The World Is My Home: A Memoir

by James A. Michener

  The word vahine (meaning woman) surfaced in almost everything I learned about Bora Bora. Lieutenant Hazzard’s regal vahine was named Malama, daughter of a man who could be called a chief, and she was a powerful influence in keeping the lesser vahines under control, for they feared a rebuke from her or even a stern glance. My yeoman’s vahine had been disturbed that he had wanted to sit with me on that first night and not with her, but she was probably mollified when he accompanied her home to their palm-lined hut after the show ended.

  I cannot now recall what name the Tahitians used—Bora Borans were Tahitians, of course—for their fales; the sailors called them huts, and it seemed as if each man stationed on Bora Bora had his own hut. In many cases it was built for him by the men of the girl’s family because they approved of her association with the Americans who could bring food and other necessary items to the place. I inspected several of the huts, always with older members of the girls’ family in attendance, to ensure that I gained a good impression of how their daughters lived. I found the little houses both clean and practical: a bed of coconut matting, a table, a chair, nails to hang the sailors’ clothes so they would be neat, and not much else, for living took place out of doors or at the naval base; the hut was for night affairs only, including sleeping.

  As at Samoa, some six or eight men remained on duty at the base overnight, and the officers had quarters for their vahines on base too, with Lieutenant Hazzard’s Malama supervising everything in exactly the same way that I had seen superior Navy wives taking charge of the private careers of their Annapolis-trained husbands. It was a well-run base marked by an unusual degree of happiness.

  When I got to know Francis Sanford and his tall, elegant wife, Lysa, who had a sharp eye for human folly, I found him to be like every good local administrator who worked with our Navy: amiable and conciliatory, performing wonders in helping to keep things moving forward without friction, but ruthless in protecting the interests of his homeland.

  The prototype of this kind of superintelligent operator I came to admire—the kind of official I would want to be if any foreign country ever invaded America—was a gangling, delightful Oxford graduate on a Micronesian island with whom I worked at one time. There was an English base on a small island a short distance from where I was stationed, and it was his habit to have himself rowed over to my base by four black men. Coming casually ashore, he would be all rumpled with hair awry and elbows sticking out so awkwardly that our men called him Sprocket, after the toothed wheel used on bicycles.

  ‘Here comes Sprocket!’ they would shout as he ambled ashore, picking his way through stacks of expensive gear. ‘I say, chaps!’ he would cry in a rather high voice. ‘D’jew happen to have a spanner?’

  Our boys would ask what a spanner was and he would explain that it was what they called a monkey wrench, and they would collapse with laughter: ‘He calls this a spanner!’ and after they quieted down he would ask: ‘D’jew happen to have one a mite bigger?’ and at the end of his visit he would traipse back to his waiting boat with a handful of our most expensive wrenches.

  In that subtle way, with our Americans laughing at his ungainly manner, his shyness and his Oxford accent, Sprocket transferred from our big island to his little one such a treasure of goods that when I rowed over to see for myself what he was doing I found him living amid a wealth of goods rarely seen in one place even in peacetime. The rascal had one of everything: stove, refrigerator, generator, compressor—plus piles of canned goods. ‘You’re living like a king,’ I complained, ‘and I’m living like a pauper.’ And he said: ‘You have to know how to work the system.’ Next day when I went to our big island I watched him sailing over from his small one and coming ashore with that boyish smile, that unkempt hair, those awkward elbows and that Oxford accent, and I thought: How damned unfair to let that genial manipulator loose among a gang of decent farm boys from Iowa. That day he wondered if they happened to have any spare petrol, and after they roared with laughter at his word for gasoline he took back two barrels.

  I admired Sprocket, for his island was a bleak spot, which his ingenuity had converted into a habitable place; but I liked Francis Sanford even more for the orderly way in which he managed the Vichy men in Papeete, and the Americans in Bora Bora. He did not connive, so far as I could see, at having his island girls captivate the American sailors, but when they did he wanted to be sure that the girls were treated decently. I think it was he who introduced a Sears Roebuck catalog, which the girls combed for things that the sailors could order for them, and pretty soon Sears was doing an impressive business with Bora Bora. I was present several times when planes flew in with sizable cargoes, all of which seemed to have come from Sears.

  Sanford and his wife kept watch to see that the girls were not abused or taken advantage of. Men who behaved poorly or with gross indifference to the girls’ rights were noted by Sanford, reported to the island command and quietly shipped back to Texas or Minnesota, a punishment that the others tried to avoid. Sanford ran a clean island, one of the best occupied areas I would inspect in the entire Pacific, and I saluted him for his efficiency and wisdom.

  I felt that I had a fairly good grasp of the situation by the time I reached the twentieth page of my report, but it was through the case of Ordinary Seaman Gosford that I got down to basics. He was from Alabama, a farm boy from the peanut belt and the recipient of a desultory education that had stopped well before the eighth grade. He was about twenty when I interviewed him concerning the problem that was causing him such distress that he was no longer able to do his work. Lieutenant Hazzard had asked me to see if I could help and now Gosford sat before me, twisting his fingers.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I’m being sent home.’

  ‘You do something wrong?’

  ‘Oh, no!’ He looked like the kind of sailor who would never do anything wrong.

  ‘So what is it? Trouble with a girl?’

  ‘Oh, no! Terua and I get along fine.’

  ‘And you don’t want to go home?’

  ‘Nobody on this rock wants to go home.’

  ‘What’s happening, then?’

  ‘I may have to go.’

  ‘Lieutenant Hazzard told me nothing specific about your case.’

  ‘It’s Mom. She insists I come home.’

  ‘She sick, or something?’

  ‘No. She hears about other men from the war front, they come home after eighteen months.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Two years. No bad marks. Nothing against me, nothing at all.’

  ‘Then what’s the bind?’

  ‘Mom knows our senator … in Washington … and she has him all steamed up … and he says it’s a disgrace … to keep a boy overseas in enemy territory for two years.’

  ‘Has he done anything about it?’

  ‘He’s told the Navy he wants me off this rock toot sweet. I expect an order any day.’

  When I inquired I learned that the order had already arrived. Seaman Judson Gosford of Dothan, Alabama, was to be shipped out immediately, so that he could join his family for the kind of extended leave to which overseas heroes were entitled. When Hazzard showed me the dispatch he pointed to the order: ‘Because the senator is personally interested in the case, release Gosford soonest.’ Since his ejection from Bora Bora was irreversible I took special interest in his case, and when I accompanied him to the hut in which he and the island girl Terua had lived for the past two years I found the main cause of his grief. Terua was pregnant, so that not only had he the normal desire of all Americans not to be sent home from this paradise, but he also had the complication of impending fatherhood.

  And complication it was, for when I assured Gosford that I might be able to arrange for the Navy to take into account what it called ‘compassionate understanding,’ which would mean a delay of orders till the baby was born, Gosford almost went into a spasm: ‘Oh, Lieutenant Michener! No! No! It would kill my mother if she ever
got to know, Navy messages and all that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She would have to find out sooner or later that Terua was a nigger.’

  When I tried to assure him that this could be kept secret—I myself would draft the messages and dream up some other excuse—he balked: ‘The senator would be sure to find out the real reason. After the trouble he’s taken, how would it look for him to see that I didn’t want to come because I was having a nigger baby?’

  This was a dilemma I could not solve. Everyone in the muddle seemed to have right on his or her side. Mrs. Gosford back in Dothan was right in wanting her son back home. The senator from Alabama was right in thinking that any one of his young constituents who had spent two years in the battle zone was a certified hero entitled to leave. And it was understandable that Terua would want her lover to stay until their child was born. But Gosford himself had the strongest reason of all: he did not want to go home and leave an island paradise, the likes of which he might never see again.

  I noted the various points of view and finally consulted with Francis Sanford and Base Commander Hazzard, who agreed that Seaman Gosford was both an ideal enlisted man and the quasi-husband of the vahine Terua, who was herself an exemplary island girl from a good family. A sad injustice was being committed, but we could see no escape. Hazzard said: ‘If his mother hadn’t involved the senator we might brazen this out, but if he starts firing rockets at Halsey, and Gosford is still here, it’s my ass, and I cannot allow that.’ He felt, with some justification I thought, that if high brass in the Navy started looking into the Bora Bora situation, more than his ass might be in jeopardy.

  So, in a decision that was going to have unforeseen ramifications for me, we decided that Seaman Gosford would have to leave Bora Bora by the next plane, which was what that word soonest meant, and no appeal would be entertained: the young hero had to leave the war zone for the safety of southern Alabama. Commander Hazzard, Terua and I accompanied him out to the airstrip, and there he made his tearful farewells. From the shack that served as the strip office Francis Sanford appeared to check on whether Gosford was leaving Terua an adequate departure present; he learned that like most of the sailors when they left the island, the Alabamian had provided his girl with more than a hundred dollars. The plane came in, wheeled about, and Gosford was on his way home.

  On our return from the reef to the island I noticed Terua carefully for the first time and realized what an ingratiating girl she was and how readily her smile at some kind word drove away her tears. I was eager that she not waste the money Gosford had left, and when I deposited her at the Bora Bora landing I saw with pleasure that her father and two brothers were awaiting her, so I told them: ‘She has money. See that she buys the things she needs,’ and they nodded.

  Two days later as I was working with my yeoman I was visited by Terua’s father and he had an astonishing proposal: ‘Michener Officer, we see you. We know you good man. Not right you live alone. You very kind to Terua. We see. We like you live with us, many fine girls know you, see you. They do not want you live alone.’

  I had no idea why this invitation was being extended, but it was reinforced the next day by the return of the father with two older friends: ‘Michener Officer, you kind man. You help everybody. No good you live alone,’ and they said that if I was sensitive about being an officer and living with an island girl, they would build me a small hut next to the one Gosford and Terua had used, and it was now made clear that she was in no way involved in this proposal; she was concerned solely with the impending birth of her child.

  I refused the offer of the hut and the accompanying housekeeper but I did keep in touch with Terua’s father, who had made this generous and sympathetic offer. I agreed with him that it was not good to live alone, and had I been stationed permanently on Bora Bora I am sure I would not have done so, but as a visiting officer writing the history of America’s unusual occupation of the island I felt that I had better remain unattached, lest I later be accused of the very improprieties I might have to be reporting.

  And so my tour of duty on Bora Bora drew to a close. As time came to leave, at least a dozen sailors begged me not to use their names and not to let the rest of the world in on the secret of Bora Bora. ‘It would be hard to explain to those outside. They might not understand.’ I promised I would keep the secret, but I suppose that my yeoman, who had typed all my notes, must have told them that I had composed a fairly faithful account but that I had not used real names.

  When the time came for me to leave, my report completed, I made a startling discovery: I had become a Gosford. I did not want to go, and felt that the necessity to do so was unfair. I wanted to remain with Terua and her family till the baby was born. I wanted to see Flying Down to Rio two or three times a week. I wanted to retain the friendship of Sanford and Hazzard. But most of all I had grown to love the island, its volcano and glorious lagoon, and I did not want to lose them.

  In the long years ahead whenever anyone would ask: ‘Michener, you’ve seen most of the world. What was the very best spot of all?’ my answer would invariably be: ‘Bora Bora.’

  It was now time for me to head south to the capital town, Papeete, where I had to attend to the matter of the secret code books. I left, escorted by Sanford and his wife as passengers in the Hiro, a rickety old interisland steamer owned by an extraordinary American beachcomber who had sailed north to meet us. Lew Hirshon, then in his mid-forties, had left a wealthy Long Island family in the early 1930s for a college boy’s journey around the world, but he had gotten no farther than Tahiti, as he explained on our first night out: ‘I climbed down out of the vessel which had brought me from San Francisco and when I saw that glorious waterfront in Papeete with yachts from all over the world backed in stern-to, I cried: “This is for me!” and I have never left. I run a big plantation, tend palms and ship out copra. I do some island trading in the Hiro, named after a Polynesian god of the sea, and I have a great time.

  ‘I wasn’t in the island long before I noticed the extreme beauty of the girls, but I had made friends with the wonderful old Chinese trader Tiong Ban, and whenever I found a girl I would walk her past his shop and he would wag his head “No, no! Not good for you.” and I would drop her. But one day I met this gorgeous girl, French-Polynesian, and when I took her past he ran out of his shop and grabbed my hands and cried: “Yes, yes! This one for you!” and I married her.’

  While Lew went to his quarters to wash up, Sanford told me that Lew’s wife had been the most beautiful woman in the islands, a true goddess, but that she had died. He had then fallen in love with two sisters: Elianne, the lovely singer, and her even more beautiful younger sister, whose name I now forget. It had been touch and go which one he would marry, but when it seemed that he was going to delay making a decision, for he was often absent taking trips about the islands in the Hiro, the younger married a Frenchman, and when Lew came back, having decided to marry her, he found her taken, and so he grabbed Elianne. ‘And when you see her you won’t be able to imagine how the other could have been prettier.’

  On the night before we landed I initiated discreet inquiries regarding the man whose errant behavior I was supposed to investigate unobtrusively, and my traveling companion told me that Ratchett Kimbrell, an older U.S. government type on an undefined mission, was one of the gentlest, best-loved Americans ever to come to the island. It seemed that his job was to keep an eye on the Vichy elements in Tahiti, and to accomplish this he operated what was less than an embassy but more than a mere consulate, and since it dealt with extremely sensitive inter-governmental relations, he had been given unusually restrictive orders. ‘Neither fish nor fowl,’ Lew said and Sanford added: ‘But he’s an asset beyond price.’ And then Lew revealed the truth of the matter: ‘A most difficult man to classify. I know Ratchett well, but I don’t know him at all.’

  In the morning all thoughts of rogue government men vanished when I saw for the first time that glorious Papeete waterfront along whose q
uay I would spend so many hours in the years ahead. There were the yachts, stern- to side by side, debouching almost into the very center of the city. From the rear of one’s boat one stepped almost directly into Quinn’s Bar, where the legendary American pianist Eddie Lund held sway, or into the grubby hotels that had once entertained many of the world’s most adventurous writers and artists. The Papeete waterfront at dawn on a windswept day with the sun about to appear was a sight to gladden the heart, for here came scores of people on their way to the market carrying the rich produce of the islands: fish from Moorea, bananas from Raiatea, breadfruit from the Presqu’île, that oval peninsula on the eastern side of the island, and chickens and pigs from everywhere. Here too came the young girls to scout the incoming ships and to greet sailors from old arrivals like the Hiro. It was a parade of never flagging interest, of perpetual newness and delight.

  It was said with some accuracy that when an American yacht arrived on that waterfront with nine sailors, eight beautiful girls appeared mysteriously within fifteen minutes. When a small ship dropped anchor with forty sailors, thirty-eight girls appeared. And when a French warship with two thousand men hove to, nineteen hundred eager girls showed up. Tahiti was a sailors’ paradise, but it was also a staid, well-governed French colony with good restaurants, cable services and numerous branches of the Banc d’Indochine. It was unique—half Polynesian, half Chinese, a mix that produced some of the most handsome Polynesian types.

  From this waterfront small boats set out for little islands with glorious names: Les Îles Sous le Vent, The Islands Under the Wind; Fakarava, Rangiroa, Pukarua, Mangareva, Pitcairn and Melville’s Marquesas. A wandering man with imagination could spend five years on this waterfront, drifting off to one island after another but returning always to the wonder of Tahiti.

  I had trustworthy guides on my first trip, Sanford and Hirshon, and they introduced me to the local luminaries, including the minor diplomat Ratchett Kimbrell, who had rented a big wooden house in the center of Papeete from which he conducted such casual U.S. government business as came his way. Kimbrell gave me a lot of trouble, because I could never pin down exactly who he was, and when I tried to sort things out I became even more confused, for both Hirshorn and Sanford warned me: ‘In Tahiti you don’t try to unravel every situation. The United States has four representatives here, their duties not clearly defined.’ When I asked who they were, he startled me: ‘First there’s the Honorable Richard M. de Lambert, official consul and a State Department gentleman of distinction. Then there’s the man you’re interested in, Ratchett Kimbrell, who seems to be a self-motivated operative. Then there’s this mysterious young naval officer McClintock, and now we have you, and no one knows what your interest is in Tahitian affairs.’ When I studied Kimbrell I concluded that his quasi-government post was a cover. But to hide what I did not know. From my briefing at headquarters I knew he was in disfavor with Washington for having rather airily assured a Norwegian skipper that he didn’t really need papers from him to clear for Honolulu, and his issuance of passports had been a disgrace.