Word: stevensons
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...These days Vailima is itself a museum, and literary curiosity beats a path to its door. The house Stevenson and his American wife Fanny carved into the mountainside recently made it into Patricia Schulz's bestselling 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, and each year up to 12,000 Stevensonians, tourists and scholars climb the hill to peer into the world of a man who has kidnapped the imagination of generations. Devoted pilgrims will hike a further hour to the author's final resting place on the peak of Mount Vaea. Here, under the breadfruit trees, they...
...many of the 115,000 Samoans who live on the main island of Upolu, Robert Louis Stevenson is still very much alive. From his office on the sixth floor of the Central Bank of Samoa building, Deputy Prime Minister Misa Telefoni points out the window to Tusitala's mountain tomb: "See, it's up under those trees - right on top. That's an indication of how much the Samoans cared for him, because they had to hack the road up there and carry his heavy coffin." Telefoni's memory of Tusitala, or "Writer of Tales," as he was known locally...
...Stevenson is also entwined in the country's political history. Arriving only months after the signing of the Berlin Treaty of 1889, which gave control of Samoa jointly to Germany, Britain and the U.S., the famous Scotsman put his weight behind the non-aligned chief Mata'afa. Former Prime Minister Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi says Stevenson's sympathies were with "indigenous people - their aspirations, their problems trying to hold their own against outsider influences, whether they were missionaries, colonial or business people." Nearly a quarter of a century after they gained independence, Samoans are relaxed in the author...
...nothing less from the story of how one of the world's tallest tale-tellers came to an island of natural yarn-spinners (fagogo is the Samoan word for their rich and digressive oral tradition). Setting out from San Francisco in 1888 with wife Fanny, 11 years his senior, Stevenson sought both material for his writing and warm weather for his ailing lungs. After stops along the way, Stevenson began to pine for "an island with a profile," and found it in the natural peaks and waterfalls of Samoa. Regular steamer connections with Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. meant...
...Today, one can hover over Stevenson's single bed in his upstairs study (Fanny disliked the aquamarine walls almost as much as his coughing), gaze into his man-sized safe, and pace the verandas where the writer would listen to the distant surf crashing on the reef. But Samoa's climate hasn't been kind to his writing. A set of first editions in the museum has almost perished. "The cockroaches got to the books," says museum manager Lufilufi Rasmussen. "The covers aren't legible now, so we have to get them restored...