Searching for Queen EMMA (Part II)Prepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International
Last week I wrote about Emma Coe, a young Samoan American woman who was practically run out of Apia, the capital of Samoa, for taking up with a saloon keeper after her husband was lost at sea. With her saloonkeeper boyfriend she sailed westward to New Guinea.
Emma saw vast possibilities in untamed New Guinea and soon began to envision an empire. But it was more than a rash dream by a zealous young lady. She fully understood what problems faced her. Foremost, she and Tom were setting up the first trading station in a true no-man's land. There was neither country nor any government that controlled the place. There was no one they could turn to for help. The only laws were their own. Justice was what they made it.
They could make great profits but the costs were high. They had to face cannibals, loneliness, heat, earthquakes and volcanoes. Emma was willing to take the gamble. She had a man who loved her and, more important, one who would stand by her. She knew if she returned to Apia she would have to conform to officialdom and the rules of missionary Dom. Her father was an outcast, yet to be vindicated, and she had been clawed by Apia society. She made up her mind to create a new world of her own. When she was rich and famous she would return to Apia. She and Tom made one last voyage to Apia. She gathered together and sold the remnants of her Forsayth estate in Samoa. Tom sold his commercial hotel and other interests in Apia.
In a letter to a dear friend, Emma expressed a resolution that "someday I shall return to this place and spit in the faces of those who now dare to insult me."
Emma was a young woman of 27 when she sailed westward from Samoa with the blackbirder and trader Tom Farrell to set up their trading station at Mioko. Emma was, by all accounts, an attractive girl with mixed Samoan and American blood. I could picture her arrival, standing on the deck of Captain Tom's tossing schooner, wearing high boots and a long skirt, pistol tucked into her belt, watching for the islands to come into view.
At a glance Mioko might have looked like an earthly paradise but in reality it was a living hell. In the jungles lived black savages, rated as the most fearsome and ferocious cannibals known. They were more than willing to dine on stray or shipwrecked sailors who landed on their shores. Trespassers who managed to escape their cooking fires faced disease, malaria, tropical ulcers, dysentery, and a score of other maladies. Then if it weren't for the diseases and fever that felled them, it might be earthquakes and erupting volcanoes.
And there was the loneliness. For a thousand miles in any direction there were but a few missionaries and but five or six traders. The traders weren't necessarily a social group either, a rough breed indeed. If shipwrecked, they faced shark-infested waters, and if they did reach shore they were certain to be murdered and eaten.
The first months at Mioko were a test of survival for Emma. She and Tom constructed a high stockade around the post to protect against marauding savages. Tom had to leave Emma alone for weeks on end, while he went to trade and open new posts along the coast. Emma ran the trading store. She went about armed, and she now took to carrying a whip which the savages feared more than her pistol.
As the trading interests grew and more ships arrived at Mioko, Emma sent off to Samoa for her brothers and cousins to come and help her build up the station. Mioko soon became a Samoan settlement. When news spread of the trading post at Mioko, run by an attractive half-cast Samoan girl, ships put into the harbour. But now came a threat even worse than black savages. It was drunken white sailors.
Blackbirding schooners also put into port, their holds stinking from human cargo. Oftentimes tribal chiefs brought captured slaves to the fort to be sold to the blackbirders.
Emma knew the minute she dropped her guard the natives would eat her and "civilized" men from trading ships would rape her. She had to be quick and ruthless. If a black man harmed any of her workers, she went and destroyed his village. When she stopped a drunken German seaman from attacking one of her Samoan girls, and he turned on her, she drew her pistol, aimed and fired. She hit him in the thigh, and had her guards drag him from the compound and toss him into the dirt outside.
Emma's biggest boon came when her sister Phoebe and her husband Dr Parkinson arrived. Parkinson was a naturalist and surveyor, with both English and German citizenship.
Emma's vision went far beyond the trading post she ran; it was the fertile plains at Blanche Bay across the strait on New Britain. If the Germans were successful with their coconut plantations on Samoa, and had to import labour from here, why not plant coconuts here? She made contact with chiefs at Blanche Bay and induced them to sell large defined areas of land to her. Then she began buying up islands by the score. Many she obtained for no more than plugs of tobacco and glass beads. But nonetheless the contracts were final and made legal, a practice learned from her father.
Parkinson laid out the plantations at Ralum and selected a sight for Emma's dream house, which she called “Gunantambu.” It was situated on a high level terrace looking out eastward towards the Duke of York Islands and the trading post at Mioko.
At Ralum a port was designed, with jetties, godowns, government sheds and houses. Ships began to arrive from Sydney and Samoa, bringing trees and shrubs, all of which were carefully planted by the tireless brother-in-law.
Tom Farrell, however, was not keen on long term investments, for a reason. He was suffering from tuberculosis and had to go to Sydney for medical treatment. Emma made several trips to visit him. Death came swiftly. Tom left everything to Emma.
After Tom’s death, Emma put all her interests into Gunantambu. It became a landmark that was to dominate the South Seas for more than sixty years, until the Japanese destroyed Ralum and the estate during World War II.
Much of the building material came from an abandoned French colony on New Ireland. In addition to tiles, timbers and fittings, there was a beautiful altar which Emma made into a bar. She delighted in telling missionaries about it when they stopped to visit her.
The crowning feature of the house was a cement staircase seventy feet wide that descended down the hill to a carriage road below. (See last week’s photos.) Every morning Emma, attended by a secretary and native footman, walked down the stairs to her awaiting rickshaw and was drawn by her two Buka boys along the seafront road to her offices at Ralum, a quarter of a mile away.
Gunantambu had no electricity or refrigeration but Emma did devise an air-conditioning system in which water dripped over louvers and fans blew the cool air into the house. She had shipped a heavy sideboard and bits of furniture from Samoa which previously belonged to writer Robert Louis Stevenson. The famed author was a friend of Emma's father and left many of his possessions to the Coe family when he died.
The house was constantly filled with pretty nieces and half-sisters from Samoa. Jonas Coe, her father, had married five times and fathered half a dozen children with each wife. There were always parties at Gunantambu, some which lasted three days.
I had read of the flamboyant and champagne-filled life that Emma led in a book by Douglas Rannie. Emma at the time was 37, and still went by the name Mrs. Forsayth. “That evening I had the pleasure of meeting her for the first time at a dinner party,” the author wrote. “She was a handsome and very striking figure, dressed in white satin, with a long train, which was borne behind her by half a dozen dusky little maidens. Above her jet black hair she wore a tiara of diamonds—her whole carriage was queenly. She was accompanied on this occasion by a number of female cousins and other relations from Samoa."
In 1884, Germany annexed New Guinea and in the years that followed Emma Forsayth consolidated both her position and her fortune. Her social status altered considerably. The harassed young woman who fled Samoa with a tough, bearded blackbirder and trader was now the respected Mrs. Forsayth, rich and much admired.
Emma demanded all the pleasures from life she could get, and from time to time she accepted a new lover. One was an Austrian sea captain, Agostino Stalio. He was immediately attracted by Emma.
Stalio was a big man, handsome and cultured, and not long after they met, he was in the employ of Farrell and Co. Emma made no attempt to hide their love affair. The few short years that followed were the happiest in her colourful career. Emma and Stalio would have married but her husband was not yet declared dead and, secondly, even if she could have married, her national status would have changed. Her land holdings under the German government would have been in jeopardy.
Tragedy came when Emma's younger brother, acting as agent for the Farrell and Co, was killed by the natives on Nuguria Island. Captain Stalio personally led a party of Bukas to revenge his death, but he in turn was shot in the chest by the island chief and killed instantly.
The grief was almost more than Emma could bear. She erected an elaborate monument over his grave. The monument, although fallen and in pieces, was still there when I visited the grave site. Other headstones also lay about, most only partly decipherable; nevertheless, they help to tell the story of Ralum in its heyday.
Emma was vulnerable at only one point, and this was the social status she lacked. In birth she was the daughter of a leading American family and of a royal line in Samoa. But because she had Samoan blood, people snubbed her, the very reason she left Samoa.
The solution was to marry an aristocrat, Captain Paul Kolbe, one of the local German officials. Kolbe was in debt and needed money to keep himself in the style he was accustomed to. And Emma needed status. Although he was a half dozen years younger than she, they reached an agreement and were married. Her position thus in the German community was established.
Whether or not it was a happy marriage is doubtful, but they did travel widely and lavishly to the capitals of Europe and to Sydney. And, Emma returned to Apia, with her count husband, bedecked in jewels and with a train of attendants and followers. She rented the entire floor of the leading hotel and commenced to entertain for a solid week, sparing no costs. At a party hosted in her honour by the German consul, in which the London Missionary Society were obliged to attend, Emma gave a speech. She greeted the society coldly but properly, and then commented on the king, her cousin. "His birth was good," she said, "but his training was all wrong. I believe his schooling came from the London Missionary Society."
Emma's keen foresight told her that Germany's position in the Pacific was not secure. If war erupted on the continent, Germany would surely lose all her possessions in the islands. What then would become of her estate?
Another fear that possessed Emma was that if she died before her husband, all her property would go to him and not to her son and family. She went to see a lawyer in Sydney and made her decision.
A few years before World War l broke out, Emma sold her entire estate, including Gunantambu, to a young German planter and trader who had made a fortune in the Bismarck Archipelago. She maintained one house and plantation at Ralum for her sister Phoebe. Dr Parkinson had been killed the year before in a riding accident.
With her vast fortune now in securities in Australia, Emma and her count husband bought a palatial house in Sydney and went on extended tours to the capitals of Europe. But Emma's health was not good. Her time was short and she seemed to sense it. She died in Monte Carlo at the age of 63.
The facts surrounding Emma's death are not clearly known. She was living quietly at her home in Sydney when she received disturbing letters stating that her husband Paul, who was vacationing in Europe, was stepping out on her. He was in Monte Carlo with "another woman" and gambling heavily.
Against the advice of her doctors and friends, Emma left for Europe. A month later the European agent in Sydney received a cable from Monte Carlo. It was from Mrs. Paul Kolbe, better known as Queen Emma, saying her husband had died.
Three days later the agent received another cable from a hotel manager in Monte Carlo, this time stating that Mrs. Paul Kolbe was also dead. She died three days after her husband and, although there followed a scandal about the nature of the deaths, they were officially recorded as a result of natural causes.
Gunantambu continued to be a landmark in the South Seas until it was totally destroyed by Japanese bombs in the opening days of World War ll. Emma's sister Phoebe, who refused to leave her home on New Britain, was interned by the Japanese and died in poverty in a small native village on New Ireland in 1945.
Heinrich Wahlen, who bought Queen Emma's estate, only to have lost it a few years later, died in Hamburg, Germany, in l966. I have been unable to find out what happened to Emma's son, or what became of the vast fortune she left behind in Sydney.
In Rabaul today there are a few people who claim to be descendants of Emma Coe and her family but unfortunately she is only a name to them. The only remaining reminders are the stone stairs at Ralum and the desecrated graveyard a few kilometres away that I mentioned. There is nothing else, except the memory of a great woman.
Next week we visit we will go caves exploring in Thailand. There are organized tours for those interested.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. Mr. Stephens. The story of Queen Emma is one of my all-time favorites. Like you, I spent a fair bit of time in Rabaul and several of the other islands north of New Guinea aboard my yacht Kittiwake. Also, a friend took me out to Ralum one day to see the ruins of her establishment. While there, we also took in the Japanese caves with the landing barges and assorted "stuff." Thank you for bringing her story into focus again, and I look forward to reading more about her next week. Ed Boden, N.C. USA
A. Dear Mr. Boden. Your wish has come true. I hope you like the story. And speaking of caves, tune in next week. –HS
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROHWeekly Travel
Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited.
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)
Note : The article is the personal view of the writer and does not neccessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited. | 
