When 26-year-old Rupert Brooke arrived in Sāmoa in 1913, he was a literary sensation. Irish luminary William Yeats called him ‘the handsomest young man in England’.
‘I want to walk a thousand miles, and write a thousand plays, and sing a thousand poems, and drink a thousand pots of beer, and kiss a thousand girls,’ Brooke wrote as he left England for the South Seas, ‘– oh, a million things.’
Arriving in Pago Pago he heard a suffragist woman exclaim ‘look at those niggers, whose are they?’ Letters home hinted at a grand sex and love adventure. Brooke was taken by the physicality of Polynesians: ‘A white man living with them soon feels his mind as deplorably dull as his skin is pale and unhealthy among those glorious golden-brown bodies.’ He marvelled at his accommodation: ‘I lived in a Sāmoan house (the coolest in the world) with a man and his wife, nine children, ranging from a proud beauty of 18 to a round object of 1 year, a dog, a cat, a proud hysterical hen, and a gaudy scarlet and green parrot, who roved the roof and beams with a wicked eye; choosing a place whence to ---, twice a day, with humorous precision, on my hat and clothes.
‘The Sāmoan girls have extraordinarily beautiful bodies, and walk like goddesses. They're a lovely brown colour, without any black Melanesian admixture; their necks and shoulders would be the wild envy of any European beauty; and in carriage and face they remind me continually and vividly of my incomparable heartless and ever-loved X.’German rule impressed him; ‘….it is one of the few white “possessions,” I suppose, where a decent white needn't feel ashamed of himself. For, though it's proper to deny that Germans can colonise, they have certainly ruled Sāmoa very well.’ Solf was wise, blocking forces that might destroy Sāmoa.
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