Girl in Sulphur fuming box in Tokolau (Tokelau) Island

Category

Museums & Galleries Item

Item no

19814

Title

p. 5, Girl in Sulphur fuming box in Tokolau (Tokelau) Island, the local method of curing a local itch.

Description

A girl sits inside of a wooden box, at Atafu on Tokolau, which completely covers her up to the neck. The box is sited inside a wooden hut with a pitched roof. Several boys are inside the hut too.

Artist / maker

Osbourne, Lloyd

Date

1890

Size

19.2 x 23 cm

Type

Photograph

Location

Writers' Museum

This image was taken at Atafu (Tokolau) on the 23rd or 24th May 1890, where most people suffered from a skin disease which covered them in whitish scales and was contagious. The locals called the disease 'Dam Pita' after the trader Peter, who had introduced it. The only cure was regular smoking with sulphur.

The Tokelau Islands are three atolls in the South Pacific Ocean; situated halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. They were previously called the Union Islands and since 1976 have been called Tokelau. The word Tokelau is Polynesian for north wind.

On 11th April 1890 Robert Louis Stevenson his wife Fanny and her son Lloyd Osbourne set off aboard the steamer Janet Nicoll from Sydney for a three-month trading voyage through the Pacific. The ship was under charter to Messrs Henderson and Macfarlane of Auckland, a well known trading firm The travelled through the Cook, Gilbert, Ellice and Marshall Islands, arriving at Noumea, New Caledonia on the 26th July.

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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Related subjects

People > Children > Boys

People > Children > Girls

Places > Oceania > Tokelau Islands

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