***
The pain of the tattooing process drew Yani’s spirit back into his body and he regained consciousness. His sponsor made a geometric design on the boy’s back. The older man incised the youth’s skin with scores of small cuts. Then the wounds were rubbed with ash and oil to raise permanent welts. The unique design consisted of a series of slits, which were then packed with a natural dye, designed to create a life-long identifying tattoo. These were meant to simulate the pattern on the skin of the fearsome crocodiles that lived in the inland lake. Even if a man should literally lose his head in battle, his body could be identified by his body markings and claimed by his family for funeral rites.
Tight-lipped with pain, the boys underwent the grueling introduction to manhood. Yani was one of the less-fortunates in the group, and remained awake during the entire process. His relatively uncomplaining demeanor brought him the praise of Ooma. The elder singled him out for recognition by the spirits. Yani was selected as a future shaman, and spiritual son of Ooma. The elder himself inflicted the additional identifying marks on the young man’s chest.
***
In Boston, Reverend Paton went on for a full hour enumerating the ways Christianity had made inroads in the Satanic lifestyle of the Godless Heathens of the South Pacific islands. Moses McDuff was entranced by the story and it struck him: This is the way I can prove my worth to my family, to God, and myself — Most of all myself. He needed to succeed in the kind of adverse circumstances the great Doctor Paton had endured. He would seek an audience with the retired missionary before he left Boston, and find out how he could qualify for such a noble calling.
***
The tattooing done, Ooma poured a huge net bag of white ashes atop the central fire, which was almost out. These were the ashes left from the fire that had consumed the previous spirit house of four years before. They captured the power of the old spirits for the new generation of pooja.
The men, who had earlier defended the spirit house from the attack of the novices, now reappeared. They were somewhat unsteady from the amount of kava and palm wine they had consumed, but they knew their duty. One by one, each of the naked men urinated into the ash pit while he chanted a magic spell he had inherited from his sponsor at the time of his own initiation to manhood.
When they had all made their contributions, Ooma stirred up the mess with his hands, mixing it with local clay, until it had the consistency of a gummy paint. “This will make you pooja,” he said. “From the top of your head to the soles of your feet, cover each other with the spirit paint.” He started the action by taking a handful of the gray mixture and putting it on the top of Yani’s head. It ran down his face, and trickled on to his chest. Ooma spread it out to cover every exposed inch of skin he saw.
The boys did the same to each other, until there was a room full of gray adolescents. The mixture dried to a white, chalky powder, which symbolized the crocodile egg waiting to hatch. One of the men twirled a bull-roarer around and above his head. It was a flat piece of wood with a hole in the middle that emitted a low growling sound like a male crocodile’s Warning noise as it spun. Its low frequency grumble added an additional element of dread to the generally frightening atmosphere.
For the third and final time they were organized into a circle and given more kava and palm wine. Their body movements had become automatic. Dancing in a tight circle for hours, they waited for the spirits to speak to them. Ooma, the shaman, whispered magic words into each initiate’s ear. This mantra was meant for him 6alone to chant over and over as he danced to the beat of the hollow log drums.
As the twenty adolescent boys fell one by one to the floor of the smoke filled spirit house, they were carried out the back of the building to the beach. Their bodies were covered lightly with sand to simulate the crocodile nest. Three had died. A few, like Yani, experienced visions, but most just passed out. These were no longer boys, but pooja — crocodiles about to be hatched into maturity according to the ritual passage of their totem.
Yani now needed to lie quietly in the sand and rest while he waited to hatch into a new life. He was soon unconscious and he heard the spirits speak to him. All the young men remained in the sand until the afternoon cloudburst of the next day. Then they were urged to rise up and run down to the ocean where they were held in the surf by the older men until the white shell covering was washed off.
That evening the new pooja stretched out on the sand with their first hangovers. Their mother’s inferior blood, having been cast out, they could now form virile blood of their own.
Yani awoke cleared-eyed and talkative in spite of the near mutilation he had undergone at the initiation. Ooma prophesied great things for this unusual young man.
***
The old Scotsman did not have time for a long personal interview, but obligingly sold Moses McDuff an autographed copy of “A Missionary in the New Hebrides” by The Reverend John G. Paton. The young minister promised to study the tome faithfully.
But, after a brief discussion, which included Seminary President Macintosh and his father, they concluded that Moses would be better suited to the conversion of the Irish Catholic immigrants in the Boston area.
Chapter 2
1939
Life on Chase Island had changed little in the past 100 years. It could be considered a blessing that there was nothing of economic value there that the white man found useful. Commercial coconuts did not grow well; there were no minerals worth mining, and the beach was blocked by a thick coral reef. It was difficult for the white man’s boats to even approach the island.
While nobody was rich, neither was anyone what could be called poor. Everyone did for himself what needed to be done. There were no hut-builders, or spear-makers or canoe-shapers. Everyone built his own hut and made his own spears. If someone decided he needed a canoe, he would persuade a few friends to help him hack one out of a fallen tree, and it would be theirs jointly. Every family had a slash and burn garden at the edge of the jungle which yielded sufficient taro to feed its members.
Yani was on an errand for Ooma. He had grown to his adult physique, and his hair was now somewhere between red and garish blond. He soaked it with a paste of certain ground seashells that bleached it from its natural black. It was one of the visual markings that identified him as an apprentice shaman. He was walking along the shoreline looking for shells that could be inscribed with symbols to improve the quality of fish living in the lagoon. The fish were countless, as usual, but lately had been on the small side.
Fishing was communal, and an activity requiring much cooperation. Both men and women participated, dragging wide nets toward the shallow end of the lagoon from the deep. Usually, enough fish and other creatures were caught that made the activity necessary only every second or third day. With no refrigeration, it was pointless to catch any more than the islanders could eat before spoilage became a problem. The need for long-term food preservation had never arisen.
This was a non-fishing day. There were other things that Yani needed to attend to. Suddenly, Jimay, one of the men Yani had shared the initiation rites with emerged from the brush, carrying a squealing piglet. He was taking it home to corral it and fatten it up for a half a year; then he would offer it to the family of a girl he wanted to take as his wife.
Yani was not interested in pigs or wives at the moment. His mind was elsewhere. Pigs were a measure of wealth and a source of endless problems. They were always changing hands. The most common method of getting new pigs was in compensation for being wronged. If your garden was ravaged by someone else’s swine, some — if not all the pigs involved — might become yours. If another man shared sex with your wife, he owed you some kind of gift in return. The village elders consistently ruled that when sufficient damage had been done to someone, a piglet was satisfactory compensation.
As he was wading out toward an unusually large shell, Yani saw a strange boat come into view. It was clearly not a native outrigger. It was a derelict European-style sailboat. By pu
re luck, it drifted through the narrow opening in the reef. The moon was full and the tides were at their highest, creating the margin of safety needed for its hull to clear. Had it been any other time of the month, there would have been only wooden splinters washing ashore.
Yani called to two other men sitting in the sand. “Look! Something that wanders the sea is coming for a visit.”
He pointed to the breakers, and the three of them waded out into the surf to catch the boat by its trailing ropes. They swam along with it, laughing as the keel buried itself in the sand. It was a medium sized yawl with a retractable centerboard, like those found on the Chesapeake Bay in the United States. It allowed the boat to enter shallow water without running aground. Once the tide went out, it would rest essentially on its side in the sand, but for now it rode well in the water. At the time of its construction, it had been an expensive craft, and its solid construction is what kept it from breaking up as it beached. Its name was Salvation.
When they climbed over the sides, they found eight men sprawled in various positions from the bow to the stern. None were conscious. Two had obviously been dead for a while. Empty liquor bottles told a clear story to the older islanders who joined Yani on board. Outside contact with Witmen for Chase Islanders was a rare occurrence. This was the first time in five years they had made contact with Witmen (Pidgin for anybody who was not a dark-skinned native islander. They made no distinctions among Orientals, Malays and Europeans — they were all Witmen). Any time they had come ashore in the past, it was always the same — trouble. They were arrogant, unruly, dangerous, and drunk. They wanted women, water and food — usually in that order.
Inland, others quickly became aware of the event, and large numbers of villagers came to see the shipwreck. Yani and his friends lifted the unconscious men over the side, and the villagers received the limp bodies. They were uncertain what to do with two dead men, so, as was their custom, four old women dragged them off the boat, and left them at the water’ edge for the time being. The old women had nothing to fear from their spirits since their days were numbered anyway.
The bottles were also handed over the sides; even the empty ones were highly treasured in a place where glass was not made in any form. Fortunately, none of the bottles were broken; bare feet did not do well among broken glass shards.
Ooma, arrived. He surveyed the scene and declared the ship taboo because of the dead bodies. From that point on no one dared climb aboard.
The six remaining men were carried to the shade of the jungle and rainwater brought in wooden bowls, was poured over their heads. When they started to show signs of coming to, those who could took long drinks, only to pass out again. They were suffering from heat stroke and dehydration for the most part. All that could be hoped for was that they might recover on their own. Chase Islanders had no treatment for heat stroke because they seldom suffered from it. They knew well what a man on the other side of the world named Noel Coward had been telling London audiences: “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun,” but this group of maritime misfits never got the message.
The leader of this motley crew of men without a country was, in fact, quite British, calling himself Captain J.R. West. He became a Captain only by virtue of the fact that he owned the yawl. It became his as the payoff of a crooked card game in which the former owner died under “mysterious” circumstances.
Before he became a sea captain, he had been a copra plantation foreman on another obscure island further north, but his title would have better been described as “overseer.” He treated the natives as little more than slaves.
The question now arose among the islanders as to what to do with these Witmen who were thrust upon them. To others in their own villages the people were congenial; the men scrupulously democratic. During debates, any man could stand and air his views, no matter how unpopular. But these Witmen had no status. They were virtually un-people.
A meeting was called and one of the men of about 19, another who had been through the initiation with Yani, said, “I think their heads would make an excellent addition to the village’s collection.”
The shaman shook his head and waved his left hand in front of him as though he were sweeping away debris. “No!” he said emphatically. “These Witmen were not enemies. There was no battle. No fight. Their heads have no spiritual value. It would be the same as making a feast from a pig we found dead in the bush.”
The rest of the men voiced their agreement. They looked to Ooma for a better ideas. He thought for a while, then said, “I believe that the decision should be made by Akambep, the Sun. We interfered with a trial by the elements when we took these men out of the boat. They were being tested by Akambep. Lay grass mats out on the sand and stretch the Witmen out on them.” Essentially, they would let nature take its course.
Mats were spread out and the sailors were dragged out of the jungle again. Stripped of all their clothes, the most outstanding thing about them was that the lower portions of their bodies were white, or light tan in the case of the Asians, marking where they had all worn cotton shorts. Men, women and children walked among the prostrate forms, remarking on the anomaly. They wondered if these men were diseased with their ghastly white rumps, resembling a certain type of fungus infection sometimes seen in the form of white circles on the skin.
At the height of the curious display, a huge cumulonimbus cloud above the island reached a critical altitude and the skies opened up in a deluge. The temperature dropped twenty degrees, as the cool rain bathed the six men on the mats. It kept raining for at least a half hour. While the entire village watched from the cover of the jungle, curtains of water swept over them in a tropical cloudburst.
Flashes of lightning illuminated the beach with dazzling brilliance. A clap of thunder loud enough to shatter any glass bottles left on the boat’s deck, woke Captain West from his coma. He opened his eyes, only to have them rinsed thoroughly by the downpour. Turning his head to the side and lifting on one elbow, he surveyed the prostrate forms of the other five crew members. He said out loud, “I thought Hell was fire and brimstone, and here it is bloody, God-damned rain. It ain’t no different than England,” and allowed himself to fall back on the wet, sandy mat.
“Akambep speaks with a loud voice,” Ooma said to Yani when he saw West stir. “When he returns to the sky, we will take the Witmen.”
Finally, the drenching rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Two more of the men proved to be dead, and they were dragged along with the first two into the jungle to be left to the elements. Such was the customary and unceremonious disposal of non-tribesmen. Ooma gave the signal to carry the castaways who were still alive to the village.
***
In a matter of days, the four Witmen recovered their strength sufficiently to walk around the village. Food was provided for them with no fanfare since there was no shortage. Ooma, proved his wisdom by providing the convalescents with an unlimited supply of kava. The pepper-root beverage had a tranquilizing effect on the patients, and kept them in an almost numb condition most of the time.
Yani was captivated by the visitors and the things they carried. Among the possessions that the dead crewmembers no longer had any use for were filthy, ragged shirts and shorts. Clothes made of cotton, linen or wool fabrics were owned only by people who had traded with the last visiting Witmen five years ago. They were worn only for ceremonial occasions, but these men wore cotton clothing all the time. Yani had rinsed the castoff clothing in the surf, and now wore a pair of khaki shorts, and a tattered shirt.
Best of all, one of the dead men he had removed from the boat had worn a steel knife in a sheath on a belt around his waist. To Yani this was a magic tool. His people knew no metallurgy, and such things as this knife were so precious as to be handed down within a family as heirlooms. There were no more than three or four iron tools on the entire island. Ooma, confiscated the other knives as his own before the sailors’ carcasses were disposed of.
However, as his health
returned, the leader of the Witmen became restless. The occasional ground tremor caused by the local volcano added to his anxiety. “Don’t drink any more of the bloody kava,” Captain West told the other three, “or we’ll never get off the island.”
“Why do we want to?” asked Gash, who was from Borneo. He got his name from a scar that ran transversely across his chest from an old knife wound. He was becoming very popular with the unmarried girls of the village. “This is better than home ... or any place we have been,” he said quite innocently and honestly.
West barked back at him, “I don’t plan to spend the rest of my days in a reed hut, eating sweet potatoes. I plan to breathe my last in a whorehouse in Sydney full of good Scotch whiskey.”
The other surviving crewmembers were Shim-shi, a Korean; and Bano, a Filipino. They shared Gash’s sentiments, but they were afraid of the Englishman. None of them understood a word of each other’s native languages, so they all spoke Pidgin, the lingua franca of the South Pacific islands. With each island essentially having its own dialect, there were hundreds upon hundreds of separate languages in use. Even native traders from neighboring islands used sign language. But since the end of the 19th Century Europeans had been spreading Pidgin. It was mostly English, but also used French, German and island words.
By listening to the sailors talking with each other, Yani made a discovery that would change his life. He had a gift — he understood and learned any language very easily. Within a week he understood many of the things they said. At the end of the second week, he began making up his own sentences. Before a month had passed, he knew the language almost as well as his teachers.
They were pleased with him. It became unnecessary for them to even try to learn the Chase Island dialect. All they needed to do was tell Yani what they wanted, and he either got it or told Ooma what they said.
The taboo imposed on their beached sailboat meant nothing to the sailors. They made frequent trips to it for things to trade with the girls for sexual favors. The natives, however, continued to refuse to set foot on its decks for fear of the spirits of the men who had died there.
When John Frum Came Page 2
