Everybody Felt Thoroughly at Home

Abstract

From With Stevenson in Samoa (1910). When the ‘Equator’ eased its way into the sheltered anchorage of Apia against a backdrop of bush and the green slopes of Mount Vaea, one of the first to meet the Stevenson party was a voluble Mid-Westerner named Harry Jay Moors, who had a chain of trading posts and numerous contacts in Samoan business, finance and politics. ‘No mouse squeaked or plot hatched without his getting some inkling’ (Furnas, 360). Delicately placed among American, British and German business interests and indigenous discontents. Moors managed skilfully. At first he provided temporary residence for the new arrivals, while they planned a trip to Australia; but, more significantly, within weeks he had encouraged Louis to buy land and settle in Samoa. Moors’s friendship has been thought a mixed blessing (Calder, 284). Plantation economy was precarious, and Stevenson’s business sense did not equip him for the role of planter. Fanny loathed Moors from the start, and perhaps with good reason, for he systematically cheated them by overcharging for supplies from his Apia store until Louis found him out and took his business elsewhere. Moors had a Samoan wife and five children, one of whom was educated in the United States. Intrigued by the American trader as a sample of many morally dubious characters who made their livelihoods in the South Seas, Louis came to find in his company a respite from the gathering tensions of his home life. See Baxter Letters, 266; Furnas, 360–3.