As part of the research for Utterly Immoral, my book on Robert Keable, I visited Tahiti in 2016. One of the aims of the trip was to try and meet the children of anyone who would have known Robert Keable back in the 1920s, when he lived on the island. As I have detailed in my post of July 2^nd, 2022, I did manage to meet the son of Charles Nordhoff and the daughter of James Norman Hall, the novelists who most famously wrote the Mutiny on the Bounty trilogy. However, I had a list of other people who Robert Keable had mentioned in private letters who I had not been able to track down.

One such person was Frank Stimson. His name appears in the first letter Robert Keable sent from Tahiti to his close friend and publisher Michael Sadler in December 1922:

… best of all there is society of the best sort … Nordhoff is here, author of FAERY LANDS OF THE SOUTH SEAS etc …also one Stimson, a fellow of real brain who has chucked the States to work as a clerk for bread and butter while he bathes in folk-lore and ethnology.

On my second last day in Tahiti, I drove along the main road going north from my hotel towards Papeete; a road I had been up and down a number of times. All along the side of the road were signs saying SERVITUDE … with a name added. Servitudes are short roads usually running down to the sea with one or two houses, the name attached indicating the orgin and ownership of the road and land. I drove slowly to check each name and there were two which particularly attracted my attention. The first was Servitude Bambridge. Bambridge was the maiden name of Madame Salmon, (whose husband was Ina Salmon’s nephew), who I had met a few days before. The second was Servitude Stimson.

I decided to stop the car and get out to take a photo of the sign. Then I thought, what the hell, why not go and have a look. The gate to the drive was open and so I walked down to find a house near the sea and outbuildings on left and right. A dog barked without much conviction and a woman walked out, (I thought perhaps 60 although I am no judge of age) wearing a short green cloth round her waist and a large faded red bra. I did my usual 'Bonjour madame, parlez-vouse anglaise, I’m afraid I only speak un peu French,' and she agreed she spoke a little English.

'I am wondering if anyone here is called Stimson?'

'I am Stimson' she said pointing to herself.

'Have you heard of Frank Stimson?'

'He is my father.'

She ushered me into the room and showed me a picture of a very white man with glasses with his arms around his Tahitian wife and a young lady. It was her father, her mother and her. We talked in our respective languages, each trying a little of the others. The picture was taken in 1951 – so she must have been about 75 or 80. She showed me anther photograph and told me a complicated story which seemed to suggest her father had had two wives and two sons, one with each wife, both called Frank and that the two sons both married sisters. I said my grandfather knew her father back in 1923 and she did not seem surprised. I checked it was her father and we worked out between us that he was born in 1884. I showed her all of Robert Keable’s Tahiti photos – I carried my blue file everywhere just in case – but she did not recognise anyone. She looked for a recent article on her father in the local Polynesian magazine but could not find it.

She seemed so excited to be talking about her father even to someone who could not really understand her. Her son and his wife with their sweet daughter drove up to the house and came in. That was why the gate had been open, otherwise I would have not seen her. They kept the car running as they had clearly come to pick her up but she was in no hurry to let me go. She went and fetched her father’s book – Dictionary of some Tuamotian Dialects of the Polynesian Languauge – a second edition, published in 2008, which she had edited. She explained that she agreed to have it published as long as it only went to students at the university not to business people – because she had received no money for it. The book has been sent to Holland but she had heard nothing.

'Have it,' she said.

'I couldn’t...' I started to say but she insisted, as long as it was for me only and not business people. She went and got a pen and wrote a message in French in the front and signed it:

16 Juillet 2016 – A Simon – En Souvernir do nos grands parents partis trop tot. Julia Stimson.

I asked if I could take a photograph of her and she suddenly realised she was only wearing a bra and short skirt. 'I was cleaning,' she said, and then obviously thought ‘what can you do’ and straightened her skirt and stood beside another picture of her father and family. I kiss, kissed both her daughter-in-law and her, and walked back up the drive with a bounce in my step.

That evening I told Roger Gowen – who now owns Robert Keable’s house – about my trip to Julia Stimson’s house and he said there were a few books in his library which are signed by Frank Stimson and must have been gifts from him to Robert Keable.

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John Francis Stimson (1883-1958) was born in Plainfield, New Jersey and went to Tahiti in 1912, living there for the rest of his life. He was married three times, first to Elisabeth Perry in 1912, then Kotirau Marerehau in 1919 and finally to Mere Lin in 1923. Julia was one of seven children which included her brother François and her half-brother Francis.

Stimson was a very distinguished anthropologist who mastered four of the Central Polynesian language dialects and collected old tales and legends. He wrote a number of books including The Legends of Maui and Tahaki, and Taumotuan Legends (Islands of Anaa) and, according to Robert D Craig writing in the Handbook of Polynesian Mythology, Stimson’s interpretive translations have never been surpassed in ‘their elegance and beauty’.