"Protestant church", p.24

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19322

Title

p.24, Protestant church

Description

An image of the end of the gabled Protestant church at Tautira, Tahiti. The church has three arched windows. A wooden hut stands opposite the church and in the background are trees and the hills of the Vaitepiha valley.

The image is from the photograph album entitled 'The Cruise of the Casco' of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels around Hawaii and French Polynesia in 1888.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1889

Size

8.7 x 13.7 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

This image was taken in November-December 1888 while the Stevenson family were staying at Tautira. Princess Moe had organised for the Stevenson party to move into the house of Ori a Ori, the sub chief of the village and deacon of the Protestant Church in Tautira after it became apparent that they were to have an extended stay on the Island. Ori, and his family moved to another house during this time.

Tautira is a village on a promontory on the south eastern coast of Tahiti, one of the Windward Islands of French Polynesia, in the southern Pacific Ocean. The promontory and bay are at the mouth of the Vaitepiha valley which leads up into the jagged volcanic hills inland.

Born in Edinburgh on 13th November 1850, Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, playwright and travel writer. Although he was plagued by ill health all his life, he was extraordinarily well-travelled, visiting Europe, America and the South Seas. He married American born Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne in 1880 and is best-known for works like Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (both 1886).

Robert Louis Stevenson spent the latter years of his life both travelling and resident in the Pacific. The family chartered the 'Casco' in San Francisco and spent several weeks travelling in French Polynesia, including an extended stay in Tahiti where Stevenson recovered from a bout of illness. After this the Stevenson group continued to Honolulu, Hawaii, where they landed in January 1889. In the summer of 1889 Stevenson embarked on a six month voyage through the Gilbert Islands to Samoa aboard the 'Equator'. It was here that Stevenson bought an estate he named Vailima. After another voyage, aboard the trading steamer the 'Janet Nicoll', Stevenson returned to Vailima. He died here on the 3rd December 1894 of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 44, leaving what many consider his best work, Weir of Hermiston (1896) unfinished.

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