Matters of grave concern
A stray “the” on RSL’s plaque causes a fuss.
Upkeep of the great man’s final resting place atop Mt Vaea, overlooking Apia, proved a constant headache for the New Zealand authorities. A fat External Affairs Department file held at Archives New Zealand is a half-centurylong catalogue of grumbles, complaints and general discontentment.
Family members proved especially intransigent. The first criticism of the tomb’s upkeep landed in 1937, as Fanny Stevenson’s daughter, Isobel, stated that the tomb “had been immaculate under the rule of the German government … but it was now scribbled over with the pencilled names of colonial soldiers”. It later emerged she’d last visited in 1916.
Acting island administrator CE
Quinn’s letter insisted that the Public Works Department scraped, repaired and whitewashed the tomb at regular intervals. No less than Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage then got involved after the Dominion newspaper published a photo of the pockmarked grave, adorned with empty beer bottles, dead flowers sticking out of them. It was said to be a dated photograph.
But when his legendary External Affairs mandarin, Carl Berendsen, suggested to Quinn that an ironwork fence be erected around the tomb, he got a terse reply: “It could not be built high enough to stop natives climbing over it … they would take the iron away for such things as fish spears.”
By the early 1950s, as Samoa approached independence, the tomb became the centrepiece of a new 50ha memorial reserve. Vailima, Stevenson’s old house, meanwhile, became the residence of the New Zealand Administrator.
Perhaps the strangest flurry of activity occurred in 1959, when an eagle-eyed New Zealand GovernorGeneral, making an official tomb visit, spotted an apparent error in the wording of the inscribed poem Requiem. Charles Lyttelton, 10th Viscount Cobham, was outraged to see the word “the” before “sea” in the second-to-last line and offered £50 (more than $2000 in today’s money) towards removing it.
Officials briefed Prime Minister Walter Nash on the “the” scandal and, after much thought, Cabinet decided the $9000 cost wasn’t worth it. The original plaque remains in place.
Besides, according to a memo to Nash, none other than Fanny Stevenson had made the original call (her ashes are also buried there).
“… the inscription in its erroneous form is supposed to have been placed on the tomb under arrangements made by Mrs Fanny Stevenson … approaches were made to Mrs Stevenson in her lifetime but she always refused”.
Grey was due to call on the Saturday morning. But the world-famous author in the wide-brimmed straw hat and stained white suit collapsed after an hour’s Queen St shopping. He was returned to his shipboard bunk on a stretcher wrapped in blankets.
Stevenson had yet to turn 40, but was burdened with a lifetime of illness caused by weak lungs. Claire Harman’s 2005 biography postulated that he was a victim of Osler-Rendu-Weber syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes chronic respiratory diseases and recurrent lung haemorrhages.
From his bunk, he scribbled out an apology to Grey, which he had delivered to him along with a copy of his latest book. The wizened old political grandee sent back his sympathies along with some of his choicer writings on the rare dialects of Polynesia.
Stevenson’s bad experiences in the Queen City didn’t end there. As the Janet Nicoll steamed out of the harbour, a stock of fireworks and cartridges secretly stashed by a fellow passenger somehow ignited, creating what were described as “gorgeous flames and the most horrible chemical stench”.
According to one account, Stevenson stood muddled with the smoke, and Fanny fought to prevent a crew member from tossing overboard a smouldering trunk full of her husband’s manuscripts. Items including photos and clothes were lost.
News of the below-the-radar visit leaked within days, the NZ Herald noting that “only two or three people in Auckland” knew of Stevenson’s presence. The renowned author was said to be “the most wonderful storyteller of his time”.
Three years passed. Stevenson’s health had deteriorated when he returned to Auckland on February 27, 1893, on board the Mariposa and en route to Sydney. Yet he still managed to spend much of a day with Grey at the city’s Northern Club, the
The world-famous author in the widebrimmed straw hat and stained white suit collapsed after an hour’s Queen St shopping.
pair glimpsed later walking arm-in-arm along St Georges Bay Rd in Parnell, talking animatedly.
At home in Samoa, the Scotsman had been laid low by influenza, to the point where he lost his voice and had to use sign language. Fanny was said to be in worse shape mentally and physically, her paranoia and mood swings turning her into what one observer called the embodiment of a female Jekyll and Hyde.
Heading to sea aboard Mariposa cheered the Stevensons and their companion, Fanny’s daughter Isobel: “Already, though we only sailed yesterday, I am feeling as fit as a fiddle. Fanny ate a whole fowl for breakfast, to say nothing of a tower of hot cakes. Belle and I floored another hen betwixt the pair of us … If you think this looks like dying of consumption in Apia, I can only say I differ from you.”
Stevenson’s continuing fury at incompetent island rule by the three colonial powers compelled him to publish, in 1892, a long, grumpy non-fiction tract:
A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. He now feared deportation for making seditious remarks.
Yet, he was happy to talk politics with a Herald reporter in Auckland, attacking regulations aimed at muzzling critics such as himself. “If certain officials down there are to continue to rule, and to exercise their powers as they have done lately, life to a British resident in Samoa will soon cease to be worth living.”
The Scotsman railed against corrupt administrators, calling for peace between colonial powers and militant – and armed – indigenous factions. He didn’t want to leave Samoa: “Certainly not – that is, unless I am deported.”
In Auckland, Grey, no less infirm, provided a sympathetic and wise sounding board: “What a wonderful old historic figure
Stevenson’s continuing fury at incompetent island rule by the three colonial powers compelled him to publish a long tract.
to be walking on your arm and recalling ancient events and instances! It makes a man small, and yet the extent to which he approved what I had done – or rather have tried to do – encouraged me. Sir George is an expert at least, he knows these races: he is not a small employé with an ink-pot and a Whittaker.”
From Auckland, the Stevenson party steamed on to Sydney. During a threeweek stay, he gave a series of public talks, and was photographed and generally feted. Fanny, however, lurked in her hotel room, depressed, as he noted: “Poor Fanny had very little fun of her visit, having been most of the time in a diet of maltine and slops – and this while the rest of us were rioting on oysters and mushrooms.”
Within two years, Stevenson was dead, aged 44, felled by a cerebral haemorrhage on the verandah of his modest red-roofed home on a plateau outside Vailima, at the foot of Mt Vaea. Samoan locals famously carried Tusitala (storyteller) to the 472m summit overlooking Apia, where his tomb bears the famous poem Requiem.
Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.
In 1899, five years after Stevenson’s death, the three colonial powers carved up the islands without consulting locals. Germany acquired the western group until the outbreak of war in 1914, when 1400 New Zealand troops invaded as a “great and urgent Imperial service”. Western Samoa remained under New Zealand trusteeship until it gained independence in 1962. The US still holds the eastern islands.