"TAVIUNI" SMITH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 218, 13 September 1940, Page 5

"TAVIUNI" SMITH.

A MEMORY OF SAMOA. AND R. L. STEVENSON. (By J.C.) That brisk and greatly experienced i ▼eteran of the sea, Captain R. E. Smith, who died in Auckland the other day, with a record of 66 years a sailor, was in his way a Captain Kettle, Cutcliffe Hyne's capital creation. He knew the old sea life in peace and "war, that nuggetty Tittle Cornishman with the alert uptilt to his chin that is rather a characteristic of the sailor somewhat short in stature. We knew Captain Smith forty-fifty years ago in the Auckland maritime world as the commander of the Union Co.'s steamer Taviuni in the South Sea Islands trade. That was his job for seven years, and in that time he was an always welcome visitor to the ports in Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Smith's impulsive and generous nature made him a great admirer of Robert| Louis Stevenson in Samoa. Stevenson was hotly criticised by many people in the early 'nineties because he expoused the cause of the natives, especially the rebels, whoever they might be, against the white man's blundering authority. The Germans, as was always their way, played the bully in that No Man's Land, and threatened Stevenson with deportation in retaliation for his political writings. In 1893 a number of chiefs of Mataafa's party were imprisoned by the threecornered Government that made such a mess of administrative matters and blundered into native wars. Stevenson took the chiefs' part and made their life in gaol a little more comfortable. Their gratitude resulted in the making of the famous "Ala Loto Alofa." Captain Smith had his own little share in the making of this bit of a bush road, as related by Graham Balfour in his "Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Mr. Balfour wrote: "Captain Smith, of the Taviuni, as Mr. Osbourne reminds me, once paid a visit to Y r ailima with some friends. On ■his loud home he passed the 'Ala Loto

Alofa,' on which the chiefs were then working like good fellows. He asked — and was told—the nature of their task; and the bluff, hearty old seamen at once insisted on getting off his horse and felling one of the trees himself. 'I must be in that too/ he said with a genuine emotion, and spent half an hour swinging an axe." This "Ala Xioto Alofa," the "Road of the Loving Heart," was the Vailima part jof the road to Apia. This end of the route which R.L.S. so often travelled during the period 1891-94, the last years of his life, was originally a narrow and rough bush path. The chiefs made it a broader and more level road. The view from it looked directly up to the Vaea Mountain, where "Tusitala" was laid to rest in the year after the roadmaking.