Coral Grotto, Vavau [Vava’u], Tonga

In August 1877, two years into Constance Gordon-Cumming’s stay as guest of Rachel Hamilton Gordon, wife of Fiji’s Governor, the opportunity to visit Sāmoa, Tonga and Tahiti presented itself. A French man-of-war Le Seignelay anchored at the harbour; it was on a peaceful assignment to take the Bishop of Samoa, Monseigneur Elloi to visit the mission stations in his diocese. Invited to join the voyage Gordon-Cumming jumped at ‘so unique a chance of visiting isles which by no other possibility could I ever hope to see’*. She thus spent several months exploring the Pacific in very novel circumstances; recording ‘my favourite niche’ was ‘the carriage of a big gun. Filled with red cushions, it makes a capital sofa, and is a cosy quiet corner, and a capital point of observation’. *

While stopping at the Vava’u island group in Tonga, connection was made with the Rev. Mr Fox and his wife at the Wesleyan Mission. Mrs Fox had recently given birth to their first child and needed medical assistance, which the ship’s doctor provided. Her condition much improved, Fox showed his thanks by showing the visitors Vava’u’s hidden beauty. Gordon-Cumming expatiated: ‘Mr Fox guided us to a truly exquisite cave, about five miles distant. Never before, in all my wanderings, had my eyes been gladdened by such an ideal fairy grot. We rowed along the face of beautiful crags, which we had passed on the previous day without a suspicion of the wonderful hiding-place within them. Suddenly we steered right into a narrow opening, and found ourselves in a great vaulted cavern like a grand cathedral — a coral cave, with huge white stalactites hanging in clusters from the roof, and forming a perfect gallery along one side…

The great outer cave is paved with lapis-lazuli, at least with water of the purest ultra-marine, which was reflected in rippling shimmers of blue and green on the white marble roof. For the sun was lowering, and shone in glory through the western archway, lighting up the mysterious depths of a great inner cavern, which otherwise receives but one ray of light from a small opening far overhead, through which we saw blue sky and green leaves. No scene-painter could have devised so romantic a picture for any fairy pantomime.’ *

It seems that for once Gordon-Cumming had set out on this expedition without her large sketching materials. She returned by boat a second time with the specific intent of drawing the grotto, observing of her own sketch that it had the ‘merit of being totally unlike anything else I ever attempted.’ *

* Gordon-Cumming, Memories, 228.

* C. F. Gordon-Cumming, A Lady’s Cruise in a French Man-of-War (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1882), 24-25.

* Ibid., 29-30.

* Ibid., 32.

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