Portrait of Lauaki Namulauulu Mamoe

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20077

Title

p. 81, Portrait of Lauaki Namulauulu Mamoe

Description

Sepia photograph of Samoan orator Portrait of Lauaki Namulauulu Mamoe. He is standing leaning on an orator's staff and pointing with this right hand.

The image is from the photograph album entitled 'The Cruise of the Equator' of Robert Louis Stevenson's travels around the Gilbert Islands and Samoa in 1889 but is a much later addition to the album.

Artist / maker

Andrew, Thomas

Date

1889

Size

19.8 x 14.3 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Lauaki Namulauulu Mamoe (c. 1850? - 1915) was a Samoan politician, orator and warrior. In the early 20th century fe formed a political group, the Mau of Pule which sought to give Samoans more control over their own affairs of government, a cause Robert Louis Stevenson had campaigned and written for earlier. He and other leaders were exiled from Samoa as punishment and sent to the Mariana Islands until pardonned by the New Zealand government in 1915.

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 where he was to spend the remaining four years of his life.

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). From the late 1880s, Stevenson stayed in the South Pacific with his family on his own estate in Vailima in Samoa. 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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