Robert Louis Stevenson and German Sāmoa

ABSTRACT

This study revisits the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson on German Sāmoa as a valuable archive for understanding the impact of Western colonialism on the Pacific. It examines Stevenson’s anti-colonial perspectives in writings such as A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), his series of letters to The Times in London (1889–1894), and his private correspondence. Stevenson’s analysis of the impact of the Germans’ militarism and meddlesome officialdom, together with their extensive plantation system and use of unfree labour, also provides an important context for reading contemporary Oceanian writers and artists. The varied creative practices of recovery and remediation deployed by Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel, Yuki Kihara, Michel Tuffery and Tony Brunt, are often inspired by cultural memories of German Sāmoa.

KEYWORDS:

• Robert Louis Stevenson
• German Sāmoa
• pacific
• colonialism
• unfree labour
• cultural memory

Introduction

When you fly into Samoa you can still see the influence of the Germans with the perfectly straight coconut plantations. We are still eating the past. (Michel Tuffery, 2015)¹

Of the three Western powers administering Sāmoa in the nineteenth century – Germany, Britain, and America – the Germans had been there the longest, amassing the lion’s share of profit and power through land alienation, forced labour, and taxation. The Hamburg shipping company, J. C. Godeffroy & Sohn, established in the Sāmoan port of Apia in 1857, later known as the DHPG (Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen-Gesellschaft), was the main driver of the island’s Western administration.² During the American civil war, Godeffroy had quickly expanded trade into plantation agriculture, taking advantage of high cotton prices. Later, since Sāmoans did not perform plantation work for foreigners, it was the DHPG’s recruitment of workers from Micronesia (the Gilbert islands) and later Melanesia (the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon islands) that enabled the switch from cotton to coconuts, and an expansion from an initial 12 acres to estimates of between 60,000–70,000 acres by the mid-to-late 1880s.³ In the years that Robert Louis Stevenson lived in Sāmoa (1889–1894), this land was worked by almost 5000 Melanesian labourers.⁴ This exponential growth in colonisation was facilitated by Godeffroy’s supply of guns and ammunition for “purchase” of land during internal Sāmoan wars between districts and chiefs – wars fomented by the Germans’ pursuit of a native “king” amenable to them, in defiance of Sāmoa’s traditional and complex “unitary system of dispersed power.”⁵ Also, because German plantation managers doubled as consuls in the early decades, gunboats were always at the ready to support business, leading to the simple equation bandied about by frustrated British and American traders that German rule meant Godeffroy rule.⁶

According to Stevenson, whose anti-German writings are the subject of this study, the DHPG (often called simply “the German firm”) was “Gulliver among the Lilliputs,” wielding an immense monopoly through the link between consuls and commerce.⁷ Small independent traders stood little chance against such a formidable combination. This game of “Beggar my Neighbour” was played with high stakes, involving a “cutthroat quarrel” and even risking an “inter-racial war” between Sāmoa’s three Western powers (A Footnote, 16–19). While this did not happen, a war did occur in late 1888 between the Sāmoans and the Germans at Fagali‘i where, remarkably, the Germans were ambushed and defeated on Vailele, one of their largest plantations.⁸ Historian Paul M. Kennedy has argued that this battle marked the “first serious defeat of an advanced white power in the Pacific.”⁹ Stevenson wrote a very full account of the causes and consequences of this battle for the island’s governance in his small book, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892), an account often overlooked in today’s histories of Sāmoa. The battle’s cause was the Germans’ continued pursuit of a centralised “king,” choosing puppets and for an entire decade blocking the legitimate aspirations of the island’s most popular warrior, Mata‘afa Iosefa. That the Germans never forgot their shock defeat can be seen in the monument they built to memorialise their loss of 56 sailors, killed and wounded. Known as the German Monument at Mulinu‘u, there is no record of Sāmoan losses inscribed on it. Instead, this memorial became the destination of all patriotic German parades, carefully preserved throughout the nineteenth century and still conspicuous on the island today.

The renewed interest in the history of German Sāmoa by contemporary writers and artists, many of whom have mixed Sāmoan-German ancestry, makes it timely to revisit Stevenson’s writings about Sāmoa, not least because they provide a rich context for appreciating today’s on-going recovery and remediation of this period of Sāmoa’s colonial history.¹⁰ In his 2015 live performance and video “Siamani Sāmoa” (German Sāmoa), New Zealand/Sāmoan artist Michel Tuffery re-created the Royal Sāmoa Police Band’s daily march to Apia’s Government House, playing German brass band music. The uniforms reflect Sāmoa’s transcultural history, with players dressed below in lavalavas and sandals in contrast to Western short-sleeved shirts and peaked caps above (colonial pith helmets in earlier photographs).¹¹ Once arrived at Government House, and with the Sāmoan flag ascending, the band ceases its imperial boom-pah music and transitions to the hymn-like Sāmoan national anthem. Having only recently discovered his German ancestry, Tuffery is keen to keep alive the memory of Sāmoa’s entangled history. As the epigraph to this essay shows, he understands that German colonial culture is one which descendants still consume today. That this history is nevertheless a puzzle to Tuffery is clear in his remark: “There are a lot of Samoans who don’t even realise they have German ancestry and there are some elderly Samoans who still speak fluent German.”¹²

For the New Zealand journalist Tony Brunt, also of mixed Sāmoan and German descent, there is no puzzle about this colonial past. In his two richly informative e-books “To Walk under Palm Trees”: The Germans in Samoa (2016; 2020), Brunt writes with pride and nostalgia about this history, convinced that the “halcyon afterglow of the industrious Germans still lingers in the islands.”¹³ To keep this warm glow alive he has compiled and annotated numerous colonial photograph albums, all of which present a harmonious image of a community which was not just multiracial, with many Germans taking Sāmoan girlfriends and wives, but richly polyglot, cosmopolitan, and peaceful (Figure 1).¹⁴ Coincidentally, the photograph chosen as the cover for Part 1 of his e-book also features that emblem of empire – a brass band – marching to the German Monument at Mulinu‘u playing an old soldier’s song, “Drei Lilien.” The year is 1932 and the occasion a commemorative service, with remnants of the German community following the band, together with their Sāmoan families (Figure 2).¹⁵

Figure 1. Photo (1895–1897) “Picnic party at Papase’ea Sliding Rocks, outside Apia;” Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Australia, PXE708-4.

Figure 2. Photo (3 July 1932) “Apia Brass Band en route to the newly renovated German monument at Malinu’u;” Klinkmüller Family Collection/T.Brunt.

Albert Wendt, the celebrated Sāmoan-born author, is deeply versed in Sāmoa’s colonial past but, in contrast to Brunt, he is not at all nostalgic about it. His lifelong quest has been to imagine strong new literary forms and cultures arising from an Oceania liberated from the “taint of colonialism.”¹⁶ He is especially negative about the legacy of his own German ancestors, early traders to Sāmoa and the Pacific world. In his poem, “Inside us the Dead” (1976), instead of mobilising family photographs to revive past Pacific cultures, Wendt focusses on a single surviving photograph of his “half-caste” grandfather, “white-suited in a cane chair” and “in love with Bismarck.” Travelling further back in time he imagines his German great-grandfather dreaming of a “copra fortune” while surrendering to the pervasive ideology of the “noble savage.” Arriving too late in the archipelago to amass riches, this forebear fathered a brood of children before fleeing to “a whisky death” on a neighbouring atoll (Inside us the Dead, 10–11). Another profligate German colonist, Heinrich Spinoza, appears in Sia Figiel’s novel Where We Once Belonged (1996), “impregnating” his Sāmoan wife Fayawayaway “sixteen times (plus three other women from the Yacht Club, plus two house-girls)” (Figiel, 81–82). That re-visiting this past is fraught can be seen in Wendt’s reflections on how the self is “a trick of memory … we are the sum of what we remember.” He elaborates this claim with a provocative metaphor: “history has everything to do with memory and remembering; history is the remembered tightrope that stretches across the abyss of all that we have forgotten.”¹⁷ For today’s anti-colonial writers and artists, the act of balancing high up on the tightrope of Pacific history and cultural memory might look like entertainment – a circus trick – but it is also a risky business.

In this study I reveal how Robert Louis Stevenson anticipated the anti-colonial, anti-German outlook of Wendt and others in A Footnote to History (1892) and in numerous letters to The Times, published between 1889 and 1894. In these writings Stevenson unapologetically draws on his celebrity to place the remote archipelago of Sāmoa front and centre on the world stage, chronicling the Sāmoans’ never-ending strife under German plantocratic rule. But while Germany is the main focus of his critique, I will show how Stevenson is more generally scornful of Westerners in the Pacific. In their mission of “de-barbarisation” of the islands, whites in general were guilty of a “progressive de-civilisation” (A Footnote, 82). Stevenson’s exposure of the hollowness of Western claims to superiority, in which the West pales in comparison with the splendid barbarism of the Pacific islanders, involved an analysis of the ideologies and practices of white racial and cultural domination, an exercise which also involved some sharp self-criticism of his own racially-biased blind spots as a self-styled “aristocrat” (Letters, VII, 156).

Sāmoa under German administration

The 1880s was a decade of wars and rumours of war amongst the Sāmoans. That they were becoming increasingly restive under Apia’s German administration was clear by the mid-1880s when fifty high chiefs conspired twice to offer “the supremacy of Sāmoa” to Great Britain (A Footnote, 23). Both invitations were declined. A few years later a plan was hatched by Hawaii’s King Kalakaua and a Sāmoan chief, Laupepa, member of a major descent group, Sā Malietoā, to form a pan-Polynesian confederation, a move designed to bring Sāmoa into the American orbit while bolstering Laupepa’s own party.¹⁸ Even Stevenson thought that this push for an independent Polynesia was foolish, but only because the plan came too late. Western intrusion into the Pacific was already too entrenched. Nevertheless, he was pleased that the very idea of a confederation briefly “encouraged the natives” while it “ruffled permanently the temper of the Germans” (A Footnote, 28). Laupepa was punished for his temerity by a two-year exile on the Marshall Islands, where the DHPG had several trading stations. Further, in the municipality of Apia there was a coup d’état by the German consul who “autocratically” assumed top place, seriously unbalancing the three Western powers (Letters, VII, 251–252). Stevenson settled in Sāmoa with his family in December 1889, a moment of high tension between the three imperial powers, later mockingly dubbed the “Consular Triumvirate” in his letters to The Times (Letters, VIII, 270).

With Laupepa exiled, the Germans meddled yet again in Sāmoa’s chiefly dynasties by installing Tamasese, a puppet leader from the Sā Malietoā’s rival descent group, Sā Tupuā. This chief, described by Stevenson as the Germans’ paradoxical “slave and sovereign” (A Footnote, 30), quickly became unpopular when the Germans extorted large stretches of land from his followers in exchange for rifles and ammunition (Letters, VI, 253). Seizing the opportunity, many who championed Mata‘afa rose up against the German puppet masters at Fagali‘i and, as Sāmoan custom dictated, heads were taken from three of the fallen German sailors, two of which were carried in triumph to Mata‘afa. Stevenson enthused about the underdog’s victory: “all Samoa drew a breath of wonder and delight. The invincible had fallen; the men of the vaunted warships had been met in the field by the braves of Mataafa” (A Footnote, 105). The Germans, incensed by their defeat, and deeply offended by the taking of heads, caused even more internal wars through manipulation of Sāmoan chiefly rivalries. They also made serious accusations against the Americans and the British. Chief of their charges was that the Americans had supplied the Sāmoans with ammunition, ferried into Apia in a British ship. Stevenson conceded the truth of these claims, candidly admitting that both the British and Americans “rejoiced in the result of Fangalii” because they were “notoriously the partizans of Mataafa” (A Footnote, 97, 109).¹⁹ As tensions mounted inexorably towards an international war, a hurricane intervened in March 1889, sweeping away and destroying six gunboats in Apia harbour, three German and three American.

A few months later representatives of the three Western powers travelled to Germany to broker a treaty at what is now known as the Berlin Conference of 1889. No Sāmoans were invited and, to Stevenson’s disgust, no translation was ever made of the treaty document. Composed of “German vanity, English cowardice, and American incuria” (Letters, VIII, 374), the document was also patently contradictory. While professing to recognise “the free right of the natives to elect their chief or king and choose their form of government,” it then declared that the three Western consuls’ nominee must be chosen (A Footnote, 134). With the Germans blocking Mata‘afa’s legitimate claims, he was eventually defeated in a particularly nasty and violent war in the middle of 1893 after which he too was sent into exile, together with thirteen of his chiefly followers. Mata‘afa’s defeat prompted Stevenson to publish anonymously a furious letter in The Samoa Weekly Herald, abhorring Sāmoa’s “fratricidal strife” and ridiculing the treaty document as “the most dismally stupid production of modern diplomacy.”²⁰ No one doubted who its author was. Nor did Stevenson just fume and write. When the Germans brought back Laupepa from exile, to be reinstalled as king, Stevenson convinced him to adopt Mata‘afa as his second-in-command, since both were Sā Malietoā. Broken by his exile, Laupepa agreed; he even offered to abdicate in favour of his deputy. Ending A Footnote with this peace deal, Stevenson appealed to King Wilhelm II to set aside the “stumbling block” of Fagali‘i and rescind the treaty (A Footnote, 155). Neither appeal succeeded and the senseless internal wars continued. The tragedy of this “fratricidal strife” was captured by Stevenson’s story of the Sāmoan warrior who proudly brought in what he thought was an enemy’s head to Mulinu‘u, the traditional seat of the Sāmoan government: “they washed the black paint off, and behold! it was his brother.” Stevenson added: “When I last heard he was sitting in his house, with the head upon his lap, and weeping” (Letters, VIII, 127). Unsurprisingly, Stevenson’s running commentary on Sāmoan affairs, capped off by the publication of A Footnote, led to rumours flying in Apia about his imminent arrest and deportation (Letters, VII, 305, 411, 415–416). Those in positions of authority, such as the President of the Municipality of Apia, Baron Senff von Pilsach and Sāmoa’s Chief Justice, the Swede Conrad Cedercrantz (Letters, VII, 449) moved against him, as did Sāmoa’s British Consul, Thomas Cusack-Smith. The latter was probably the architect of an edict for sedition issued by the British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, a move clearly directed against Stevenson in the interests of Anglo-Germany diplomacy (Letters, VII, 435n).²¹

Stevenson’s anti-German critique

As the “Footnote” of his title suggests, Stevenson pre-empted the dismissive reaction of readers (including family and friends), who were annoyed that he should devote so much time and energy to the history and politics of such a seemingly insignificant, faraway place. Oscar Wilde, for instance, famously joked: “I see that romantic surroundings are the worst possible for a romantic writer. In Gower Street Stevenson could have written a new Trois Mousquetaires. In Sāmoa he wrote letters to The Times about Germans.”²² Stevenson’s American wife, Fanny, was similarly puzzled. While she recognised the importance of dispelling “all the prejudices, and all the mistakes and all the ignorance” of Westerners concerning the South Seas, she fretted that the “stern duty” of the “Scotch Stevenson head” was prioritising vexed questions of race, language and civilisation over highly readable, ready-made adventures inspired by the “enchanting material” all around them (Letters, VI, 303–304). For Stevenson, however, his writings on German misdoings formed part of what he called a serious “big book” on the South Seas. In comparison he rated his most recent novel Catriona (1893) as no more than “a nice little book” which in the end was only “inadequate. Small is the word” (Letters, VIII, 235).²³ The seriousness with which he took his new role can be seen when his close friend and most frequent correspondent, Sidney Colvin, made racist remarks about the Sāmoans. From a prominent British-India family, Colvin scolded Stevenson for his preoccupation with his “beloved blacks – or chocolates – confound them; beloved no doubt to you; to us detested, as shutting out your thoughts … from the main currents of human affairs” (Letters, VIII, 279, fn, 1). Resenting this deeply, Stevenson threatened to break off all correspondence if his friend remained dismissive of a subject which had become so important to him: “Dear Colvin, please remember that my life passes among my ‘blacks or chocolates’ … You must try to exercise a trifle of imagination, and put yourself, perhaps with an effort, into some sort of sympathy with these people, or how am I to write to you?” (Letters, VIII, 279–282).²⁴ Colvin apologised profusely, but he clearly thought Stevenson was wasting precious time and effort on a peripheral topic and unimportant people; furthermore, as his editor, he did not much care for Stevenson’s South Seas fiction, full of sinister and degenerate Western traders. Sales were in decline because, as one long-standing fan commented: “This is not the Stevenson we love.”²⁵

Although the climate of Sāmoa brought renewed health, Stevenson sometimes felt wretched about the daily “dance of folly and injustice and unconscious rapacity” in and around Apia where a “handful of whites have everything; the natives walk in a foreign town” (A Footnote, 12). Although he developed close friendships with several Sāmoan chiefs, there was not a lot that he could do on their behalf because he had no formal role on the island. He was not a consul; he was not even a member of the Apia Municipality because his estate at Vailima fell just outside its boundaries. As for fraternizing with the whites “on the beach,” this would require him to “rat, and flatter, and bear tales, and earwig, and intrigue, and play the rancid game of popularity,” behaviour out of the question for someone who considered himself a gentleman. Caught between the traders’ “ugly picture” of democracy and Apia’s pompous German officials, Stevenson took to his celebrated pen, availing himself of Sāmoa’s fast mailship service to get his journalism and other writings out into the world, hoping that his reports would direct the public’s attention “in Britain, in the States, and still more in Germany” (Letters, VII, 153–154, 171).

Stevenson makes many blunt statements in A Footnote against the “German firm,” describing it as “the head of the boil of which Samoa languishes.” The DHPG’s headquarters in Apia is also dubbed “the seat of the political sickness of Samoa.” The Sāmoans’ perspective on Apia was summed up as follows: “all the money, luxury, and business of the kingdom centred in one place; that place excepted from the native government and administered by whites for whites; and the whites themselves holding it not in common but in hostile camps, so that it lies between them like a bone between two dogs, each growling, each clutching his own end” (A Footnote, 10–13). But like today’s artist Michel Tuffery, Stevenson could not help but be impressed by the boldness and size of Germany’s plantation signature on the Sāmoan landscape. New arrivals approaching Apia harbour, standing on the deck of their ship, would (Stevenson claimed) see “parks of palm tree alleys, regular, like soldiers on parade.” But while the “native roughness of the tropics” had been smoothed and transformed into a “fairyland,” the metaphor of “soldiers on parade” suggests that the typical German plantation was no enchanted place. Quite the contrary. It was a militarised zone of “punitive extra-labour” where the whip was often “busy,” the wages “hypothetical,” repatriation uncertain, and Melanesian runaways numerous (A Footnote, 15–16).

In this early section of A Footnote to History, Stevenson approaches the “burning question” of the “labour traffic” but it is a “dirty” topic which he can only touch with “tongs.” Stevenson and his wife Fanny had seen and heard plenty of evidence of blackbirding during their two years of touring the Pacific, from 1888–1890. One of the tales they heard concerned the ruthless raid of a Peruvian slaver on Hiva-oa in the Marquesas. This later resulted in an American sailor’s narrow escape from being killed and eaten, wrongly believed by the local Marquesan chief to belong to the “bad shippee, this slave shippee.”²⁶ The Stevensons also learned of another slaver which had recently enticed on board two thirds of the population of Funafuti, luring the islanders with presents. Those who were kidnapped were never seen again, leaving the island bereft of all but the very young and the elderly.²⁷ With this knowledge of blackbirding, and with twelve runaways arrested one morning in his kitchen at Vailima, Stevenson knew how “recruitment” worked and also how harsh the German plantations could be. Nevertheless, he uses the archaic word “thralls” to describe the Melanesian labourers (A Footnote, 16–18). In one sense, with its connotations of enthralment, this term is appropriate for labourers confined to “fairyland,” but it also stops short of declaring them “slaves.” Here we see Stevenson treading carefully, applying “tongs” to an explosive topic which remains controversial to this day. With many oral histories of contemporary Australian South Sea Islanders stating categorically that the labour trade was slavery, academics either agree or disagree with this verdict while others argue for evidence of both blackbirding and contractual indenture.²⁸

Stevenson’s letters to The Times expose numerous German misdoings in Sāmoa. One allegation concerned the German firm’s justice system in Apia, where they had built a private jail. After imprisoning five Sāmoan chiefs in August 1891, the President von Pilsach allegedly planned to blow up the jail should anyone attempt a rescue (Letters, VII, 169–172). In another letter to The Times, Stevenson focussed on the unequal salaries and housing conditions of the German officials and the Sāmoan chiefs. Von Pilsach and the Chief Justice Cedercrantz had also used tax-payer money to purchase the newspaper, the Samoa Times, seeking “safety and strength in gagging the local Press of Apia.” This was a ludicrous tactic given the current security situation, when “eight provinces of discontented natives threaten at any moment to sweep their ineffective Government into the sea” (Letters, VII, 264–265). Confronted by the enormity of the many charges listed in this long letter of June 1802, the editor of The Times published his uneasiness at Stevenson’s vehement “fury.” To the editor’s suggestion that the “cold and formal phraseology of a Consular report” might better attract further enquiry and even “diplomatic intervention,” Stevenson conceded that passion burned in his words but was gratified that “the facts alleged” had been communicated clearly (Letters, VII, 338 and note).

Inevitably Stevenson used some of the paternalist language of his times, referring to the native Sāmoan as resembling “a child, his true analogue” (A Footnote, 14). To the British Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, he spoke on behalf of this “child,” but he attributed his presumption to the Sāmoans’ language and distance from Europe: “They have a troubled utterance; there are very few who care to listen to them; there are still fewer who can understand them if they did listen. It lies close upon my conscience … to make their dumb complaints a little vocal in England.” Their chief complaint was that, instead of offering them protection, the imperial powers had turned them into “slaves” (Letters, VIII, 231). Here the “slaves” in his line of vision were not the Melanesian workers but the matai, the élite titleholders whose chiefly language he learned from his “secretary” Henry Simile, a chief from Savai‘i. Of the non-élite Sāmoans who made up Vailima’s “houseworkers” – the word “servants” was not allowed – these were highly respected and valued. This assessment does not, however, suit the agenda of some scholars today, one of whom wrongly charges Stevenson with whipping a Sāmoan’s “buttocks.”²⁹ The victim was actually Stevenson’s stubborn horse, Jack, an episode described comically to Colvin, the dedicatee of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), a narrative full of skirmishes with a rebellious donkey called Modestine (Letters, VII, 215). As for the Melanesians, in common parlance “black boys,” Stevenson wrote privately about how the Christianised Sāmoans feared them as pagan cannibals – prejudices which, while phrased differently, persist today in Sāmoa.³⁰ As for the Melanesian runaways who regarded his estate as a refuge, Stevenson was well aware of their suffering. When walking out deep in the bush, he came upon traces of how they would “build little sheds of leaves, and eat nuts and roots and fruits” (Letters, VII, 227). Moreover, absconding was no solution to their hard lives as they were at risk of being caught by the Sāmoans and handed back to plantation managers for reward money.³¹ Notably, Stevenson’s sympathy and admiration for these workers is re-created in the noble character of Sally Day in The Ebb-Tide (1894), described as a “lean-flanked, clean-built fellow from some far western island … of a darkness almost approaching to the African.” Sally Day and his Melanesian companions are heroic figures compared to the degenerate and drunken whites ostensibly in charge of the ship, Farallone.³²

Disgruntled with other writers on the Pacific who got so carried away by romantic settings that they delivered sham “sugar candy” epics, Stevenson was determined to create a deeply scored “etching” of his new surroundings. His stated fictional method was to blend the sordidness of Western presence with Pacific romance, the aim being to produce an uncompromisingly realistic “human grin” (Letters, VII, 161). The achievement can be seen in one of his most disturbing tales, The Ebb-Tide (1894), a nightmare story of commercial barbarism and religious imperialism summed up in the two main characters, both well-educated Oxbridge “gentlemen.” One of them, Attwater, is an upper middle-class trader and missionary who sadistically drives one of his enslaved pearl-divers to suicide. The other, Herrick, is broken-backed and cowardly. The pact between these two “gentlemen” stems from their shared white privilege and financial greed. Of “The Beach of Falesá” (1892), another dark tale, Stevenson asked Colvin to note of his two traders, the British Wiltshire and the American Case: “will you please to observe that almost all that is ugly is in the whites?” (Letters, VII, 282). For Stevenson, colonialism in the Pacific was a thoroughly Western project, unmarked by anti-German xenophobia.³³ As Marlow remarks of white savagery in Heart of Darkness: “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”³⁴

Stevenson left behind a number of unfinished works on the topics of labour and slavery, several of which he was drafting while composing A Footnote. In all of these fragments he appears to have dropped his “tongs” in order to approach more closely to the smelly topic of the “labour traffic.” There were several essays and fictional works on blackbirding, and a political story called “The Labour Slave” (Letters, VII,154). Six months later he was describing to Colvin a long novel entitled Sophia Scarlett, set on a plantation “run by ex-English officers,” an idea inspired by the enormous Tahitian cotton plantation run by the Scottish adventurer, William Stewart. The challenge for this novel would be to avoid sugar-coating the whole with “a kind of Uncle Tom flavour” (Letters, VII, 231). From his letters, and from drafts of this story, it is clear that he was completely unseduced by the romantic racialism which had inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Christ-like and passive Uncle Tom.³⁵

White prestige

While Stevenson was committed to challenging Western racial hierarchy and privilege in the Pacific, he was just as concerned about the daily spectacle of whites parading their grossness in front of islanders. Honolulu, for instance, he described as “vile,” full of “beastly haoles” (whites) who had actively de-civilised the town with their belief in the Hawaiians’ inherent inferiority and their own natural entitlement to rule. The presence of so many Americans in Honolulu meant that the town was overborne by white “civilisation,” in his eyes “a dingy, ungentlemanly business” (Letters, VI, 295–302). The word “ungentlemanly” may not carry much force today but the gentleman was a morally admirable figure for Stevenson, especially if endowed with courage and great physical strength.³⁶ The Sāmoans, for instance, were gentlemen, even when it came to the custom of cutting off the heads of wounded warriors. For Stevenson, this action, while barbaric, constituted traditional “field etiquette” (A Footnote, 5). In support of his point, he contradicted himself, a sign of his unease. While reminding his readers of how “etiquette and morals differ in one country and another,” he then argued that there was a Christian precedent for the taking of heads in battle, a point made by a group of Sāmoan chiefs who remonstrated with one of the island’s missionaries: “But, Misi, is it not so that when David killed Goliath, he cut off his head and carried it before the king?” (A Footnote, 5). Although Stevenson was personally against this gruesome and bloody custom, there was still much to admire in the Sāmoan warrior: “the punctilio of the barbarian, and all his parade,” including feasts, fine clothing, songs, and fine oratory (A Footnote, 5). But it was the taking of three Sāmoan women’s heads in 1893 that marked a shocking departure from customary protocol. One of these heads was that of a taupou, a young virgin of high rank, selected by her village as a ceremonial “hostess.” While women had been shot accidentally on the field as they ferried ammunition to their men, “no fighting man had ever before dreamed of taking a woman’s head,” according to Henry Simile. This hateful innovation in “field etiquette,” which brought disgrace to the offender’s descendants over many generations, left many Sāmoans deeply ashamed, signalling a clear breakdown in their traditional rules of warfare.³⁷

While Mata‘afa maintained his prestige “unimpaired” throughout his dealings with the Germans (A Footnote, 151), the behaviour of the Triumvirate struck Stevenson as deeply damaging to “white prestige.” The petty rivalries and jealousies over trivial matters – nicknamed “tempests in teapots” by the Stevensons – made the white community look ridiculous. The phrase “white prestige” is repeated several times in his third letter to The Times, culminating in an urgent call to the Triumvirate to repair “breaches” before the damage proved fatal. For his metropolitan readers he paints a vivid picture of what he imagines Mata‘afa and Laupepa see, emphasising their dignified and united front despite their differences and rivalry:

Mataafa sits hard-by in his armed camp and sees. He sees the weakness, he counts the scandals of their Government. He sees his rival and “brother” [Laupepa] sitting disconsidered at their doors, like Lazarus before the house of Dives, and, if he is not very fond of his “brother”, he is very scrupulous of native dignities. He has seen his friends menaced with midnight destruction in the Government gaol and deported without form of law. He is not himself a talker, and his thoughts are hid from us; but what is said by his more hasty partisans we know … a native orator stood up in an assembly. “Who asked the Great Powers to make laws for us; to bring strangers here to rule us?” he cried. “We want no white officials to bind us in the bondage of taxation.” (Letters, VII, 266)

While the phrase “white prestige” is not the same as “white supremacy,” it is nevertheless integral to maintaining the hierarchy of races as understood in this period of high empire. So how are we to understand Stevenson’s concerns about racial prestige when he is himself mounting so many attacks on the white rulers of Sāmoa? Perhaps, given his pitch to an audience of white readers convinced of their superiority to “brown” Polynesians, an appeal to “white prestige” was the easiest card to play. After all, his close friend Colvin had not hesitated to declare his low opinion of black and brown people.

In Stevenson’s musing on the clash between his mission to Sāmoa and his loyalty to white gentlemanly codes of honour, there is a good deal of self-satire. As an “aristocrat” with an “old, petty, personal view of honour” he found himself on the horns of a dilemma (Letters, VII, 156). To Colvin, in a high-spirited, capering vein, he confessed that he did not actually dislike Chief Justice Cedercrantz, despite the fact that he was an incompetent judge and had irresponsibly de-camped for two months to Fiji and Australia in the midst of a political crisis. Finding himself “in treaty” with a stubborn “petty, personal view of honour,” the two of them would “meet and smile, and – damn it! Like each other” (Letters, VII, 368). In the end, when it came to this “weakness” towards Cedercrantz, he made his dilemma clear:

I love his society – he is intelligent, pleasant, even witty, a gentleman – and you know how that attaches – I loathe to seem to play a base part; but the poor natives – who are like other folk, false enough, lazy enough, not heroes, not saints – ordinary men damnably misused – are they to suffer because I like Cedercrantz … ? (Letters, VII, 156)

This question as to whether or not the Sāmoans should suffer because of white racial and class solidarity was, of course, purely rhetorical, with the answer already out there in Stevenson’s blistering attacks on Cedercrantz in The Times – attacks designed to “damn the man and drive him from these islands,” aims in which he succeeded (Letters, VII, 368). Although his stepson Lloyd Osbourne had advised that honour was an “insurmountable” barrier for gentlemen, Stevenson nevertheless smashed through it (Letters, VII, 156).

Conclusion

Stevenson’s support for Mata‘afa never wavered. According to Osbourne, in the last months of his life he declared “that if the worst came to the worst in Samoa, with Germany intriguing for possession, he would go to America and try to raise public opinion by a course of lectures” (Letters, VIII, 406). Although Stevenson never arrived at this next stage of activism, A Footnote has left us an enduring image of Mata‘afa, adorned with the four high titles that would grant him titular supremacy. Pitching forward to an imagined time when Mata‘afa would be proclaimed Tafa‘ifā across all of Samoā, Stevenson provides his readers with a befittingly heroic end for his hero:

The centrepiece of all is the high chief himself, Malietoa-Tuiatua-Tuiaana Mataafa, king – or not king – or king-claimant – of Samoa. All goes to him, all comes from him. Native deputations bring him gifts and are feasted in return. White travellers, to their indescribable irritation, are (on his approach) waved from his path by his armed guards. He summons his dancers by the note of a bugle. He sits nightly at home before a semi-circle of talking-men from many quarters of the islands, delivering and hearing those ornate and elegant orations in which the Samoan heart delights. About himself and all his surroundings there breathes a striking sense of order, tranquillity, and native plenty. He is of a tall and powerful person, sixty years of age, white-haired and with a white moustache; his eyes bright and quiet (A Footnote, 150–151)

When Stevenson died suddenly at the end of 1894, Mata‘afa had been in exile for over a year and was to endure another four years on the Marshall Islands. After Laupepa’s death in 1898, he returned to Sāmoa, fully expecting to succeed to the paramountcy, but once again the Western powers (this time, Britain and America) intervened, installing Laupepa’s young son as “king,” a move in direct opposition to the will of most Sāmoans. More blood was shed until Mata‘afa, with the support of the Germans, was declared paramount chief in 1899, at which point he issued his “Cry” to the Western powers. Asking for compassion and peace on the island, he also demanded compensation for the many villages and houses burnt and destroyed by shelling. The “evil influence” of white officials had commanded Sāmoans to kill and injure many of his people with “guns which fire many bullets, like the drops of rain in a heavy shower.” Those who survived – homeless old men, women, and children – had fled into the bush where they “sickened and died, causing great sorrow and distress in almost every town and village.” As Mata‘afa was writing his “Cry” the partitioning of his islands was underway, with the Germans formally annexing the west, and America the eastern island of Tutuila. Britain was compensated with a protectorate over Tonga, some islands in the North Solomons and a portion of Ghana (Kennedy, 239). In 1900 the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, was installed as Tupu Sili, the Supreme Ruler, with Wilhelm Solf appointed the colony’s first Governor.³⁸ A decade earlier Stevenson had been remarkably prescient about how Sāmoa and other islands in the Pacific would be carved up by the imperial rivals. Writing to Osbourne in September 1890, he quipped that if he could read the sealed orders of the United States warship which had just called at Apia he would be able to tell him “when Hawaii is to become American … when all Samoa is to become German; and as a probable side issue, when Tonga will be British. Politics are not pretty” (Letters, VII, 9).

There is a photo from 1900 of the Deutsche Schule in Apia which shows us the benefits of re-reading Stevenson’s works today (Figure 3). Numerous mixed-race children, offspring of German fathers and Sāmoan mothers, hold various objects in their hands, some serving as symbols of traditional Sāmoa, others representing German rule. For instance, we see a boy holding a Sāmoan club while girls display native ‘ili (fans) or pieces of coral; one girl cradles a model war canoe. Conspicuous amongst the German items is a portrait of the German Emperor. We also see in the first row, far left, a plank from the wrecked German warship SMS Adler (Eagle), launched in 1883 from Kiel’s imperial shipyard for service in Sāmoa. Until it was destroyed in the hurricane of March 1889, the Adler played a key role in the turbulent 1880s, ferrying favoured warriors around, supplying ammunition to smaller naval boats, lowering its gun ports to shell native villages, and shipping off Laupepa into exile when he would no longer cooperate with German plans for his country. Admired by Stevenson as a state-of-the-art gunboat, the Adler had also played a key role in the battle of Fagali‘i. Its prominent memorialisation in this photo shows the reach of Germany’s Sāmoan history into the curriculum of the colony’s new school. While Mata‘afa had ended his “Cry” with the hoped-for prospect of peace, and the ushering in of a new and stable Government from 1900 onwards, such a prospect remained elusive, with New Zealand repeating many of the worst aspects of German rule after 1914. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the peaceful Mau movement for freedom from colonial rule gained traction, but Sāmoa would not gain political independence until 1962.³⁹

Figure 3. Photo (5 July 1900), “Deutsche Schule, Apia;” Spemann Family Collection/T. Brunt.

In his 1920 novel Der Papalagi (meaning “the white man”), Erich Scheurmann, a German resident in Sāmoa from 1900–1914, invented a fictional Sāmoan chief by the name of Tuiavii, living in Germany as a participant in the Völkerschau or “human zoos” of this period. In the manner of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Tuiavii delivers satirical observations on Western civilisation and Christianity. In riposte Yuki Kihara, a contemporary Sāmoan-Japanese performance artist, pierces through Scheurmann’s masquerade with her video installation, Der Papālagi, performed in 2016. Here she mocks Scheurmann’s narrative by photographing a long-resident German couple in Sāmoa who have “gone native,” dressed in high-rank garments and posing in Apia’s supermarkets and other commercial venues (Figure 4). If the Sāmoan scholar Malama Meleisea claims that one of the greatest insults one Sāmoan can say to another is fia palagi! (You want to be like a European!),⁴⁰ then Kihara creates the reverse, German expatriates longing to be Sāmoans.⁴¹ As a marker of authentic identity, the Germans’ costume masquerade fails conspicuously, falling clumsily between cultural appreciation and appropriation. Like the souvenired plank of the Adler, the masquerade dramatises a “tightrope” performance in which three imperial powers had tried, but failed, to balance their dangerous rivalries, at high cost to those subject to their rule.

Figure 4. Der Papalagi at the Frankie Supermarket (2016) by Yuki Kihara. Courtesy of Yuki Kihara and Milford Galleries, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Acknowledgements

I thank Tony Brunt for his unparalleled knowledge of the Germans in Sāmoa, as seen in his (free online) series of album books, “To walk under Palm Trees.” His dedicated work of collecting, scanning, restoring, and digitising early Sāmoan photographs has been a gift for scholars. Mr Brunt has also been generous in answering numerous queries and supplying me with enhanced images (Figures 2 and 3). My Pacific anthropologist colleague, Professor Kalissa Alexyeff must also be acknowledged for her expertise and advice regarding all matters Sāmoan. Finally, I thank the editors Pia Wiegmink and Heike Raphael-Hernandez for their suggested revisions, and Hannah Rieck for her copy-editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Bonn’s Centre for Dependency and Slavery Studies; Australian Research Council Discovery Grant [Grant Number Project ID: DP220102378].

Notes on contributors

Deirdre Coleman

Deirdre Coleman is the Robert Wallace Chair of English and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history, with a focus on women’s writing, anti-slavery, colonialism, and natural history. Recent publications include (with Trevor Burnard) “The Savage Slave Mistress: Punishing Women in the British Caribbean, 1750–1834,” Atlantic Studies, Global Currents (2021), “Creole Identity in the Enlightenment,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2022), “Voyaging in the Pacific,” The Oxford Handbook of British Romantic Prose (2024), and (with Sara Fernandes Crouch) “‘Embronzed with the African tint’: Racial color-coding and intergenerational inheritance in Jamaica, St. Domingo and England in the Age of Abolition,” European Romantic Review (2024).

Notes

1 Sebag-Montefiore, “Brassed off.”

2 Firth, “German Firms in the Western Pacific Islands, 1857–1914,” 10–28.

3 Munro and Firth, “Sāmoan Plantations,” 102–103.

4 Munro and Firth, “From Company Rule to Consular Control,” 27.

5 Meleisea, The Making of Modern Sāmoa, 1.

6 Munro and Firth, “From Company Rule to Consular Control,” 31.

7 Stevenson, A Footnote to History, 32. (Subsequent references to the novel will be cited parenthetically).

8 See Hempenstall’s Pacific Islanders under German Rule, 27–28.

9 Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle, 77.

10 For a recently funded community-based UK project of decolonisation and remediation, focussed on Stevenson’s works, see Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), “Remediating Stevenson.”

11 For Tuffery’s “Siamani Sāmoa,” see https://carriageworks.com.au/events/siamani-samoa/; for pith helmets, see Figure 2.

12 Blake, “Artist Michel Tuffery brings Samoa’s German history to life with royal band.”

13 Brunt, “To Walk under Palm Trees”, 23.

14 Ibid., 13.

15 Brunt, “To Walk under Palm Trees”: The Germans in Samoa: Snapshots, 15.

16 Wendt, “Towards a new Oceania,” 53.

17 Wendt, “Novelists and Historians and the Art of Remembering,” 79.

18 Fitzpatrick, The Kaiser and the Colonies, 324.

19 Fangalii is Stevenson’s name for Fagali‘i.

20 Stevenson, The Samoa Weekly Herald, 2.

21 Farrell, Robert Louis Stevenson in Sāmoa, 170. For Anglo-Germany diplomacy around Britain’s difficulties in Egypt, see Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle, 111.

22 Wilde, quoted in Jolly, “Introduction,” South Sea Tales, xxix.

23 For the best study of Stevenson’s new authorial direction at this juncture, see Roslyn Jolly’s Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific.

24 For an interesting discussion of the influence on Stevenson of Hume’s theory of sympathy, see Maxwell, “‘Civility’ and ‘Savagery,’” 38–50.

25 Quoted Jolly, “Introduction,” South Sea Tales, xxix.

26 Stevenson, In the South Seas, 66–67.

27 Stevenson, The Cruise of the “Janet Nichol”, 120–121.

28 See Bandler, Wacvie; Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue; Saunders, “‘The Black Scourge’”; Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa; Moore, Hardwork.

29 Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting, 307, fn. 277.

30 See Meleisea’s O Tama Uli and TheCoconetTV’s Tama Uli.

31 Munro and Firth, “Sāmoan Plantations,” 106–107.

32 Stevenson, South Sea Tales, 155.

33 Strong anti-German sentiment runs through the Pacific tales of Jack London and Louis Becke; for the latter, see Spennemann, “‘Vell, I don’t call dot very shentlemanly gonduck’.”

34 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 50; for precursors to Conrad’s Kurtz in The Ebb-Tide and “The Beach of Falesá,” see Edmond, Representing the South Pacific, 19, 177–180, and Jolly, “Introduction,” South Sea Tales, xviii.

35 For the surviving drafts of Sophia Scarlett see Stevenson, Sophia Scarlett, 129–143.

36 Johnstone, Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson, 58.

37 Stevenson, Our Sāmoan Adventure, 226–228.

38 Hempenstall, “Manuscript XLII,” 532–538.

39 The Mataʻafa chieftainship is still powerful in Sāmoa. It delivered the country’s first Prime Minister, Fiamē Mataʻafa Faumuina Mulinuʻu II (1921–1975). His daughter Afioga Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa (1957–) is currently the seventh Prime Minister.

40 See Meleisea, “Ideology in Pacific Studies,” 143.

41 For an excellent, wide-ranging article on Scheurmann’s novel, see Alexeyeff and Kihara, “Polyface in Paradise.”