"Native Girls Making Kava", P. 46

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20128

Title

p. 46, Native girls making kava

Description

Two girls sitting cross legged on a mat on the floor. One is making kava, grinding the root by hand in a conical bowl on feet. The girl beside her is holding a feathery fly whisk. Behind them is a third girl standing, holding a large fly whisk. In the background can be seen a number of huts.

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

9.5 x 12.3 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Kava is a drink made in many islands of the Western Pacific made from the crushed and ground roots of the kava plant. It is used as a relaxant and sedative, but also had many uses in Polynesian medicine, religion, politics and culture. It was made often by grinding the roots by hand in a cone-shaped coral bowl.

Samoa is a group of volcanic islands in the South Pacific to the north east of New Zealand. Its largest islands are Upolu and Savai'I, and its capital, on the north coast of Upolu is Apia, where Stevenson bought the estate of Vailima and spent his last four years. He writes of the civil wars and foreign involvement in Samoan affairs in his 'Footnote to History; Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa'. Here, Stevenson is his most sympathetic to Polynesian people and culture, and writes how Europeans view the islands through Western, feudalist eyes and not understanding the culture and government of the region from an islander's perspective.

When Stevenson arrived at Samoa in December 1889, the island group was recovering from a civil war between the factions of rival kings, Tamaese, Malietoa Laupepa and Mata'afa Iosefo. The war involved Britain, the USA and Germany, each vying for control of the islands, and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Berlin in 1889 which restored Malietoa Laupepa as king.

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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"Native girls making kava", p. 46