. And the chiefs arrived with fine maps, which they laid over the bed. It was very touching when they came in bowing and said, tolo, to setala. And after kissing him and saying tolo, to setala, sleep to setala, went out. We do not obey the way that tells the way that it looses us. O Nous ne tomons nكdramatic

F DANIEL ARNAN F 들어�on Ayor En Neptures This wonderful Let us continue to The In contempt In contempt Intrepid The The Intrepid The Intrepid Intrepid The Intrepid Intrepid At forty-four, Robert Blueis Stevenson was dead, not of the dreaded tuberculosis, but of a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by overwork. His Samoan friends kept watch by him, lamenting. I am poor and give nothing this last day. Yet I am not afraid to come and look the last time on my friend's face. We were to see him more till we meet with God. Behold, to Sitala is dead. We were in prison and he came to us. We were sick and he made us well.

We were hungry and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. By morning, Mata Athas men were clearing a switchback path, up Mount Baeah, the highest point of Samoa, or to Sitala had wished to be buried. Strong Samoan shoulders carried the coffin of the difficult slopes. Samoan hands lowered it into his grave. RLS was now completely won with the land he had come to love. Today, Tussitala's tomb looks out at the great ocean. Beside him rests his faithful fanny, who died a decade later. Love them are inscribed his own lines. Here he lies, where he longed to be. Home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter, home from the hill. The great Ark Stevenson traversed from Edinburgh to the south seas, completed the circle of

his destiny, rounded fullness as a man. As a writer too, he had come a long way from the precious self-involved aestheticism of his youth. In learning the real ways of men, white and brown, he who had been a good writer became a great one. Because he brought to the Pacific courage, genius and a powerful will, he won a rich reward where others had found frustration and decay. He who had won fame by writing off the top of his head, died writing from his guts. And here now is Professor Reed to say some closing words.

All the world knows RLS is the brilliant stylist, letter-day romantic, and chronicler of the beginnings of the modern south seas. We of the Pacific remember him too as one who understood the nature of the clash between white men and brown as few have done, as a shrewd, compassionate observer, and as a champion of justice for the natives. All who climbed the mountain where Stevenson sleeps remember that it was because of the foresight and the human understanding of men like him that the Samoans enjoy a peaceful life today and that their islands have become an integral part of the far flung modern Pacific community. Pacific portraits, radio sketches of men and women,

whose lives illustrate times and places south of the equator, in the Pacific Ocean. These programs are produced by radio station WHA of the University of Wisconsin under a grant from the Educational Television and Radio Center. Professor John C. Reed of Auckland University, Auckland New Zealand, is the writer and planner of the series, production by Carl Schmidt, music by Don Vagley. These programs are distributed by the National Association of Educational Broadcasters. This is the National Educational Radio Network.