Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 65

1889

When  Fanny  ?rst  clapped  eyes  on  their  future  homestead  in  the  South  Seas,  she  was standing on the side of a mountain, two and a half miles above the town of Apia, on the island of Upolu in Samoa. The sighting of the property lacked the thrill she’d felt upon ?rst seeing the house in Bournemouth, or the chalet in Hyeres, or even the little cottage in Oakland where she had raised her children. She wasn’t even looking for a place in Samoa. They had merely gotten o? the Equator for a couple of weeks while Louis researched the history of the place for his newspaper letters. His best source was a local trader, one Mr. Harry J. Moors, who promptly o?ered his home as the place they should stay during their visit. He happened to be the local land agent as well.

“Moors wants to show us some land this afternoon,” Louis said after breakfast. “He’s enterprising, I’ll give him that. We’ve been here all of three days,” Fanny replied.
They were taking an afternoon stroll through Apia, looking it over. On its main street, where drinking shops alternated with churches and houses, sin and salvation appeared to be tied in the contest for Apia’s souls. Pouring out of tavern doorways came the deafening whine of hurdy-gurdies. Within, they spied tawdry-looking women drinking with sailors.
The town was full of whites—some four hundred, Moors had told them—mostly British, with about ninety Germans and fewer than twenty Americans. “The whites you’ll see are missionaries,  expatriate  farmers,  traders,  sailors,  and  beachcombers  who  washed  up  in Upolu  and  never  left,”  Moors  said.  Fanny  noticed  the  whites  had  mixed  enough  with natives that there were plenty of “half-castes” on the streets of Apia. Moors himself had a native wife.

“Would you seriously consider living here?” she asked Louis.

He shrugged.  “I wouldn’t want to live in town. But you heard the doctor. If I am to remain well, I’ll have to stay in this area for the bulk of my time. And you need a place to land, Fanny. I just don’t know if Samoa  is the right spot. We might be better o? near Sydney. Bigger port, more culture.”

“It can’t hurt to look at it, I suppose,” she said.

Standing on the hill in the tropical sun that afternoon, with Mount Vaea climbing up in the  distance,  Fanny’s  eyes  scanned  some  three  hundred  acres  of  tangled  forest  and

undergrowth, a mess of impenetrable branches and liana vines.

“Upolu and Savii are the biggest of the islands in Samoa, but we get the most contact with the outside world here in Upolu.” Mr. Moors swept a hand across the treed landscape. “Look at it! Five rivers, all of ’em full of freshwater prawns; a high waterfall and a smaller one that has a bathing pool below it. It’s nigh-hand to paradise.” He kicked the toe of his boot into the soil. “You can grow anything here, the year round. Oh, there’s the occasional cyclone, but that’s about it. You might consider a plantation of a couple of crops; people do that to help pay for the cost of the land. Locals will keep it going while you’re away.” The trader  took  o?  his  straw  hat,  wiped his  forehead with  a  sleeve.  “Folks  call  this  place Vailima, which is Samoan for  ‘?ve rivers.’” He pointed to a spot on the hillside.  “Right there would be the best place for a house,” he said. “That’s where I’d put ’er. You’ll know exactly when a mail ship comes in.”

Sweating profusely, Fanny stared in wonder at Louis, who seemed excited by the land and infused with new energy now that the temperature was well into the nineties. “You are the only person I know who perks up in a heat wave,” she said.

“How many mail deliveries?” Louis asked Moors. “Four a month. You can’t beat that.”

As they dressed for dinner at Moors’s house that evening, Fanny said,  “Did you notice how ?lthy the beach in Apia was? What kind of town would allow animal carcasses and o?al to remain there? I don’t know what to think of this place.” Nor did she know what to make  of  Mr.  Moors,  a  brawny  Michigander  whose  heart  appeared to  retain  a  nook  of sentimentality and whose ?ngers were in a lot of Samoan pies. He was mainly a trader, with a post in Apia and a string of trading posts on other islands. But he was also the person  who  would sell  them  the  land on  Upolu,  arrange  to  have  it  cleared,  build the cottage for them, and act as their banker, since he had considerable money to loan until their funds could get to the island. He was a big ?nancial force in town. She suspected his enthusiasm for having them as neighbors had something to do with Louis’s fame but more to do with his money.

What the people of Apia thought of them on ?rst sight was apparent in the face of a missionary who happened to be at the harbor when the Equator pulled into port. She and Louis and Lloyd disembarked from the boat barefoot. Fanny wore a holoku, bracelets, big gold hoop earrings she had acquired in Tahiti, a straw hat on her head, and her guitar

slung over her back. Lloyd wore hoop earrings, blue glasses against the sun, and carried a battered ?ddle. Louis, she supposed, was strange-looking simply for the slender ?gure he cut, but with his somewhat seedy cotton trousers and shirt, and the ?ageolet in his hand, and  a  twenty-?ve-cent  white  cotton  yachting  cap  on  his  head,  he  might  have  been  a beachcomber. All of them were smoking.

The missionary man, Reverend Clarke, had looked puzzled and then hopeful when he saw them tromping along the coral-and-sand main street of Apia. He approached Louis and asked, “Are you folks minstrels?”

“After a fashion, sir,” Louis replied cheerily. “Have you work for us?” A few days running, they rode horses over the hills above Apia. Louis was vigorous in the
Samoan  climate,  staying  in  the  saddle  for  ?ve  hours  and then,  over  long  dinners  and drinks, talking with the trader and his wife, Nimo, about the politics of the place, on which Moors was an expert.

Impulsively,  they  decided to  buy  the  property.  They  authorized Moors  to  embark  on building  a  cottage where they  would live while a  larger house was constructed.  Fanny calculated that they could sail on to Sydney, get a steamer and return to England, see old friends—what friends were left—collect their possessions, and be back to Samoa in eight months, by September 1890, when the cottage would be done and the house under way.
Reverend Clarke, a decent, gentle man, appeared excited by the idea that they would be neighbors but clearly felt compelled to tell them the truth about the land. “The locals say your property only has four rivers,” he said regretfully, as if the information might spoil the deal.

“Close enough,” Fanny said.

Later she would wonder: What made me think I could make this wild place a home? Then she would remember what she saw the day they bought the land: an orchid growing on a tree limb. It was an exquisite thing, glowing white and tinged with rose and green, perfect in form, ?ourishing in health, a spot of beauty secretly tucked into ordinary brown bark. That was what she would make Vailima—an unexpected jewel in the Samoan forest.