In Search of Robert Louis Stevenson in Hawaii

Mike Dillon

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.1

As my wife and I gazed down from the highest sea cliffs in the world, reaching 3,000 feet at their peak, I declaimed Robert Louis Stevenson’s words as the signal for our descent. Our love for Stevenson, the man and his books, has led us here to the famous precipice of Molokai. We’re on a quest for his elusive spirit in the Hawaiian Islands.

Blue ocean curled and shattered white far below. A votive niche at the trailhead sheltered mementos left by wayfarers— seashells, coins, and religious icons—a reminder this was to be no ordinary day hike. With twenty-six switchbacks, the trail drops 1,700 feet and covers more than three miles.

Green, mountainous, cloud-wreathed Molokai lies between Maui and Oahu. From the air the island resembles a shark. Straight below, the isolated peninsula of Kalaupapa National Historical Park is the dorsal. It’s also the site of the infamous, former leper colony established by the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1866, a bare, windswept place consecrated by human suffering and the heroic ministrations of a Roman

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Catholic priest and nun: Saint Damien Joseph De Veuster of Belgium and Saint Marianne Cope, an American citizen born in Germany.

Shortly after Damien’s death in 1889 Stevenson spent seven days in the Lazaretto. Swallowing his fear, the frail author mixed freely with the patients. ‘I have seen sights that cannot be told, and heard stories that cannot be repeated,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘yet I never admired my poor race so much, nor (strange as it may seem) loved life more than in the settlement.’2

A Life of High Adventure

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1850, Stevenson suffered, at times greatly, from what was most likely tuberculosis for the better part of his life. He died in Samoa at age 44. His condition would have shipwrecked most mortals; Stevenson, however, authored more than thirty books, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and lived a life as picaresque as any plot found in his novels. His voluminous correspondence, for sheer aliveness, rivals Byron’s.

This stork-like, high-strung, vivid wraith of a man with intense, refulgent brown eyes that people never forgot; this pampered, only child from a family of Scottish lighthouse builders, bet everything on his pen and risked all by taking his extended family to sea.

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As he wrote a friend in 1889, upon arriving in Honolulu after a difficult sail from Tahiti, ‘Altogether, this foolhardy adventure is achieved, and if I have but nine months of life and any kind of health, I shall have both eaten my cake and got it back again with usury.’3

Here, in a nutshell, is the famous Stevenson charm.

Stevenson had sailed in his chartered schooner Casco from San Francisco for the South Seas on June 28, 1888. Before departure, the ship’s owner cast a cold eye on 1the rail-thin author and advised the crew to be ready for a burial at sea. Stevenson, for his part, wasn’t ready. He had six more years. ‘The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense,’ he would write from the Pacific.4

A colorful cast sailed with Stevenson through the Golden Gate that day, including his American-born wife Fanny, a divorcee 10 years his senior, who could butcher a hog and roll her own cigarettes. Stevenson’s friends and admirers in Great Britain blamed Fanny for burgling their beloved boy for parts unknown — she was the Yoko Ono of her day. Stevenson likened her dark stare to the sighting of a pistol.

In the Pacific, Stevenson’s South Seas fiction took on a harder, realistic edge, which won the admiration of master stylist Joseph Conrad. Here’s the opening to The Beach at Falesa: ‘I saw that island first when it was neither night nor morning. The moon was to the west, setting, but still broad and bright. To the east, and right amidships of the dawn, which was all pink, the daystar sparkled like a diamond. The

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land breezes blew in our faces, and smelt strong of wild lime and vanilla: other things besides, but these were the most plain; and the chill of it set me sneezing.’5

Conrad would learn from Stevenson.

After landfalls in the Marquesas and Tahiti, the Casco entered Honolulu harbor on Jan. 24, 1889, where Fanny’s daughter Belle and her improvident, artist husband Joe Strong, Honolulu residents and part of the royal set, greeted the new arrivals along with a clutch of newspaper reporters. In those days Honolulu was a city of perhaps 24,000 people. The Casco arrived at a critical time in Hawaiian history, as non-native interests pushed to undermine the monarchy. Stevenson, ever on the side of the underdog, stood with the royals. He quickly befriended King David Kalākaua, ‘The Merrie Monarch,’ an impressive, Falstaffian man of immense learning whose court became the beating heart of Hawaiian culture in the face of the ‘haole’ onslaught.

In a letter to a friend, Stevenson noted the King could also hold his liquor: ‘He carries it too like a mountain with a sparrow on its shoulders. We calculated five bottles of champagne in three hours and a half (afternoon), and the sovereign quite presentable, although perceptively more dignified at the end…’6

The Quiet End of Waikiki

Stevenson and his family moved from downtown Honolulu to a friend’s cottage at Waikiki (‘spouting water’) three miles

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33 In Search of Robert Louis Stevenson in Hawaii

away near the foot of Diamond Head. In those days Waikiki was place of mild surf, sacred sites, fresh water springs, taro plantations and royal fishponds.

Modern Waikiki represents tourism at its highest pitch, but even now a 10-minute stroll away from the human circus toward Diamond Head brings you to the quiet end of the beach and Stevenson’s old stomping grounds. A favorite swimming spot for locals, Kaimana Beach, a.k.a. Sans Souci (‘without care’) Beach, begins on the east side of the Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial.

After his initial, five months stay, Stevenson returned to Oahu in 1893 from his Samoan home for five weeks. Once again he made for the quiet end of Waikiki, taking up residence at the Sans Souci Hotel, a rambling beach hostelry among the coconut palms. The Sans Souci condo apartments occupy the approximate spot. Stevenson left his imprint in the hotel register: ‘If anyone desire such old-fashioned things as lovely scenery, quiet, pure air, clear sea water, good food and heavenly sunsets hung out before their eyes over the Pacific and the distant hills of Waiana, I recommend him cordially to the ‘Sans Souci.’7

This is still good advice.

Nearby, the New Otani Kaimana Beach Hotel is the site of a Victorian estate where Stevenson liked to spend leisure time. The hotel’s Hau Tree Lanai restaurant features the railing from the main house’s veranda; the famous hau tree still provides shade for diners, as it did for Stevenson, as an old photograph attests.

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Stevenson struck up a friendship with fellow Scot Archibald Cleghorn, widower of King David’s sister. His young, teenaged daughter Princess Ka‘iulani, soon to be shipped off to England for her education, became Stevenson’s fast friend. He wrote stories for the princess beneath the banyan tree at Cleghorn’s 10-acre estate ‘Ainahau, in what is now the busy center of Waikiki. The Princess Kaiulani Hotel, across the street from the venerable Moana Hotel, occupies much of the former site. Here’s a stanza from a poem Stevenson dedicated to the princess:

Her islands here, in Southern sun, Shall mourn their Kaiulani gone, And I, in her dear banyan shade, Look vainly for my little maid.8

One looks in vain for Stevenson’s spirit anywhere in the heart of modern Waikiki.

Tusitala Street (his Samoan nickname meaning ‘teller of tales’), will do nothing to revive his memory — except to invoke an ironic smile he would have appreciated; nor will the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Grass House, on the grounds of the Waioli Tea Room in Manoa, a reconstruction of a hut on Cleghorn’s estate Stevenson likely never sat in. During his first stay in the islands Stevenson also visited the Kona Coast on the Big Island, after finishing his dark novel, The Master of Ballantrae. which had given him fits.

Stevenson and his Hawaiian host rode north on horseback to visit the City of Refuge, Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau National Historical Park today. The Great Wall, a barrier of lava blocks

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some 12 feet tall and 18 feet wide protects the sacred site, built some 400 years ago. Stevenson wrote: ‘The ruin made a massive figure, rising from the flat lava in ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, of an equal thickness, and enclosing an area of several acres. The unmortared stones were justly set; in places the bulwark was still true to the plummet, in places ruinous from the shock of earthquakes.’9

On the Ho’kena seafront Stevenson witnessed a heartbreaking departure scene as leprosy sufferers boarded a boat to be rowed to the mother ship that would carry them to permanent exile on Molokai. A young woman in a red dress wearing a hat with red feather caught his attention; her scarred face carried ‘a haunting look of an unfinished wood doll.’ As the exiles boarded, ‘Almost every countenance about me streamed with tears,’ he wrote.10

Stevenson determined to go to Molokai to see the place for himself.

Modern visitors to the Kalaupapa National Historical Park, administered by the National Park Service, must have a permit. The Kalaupapa National Historical Park website provides the necessary information a visitor needs to book a tour in advance.

There are three ways into the park: Hike down the trail, take a guided mule tour down the same trail or fly in to the Kalaupapa airstrip. Everyone then boards a school bus for the four-hour tour. Unescorted walk-abouts are not permitted.

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Beginning in 1866 the Hawaiian and United States governments exiled more than 8,000 people to the peninsula. The word leprosy, from Biblical times on, covered a multitude of skin conditions. The proper name for the illness is Hansen’s Disease, which was brought under control through sulpha drugs in the 1940s. Throughout history, people had no way of knowing their fear of contagion was overwrought; perhaps five percent of the world’s population is susceptible to the disease.

Damien was one. It finally killed him after 16 hard years of caring for the afflicted.

Although the forced quarantine was lifted in 1969, a few former patients and their descendants still reside at Kalaupapa by choice, their privacy is carefully guarded. A maximum of 100 visitors are allowed to the peninsula per day; the Hawaiian Islands will attract more than 9 million visitors this year.

During his seven days at the settlement, Stevenson taught the young female patients croquet, wore no gloves and charmed Sister Marianne. Once back in Honolulu, Stevenson sent the future saint a piano.

His Pen as Sword

The following year, while in Sydney, Australia, Stevenson learned of a church bulletin letter penned by one Dr. C.M. Hyde of Honolulu attacking Damien. Stevenson, in a white heat, penned a defense. His ‘Open Letter to the Rev. Dr.

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Hyde Honolulu,’ reprinted in a Honolulu newspaper is one of the most searing philippics in the English language.

‘He was not a pure man in his relations with women,’ Hyde wrote, inaccurately, ‘and the leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.’11

In taking on Hyde in public, Stevenson risked a ruinous libel suit. Stevenson’s 6,000-word letter, after noting he’d visited Hyde in his comfortable home in Honolulu, went straight to the mark: ‘I conceive of you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with what measures you mete, with that it shall be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home.’12

Stevenson predicted that if Hyde is to be remembered at all, ‘on the day when Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint it will be in virtue of one work: your letter…’13

With his pen as sword, Stevenson whittled away until there was little of Hyde left standing. Hyde, who didn’t sue, dismissed Stevenson as ‘a Bohemian crank.’14

Stevenson had no tolerance for bullying. Witnessing the scramble for territory and influence among the great powers in the Pacific, he wrote letters to the London Times railing against the kind of colonial maneuvering that presaged a disastrous world war he wouldn’t live to see. His incessant letters, in fact, distressed his friends back in the plush clubs of London. They feared he was wasting his time and talent.

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In the far Pacific, a light-year from the boreal precincts of Great Britain, Stevenson didn’t see it that way. Holy Ground

Our tour group climbed out of the bus and gathered around Damien’s gravesite at St. Philomena Church. In 1936 Damien’s body, with great ceremony, was shipped back to Belgium. A ‘relic’—his right hand—was later returned to the gravesite.

I thought of Stevenson’s heroic letter and his seven days on the peninsula, and looked around at the sheer cliffs, the sea, the sense of being in a holy place, ‘grand, gloomy and bleak,’ he wrote.15

We climbed back on the bus and waited while a middle- aged Belgium nun gripped the iron rails fencing Damien’s gravesite. She prayed with a silent, intense fervor while we quietly looked on, her head bowed, for the man Stevenson defended and who, in a better world, would have needed no defense.

Back on the mainland it came as no surprise when I read that in the years following Stevenson’s death Fanny Stevenson received an unsigned letter written in pencil on a scrap of paper postmarked from Hawaii. ‘Dear Madam,’ it began. ‘All over the world people will be sorry for the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, but none will mourn him more than the blind white leper of Molokai.’16

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On Molokai my wife and I found the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson. And more. Because of him, we also found an unforgettable place.

Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. A retired community newspaper publisher, he is the author of four books of poetry and three books of haiku. Several of his haiku were included in Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years, from W.W. Norton (2013). Departures, a book of poetry and prose about the forced removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor will be published by Unsolicited Press in April 2019. His poetry, essays and feature writing have appeared in numerous publications worldwide.

Notes

1 Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey (London, Chatto & Windus, 1986), p. 69. 2 A. Grove Day (ed.), Travels in Hawaii (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1973), p. 139. 3 Day (ed.), Travels in Hawaii, p. 935 4 Robert Louis Stevenson, Neil Rennie (ed.), In the South Seas (London, Penguin Classics, 1998), p. 6.4 5 Roslyn Jolly (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson South Sea Tales (New York City, Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3. 6 Day (ed.), Travels in Hawaii, p. 94.68 7 Manya Vogrig, ‘Earlier Times – Sans Souci History,’ http://www.angelfire.com/hi5/sanssouci/Page3.html Accessed: 03.07.20187 8 Day (ed.), Travels in Hawaii, p. 177 9 Ibid, p. 26.9 10 Ibid, p. 43-44.10 11 Ibid, 151.11 12 Ibid, p. 151.12 13 Ibid, p. 155.13

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14 Sister Martha Mart McGaw, C.S.J. Stevenson in Hawaii (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1950), p.110. 15 Day (ed.), Travels in Hawaii, p. 140. 16 Nicholas Rankin, Dead Man’s Chest (London, Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 289.

Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures