Under the Wide and Starry Sky

  A few days running, they rode horses over the hills above Apia. Louis was vigorous in the Samoan climate, staying in the saddle for five hours and then, over long dinners and drinks, talking with the trader and his wife, Nimo, about the politics of the place, on which Moors was an expert.

  Impulsively, they decided to buy the property. They authorized Moors to embark on building a cottage where they would live while a larger house was constructed. Fanny calculated that they could sail on to Sydney, get a steamer and return to England, see old friends—what friends were left—collect their possessions, and be back to Samoa in eight months, by September 1890, when the cottage would be done and the house under way.

  Reverend Clarke, a decent, gentle man, appeared excited by the idea that they would be neighbors but clearly felt compelled to tell them the truth about the land. “The locals say your property only has four rivers,” he said regretfully, as if the information might spoil the deal.

  “Close enough,” Fanny said.

  Later she would wonder: What made me think I could make this wild place a home? Then she would remember what she saw the day they bought the land: an orchid growing on a tree limb. It was an exquisite thing, glowing white and tinged with rose and green, perfect in form, flourishing in health, a spot of beauty secretly tucked into ordinary brown bark. That was what she would make Vailima—an unexpected jewel in the Samoan forest.

  CHAPTER 66

  1890

  Cold germs found Louis easily enough in Sydney. Soon he was coughing, and then, for the first time since he fell ill in Tahiti, he was hemorrhaging.

  They had ended their cruise on the Equator dreaming of a return to Europe, if only for a visit. Now even that diminished plan was crushed.

  “You will die if you go back to Britain,” a Sydney doctor told Louis. “You cannot return for any length of time. It’s as simple as that.”

  The news staggered Fanny. She watched Louis struggle bravely to put a good face on it. “There are only a few people in England and one or two in America whom I will truly, truly miss.” After a day or two, though, he could not conceal his despair. “I heard a church bell this morning,” he told her, “and I was back in Swanston, in my grandfather’s country church.” His eyes looked off beyond her, as if he were seeing, just behind her, the old parishioners he once knew. “It was so vivid! I wanted to be there.” He shook his head with sober resignation. “I am going to die in exile. When I return to Scotland, it will be to a grated cell in the Calton Burial Ground.”

  As his fever rose, Fanny saw what had to be done. She went down to the docks, looking for a boat that might take them out to sea while they waited for the cottage to be finished. A maritime strike was under way, and boats were not leaving Sydney. Only one, a copra trading ship called the Janet Nicoll, had a nonunion crew and intended to sail despite the strike. When Fanny inquired about taking passage, she drew a flat no from the shipping company owner, Mr. Henderson, who communicated to her through a representative.

  “I didn’t get a chance to explain myself properly,” Fanny told Louis when she returned from the harbor.

  “Oh, I think the owner got your message clear enough. He doesn’t want us, my dear. The man has his hands full just getting his ship out of port.”

  “I’m going back tomorrow,” she said, “and I’m going to get us on that boat. You can stake your wig on it.”

  The following afternoon, Fanny waited outside Henderson’s office for an interview. When he opened his door, he wore a scowl. “Madam,” he said, “this is a working boat with fifty men. There is no place to put a woman.”

  “I sailed as the only woman on the Equator, sir,” Fanny said. “I have lived the same way the men live. You would not have to make any special accommodations for me. And I can afford the fare, whatever that might be.”

  The man shot her a baleful look that asked, Why my ship?

  “My husband is extremely ill. We have found that he regains his health when he is at sea. Yours is the only ship that will be leaving this harbor, and the sooner my husband gets sea air in his lungs, the better.”

  The owner nearly guffawed. “All the more reason why I cannot take you on, madam. The last thing I am equipped to handle is a sick man.” With that, his head withdrew, and he shut the door.

  Progress, she thought. The man spoke with a Scottish accent. Was there a living Scot who did not feel pride in the accomplishments of a countryman, particularly one as beloved as Louis?

  The next day, she stopped at a bookstore before going again to the Henderson and McFarlane shipping company. When she went in search of Henderson, his assistant informed her he would not see her.

  “Tell him I won’t bother him after today.”

  Some thirty minutes later, Henderson’s harried face peered around the half-opened door. Fanny reached into her satchel and held out to him copies of Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde. The man looked blankly at them.

  “Do you know these books?”

  “Mmm,” he grunted.

  “My husband, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote them. You are Scottish, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know that Mr. Stevenson is a national treasure to your people. To have my husband perish here because he could not get out to sea would be an incredible loss to his countrymen. You could have a hand in saving his life.”

  The man chewed his tobacco furiously.

  “I will not hold you responsible if he dies at sea,” she said, her voice quavering. “This is his only chance. Do you understand?”

  “Wait here,” he said, taking the books she pressed into his hands.

  She paced outside his door. When he returned, he planted himself in the doorway with his arms crossed. “This ship sails with sealed orders. Do you know what that means?”

  “No.”

  “It means you will not be told where we intend to sail. I shall be on the ship, and I can assure you, you will have no say in where we go. We will be out for four months, and during that time, you will receive not a particle of special attention. If you get off the boat at one of our stops and are not on board when we depart, we will not look for you. We will leave you. Do you understand?”

  “I do.” She turned to go but stopped in her tracks. “I forgot to mention. There are three of us, not two. My son is traveling with us.” She hurried out the door and didn’t look back.

  Fanny raced around Sydney buying gifts. She remembered the women she had met already, both native women and the wives of missionaries and traders. She hadn’t encountered one yet who wasn’t starving to have a pretty new garment or decoration. She ended up buying printed fabrics and a box full of artificial flowers to make wreaths. In a dry goods store, she came across a notebook labeled Lett’s Australasian Diary and Almanac, 1890. She needed a proper journal. She bought the Lett’s and wrote her name on the cover. Below it, she wrote in block letters, The Cruise of the Janet Nicoll.

  On this voyage, she intended to keep good notes. Memory was a fickle thing, and Louis counted on the details she pulled out of her journals. But it was more than that. Already they had been at sea for nearly two years. This would be the third and last ship voyage before they settled into the house in Samoa. It was a piece of her life she did not want to lose.

  The following morning, she wrapped Louis in blankets and walked behind as four strong sailors carried him aboard on a gurney. It might have been a funeral procession, with Fanny carrying armfuls of artificial flowers. At one point, a drunk young white man with a rose in his lapel rushed up in an attempt to assist the sailors, but lost his footing and pitched backward off the gangplank into the water, where he flailed around until someone rescued him.

  Fanny opened the porthole in their cabin so Louis could gulp the sea air as the ship departed. An exile he might be, but at least he was alive.

  CHAPTER 67

  Fish striped in vivid hues of orange and white and black swam around his ankles. A crab dotted with brown spots scuttled past his toes. Green finge
rs of sea life with flesh-pink tips waved all around him.

  “Why don’t you come with us?” Fanny called to her husband. She held on to her straw hat with one hand and a bundle of skirt with the other as she climbed out of a canoe.

  “I want to collect a piece of this coral,” he answered. Louis stood calf-deep in the ocean, his pants rolled above his knees, his shirt abandoned on the sand. In the water surrounding him lay an astonishment of coral.

  It was a perfect day, somewhere just south of the equator, on a slender thread of land called Arorai in the Gilbert Islands. They had been at sea in the Janet Nicoll some two months; he knew it was June in the year 1890, but he had lost count of the date and day of the week. He hadn’t any idea of the hour; it would have been a sacrilege to consult a watch. He had hitched a ride to shore in a native’s canoe and was stricken nearly blind by the violent glare of the sun on the water. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the reef was made up of a mass of spherical shapes, each a labyrinthine miracle of squiggling grooves.

  Louis went back to the ship and fetched a hatchet. With the sound of the surf pounding in his ears, he chopped at the coral. He knew no proper names for the exotic objects in this fantasy, but he wanted a piece of it. Through the clear water, he saw the rippled patterns the waves had made on the ocean floor. Was there a single straight line in all of the Pacific? Even the sand bore the mark of nature’s art. Surely Darwin must have dropped his notebook to gasp at the beauty of the Pacific.

  As the morning heat rose, the air singed Louis’s nostrils. He splashed his face to cool off, tasted the briny seawater in his mouth, longed for drinking water. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave this spot.

  The Big Book of the South Seas soaked his brain. Colvin had written to him in Sydney, objecting to his concept for the volume. He was singing the same tune as Fanny, that the book should be in the vein of Travels with a Donkey. The letter left Louis feeling uncomfortably out of tune with the two people he trusted most. Neither seemed to understand that he wasn’t the same man who had written that early book.

  Something had happened over the two years since he and Fanny had left Bournemouth. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was, but he felt himself changed. Physically, to be sure. To function in the world as other men functioned, to no longer view himself as an invalid, was still miraculous to him. He felt more alive than he’d been in a very long time. He was hungry to learn about the world, to be in the world.

  Louis continued hacking at the coral. He felt the muscles in his arms growing sore, yet he kept chopping, curious to see how far the new sap in his limbs would take him. After a time—how long, he wasn’t certain—he saw Fanny and Lloyd returning from the village.

  “What are you doing?” Fanny asked when she got close. She stood in the water next to Louis, her arms laden with necklaces of red seeds and shark’s teeth. “You fool!” she exploded. “You haven’t moved from where we left you this morning.”

  Louis held up the pieces of coral he had managed to dislodge. “Have you ever seen such extraordinary patterns?” he said.

  “How ignorant you are, Louis. That’s common brain coral in your hand. Any schoolboy in San Francisco knows that and will give you specimens.” Fanny was fuming. “You should see yourself—burned to the color of a brick! You’re going to be blistered head to foot.”

  “I saw the letter from Colvin,” she said later when they were alone in their cabin. “I’m glad he agrees with me that it is a bad idea to approach this material in such an impersonal way.”

  “Colvin is doing what Colvin does,” Louis said. “He hates an idea when I present it to him, and then, when the book is a success, he claims he knew it would be all along.”

  “Louis, listen to me. We have seen things that no one else has seen. And to write in an academic way about the South Seas people with only a few personal aneċes is a terrible mistake. You should have seen what Lloyd and I saw on the island today. The people were so colorful. There were women walking around in these little doll hats they’d gotten in trade, and they’d made them into hair ornaments.”

  “I have no desire to cast myself as the witty narrator who tells amusing stories about the quaint characters I encounter in my rambles,” Louis said. “It belittles them, and it cheapens the significance of the tragedy happening to the people here. This material is bigger than I am, and there’s too much at stake. What we are witnessing is the imminent disappearance of ancient traditions. It’s been passed on orally, and if their way of life continues to degenerate, their history will be lost. Not just their history but their wisdom. Somebody needs to document their languages, their rituals and beliefs, to alert the world to what is happening here.”

  “How can you suggest that I would want you to cheapen the material?” She bristled at the idea. The cabin was full of things she’d been collecting, and she threw a pile of rolled tapas aside in order to sit down. “You are the brilliant writer on this journey, and I am a poor second by comparison. But if you choose to ignore the stories of what we’ve experienced, I will tell them. This is our journey, Louis, not just yours.”

  “We are not one person!” he shouted.

  “Have I no voice?”

  “You are free to do as you please.”

  “We wouldn’t even be on this ship if I had not talked our way onto it!” She raised her chin defiantly. “Henry James says I should publish my letters. Well, I assure you I will. Along with my diary from this trip, if need be.”

  He left the stifling compartment in a fury, desperate for fresh air. Up top, he lit a cigarette and watched the fellows working on deck. They were all black sailors, some from the New Hebrides islands, some from the Solomons, and they all spoke surprisingly fluent English. Perhaps they didn’t understand one another’s native tongues; he wasn’t sure. One of them was named Sally Day. Fanny had come into the cabin a week ago to report that she’d overheard another sailor respectfully call him Sarah. They’d had a chuckle over it.

  That was precisely the sort of tidbit she wanted him to include in the Big Book, and he didn’t blame her, it was funny and sweet, but where was the room? The bigger story to tell was about what was happening to men like them from their home. For years, ships piloted by slavers had been “recruiting” native men and carrying them off to distant islands to work as laborers. “Blackbirding,” people called it, as if it were a hunting sport. At best, the workers ended up as indentured servants; at worst, they died in captivity as slaves. “They take my uncle away,” one sailor had told Louis. “Ten years, fifteen … no one see him again.” In their three voyages, Louis and Fanny had come across laborers who had been dumped on far-flung islands after their service, with no hope of making their way home.

  The bigger story was about what commerce was doing to the South Sea islanders. It was enough to hear Fanny mention that she noticed native women on Arorai wearing doll hats; Louis had seen the same phenomenon a hundred times. Yes, it expressed the clever way the native people took the brummagem of the trading ships and found some use for it. But it was an image that sickened him, for it showed how profoundly the influence of foreign things was having on the culture. He was struck by how the ships were creating an appetite among the people for more things. And while the traders collected copra to sell to manufacturers who would turn it into coconut oil and sell it to merchants in Europe and America at considerable profits, the islanders got dolls’ hats.

  I need to tell that story.

  Sometimes he wondered what it all said about human beings. These ships hurrying port to port, this busy moving around of goods in the name of progress and industry. And religion, that must not be forgotten, for it was aboard the ships as well. The South Seas were a wilderness like any other. First came explorers and then a wave of missionaries and traders who brought their brand of enlightenment to the poor savages. Is this what we’ve been evolving toward? Is this the best that the crown of creation can do with his mighty gifts? Is commerce what makes us superior to apes?

 
He was too much of a realist to romanticize the South Sea islanders or demonize the whites who traded with them and lived among them. But as far as he could see, not much good had come of Europeans bringing their notions of civilization. Of the islands they’d visited, it seemed that the ones with the least contact with the outside world had fared best. And in many places, the kanakas, as the natives were called, had been hideously misused by the colonizers.

  Fanny had no claim to be the arbiter of what he wrote and published. He had been pleased enough to see her taking notes so diligently with her journal propped on barrels, on her pillow, on the floor, whenever she had a moment to write. Her notes were useful to him, and her perceptions about the women she’d encountered on this voyage were especially interesting. But her perceptions were not identical to his. Proud as she was of her instincts, they were often flawed.

  Maybe it was the money that worried her. After all, McClure was committed to ten thousand dollars for the fifty-two letters; a piece of their future was riding on that horse. Or maybe she was disappointed because he didn’t want to write about their adventures in a romantic vein. The way he had written Travels with a Donkey. He’d been positively possessed when he wrote that book. It had been an open love letter to her. Was she worried that at fifty, she didn’t look like the woman he’d fallen in love with?

  Her wrinkles didn’t disturb him; they were a map of her amazing life. He loved his wife, though love seemed an inadequate word to contain all the emotion that passed between married people. After fifteen years, shouldn’t disagreeing with Fanny be easier? When they quarreled, he felt as if he were walking barefoot across jagged coral. Shouldn’t their marriage be smooth by now, like a polished stone?

  CHAPTER 68

  Louis ambled through Apia on his horse, Jack. The town was alive with the afternoon noise of children, dogs, and chickens in the fenced yards adjoining the low wood houses. He had spent the past few hours sitting on Moors’s verandah drinking stiff coffee and chewing on local politics. They had a view of the harbor, where an overturned German man-o’-war appeared like a political cartoon titled “Samoan Troubles.” Louis knew enough about recent history to see the wrecked ship as a sad symbol for the mess created in Samoa by Germany, Britain, and the U.S.