Vailima
"He came here sick and stayed to write and die — and somehow that feels less like tragedy than like a good decision."
I am not someone who makes pilgrimages to writers’ houses. Museums dedicated to the lives of dead authors tend to feel airless and institutional, the furniture roped off, the curators whispering. Vailima broke this rule for me so thoroughly that I stayed for three hours when I had planned for one. The house sits on a hillside above Apia, a two-story wooden colonial mansion with deep verandahs on all sides, the kind of house that was built specifically to negotiate with tropical heat — high ceilings, thick walls, the orientation angled to catch whatever breeze the hills produce. Robert Louis Stevenson arrived here in 1890, already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him four years later, and built this house with the proceeds of his novels. He named it Vailima: five rivers in Samoan, for the streams running through the property.
The museum inside is genuinely well-curated — an unusual thing to say, but the Samoan government has taken stewardship of the site seriously, and the interpretation doesn’t overclaim. There are first editions, letters in Stevenson’s cramped handwriting, the typewriter he used for the later manuscripts. His study looks out over the gardens toward the water, and there is a particular light in the late afternoon that comes through those windows at an angle that I think explains something about why he wrote so prolifically here — twelve books in four years, including the completion of Weir of Hermiston, left unfinished on his desk when he died suddenly on December 3, 1894. He is buried on the summit of Mount Vaea, which rises steeply behind the house. The hike up through the bush takes about forty-five minutes, and the tomb is a plain concrete structure with a plaque bearing his own Requiem: “Home is the sailor, home from sea / And the hunter home from the hill.” The view from the top on a clear day takes in the full harbor and the reef line and, on the far horizon, what might be Savai’i.
What stays with me most from Vailima is not the literary history but the ordinary domesticity of the place. Stevenson called himself Tusitala — the teller of tales — by his Samoan neighbors, who genuinely mourned him when he died. The path that the chiefs of Samoa cut through the jungle to carry his body up to the mountain summit, in a single night, is documented in the museum. Two hundred men came, many of them carrying torches. The detail that does something to me every time I think about it: they called the path they cut “The Road of Loving Hearts,” and you can still walk it today.
When to go: Year-round — the museum operates regardless of season. Go on a weekday morning to have the house mostly to yourself. Allow time for the Mount Vaea hike; the path can be muddy in the wet season, so dry season (May–October) makes for a more comfortable ascent.