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“Little House in the Bush”: Specters of Vailima

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Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions

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Abstract

This chapter takes the development of the Stevensons’ Vailima Plantation on Sāmoa as its starting point and broadens its focus to discuss the many German-run plantations on Upolu. Stevenson depicts these plantations as sites of Gothic terror that have incorporated—and become part of—Samoan folklore, especially insofar as spirits known as aitu inhabit them. Stevenson’s accounts from his personal correspondence and A Footnote to History in Sāmoa are juxtaposed with local newspaper coverage that participated in debates regarding the ethics and violence of plantation labor. The chapter closes with the specific case of Arrick, a young Melanesian “savage” who worked at Vailima and was included in a family portrait. An analysis of this photograph reveals Arrick as a domestic “cannibal,” a banal feature of domestic life on the imperial fringe.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In December 1991, Cyclone Val ripped its way across the islands of Sāmoa and American Sāmoa. The cyclone, which lasted 11 days, devastated government buildings, schools, and houses. In Apia, Sāmoa’s capital, the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum (RLSM) suffered only minor damages. Founded a year earlier in Stevenson’s Vailima home , the RLSM was set to become one of Western Sāmoa’s most important tourist attractions. The American RLS Museum/Preservation Foundation, which leases Vailima from the Samoan government, restored the damaged buildings and reopened Vailima’s doors to the public in 1994.

  2. 2.

    All newspaper articles cited are publicly available in New Zealand’s digital National Newspaper Collection (paperspast.natlib.govt.nz). By 1889, the Samoa Weekly Herald was the last remaining Apia-based newspaper. At the end of 1900 the newspaper was sold to the German colonial government and by April 1901, the first issue of the Samoanische Zeitung appeared. After the New Zealand takeover of German Samoa in 1914, the Samoanische Zeitung was renamed the Samoa Times. For more on Sāmoa’s nineteenth-century newspapers, see Spennemann (2003). An expanded study of what I name the “Samoan Gothic” appeared as Manfredi (2016).

  3. 3.

    For photographs of Hufnagel and the Vailele plantation, see Hiery (2005, 248). For photographs of other Samoan plantations (e.g., Vaitele and Mulifanua), see Churchward (1907, 80–3).

  4. 4.

    Kew founded botanical stations in Fiji in 1889 (Drayton 2000, 253). For more on the relationship between the British imperialism and Kew Gardens, see Brockway (2002).

  5. 5.

    The cacao bean is the seed of the Theobroma cacao and is native to the Andes. Chocolate, or cocoa, is a processed form of cacao (Brockway 2002, 53).

  6. 6.

    For detailed examinations of the indentured labor trade in the Pacific Islands, see, for instance, Docker (1970); Corris (1973); Moore (1985).

  7. 7.

    For a discussion of Cornwall’s activities, see Munro (1989).

  8. 8.

    The Australian novelist Louis Becke is the prime example.

  9. 9.

    For photographs of Melanesian indentured laborers in Sāmoa, see Hiery (2005, 246–47). For a useful introduction to labor recruiting in the Pacific Island region, see Moore, Leckie, Munro (1990, xxvii–xxxvi).

  10. 10.

    Munro (2000) claims that the Germans, unlike the British, did not face “humanitarian concerns of philanthropic pressure groups” (216). For a broader history of British imperial and humanitarian interventions in the Pacific Islands, see Samson (1998).

  11. 11.

    Samoans were unwilling to work on foreign plantations on a regular basis and only at high wages Gilson (1970, 181–82); Munro and Firth (1987, 26).

  12. 12.

    In her diary, Fanny also recounts that “some black boys on the German plantation got liquor somewhere and while drunk attacked the native police with axes and sticks” (OSA , 9).

  13. 13.

    I borrow the phrase “counter-violence” from Fanon (1963) and his theorizing of colonial violence. On “cannibalism” as “counter-colonial,” see Chap. 1.

  14. 14.

    For more on the literary depictions of Melanesians, see Brawley and Dixon (2015, 59–75).

  15. 15.

    The Samoan fear of Melanesian cannibalism may be traced back to what Sinclair (1982) observes in her discussion of early Samoan missionaries who died in New Guinea: “Part of the legend in Samoa is that the cannibals of Papua ate some Samoans in the early days. I have been unable to find any written evidence to support this” (17). In The Samoa Islands, Augustin Krämer (1994) contrasts “the real gods (atua) of heaven” with “the demons … called aitu” (24). Several Samoan legends feature cannibal chiefs (sauali‘i) who were believed to be demonic (664).

  16. 16.

    Jolly (2010) also discusses Stevenson’s conception of the Samoan bush and suggests that “at a supernatural level, the physical properties of the forest combined with the local legends about it to produce emotions of irrational fear and ‘horror,’ which Stevenson also explored in his letters about clearing the bush” (128).

  17. 17.

    Later, Arrick was wounded in a fight with plantation laborers from Malaita and eventually returned to work for the German firm. He died on the plantation (Letters, 7:369, 416).

  18. 18.

    For a discussion of this portrait, see Bell (2002).

  19. 19.

    Talolo was a Samoan, Lafaele was a Futuna Islander, Tomasi was referred to as either Fijian or Tongan. Elena was Tomasi’s wife.

  20. 20.

    I am grateful to my anonymous reader for this observation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Carla Manfredi

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  1. Carla Manfredi
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Manfredi, C. (2018). “Little House in the Bush”: Specters of Vailima. In: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Impressions. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98313-4_6

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