Rascals in Paradise

by James A. Michener

  His son Moenga, in a desperate effort to ward off the threat to his father’s life, hurriedly chose one of the lesser babies of Finau and strangled it in a pious manner. But this atonement came too late. Will Mariner, at the dying man’s bedside, placed his hand on the chief’s heart. There was one more convulsion, and then Finau II lay empty of life, a victim of the vengeance of the outraged gods of Tonga.

  The hau of Tonga was buried, along with his beloved daughter in her little cedarwood casket, in a vault near Will’s estates in Vava’u. Mariner could not help revealing a genuine grief at the loss of this violent man, who with all his barbaric faults had been a good friend to the papalangi lad he had saved from death on the ship and had raised to a high place in the island world. But Moenga told Will that it was unfitting to a warrior to show womanly tears, and there were more manly ways of mourning. He pointed to warriors who ran about knocking themselves over the head with clubs, and gashing themselves with sharp shells until the blood ran. Then every mourner went home, shaved his head and burned a two-inch patch on each cheek; he rubbed in the juice of a certain berry to make the wound bleed, and thus the sore was kept open for twenty days thereafter.

  In an impressive ceremony of kava drinking, Moenga was invested with the kingly title of Finau III, and took his place at the head of the chiefs. Here was a ruler of a completely different sort from his violent and treacherous politician of a father. The young man was devoted to the peace and happiness of all his subjects, and advocated a return to the cultivation of the fruits of the soil and the simple arts of woodworking, weaving, and dance and song. Yet he was not unaware that some of the chief’s were envious; and, watchful for revolution, he kept his closest friend, Will Mariner, at his side at all times with pistols primed and ready to defend the young king.

  The proper number of months of mourning passed, and now the time came for Finau III to perform the ritual of “breaking his head” in front of the tomb of his father. While the party of chiefs were dressing for the ceremony and laying out the weapons with which they were expected to wound themselves, Will Mariner entered the house and thoughtlessly indulged in a loud sneeze.

  This omen was so frightful that instantly the warriors realized that they would be affronting the gods and invoking disaster if they went any further in the ritual. Finau III was gripped by one of those storms of rage that he had inherited from his violent father, and roared at his best friend the most frightful Tongan oath he could think of.

  Will, realizing what he had done, firmly answered: “Your father would not have believed in such nonsense, and I am surprised that you do.” Finau grabbed a club and would have killed Will in an instant, but his chiefs held him down and others hauled Mariner out of the house to safety.

  The warriors hastened to assure Finau that the sneeze was, after all, merely a papalangi sneeze and should not be allowed to affect their Tongan religious duties. They went forth and began wounding themselves on the head in a violent fashion. Finau, now somewhat reassured, outdid them all. He took a sharp saw, salvaged from the Port-au-Prince, and gashed his head frightfully until blood poured forth in streams.

  Will withdrew to his estate and, advised by his foster mother, who felt keenly that he should maintain his dignity, resolved not to be the first to make advances of peace toward the young king. Thus he refused to accept any messages to return to the court, and at the end of ten days, Finau himself walked into Will’s house, greeted him warmly with a Tongan nose rubbing and begged his pardon for his outburst of anger. The two great friends were reconciled.

  Thereafter the young men were inseparable. But although Will Mariner was now the comrade of a king, and a wealthy landholder in an island paradise, he was not happy; for he yearned to see once more the thronging streets of London. His disappointment that Captain Chase had refused to rescue him was still sharp.

  Thus his heart leaped up one evening in November, 1810, when, returning home in his canoe, he caught sight of the sails of a European ship against the sunset. At once he ordered his three men to paddle him to the strange vessel, promising that they would be made rich for life by the gifts they would receive.

  The head canoe man, Teu, replied that they had seen the ship before but had not told him, because it was well known that the chiefs of Tonga would kill anybody who helped their beloved Toki to leave their land. Again Will ordered the men to paddle him to the ship, but they began whispering together, and then Teu swore that, although they held their master in high respect, they could not disobey their tribal rulers. Teu picked up his paddle and began pulling for the shore.

  This was too much for Will to bear. He had been given the power of life and death over these men. It was also well known that, although Teu was a reliable boatman, he had killed two of his children because they were unwanted, and had also, during a time of famine, killed and eaten his own wife. In rage Mariner grabbed up his musket and lunged out with it at the disobedient serf. The barrel was old and worn around the muzzle, and the weapon stabbed into Teu’s belly as he knelt at his paddle. With barely a groan, he fell senseless in the bottom of the canoe.

  The two others, frightened by Toki’s threat that he would shoot them, and unaware that if he fired at either he could not quickly reload, fearfully began paddling toward the distant ship, just barely visible in the dusk. The journey was long and anxious. Guarding himself from the dying Teu and watchful to see that the other men did not jump overboard and abandon him, Will Mariner urged on the exhausted paddlers through the long night.

  At dawn the canoe came alongside the ship, and Will leaped into the main chains. He was almost knocked overboard by the sentry placed there. The man naturally supposed that natives were attacking the ship, for here confronting him was a brown-skinned man with long hair knotted inside a turban of bark cloth, wearing only a short skirt of ti leaves.

  “I’m an Englishman, a survivor of the Port-au-Prince!” Will shouted. An officer standing by came up.

  “I am Captain Fisk, of the New South Wales brig Favorite,” he announced. “I heard in Sydney about the massacre. I’ll take you to China, if you are willing to work your passage.”

  Will agreed at once, and was given a pair of pants and a shirt, so that he could dress like a white man for the first time in four years. But when he washed the shirt, which was filthy, and hung it to dry in the rigging, it was stolen from him, and for the remainder of the voyage to Macao he was to go about naked to the waist.

  Will asked the captain to give food and presents to his men in the canoe, who then began the long paddle home with the dead body of the unruly Teu. They took also a steel ax as a present for Finau. Captain Fisk was impressed by Will’s story that he was a friend of the ruler of these islands, and anchored the Favorite off Vava’u, where a crowd of Will’s native friends came out to visit this marvelous ship.

  Among the visitors was Finau III, who brought five hogs and forty giant yams as provisions for his comrade and Will’s shipmates on the voyage toward home. The Tongan chief was so impressed by the luxury of the ship that he spent a night aboard, and two days later, when the Favorite was weighing anchor, he asked Captain Fisk if he might go with Will to Bolotané and learn the sciences that had made the English people so great.

  Quite reasonably, the captain refused, pointing out that here Finau was a king, but in England he would, because of his skin color, be put in a lower class and would be given none of the respect that he had taken as his right from the time of his birth.

  Finau’s beautiful sister came sightseeing on board ship and her lively remarks, translated by Will, greatly amused the crew. She pretended that she would go to Bolotané and asked if she could wear her usual dress there—a skirt of bark cloth and nothing above it. “But perhaps it would be too cold for that, anyway!” she prattled. “I might have to spend all my time in one of those hot-houses that Toki tells me they use to raise plants in from warm climates. And my brown skin would keep me from getting a papalangi husband. It would be a great pity to leave s
o many handsome chiefs in Vava’u and then go to live a single life in England!”

  Mariner performed two important tasks before his departure from Tonga forever. The first of these was to persuade Captain Fisk to ship any of the other survivors of the massacre who wished to leave the islands. All those who desired to go were summoned and taken aboard the Favorite as members of the crew. Several, however, chose to remain in Tonga, saying that they preferred to live in this tropical, hospitable land rather than to go back and starve in cold, unfriendly England. Among these was one of whom Mariner reported: “Thomas Waters was not disposed, however, to return to England. He was an old man and he reflected that it would be a difficult matter for him to get his bread at home, and as he enjoyed at Vava’u every convenience that he could desire, he chose to end his days there.”

  The second duty was to recover the log book of the ill-fated Port-au-Prince. This record was the only evidence in existence of the claims for prize money from the capture of enemy ships during the cruise, and without it there would be no chance to obtain the shares that represented the whole wages of the survivors for the past four years. Will sent ashore two trusted natives who brought back the famous log book to him. He had hidden it in a barrel of gunpowder—the only place where a curious Tongan might not search for concealed documents.

  Almost four years after Will Mariner had first sighted the Friendly Islands, he bade farewell to these fatal shores with a joy tinged heavily with regret. He was leaving behind a private estate, a royal comrade and a host of brown friends whose lives had been mingled with his own. But now Toki wanted to go back to the land of the papalangi.

  Did he leave behind a sweetheart? In his book Mariner discoursed learnedly on the marriage customs of the Tongans; but nowhere among its thousand pages is there a hint that he loved a Tongan girl.

  More than half a year later, voyaging by way of Macao and the Cape of Good Hope, Will Mariner landed at Gravesend—the same port from which, a boy of thirteen, he had sailed with high hopes some six and a half years earlier. He took the ferry to the London side of the river, and sought out his home. But he received a brutal welcome. He was grabbed by a roving press gang who were collecting likely lads to serve forcibly in His Majesty’s navy. A prisoner, he was rowed out to a hulk in the river, and more than a week passed before his father, Captain Magnus Mariner, was able to pull strings and get his long-lost son released.

  Thus, in a Thames hulk, ended the great adventure of Will Mariner. His mother had died not long before, still believing that her son was a captive on a far Pacific isle; but his father greeted Will joyously. He had said farewell to a little boy; and here was returned to him a man, full grown and bearing the marks of danger and deep experience.

  After Will’s return to England, his former schoolfellows were hardly able to recognize him. His love of adventure seemed to have been so sated by his savage existence that, as a result of hardships and perils suffered too early in life, he yearned only for rest and quiet. During the five years between his return and the publication of the famous book, usually called Mariner’s Tonga Islands, he embraced the quietest shore life he could find, as an accountant in a merchant’s office.

  In May, 1818, he married Margaret Roberts, daughter of a Welsh banker. He then became a stockbroker, going daily to his office in Hercules Chambers at the Stock Exchange. Eventually he retired from business and went to live at Gravesend, in view of the spot from which the Port-au-Prince had sailed in his boyhood on the famous voyage.

  The Mariners had six daughters and five or six sons. Tradition has it that all the men were drowned at sea, leaving no children. Thus no direct male descendants now live to carry on that fitting and melodious surname of Mariner, so suitable for a family destined to follow the sailor’s craft.

  Will’s wife lived until 1871, after a widowhood of eighteen years. Will, after his hairbreadth escapes and perils on the oceans of the world, had died ironically. He was drowned when a little skiff overturned on the river Thames.

  * All the South Sea natives had trouble with the word Britain. In Honolulu, for example, one of the main thoroughfares is Beretania Street.

  10

  Leeteg, the Legend

  Shortly after the end of World War II an airplane pilot flying low off the coast of Japan saw an impressive sight. A volcano arose from the surface of the sea, writhed and twisted in the sunlight, spewed smoke and rock, then in great convulsions of incredible force lifted an island from the bowels of the earth and into brute being.

  When the pilot returned to base he was badly shaken, for he had seen what no one had previously witnessed. He had seen the earth being born, and the sight was unnerving.

  The present authors feel much the same way about the subject now to be treated. They observed the birth of a new legend that will echo throughout the Pacific for years, and in retrospect the whole affair is amazing, for this man boldly set out to clothe himself in fable. “I have boozed more,” he boasted, “fought more, laid more girls, and thrown more wild parties than anyone else on the island, but it’s all good publicity and gets me talked about plenty, and that’s what sells pictures.”

  The legend begins on any Tuesday in Tahiti. The little inter-island boat Mitiaro has set out from the neighboring island of Mooréa around eight in the morning, and for nearly four hours it has been ploughing through some of the most glorious waters in the world. Behind lie the noble peaks of Mooréa, those unexcelled volcanic minarets whose green points dance in the tropic sunlight. Ahead lie the lower and softer hills of Tahiti, whose valleys slip quietly down to the sea, forming black beaches of stark and sweeping charm. No boat in the world plies a more legend-strewn path.

  And none is more uncomfortable. There are no seats this morning, for they are jammed by crates of chickens, while overhead, threatening the frail canopy, half a dozen pigs have been lashed together and are squealing their way to market. Forward a group of girls in blue and green pareus tucked tightly about their breasts sing old songs as a weary man, propped up against a sack of fruit, strums a guitar and beats time with his foot. He is too perpetually drunk to create a legend, but behind him, leaning against the rail, stands a man of quite a different sort.

  He is short, with unusually abbreviated legs and small feet. He stands not more than five feet three and wears a woven Manihiki hat whose flopping brim keeps the sun and spray from his round face and prevents one from seeing his sparse black hair that is just beginning to gray. It is a kindly face that peers out from beneath the island hat. The mouth is ample, the lower jaw juts forward slightly; the chin is fleshy, the nose large. The eyes are a steely blue, and although the man laughs from time to time, for he enjoys all that goes on around him, it is not a naturally mirthful laugh but one that is slightly nervous, as if the owner were a compulsive drunk who had not yet had his morning bottle.

  Actually, for five days each week the traveler is abstemious, but on Tuesday mornings, as the Mitiaro approaches the dock in Papeete harbor, he senses the approach of good whisky and begins to fidget. For this is his habitual day to tear old Papeete apart, to chase half-naked girls down the street, to punch policemen, to knock Chinese down and to curse at sailors. Gentle, tolerant Tahiti has known some epic brawlers in its day, but none to surpass the strange man who waits impatiently to begin the assault.

  It would be difficult for a stranger to identify this short-legged man. He looks like a planter from southern France, but he speaks almost no French. Others will say, in later years, that in appearance he is a twin brother of America’s Senator McCarthy, but he boasts not a drop of Irish blood. He is a German, of American birth, and when he calls out to a friend on the Mitiaro he uses the nasal twang of Arkansas.

  “Behave yourself today,” the friend warns him.

  “I will,” the roly-poly man calls back in his high, flat voice, and everyone within earshot laughs, for it is a certainty that by midnight he will be lying somewhere in a gutter or in jail, his shirt torn off, his eye aflame from some stray fi
st and his friends gone. It is going to be one hell of a day, this Tuesday in Tahiti; and now, as the rickety Mitiaro approaches the pleasure capital of the South Pacific, the chunky little man grimaces in delightful anticipation of the forthcoming brawl.

  By noon the dock at Papeete is crammed with islanders who have wandered down to see the boat land. Brown girls and yellow men, and white women with parasols to fight off the midday sun, and traders and bums wait for the gangplank to be lowered; and in the interval two island girls who have been dismally seasick on the bouncing boat jump over the railing of the launch and onto the dock. Unsteadily they run away from the sickening memory of their voyage and disappear in the crowd.

  Then, as the gangplank hits the dock, a horde of passengers descend with chickens and bananas and laughter and kisses. There is shouting and much weeping and men making appointments with pretty girls, and finally there is this rather plump forty-nine-year-old American in a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, with a funny hat pulled down about his eyes and a bundle of black velvets under his arm. As he lands in Papeete all the habitual drunks shout greetings, but the more sedate shopkeepers ignore him, for it is apparent that as soon as he gets his velvets safely out of the way, he will start to debauch the town.

  Ignoring those who have turned away, he walks slowly through the crowd, limping a little, for he is just recovering from a bout of elephantiasis and one leg is a little swollen. In the old days, this leg would have continued growing until it was thicker than a tree, but now the drug Heterasan controls the disease so that it is no longer disfiguring.

  The American walks slowly to the post office, where he mails a huge batch of letters and his lengths of black velvet, on which have been painted in glowing colors a series of handsome Polynesian heads. He is careful of the velvets, for although they used to be worth about $4 each, they have recently skyrocketed to around $5,000 each, and he is becoming rich. He then goes to the Banque d’Indochine, where like a sober businessman he cashes the cabled drafts that have reached him that week from many parts of the world, and drawing a few thousand francs, he stuffs them in his pocket. The rest he deposits to his growing account and signs his name to the receipt in careful blue letters: Edgar William Leeteg.