"Great Dance in Apemama Speak-house", P. 42

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20117

Title

p. 42, Great dance in Apemama speak-house

Description

A group of men dancing and singing in the Speak House of Apemama. They are standing in a row with their right arms held high above their heads, and dressed in long skirts made of coconut fibre.

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.

Artist / maker

Unknown

Date

1889

Size

18.1 x 23 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The Speak-House at Apemama was where the elders and the chief would meet, and where the men of the island would gather to sing and dance, 'delivered with an energy that shook the roof'.

Stevenson stayed on Apemama from 30th August to 25th October. During this time, they stayed in a group of huts which became known as 'Equator City'.

Apemama, now Abemama, is an island atoll in the centre of Gilbert Islands group, just north of the equator. At the time of Stevenson's visit, the island's chief was Tembinok' (or Tem Binoka). Tembinok' was an impressive, tyrannical leader with strong views on European visitors to the island. So much was he feared by travellers, Stevenson writes that the Equator was thoroughly cleaned and prepared for the royal visit, and 'dandified for the occasion'. Apemama was a 'close island, lying in the sea with closed doors', and Stevenson was interested to see how this island, so shut off from the rest of the world, had preserved many of its traditions.

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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"Great dance in Apemama speak-house", p. 42