"Mariki - Shelling Copra", P. 3 - Capital Collections

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

20145

Title

p. 3, Mariki - shelling copra

Description

Two men sat on the ground removing the flesh from coconuts, and a woman standing beside them, at the foot of a coconut tree. The image caption reads "Mariki - shelling copra - ie picking the dry coconut flesh out of the nut - it is then ready for putting into bags and being shipped off."

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

9.1 x 11.6 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

Maraki, or Marakei as it is called today, is an atoll in the north of the Gilbert Islands group, and part of the island nation of Kiribati. In the 19th century, the Gilbert Islands were known as the Kingsmill Islands, a name now applied to the southern part of the group.

The island atoll almost entirely surrounds its deep lagoon, apart from two passes which are unavigable at low tide.

The Stevenson party visited Marakei during their stay on Butaritari and Apemama.

Copra is the dried meat of the coconut from which the coconut oil is extracted. The dried meat was a valuable food source, but the oil was an important export. At the time of Stevenson's visit to Mariki, ships would travel from island to island collecting the dried copra for processing.

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-traveled, 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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"Mariki - shelling copra", p. 3