"Samoan Girls Making Kava", P. 48

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20137

Title

p. 48, Samoan girls making kava

Description

A group of Samoan girls making Kava. The girls are pictured sitting in a row on a long mat. The girl in the centre has a conical bowl in front of her, on small feet, in which she pounds the kava root to extract the juice. Other girls hold bits of kava root, or large poiunding stones. In the background is the open side.

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

Davis, John

Date

1889

Size

14.3 x 19.8 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

The photograph was taken by a studio photographer, John Davis, based at Apia in Samoa. Davis was working in Apia as postmaster, but also worked as a photographer during the 1880 and 1890s. He was known for his carte de visite photographs showing Samoan culture and traditions.

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.

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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"Samoan girls making kava", p. 48