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Belle Part XVI: The Stevensons

“When the Queen gave a garden party at Iolani Palace, often for the benefit of some charity, I was always asked to tell fortunes. On the backs of my calling cards I had drawn and painted little symbols — a horseshoe for luck, a bee to signify work, a heart for love, etc. These cards were the beginning of my Teuila Fortune Telling Cards now published by the U.S. Playing Card Company.”

“This Life I’ve Loved: An Autobiography” Mrs. Isobel Field — ‘Belle’ — stepdaughter of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Belle was still Mrs. Joseph Strong, both professional artists, when they moved to Hawaii with their little boy, Austin, in 1883. The 1880s were the twilight years of Hawaii’s monarchy and the Strongs had become insiders with King David Kalakaua, last of his kind. Belle says much about him in her book: “The King was very kind to the little group that might be called his ‘coterie.’ We were always asked, of course, to the palace balls but he also invited us to many other affairs he thought would interest us …”

“Another very interesting entertainment we owed to the King was the ceremony of welcoming the first consignment of Japanese laborers sent to work on the sugar plantations. The planters had not been very successful with the people they had hired to work the cane fields.” By that, Belle meant native Hawaiians who scorned the work, Portuguese from Madeira who didn’t like taking orders, Chinese indentured workers who preferred house work to field work, and native boys from the Caroline Islands and New Guinea who “simply lay down and die of homesickness. It was the King’s idea to import Japanese laborers for the plantations. … The first contingent of laborers did so well and sent such good reports home to Japan that more were sent and it was then the King commissioned Joe to paint a picture of work on a sugar plantation to be sent as a present to the Mikado.” The painting was a success. “It was very large, full of sunlight and color and showed Japanese laborers at work in a cane field. The King approved of it … the King said he could arrange to send us both to another place where there was a much larger sugar plantation that he was sure we could find interesting.”

“‘Thanks so much,’ I said. ‘I’d love it, but I’m expecting my mother and my brother, who are coming for a visit and I’d be afraid to go away.’ I went on to explain, ‘My stepfather, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson is coming. He has written several books.’ ‘Never heard of him,’ said Jack Haley (one of the ‘coterie’). ‘What did he write?’ To my surprise it was the King who answered, ‘Treasure Island and Jekyll & Hyde.'”

Robert Louis Stevenson’s fame had preceded him to the Islands. At least King David Kalakaua knew who he was. The author of said classic hits already knew of the King, too, by the time he had conceived his current South Seas adventure in Saranac Lake. There, with the assistance of Samuel McClure, Stevenson’s second American publisher, they made plans at Baker’s, where RLS and his family had rented rooms for the winter of 1887-88, which is now a memorial. McClure recalled it all in a speech he gave there in 1922: “I think the South Seas must have been mentioned that evening. … The next time I came to Saranac, we actually planned out the South Pacific cruise, talking until late into the night. That was one of the most extraordinary evenings of my life. Mr. Stevenson walked up and down that room with the fireplace, or stopped occasionally to lean his elbow on the mantelpiece and we made the most splendid plans and arrangements…”

That dream became reality in May, 1888, when Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, found the brand new luxury schooner-yacht Casco, Captain Otis, in San Francisco to charter for six months. But it was more like seven months before the so-called Stevenson expedition reached Honolulu, having weighed anchor at Papeete, Tahiti, on Christmas Day, 1888. This group of five voyagers was comprised of RLS, Fanny, his wife, and Lloyd Osbourne, her son, also the author’s mother, Margaret or ‘Maggie’ and Valentine Roch, Swiss traveling servant. Their voyage between Point A and Point B had been difficult. To his cousin Bob Stevenson, Louis wrote that “Our voyage up here was most disastrous, calms, squalls, head sea, waterspouts of rain, hurricane weather all about, and we in the midst of the hurricane season. … We ran out of food and were quite given up for lost in Honolulu; people had ceased to speak to Belle about the Casco, as a deadly subject. But the perils of the deep were a part of the programme…”

Maggie, at 59, was the senior member of the party and like her celebrity son, had good sea legs and was less prone to seasickness. The others were less fortunate. Maggie was still writing letters to her sister in Scotland, the ones later edited and published under the title From Saranac to the Marquesas — Some Letters Written to Miss J.W. Balfour, Scribners, 1903. The title is misleading because the final destination of the Casco was Hawaii and Maggie was glad to finally get there after days like this at sea: “January 20 (1889) … have been flying along at a great rate. … But I cannot call it ‘pleasure sailing’ as it has been a ‘beam sea’ all the time and we are tired out with the constant holding-on and effort required to keep oneself steady. Such a knocking about is very fatiguing after a time, and there is no rest night or day.”

Finally, after one last dead calm with provisions gone, a fresh wind and a swell, “the heaviest I have ever been out in,” says RLS, “at least 15 feet came tearing after us about a point and a half off the wind.” Belle picks up the narrative here: “The Casco, all sails set, came flying round Diamond Head with the speed of an express train. Austin and I were in a little open boat directly in her path. Why we were not run down and drowned is a mystery to me. I can’t remember how we got on board, but in the midst of shouts and screams we were scooped out of our boat and found ourselves sprawling on the deck, Louis and Lloyd laughing as they helped us to our feet, Aunt Maggie, Louis’ mother, looking on with amusement while my mother scolded us roundly for being such idiots.

“The Stevenson party looked remarkably well, especially Louis who was brown as an islander and wildly excited, as they all were, at nearing the end of what had been a terrible journey of storms and calms and contrary winds. They were all hungry, too…”

The stage was now set for the Hawaiian chapter in the RLS story. All that the author had left for a family after his father’s death in 1887, was there with him aboard the Casco at anchor in Honolulu harbor. That night they would all celebrate their safe arrival and reunion in the Islands. That included Captain Otis and Ah Fu, the Casco’s cook. The nearby Royal Hawaiian Hotel was the scene of the party and for the new arrivals from Tahiti, food was the priority. Aunt Maggie’s letters as published in From Saranac to the Marquesas end here. Because we learned so much in these letters about their life at Baker’s and Saranac Lake in 1887-88, the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson–Mrs. Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson, aka, Maggie, gets the last word.

“Honolulu, Friday, 25 … I must confess our dinner last night at the hotel seemed to me the very finest banquet of which I had ever partaken. But, oh dear me, this place is so civilized! And to come back from Tautira (Tahitian village where they had lived for five weeks as the guests of Chief Ori-A-Ori) to telephones and electric light is at first very bewildering and unpleasant. I grant the conveniences, but we realise that our happy cruise in the South Seas has come to an end. Thank God, the end is a happy one, and we are met by good news of all we love. But it is the end, nevertheless.”

This is also the end of “Belle,” a miniseries; nevertheless, Belle still has more to say from her book, “This Life I’ve Loved.”

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