Aggie Grey & James Michener   When planning the trip to Samoa I knew nothing of Aggie Grey, but after reviewing her background, I knew I had to stay at Aggie Grey’s Hotel, and it turned out to be a major factor in my enjoying Samoa. The various blurbs I had come across involved serving hamburgers to GI’s in 1943, something about Bloody Mary, and appearing on a postage stamp. There just had to be something behind all this, and there was indeed. It ended up with my interviewing for a few moments Aggie’s daughter-in-law, Marina Grey, and Marina graciously giving me a gift of Aggie’s biography. The information below comes from all these sources.

Agnes Grey (1897-1988) was the middle of three sisters, plus a brother, born to an English pharmacist who’d made his way to Apia by way of Fiji, and a Samoan mother. The family lived above the pharmacy on Beach Road right at the southeast corner of the harbor, right where the hotel is today. Aggie’s dates correspond very closely to the 20C history of Samoa, so she experienced all the governmental changes. Eventually she opened a small pub. During WWII, there was a flood of American GI’s on Samoa, and when Aggie started serving hot dogs and hamburgers to serve their specific needs, hers being one of very few places that were not off limits to the GI’s, it became the most popular place in town. Aggie was also a manipulator when dealing with the US military authorities. Also, when officers could get a good supply of spirits, but GI’s could not, she had a still installed upstairs to serve their needs. Aggie became a very successful businesswoman, and her enterprise grew into a three-story hotel. Even US Secretary of State George Schultz had fond memories of being at Aggie’s. Someone else who visited her then, and many times afterward, was Naval Historical Officer for the Eastern Pacific James Michener (1907-1997). After the war, Aggie’s enterprise grew, and Aggie was always available to circulate among her guests and make them feel at home. Eventually, she became as revered among the Samoans as Robert Lewis Stevenson had been eight decades earlier (see below). Finally, in 1971, the Samoan government gave tribute to Aggie by portraying her on a stamp, in recognition and appreciation of her contribution to tourism, even though seldom is a living person, other than royalty, portrayed on a stamp.

James Michener wrote his collection of short stories, “Tales of the South Pacific”, in 1946, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1948. Based on several of those stories, Rogers and Hammerstein wrote the musical “South Pacific” in 1949, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1950. Mary Martin played Nellie Forbush and Ezio Pinza played Emile de Becque. The 1958 film version (filmed in Kauai‘i) had Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi. I finally got to see it on stage at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater on 11 June 2008 (2008/8 “Broadway”), just about 7.5 months before arriving in Samoa.

As much as I revere the historic depth of most of Michener’s works, I’ve always held off reading “Tales of the South Pacific” because it’s so different from his later writings. I found Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque discussed quickly in two of the stories, and Joe Cable and wheeler-dealer Bloody Mary, with her daughter Liat, in another. Luther Billis, the finagler, is elsewhere. All these characters are fleshed out much further in the musical, which is based on these characters alone. But most of the stories in the book are very war-oriented, and I found myself skimming many of them after a while. It’s very much “of the period” with talk of killing “Japs” and “Nips”. I’m glad I was reading/skimming the stories while located in the South Pacific, but to me it’s not vintage Michener. The musical has much fuller and deeper characterizations of the individuals involved.

Aggie is widely believed to have been the inspiration for Bloody Mary, which, given the negative qualities of Bloody Mary, is understandable. But Marina Grey, Aggie’s daughter-in-law, who assured me that Aggie knew Michener, who visited the hotel many times, also told me (it’s also in the biography) that Michener assured Aggie that at most, she was the inspiration for only the good side of Mary. In reality, this Michener quote appears in the biography:

Aggie Grey's Hotel   You suspect already that, given the background, Aggie Grey’s Hotel is going to have some particular ambiance, and it certainly does. There are a couple of other hotels in Apia (I’ve already mentioned the Insel Fehmarn), and Aggie’s now has opened a beach resort hotel way in the west of Upolu five minutes from the airport, but I had to be at the original, not only because it’s the original, but because I like to be in town. It still has its lovely position on Beach Road overlooking the entire harbor. The front of the hotel has recently been replaced with a Victorian-looking structure geared to business travelers, which has nothing to do with the charm behind it. Entering this structure you find a large, flower-laden lobby, and behind it a relaxing terrace overlooking the traditional part of the hotel. While this latter part has a number of functional, two-story motel-style strips of rooms around the center, it’s the center that’s so special.

At the very center is the huge Old Fale Restaurant, with a pool beside it that has a palm tree in the middle. The restaurant has a stage at one end, and the roof is in the fale style, a huge arch above with carved beams below and posts all around the edges. This is where the themed buffet dinners are held, and also the fiafia (see below).

But the walkways all around the restaurant and leading back to the lobby are also fale-style, roofed over with posts. And all along the walkways are the bungalows. These are the prime locations. Each one is oval (with bath attached on one side) and has fale-like posts on its tiny porch to evoke the proper feeling. Inside you see above through the carved wooden beams to what would otherwise be an attic if it had been enclosed, with other carved vertical beams holding up the roof. The roof is curved on both ends, and flat on the sides. These rooms are very special places.

Some of the fales are named after people, including actors who stayed there. In 1952, “Return to Paradise” was filmed on the south coast of Upolu, and its stars, Gary Cooper and Roberta Haynes, stayed at Aggie’s. The film was based on a Michener sequel to Tales of the South Pacific. There are fales named after both actors, and also ones named after William Holden and Marlon Brando. I stayed in the Roberta Haynes fale, someone whose name has long since fallen off the charts (I had to look up who she was). One can wonder how many younger people will remember the names of the other actors, and at what point fame fades away.

Fiafia   Well, what do we have in this Samoan word but reduplication? I understand “fia” means “happy”, and it will not surprise that a fiafia is a festival or big celebration. Two hotels in Apia are known for theirs, and Aggie Grey’s gives the premier one every Wednesday evening, followed by a buffet dinner. Fortunately, I arrived on a Wednesday. Friday nights the buffet is a Mongolian barbecue (2005/6 “Vancouver”); Saturday is the seafood buffet; only Thursday did I have to order à la carte.

It was off season, and the world economy isn’t too good, so most evenings the crowd at the dinners was sparse, but for the fiafia the locals poured in (you could tell, because they paid cash at the entrance, and others charged dinner and the show to their room). There must have easily been thirty young performers and musicians, and, as it was announced, they are all workers at the hotel. They may be porters, or waitstaff, or whatever. Right after the show, some of them were serving behind the buffet.

It started with four young men in the center aisle leaning back gracefully and blowing a mournful wail on conch shells. There were then musicians on the stage, and a line of women sang, using the graceful hand gestures you see with a hula. Most spectacular was the slap dance performed by the men. It could have been a Bavarian Schuhplattler, but in super-fast time. Toward the end, Marina Grey (this was the first time I saw her), appeared in the center aisle in costume, singing and doing the appropriate hand gestures. The way the entire staff is involved evokes the family spirit initiated by Aggie. Finally, the audience got up and stepped to the pool side of the fale, where several of the guys did a fire dance, twirling batons that were burning on both ends.

That Aggie Grey’s fiafia is well known is evidenced by the number of entries it has on YouTube. Although I couldn’t find any entries with the conch shells, or with the line of hand-gesturing women, I did find these: Fiafia: Chanting and Dancing; Fiafia: Slap Dance; Fiafia: Hula; Fiafia: Fire Dance.

Apia   The first day I was in Apia I wanted to reconfirm the day trip to Pago Pago I’d planned long in advance with Oceania Travel & Tours, located in another hotel, since the tour company located in Aggie’s doesn’t do it, but I also wanted to see about getting to the Stevenson home, Vailima, and seeing more of Apia. This is where I got to know Jon, a civil engineering student from Brisbane, who was having some trouble arranging tours that came with his hotel package (he eventually straightened it out). It didn’t look like Vailima was going to work with the local group, so I ended up arranging that with Oceania for the day after I came back from Pago, and Jon joined the trip to Vailima. It was also nice having a dinner companion all four nights, as well as a traveling companion for the Vailima trip.

I’ll discuss the Pago trip below, but the next day, a guide arrived from Oceania to take Jon and me on the “Apia Township Tour”. Now don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the tour, but the negative on a tour is that you get to see what the guide wants to show you, which is not necessarily what you want to see. Seeing Apia would take a half-hour, and Vailima maybe 1 ½ hours. So how do you extend two hours to four, to make the tour charge worthwhile? You drive around and around. We saw the stadium. We saw the hospital. We saw the swimming pool. We saw a school, and a university. We saw a waterfall. We saw the gardens around the Baha‘i temple. We drove past the Mormon church. Do you get the picture? Fortunately, most of these were drive-bys, and not stops.

As for seeing Apia, Jon and I had walked along the low seawall on Beach Road on the first day, but it was just to hot to go any further. On another evening, when it was cooler and very pleasant, I walked the other way up to the nearby wharf area, where, of all things, the Europa had sailed in for the night. That night, waiting in line for the Mongolian barbecue, I had a chat in German on the buffet line with two of the young crew members. The Europa was doing a round-trip world cruise out of Dubai, of all places.

But we hadn’t seen the far side of Apia, which is a peninsula extending quite noticeably into the ocean. Although the parliament is here, much more interesting were the three monuments. First was the joint British-American memorial to their ships and crew lost in the 1889 hurricane, then second, a separate German one for the same hurricane. Yet most poignant at the German memorial was a small, separate stone at its base. It said “Unserem Sohn Hans Sieger” (To our Son Hans Sieger), who apparently was a lieutenant whose dates showed him to be 24 years old. The poignancy lies in the fact that the family’s loss was real, felt strongly enough for them to have erected this small stone halfway around the world due to a natural disaster, but today it’s just a forgotten stone next to a forgotten memorial to a forgotten hurricane.

The third monument dated from about a decade later, and bears a poignancy of its own. On the maps it’s listed as the “German Flag Monument”, but since it’s just in German and Samoan, most people probably don’t get what it’s all about, or really care, anyway. The German text is simply:

Since it then repeated it only in Samoan, I explained to Jon that it translates as “Here, on 1 March 1900, the German flag was raised”. It’s nothing nationalistic, or even jingoistic, just a statement of fact to commemorate an event. But if you have a sense of history, there’s so much more behind it. There had been a German presence in Samoa for half a century because of the planters and other settlers, and finally Germany was getting to take over Western Samoa, just as the US was taking over Eastern Samoa next door. The date indicates the beginning of a new—and fateful—century. But this German presence would last just a decade and a half, at which point the German governor would surrender peacefully to the arriving New Zealanders.

These three monuments are on all the Apia maps, but I’m sure not too many people on tour get any significance out of them. If the German presence had continued, I suppose Hans Sieger might have gotten a bit more attention from people who could read his stone. I suspect the ebullient crew members from the Europa that I spoke to, all twenty-somethings, had no interest in the memorials, or even knew they were there. I’d go so far to guess that they didn’t even have any concept of there having been any German presence in Samoa at all a mere century ago. Only those monument-readers among us work to keep history alive. Sic transit gloria mundi.

R L Stevenson’s Vailima   As I review my notes, it would seem that I’ve been on the trail of Robert Lewis Stevenson over the last half-year, and in chronological order to boot, but it’s all a coincidence, I assure you. Stevenson was moving about looking for a location where he could more easily live with his tuberculosis (then called consumption) than in Scotland. In Switzerland (2008/16 “Davos”) I noted that he wrote Treasure Island, which made him world famous, while recuperating in the mountain resort Davos in 1881. In Hawai‘i (2008/24 “Waikiki”) I mentioned that he spent five weeks in Waikiki in 1893 for his health. But in this period, he also found Samoa, which turned out to be his Shangri-La.

He arrived in Samoa in 1889, not yet 40 years of age, and liked it so much that he and his wife Fanny (21 years his senior, from San Francisco, with children) started to build the wooden mansion, Vailima, up in the hills above Apia in 1891. They were serious about staying—one account has it that they shipped 72 tons of furniture from Britain, and he also brought his mother. The house is very tropical in style, with open porches on both levels and lots of cross-ventilation. The Samoans thought the whole way of life a bit odd, and different from their culture. The Stevensons, even in the hot Samoan climate, were still very Victorian, and dressed for dinner every evening—except for the fact that they remained barefoot. The Samoans revered Stevenson and called him Tusitala (Teller of Tales), but they couldn’t quite understand how someone could make a living from writing. Stevenson learned Samoan, and even translated one of his stories into Samoan, and it became the first fictional tale ever to appear in that language.

Yet amazingly, given the strong connection between Stevenson and Samoa, he died in 1894, only five years after first arriving there. More surprising is that it wasn’t his consumption that killed him; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage. On tour one is shown from inside the back door to the house outside of which Stevenson was preparing some food when he collapsed.

Stevenson was to be buried on top of a nearby hill, and the Samoans cut through a roadway just for his burial. It’s a difficult hike, especially in the heat, and Jon and I didn’t do it (I’m sure most people don’t). Yet his own words are on the stone:

After Stevenson’s death in 1894, a local German merchant bought Vailima and stayed until 1899, at which point it became the home of the German Governor, followed by the New Zealand Governor, and then the Head of State of independent Samoa. He lived there until the hurricanes of 1990-1991, at which point the house was abandoned due to severe damage. I learned at the museum that it was a private individual who leased the land from the Samoan government and paid to restore the house. There are many artifacts in the house, including authentic furniture, plus other period pieces, but surely not everything the Stevenson’s had there. In a special viewing case there are First Editions of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde.

But then while Jon was going about taking pictures of everything that wasn’t nailed down (and some things that were), I stopped at the large display of the translations of Stevenson’s works. Here are the names of the copies of Treasure Island I found.

The Italic (Romance) languages (here, French, Italian, Spanish) put the main word first (Island) and the modifier (Treasure) second, which is typical.

The Germanic languages (here, German, Dutch, Swedish) typically put the main word (Island) second, and the modifier (Treasure) first. English, being Germanic, does this as well, although the English word Treasure is clearly related to the first group of languages. English often has its finger in these two pies at once.

And I can’t leave off the Russic (Slavic) element. The author we’re discussing appears as Р. Л. Стивенсон and the title is Остров Сокровищ / Ostrov Sokrovishch (remember the quirky letter щ, which can be said to correspond to sh+ch). I recognize the first word as meaning “island”, and the second word is in the genitive plural (for those who know what this means), so would mean “of treasures”, or, more accurately “treasures-of”. In other words, Russian expresses the title as being “Island of Treasures”.

I found on YouTube a reasonably good tour of the museum: RLS Museum - Vailima