by Tony Horwitz
“Here it is not so direct,” Hinarii added. “It starts with the eyes, with dancing, with seduction. Can you do the Tahitian waltz?”
I shook my head. “That is too bad,” she said. “You will not have sex.”
“That’s okay, he’s married,” Roger said. “I’m single.”
“This does not matter so much in Tahiti.”
“What does?” I asked.
“You must not only behave a certain way, but look the way we like.”
Using Roger as a prop, I asked what suited the women, and pointed first at his unshaven chin. “Non!” they cried in unison. “No beard.”
I pointed at his rumpled shirt and shorts. “No way,” Tania said. “He must be clean and neat, over his whole body.”
I reached for Roger’s hair. “Long or short?”
“Long, like his, but it must be shampooed and combed,” Hinarii said, studying Roger’s unruly curls with obvious disdain. “Perhaps you have a tattoo? It is part of our culture, to have them all over. Very sexy.”
“No,” Roger said. “Just a smallpox vaccination.”
“Tant pis.” The plane arrived. Tania applied lipstick to her four-year-old daughter, who wore flowers around her neck and a black pearl earring. Hinarii reached in her purse and handed me a lighter decorated with a picture of herself in a tight floral wrap. “Miss Tahiti, 1984,” she explained. “I was young and beautiful then.” She offered me a golden cheek to kiss, then the other, and held out a limp hand to Roger. “Enchantée,” she said, not very convincingly, and the three of them went to board the plane.
Roger’s face crumpled. “I’ve just met Miss Global Crumpet 1984 and I’m quintessentially what she can’t stand. A polecat. Mr. Fafaru. Did you see her shake my hand? She’s probably soaking it in disinfectant as we speak.”
“Can’t blame her. Look at you.”
“Look at you. I’ve been sailing, working with the outboard. A few hours ago you were puking poisson cru. She only liked you because you were taking notes. She’s a total narcissist. They all are.”
We walked over to help Dorothy clean up. “How’d you do?” she asked.
“Not as well as Cook’s men,” I said.
“I’ve wondered about that,” Dorothy said. “Islanders didn’t like the hippies who turned up here in the seventies: too funky. When you think about it, Cook’s men must have looked the same. Unshaven, unwashed, ponytails, bandannas. The women probably took them to the beach and scrubbed them before they’d do anything.” She paused. “Then again, I’ve heard women here say, ‘A white man, that’s something different. Why not try it just for fun?’ I guess Cook’s crew must have seemed exotic. Plus they had nails.”
“We could pull the rest of the screws out of the yacht,” Roger said. “They’re going to fall out anyway.”
Dorothy dropped us back at the pier in Fare. The outboard on the dinghy quickly flooded. We paddled the leaky boat to the yacht. Roger drank from a rum bottle, studying the Miss Tahiti lighter. “Our first ‘artificial curiosity,’” he said, adopting the phrase Cook and his men used for the man-made relics they collected. “I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life, leave it to the British Museum when I die.”
The next day, we sailed across calm seas to Raiatea and found a mooring on the island’s western edge, very close to where the Endeavour had anchored. Then the weather turned, bringing high winds, hard rain, and poor visibility. We’d planned to circumnavigate the island, as Cook had done, but after peeking from the cabin Roger retreated to his bunk. “Cook wouldn’t sail in this slop and neither will I,” he said, opening a Patrick O’Brian novel.
“We could explore on land,” I suggested.
“And see what?”
“A famous marae, one of the most—”
“—boring piles of rock. That’s a redundancy. Be my guest.” He piloted the dinghy to shore and let me off. “I can’t wait to hear all about it.”
Like Tahiti, Raiatea had a coastal road ringing the island, which was fifteen miles long and nine across. After walking through the rain for a few minutes, I stuck out my thumb. A battered Citroën pulled over, driven by a barefoot Frenchwoman named Christine. She’d come to Raiatea for a visit twenty years before and never left. “No stress. No shoes. Easy life. Why leave? Maybe some day I find another island, farther away.” We reached Uturoa, the only town on the island. I asked Christine what there was to do there on a wet afternoon. “To do? Rien. Same as in sunny weather. That is why I like it. What do you want to do?”
This was a good question. She let me out at the Quai des Pecheurs, though there were no fishermen in sight. I wandered past a London Missionary Society church, a gendarmerie, and a tin-roof Chinese-owned shop called Magasin Yee-Foo Alimentation Générale. Uturoa was the second largest town in French Polynesia, after Papeete. It took me ten minutes to walk from one end to the other.
I stuck out my thumb again and a pickup pulled over, the Tahitian driver pointing to the truck’s open bed. Soon after I climbed in, the truck stopped again. A woman stood by the road, in the middle of nowhere, with two fish as big as she was, hooked to a tree. The driver paid a few francs and heaved one of the fish in the truck bed beside me. “Bonito,” he said, climbing back in the cab. The road was windy, and the bed held several inches of rain. The gargantuan fish kept sloshing against me, its glassy eyes staring with evident reproach for all the poisson cru I’d consumed over the past ten days.
I distracted myself by gazing at the scenery, lush and jungly as a rain forest. The few buildings we passed appeared much poorer than those I’d seen in Tahiti or Huahine, mostly small wooden houses and sheds with trays of coconut meat. Once dried, the meat became copra, used to make coconut oil. Copra, along with the fish sold by the road, seemed to be all that remained of the island’s rural economy.
When the driver reached a turnoff, I climbed out and took refuge from the rain beneath the broad, dripping fronds of a banana tree. The next ride I caught was in a Cutlass Supreme driven by a Chinese-Tahitian named Gilbert. He offered to take me to the marae, at the far end of the island, if I didn’t mind a detour. His car needed fixing. Since automobile parts were scarce on Raiatea, he kept a junked Cutlass parked in the mountains and was headed there to cannibalize it. He’d found the old car first, which determined his choice of a new car. “I know I have the dead Cutlass to keep a new one alive,” he said.
We turned onto an unpaved road covered in pale, gravelly shale that Gilbert called soupe de corail, or coral soup. He parked beside a tiny Catholic church. As he worked under the two hoods, transplanting spark plugs from one Cutlass to the other, Gilbert told me how his family had come to Raiatea. When the American Civil War curtailed cotton exports from the South, an enterprising Scotsman founded a plantation on Tahiti and imported Chinese laborers. The Tahitian cotton trade ended soon after the Civil War, but many Chinese stayed, fanning out across the islands, mostly as merchants.
“I am fourth generation here, but still we are different,” Gilbert said. “We work to make a better life. The island man, he likes his life. He wants only to eat, sleep, drink, make love. If he gets this, he is very nice. If not, he becomes angry, méchant.”
Anti-French rioting in the 1990s had led to the looting and burning of Chinese-owned shops. Gilbert now feared that the islands might win their independence. “France is our protection,” he said. “That is why many Chinese become Catholic, to fit in, seem more French, even if we are still Chinese inside.”
His Cutlass repaired, Gilbert drove me to the end of the paved road at a sleepy village called Opoa, strung along the banks of a wide inlet. Beside it stood the vast marae of Taputapuatea, one of the most significant historic sites in the Pacific. The word “Polynesia,” coined by a Frenchman in the eighteenth century, derives from the Greek poly, “many,” and nesos, “islands.” Tradition held that Taputapuatea was the starting point for great canoe voyages to far-flung outposts across the Pacific. It was also at Opoa that Cook had first raised the British
flag, setting in motion the destruction of the culture and belief system this ground had once consecrated.
The site was dramatic and outward-looking, jutting from the jungly interior, with water lapping on three sides and waves roaring against the reef a half-mile offshore. Taputapuatea comprised a complex of temples centered on a vast courtyard cobbled with giant stones. A black slab, ten feet high and four feet across, rose from the terrace. A row of similar stones formed one wall of an altar by the sea.
Silent and empty, Taputapuatea seemed as abandoned and remote from the twenty-first century as Stonehenge—even though the temple had remained in active use until just 175 years before my visit. Adding to the eeriness was the mystery surrounding the rituals that took place at the marae. Traditional Polynesian belief was wreathed in secrecy and taboo, and passed on orally. Missionaries encouraged the abandonment of pre-Christian faith, and also the dismantling of once sacred sites. Epidemic disease, which took an especially heavy toll on the elderly, also helped extinguish memories and traditions. As a result, modern anthropologists know more about the practices of the ancient Sumerians than they do about the Polynesian priests who practiced their faith here only half a dozen generations ago.
Cook and his men were among the few Westerners even to glimpse the old religion. But the English couldn’t penetrate much beyond the surface of what they saw. “The Misteries of most Religions are very dark and not easily understud even by those who profess them,” Cook wrote. Later, on his second voyage, Cook had a revealing exchange with a Raiatean chief he’d befriended.
“He asked the name of my Marai,” Cook wrote, “a strange quiston to ask a Seaman.” Cook interpreted the query in its narrowest sense: the chief “wanted to know the name of the place where our bodies were to return to dust.” He replied with the name of the parish his family occupied in London: Stepney. Cook’s second in command, Tobias Furneaux, was asked the same question and answered: “No man who used the Sea could tell where he would be buried.”
Neither man grasped that the chief may have sought something more than the name of a London churchyard. Cook’s biographer J. C. Beaglehole, a New Zealander who also studied Polynesian culture, describes the marae as “an essential part of a man’s social existence, and his relationship to the gods: the question was really, What place are you particularly identified with?” For a man as rootless and secular as Cook, there wasn’t a ready answer to this question, even if he’d understood it.
Cook learned much more on a later trip to the islands, when he visited a marae on Tahiti to witness an “extraordinary and Barbarous custom”: human sacrifice to the war god, Oro. Cook described “the unhappy sufferer” as a middle-aged man, killed by a stone blow to the head. He noted every detail of the long ceremony: incantations, drum-beats, and the plucking out of one eye, which was held to a chief’s mouth for symbolic consumption. With typical precision, Cook also counted “forty nine Sculls” of earlier victims, set into the marae’s stonework, which led him to conclude, “These sacrifices are not very uncommon.” A drawing of the scene by a ship’s artist became one of the best-known illustrations from Cook’s voyages. A lurid adaption of the original artwork also circulated in missionary pamphlets as evidence of Polynesian depravity—one example, among many, of the unintended consequences of Cook’s travels.
Taputapuatea, dedicated to the war god, had likely been the scene of sacrifice, too. But scholars believe its primary purpose was as an “international marae,” a gathering place for priests from across Polynesia, and the seat of spiritual power: a Pacific Mecca. The upright slab at the courtyard’s center served as a backrest for leading chiefs. Nearby perched an eroded stone figure of a woman with a flattish face and hands crossed on her belly. This was a ti’i, or tiki, a symbolic representation of a guardian ancestor or god. Similar tiki survived, in different form, across Polynesia, including the enormous statues of Easter Island, believed to have been erected to honor illustrious forebears who watched over their descendants.
Wandering among the rocks, I found bits of graffiti, names scratched inside hearts, an asthma inhaler, and scraps of paper stuffed in cracks. I later learned these papers had been left by visiting New Agers, who believed that scribbling their sins and negative emotions and storing or burning these missives at the marae helped expel karma.
Walking back along the road toward the village of Opoa, I saw six teenagers on a pier, their legs dangling over the dock as they drank beer and rolled joints in banana fronds. They motioned me to join them, and asked in French where I came from. When I told them, one of the boys gave me a vigorous thumbs-up, exclaiming in English: “American wood—tops!”
Unsure how to respond—was he a carpenter?—I smiled and gave him a thumbs-up, too. He passed me a joint and asked, “Why you are here?”
I pointed at the marae, and asked if he ever went there. He shook his head. A girl ran a finger across her throat and said, “Before, much killing. Very bad place.” The others nodded gravely. New Agers might romanticize the old ways, but young islanders evidently didn’t. I asked if they knew about Captain Cook’s visit to the bay.
“Le premier voyageur.”
“He stop the killing at marae.”
“He think we are savages.”
I wanted to learn more, but we quickly exhausted our common store of words. Their French was oddly accented and almost as halting as mine—they spoke it only in school, a girl said, and talked to each other in Tahitian. I had just as much trouble comprehending their broken English. The dope wasn’t helping. I learned a few words of Tahitian by pointing—te rai (the sky), te ua (the rain), te miti (the sea)—and reciprocated with some American words they pantomimed, mostly to do with sports and music. But after a while we just lay on the dock, exchanging smiles and occasional gestures: a thumbs-up, or a bull’s horns motion with raised pinkie and thumb, an all-purpose Polynesian greeting that translates roughly as “Hey.”
Lolling on the narrow pier, surrounded by these mocha-colored youths, I became aware of my own pallid body in an unaccustomed way. “Like cats,” George Biddle, an American painter, wrote of islanders in the 1920s, “they fall naturally into harmonious poses.” Sprawled beside these languid felines, my sun-pink limbs poking from cutoff shorts and a sweaty T-shirt, I felt about as harmonious as a toad.
But the sensation wasn’t altogether displeasing. For one of the first times on the islands, I caught an echo of the strangeness and wonder of Cook’s travels. The scenery was little changed since Cook’s visit to Opoa: a cerulean lagoon thrummed by rain, volcanic peaks robed in emerald flora, the massive black stones of Taputapuatea looming onshore. In their journals, the English often tried to express the wonder they felt when gazing at Pacific landscapes. “The whole exhibits a View which can only be discribed by the pencle of an able painter,” Cook wrote in a typical passage. Despite their muskets and sextants and spyglasses, the English felt overawed by the strange majesty of the world into which they had sailed.
The islanders they encountered had no concept whatsoever of the West, unlike the TV-influenced teenagers on Opoa’s dock. Still, as I fumbled to communicate with hand signs, exaggerated facial expressions, and mangled phrases, I also sensed some of the thrill and frustration the English must have felt as they mingled with Polynesian society.
As I got up to go, the boy I’d first spoken to coughed over his banana-leaf joint and repeated, “American wood—tops!”
Still mystified, I raised my thumb in reply before extending it, once again, beside the road running around the island.
While I was away, Roger had done some exploring of his own. Our mooring lay near a marina run by Frenchmen, and Roger insisted I come meet some of the characters he’d encountered at the bar. “They’re seriously damaged,” he said. “Just shocking. Even compared to me.”
I settled on a stool beside a hard-drinking, chain-smoking Frenchwoman of a certain age, named Sophie. She wore a flowing robe and a flowered tiara. “Flamboyant, bougainvillea, orchid,” she
said, ticking off the blossoms. A florist by trade, Sophie had lived for many years near the atoll of Mururoa, ground zero for the French nuclear tests that had taken place in Polynesia for decades. I asked if she’d worried about nuclear fallout. “Not at all,” she said. “If the wind blew toward us, the authorities simply ordered us to run and hide in blockhouses.”
At this, the club’s owner, Jean-Pierre, reached under the bar and produced photographs of mushroom clouds. Under each one he’d written a sarcastic caption: “Good Place for a Honeymoon!” or “Hiroshima, Mon Amour.” He grinned, pouring another round of drinks. “Do not worry for us,” he said. “I drink twelve Pernods a day, and smoke five packs of Benson & Hedges.” He pulled out a cigarette and groped the breast pocket of a barmaid for a lighter. The barmaid giggled; she was a he, a mahu, like the ones we’d seen at Papeete’s Piano Bar. “Alcohol and tobacco, they will kill us long before radiation,” Jean-Pierre said.
The adjoining restaurant was empty. Many of the hotels and restaurants we’d seen on the islands had also been vacant. When I asked Jean-Pierre about this, he explained the Byzantine workings of the local economy. Frenchmen who invested in the islands could bring their money home tax-free after five years. Businessmen enjoyed other perks: freedom from most taxes and deductible four-wheel-drives, needed for the islands’ coral-paved roads. Also, many of the francs flowing through the economy were laundered, from drug sales in Marseilles or Mafia-like syndicats in Paris. Islanders facilitated this with crooked deals; one top official was known as “Mister Ten Percent” because of the cut he took of government contracts.
“The French here are gypsies,” Jean-Pierre said. “Many have lived already in other colonies. New Caledonia, Martinique, Algeria in the old days. In a few years we will move on to take what we can from some other place.” He poured another Pernod, lit another cigarette. “La France!” he said, raising his glass.
At midnight, Roger and I rowed the dinghy back to the yacht. “This whole place is built on exhaustion,” Roger said. “Worn-out people, exhausted by their boring, terminal lives. By heat and booze and nuclear fallout. Anyone who can’t make it in Europe ends up here—just like all the crappy products that wash up in Polynesia.” He poured a nightcap. “It’s good to know a place like this exists. I may end up here before too long.”
