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Daily Archives: 19 December 2025

by Joel | 19 December 2025 · 11:53 pm

RLS, Missionaries, and Chiefs

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 625-628:

Westerners took pride in bringing faith to the heathen in the Pacific; that was often invoked as their principal justification for being there. By the Stevensons’ time, missionaries were ubiquitous, distributed variously by denomination depending on the region. Maps were published that indicated the predominant territories of Catholics, Congregationalists, United Presbyterians, Free Church of Scotland, Wesleyans, Baptists, and Mormons. In Samoa a minority were Catholics, but the dominant group was the “L.M.S,” the interdenominational London Missionary Society.

During the cruises on the Casco, Equator, and Janet Nicholl, Louis had formed a negative view of missionaries as moralistic bullies, but in Samoa he got to know a number of them well and gained great respect. They were less dogmatic theologically than he had been led to expect, and in fact took a deep interest in native beliefs and did pioneering work in ethnography. They knew and understood the people much better than foreign bureaucrats did, who didn’t bother to learn the language and were regularly rotated in and out of Samoa.

In 1892 Louis told a journalist, “Missions in the South Seas generally are far the most pleasing result of the presence of white men; and those in Samoa are the best I have ever seen.” He especially admired William Clarke, who had mistaken the family for traveling entertainers when he first saw them on the Apia beach. Louis wrote to Colvin, “The excellent Clarke was up here almost all day yesterday, a man I esteem and like to the soles of his boots; indeed, I prefer him to any man in Samoa and to most people in the world.”

Many of the missionaries were fluent in Samoan, and one of them, who gave Louis regular lessons, recalled that Louis “thought the language was wonderful. The extent of the vocabulary, the delicate differences of form and expressive shades of meaning, the wonderful varieties of the pronouns and particles astonished him.” The point is striking: he liked language to be complex.

The division between Catholics and Protestants was evident but not hostile, and there were adherents of both at Vailima (the Catholics were known as Popies). Louis’s closest missionary friends were Protestants, but he was fond of Catholic priests as well. “He had a special admiration,” Graham Balfour said, “for the way in which they identified themselves with the natives and encouraged all native habits and traditions at all compatible with Christianity.” Also, he enjoyed speaking French with them.

At one point Louis’s friend Adelaide Boodle wrote from Bournemouth to say that she was considering a trip to Samoa but had been urged to avoid places that had no Anglican clergy, presumably because she wouldn’t be able to take Communion in the authorized way. Louis replied, “Christ himself and the twelve apostles seem to me to have gone through this rough world without the support of the Anglican communion. I am pained that a friend of mine should conceive life so smally as to think she leaves the hand of her God because she leaves a certain clique of clergymen and a certain scattered handful of stone buildings, some of them with pointed windows, most with belfries, and a few with an illumination of the Ten Commandments on the wall.”

As Louis had discovered in Tahiti, islanders might embrace conversion but continue to hold on quietly to their old beliefs. “We may see the difficulty in its highest terms,” he wrote in his notebook, “when a missionary asks a savage if he believes it is the virtuous who are to be happiest in a future state, and receives an affirmative reply. The good man is much pleased with such incipient orthodoxy, while all the time they have been juggling with each other with misunderstood symbols. The missionary had Christian virtue in his mind, while the Tupinamba [an Amazon tribe] means by the virtuous ‘those who have well revenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies.’”

One of Louis’s unpublished fables, “Something in It,” explores the mutual incomprehension of belief systems. A missionary violates a native taboo and is carried off by a spirit to be baked and devoured. As a preliminary step he is required to drink ritual kava, which he refuses on the grounds that it is intoxicating and therefore forbidden. He is asked, “Are you going to respect a taboo at a time like this? And you were always so opposed to taboos when you were alive!” He replies, “To other people’s. Never to my own.” He is thereupon sent back to the world of the living, as unqualified to enter the spirit world. “‘I seem to have been misinformed upon some points,’ said he. ‘Perhaps there is not much in it, as I supposed; but there is something in it after all. Let me be glad of that.’” The taboo and the missionary’s rules, Roslyn Jolly says, “are utterly alien to each other, equally valid, with neither able to command universal authority.”

Well-meaning and sympathetic though individual missionaries might be, they were still complicit in the deployment of Christianity as an agent of imperialism. Louis would probably have appreciated Jomo Kenyatta’s comment in twentieth-century Kenya: “When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.”

RLS First Encounters Polynesia

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 534-537:

Continuing in a southwesterly direction, the Casco made its first landfall after three weeks at the island of Nukuhiva in the Marquesas, thirty-five hundred miles from Hawaii. Melville had lived there in 1842, and made it the setting for the semi-fictionalized memoir Typee, to which Louis had been introduced by Stoddard. Melville’s other South Seas book was Omoo, a Marquesan word meaning someone who wanders from one island to another. Louis was an Omoo now.

In the travel book he did eventually write, In the South Seas, he described this moment: “The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.” When the Casco dropped anchor “it was a small sound, a great event; my soul went down with these moorings whence no windlass may extract nor any diver fish it up.”

This was Louis’s first encounter with Polynesian culture, and the beginning of his sympathy with the islanders at a time when that culture was being destroyed; the Marquesas were nominally independent but by now controlled by France. He recorded a conversation with a teenage mother nursing her little baby. When she questioned him about England he described, “as best I was able, and by word and gesture, the overpopulation, the hunger, and the perpetual toil.” She sat for a time silent, “gravely reflecting on that picture of unwonted sorrows.” And then,

It struck in her another thought always uppermost in the Marquesan bosom, and she began with a smiling sadness, and looking on me out of melancholy eyes, to lament the decease of her own people. “Ici pas de kanaques [there are no kanakas here],” said she; and taking the baby from her breast, she held it out to me with both her hands. “Tenez—a little baby like this; then dead. All the Kanaques die. Then no more.” The smile, and this instancing by the girl-mother of her own tiny flesh and blood, affected me strangely; they spoke of so tranquil a despair.

Foreigners sometimes used the term kanaka as a racist put-down, but it wasn’t originally negative. In the Polynesian languages [via Hawaiian—J] it simply meant “people,” and Richard Henry Dana had observed in Two Years before the Mast that islanders everywhere called themselves by that name—“they were the most interesting, intelligent, and kind-hearted people that I ever fell in with.”

Louis was struck by the matter-of-fact way in which the islanders referred to cannibalism, which had been practiced until very recently. He was introduced to a chief who was notable as “the last eater of long pig in Nukuhiva.”

Not many years have elapsed since he was seen striding on the beach of Anaho, a dead man’s arm across his shoulder. “So does Kooamua to his enemies!” he roared to the passers-by, and took a bite from the raw flesh. And now behold this gentleman, very wisely replaced in office by the French, paying us a morning visit in European clothes. He was the man of the most character we had yet seen: his manners genial and decisive, his person tall, his face rugged, astute, formidable, and with a certain similarity to Mr. Gladstone’s—only for the brownness of the skin, and the high-chief’s tattooing, all one side and much of the other being of an even blue.

Kooamua enjoyed a tour of the Casco, and commented that as a chief he had to observe exact sobriety, but a few days later they encountered him hopelessly drunk “in a state of smiling and lopsided imbecility.”

Margaret was open-minded about everything she was seeing, including the exposed skin and tattoos that missionaries denounced. “Two most respectable-looking old gentlemen wore nothing but small red and yellow loincloths and very cutty sarks [short skirts] on top. There were even some who wore less! The display of legs was something we were not accustomed to; but as they were all tattooed in most wonderful patterns, it really looked quite as if they were wearing openwork silk tights. . . . Fanny and I feel very naked with our own plain white legs when we are bathing.” Margaret had no prejudice concerning skin color, either. She mentioned one man who wore a garment “leaving an ample stretch of brown satin skin exposed to view. What wonderful skins they all have, by the way!”

It amused her that the Marquesans invented new names for the visitors.

Louis was at first “the old man,” much to his distress; but now they call him “Ona,” meaning owner of the yacht, a name he greatly prefers to the first. Fanny is Vahine, or wife; I am the old woman, and Lloyd rejoices in the name of Maté Karahi, the young man with glass eyes (spectacles). Perhaps it is a compliment here to call one old, as it is in China. At any rate, one native told Louis that he himself was old, but his mother was not!

The name “Ona” was important. That implied that Louis was a rich man traveling solely for pleasure, as contrasted with the unscrupulous traders who were constantly trying to cheat the Polynesians.