Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  McNair roared onto the causeway above the deck and surveyed the scene below. “They’ll hold,” he shouted “They’re the profit on this trip.” He started back to the bridge but saw Millstor staring at him. In some embarrassment he justified himself. “Nothing wrong with those drums, Mr. Morrison.”

  But now a succession of devastating waves crashed down upon the ship and eight more of the perilous drums tore loose. They careened about the deck like roistering drunks knocking down beer bottles in a dirty café. Two of them hit the goal posts and one of the uprights broke off with a shattering crash.

  “You there!” McNair bellowed at a young seaman. “See what you can do with those drums.”

  “No!” Millstor screamed, determined to countermand such a callous order, but before he could intervene, the lad had jumped onto the flooded deck. The Roviana lurched desperately and the heavy drums roared down upon the seaman. There was a penetrating scream, a body pinned against the bulwarks.

  Without thinking John Millstor automatically vaulted over the railing and dropped onto the deck below. Captain McNair saw him do so and watched the mounting fury of the drums as they converged upon the American.

  “John!” he shouted. “Come back, you fool!”

  For a moment Millstor hesitated, and then with an old football skill sidestepped the crude projectiles as they ripped into the bulkhead. He dodged across the deck and knelt by the stricken sailor. “Thanks, cobber,” the boy said. “They hit me with the hammers of hell.”

  There was an instant of intense identification between the two men as Millstor grinned at the broken legs. “We’ll get you out of here,” he said reassuringly.

  Standing up, with the great storm in his face, he tried to pry loose the drum that wedged the seaman into a corner. The footing was precarious and from aloft he heard McNair bellowing, “For God’s sake, throw a rope about the boy and get back here!” Millstor continued straining at the drum and McNair shouted, “Mr. Morrison! Get that damned fool out of there.”

  There was a moment’s silence and then an agonized voice from somewhere near the bridge cried, “Oh, Jesus! Look!”

  From the dark south, where the hurricane was most furious, a giant wave descended upon the Roviana. Its hungry lip was more than forty feet in the air and John could feel the dismal little ship hurry forward to meet it. He looked up, his hands still on the drum, and heard the crippled seaman cry, “Woolloomooloo! Here we go.”

  As the tremendous wave swept the ship and lifted Millstor high in its impersonal arms, he had a last fleeting glimpse of his universe. Mr. Morrison was hanging onto the gangway ropes. Captain McNair was bellowing confused and impotent orders to no one. And on the bridge, in her nightgown, her knuckles pressed against her white teeth, stood one of the world’s desirable creations: an American wife, tall, straight, thin limbed, carefully beautiful. Above the disaster he heard her frenzied scream: “John! Oh, God, no! John! I love you!”

  New Guinea

  No island in the Pacific was so terrifying to American troops as New Guinea. Those men who landed at Port Moresby and crawled across the Owen Stanley Mountains to Buna and Gona knew war at its worst.

  The jungle was almost impenetrable. Great gorges halted progress and rain was measured in feet. Malaria struck down many. Jungle itch was incurable. Often ninety men out of a hundred would be sick.

  I remember flying across the Dutch end of New Guinea in a bomber. Around us towered massive peaks 16,000 feet high. Below stretched a dismal swamp. Unnamed waterfalls roared into sodden jungles that no white foot had touched. Great brown rivers crawled like snakes, cutting the land into impassable segments. Here was the most gloomy land I had ever seen.

  It’s surprising, therefore, to find that New Guinea today is one of the most loved sections of the world. All across the Pacific you meet old codgers with faraway looks in their eyes. They’re obviously unhappy, and their friends explain: “He’s an old New Guinea hand. Dying to get back.” And on the island you hear again and again: “Me? Leave New Guinea? Not on your life!”

  Lae, on the north coast, helps to explain this feeling of devotion. It’s a rambling town of small houses, government buildings, Chinese stores and a fabulous airport that is said to be the fifth busiest in Australian territory.

  Life is good in Lae. There’s a large white population who live healthy lives. Malaria has at last been beaten by a miracle drug, paludrine. (No earache like quinine; no yellow skin like atabrine.) Most homes have conveniences, most have family cars, usually war-surplus jeeps, and air travel is commonplace.

  In this jungle town, only seven degrees off the equator, there are telephones, electric lights, refrigerators, good stores, hundreds of cheap servants, a branch office of the Brisbane lottery and a bookmaker.

  Lae is hot during the day, but never so unbearable at night as New York or Washington in a bad summer. There’s ample food, but few vegetables. As for drink, the per-capita consumption is beyond belief. Hong Kong beer is the favorite—Amsterdam second—and it’s not at all unusual for a man to drink two gallons a day. When Anderson, the Rabaul sausage king, hits town I swear he drinks six dozen bottles. That’s twelve gallons!

  There’s an active social life in Lae, built around the fabulous Hotel Cecil, an unimproved Army camp with few conveniences and excellent food. At a dance the women tend to be more carefully gowned than at an American country club. The men are handsome in tropic whites.

  Socially there’s one thing terribly wrong with Lae. There aren’t enough women. Although many wives live there quite happily—no housework—unmarried girls are scarce. In peace time I’ve never before seen so many young men with so much money and no girls to spend it on. Said one quite homely girl after a visit to Lae, “If I didn’t know I was ugly, I’d be convinced I was a pocket Venus.” She married and stayed in town.

  Eric Cretier is a typical Lae citizen. He’s 25, a good-looking, tough young fellow with a ready wit. He drives a worn-out Army truck from Lae to the gold fields at Wau, 93 miles up in the mountains. The Road—the only one in New Guinea—clings to sheer cliffs, fords bridgeless rivers, plunges through jungle and rides across breathlessly beautiful kunai plains where a tree can’t be seen. Eagles, hawks, parrots, and swallows follow him as he rides. Scarlet flame-of-the-forest and delicate orchids hang from the trees over his head.

  Only vehicles with four-wheel drive can negotiate The Road, and men are constantly being killed by plunging down cliff faces into rocky gorges. The Road—built by Americans during the war—is a triumph of engineering skill and patient attention.

  Eric figures he can average 10 miles an hour. Four of his buddies have been killed so far; so he takes it very easy. He makes two round trips a week, hauling supplies up to the gold fields, timber down to the coast. Everyone along the road knows him and he sleeps at any house he happens to be near. He makes more than $60 a week and picks up extras by letting natives cling to the cargo for $2.50 a head. He has no girl to spend his salary on and often hints that “maybe I’ll go to Australia and try to win me a heart.”

  His principal entertainment is singing with a gang of drivers at Mark Schultz’s half-way pub and drinking beer. He can drink more than two gallons in an evening but is careful not to drive when drunk. He wouldn’t work anywhere but New Guinea. “It’s a big free land,” he says. “When adventure here runs out, I’ll find me some other backward land.”

  At the top end of his run he stays at the beautiful town of Wau. Here is New Guinea at its best: no mosquitoes, incomparable climate, fine houses, lovely gardens, good school, a rollicking hotel. Wau seems unreal. Even the airstrip runs uphill at an angle that experts said was impossible!

  It is one of the fabled towns of the Pacific. Situated on a handsome plateau, miles from jungle, it was surrounded by gold fields. Edie Creek nearby contained an alluvial deposit of free gold from which more than 40 tons of bullion was lifted!

  That was in the late 1920’s, and a lusty crew of men and women invaded the highlands. Th
ey bought airplanes and started a unique service whereby houses, shovels, live animals and a hotel were flown into the crazy uphill airstrip.

  In 1933 the gold-happy miners decided to have a horse race. They flew five fast horses in from Australia, set up a bookmaker who handled more than a hundred thousand dollars, and ran a fantastic series of races in which a thoroughbred named Harmony made a small fortune for her owner.

  The next year Wau pooled its resources and backed a local boy in an air race from England to Australia. Their man got mixed up with some high life in Singapore and finished six months late. Toby Miller and his wife got news of a winning lottery ticket and chartered a plane to collect their winnings. They spent $890 to pick up twenty! In 1949 the tradition persisted. A child was strangling from a coffee bean in its windpipe. An airplane was chartered from Wau to Brisbane for $3,800. The child was saved.

  Edie Creek was situated on a precipitous mountain that dropped into an equally precipitous gorge. A wise miner figured that much of the original gold must have washed away into the stream beds below. So on the Bulolo flats immense dredges were built of parts assembled at the seashore and flown in across the jungled mountains. No piece could weigh more than three tons, but the completed masterpieces, eight of them, weighed 3,000 tons each. They could cut channels fifty feet deep, and from the gravel beds of the insignificant Bulolo River these cavernous monsters still dredge huge finds of gold.

  Among the wild men of the gold fields was one whose strikingly handsome face has never been forgotten. He was a young fellow quite adept with his fists. He recruited labor, tended bar, worked sluice boxes and sailed small boats along the coast. At Busama he produced a hollow bamboo cane into which he tossed thrup’ny bits and out of which came bright new shillings. This so entranced the Luluwai that he traded forty prime boys for it, with the understanding that he must not work the magic bamboo until three days had passed. By then the labor contracts of the boys had been passed along to the gold fields for a profit of $4,000. The young trader’s name was Errol Flynn.

  He wound up at Rabaul where a news cameraman hired him for a trip up the Sepik to film headhunters. In order to start the fireworks, Flynn went ashore and launched a fine riot. The resulting films were so good that an Australian company hired him as lead in a picture “which might have dramatic interest”: In Wake of the Bounty. Flynn played Fletcher Christian and then went to Hollywood.

  The old hands say that New Guinea is divided into three parts—twice. The biggest third belongs to the Dutch. Papua once belonged to Great Britain, who gave it to Australia. The last third originally belonged to Germany, but in 1920 the League of Nations mandated it to Australia. For the present the United Nations have approved a single administration for Papua and the Mandate, which includes islands like New Britain, Manus and Bougainville.

  The second division concerns people, not land. It divides all whites into three warring camps: B-4’s, missionaries, goverment.

  B-4’s are old timers who lived in the Territory before 1935. They’re planters, fossickers, traders. They can’t speak of missionaries or government blokes without apoplexy. They drink tremendously, belt natives upon provocation, and assure one another that the world, especially New Guinea, is going to the devil.

  Yorky Booth, from Yorkshire, is a B-4. He sits at a table in the Lae bar and drinks ginger beer. He has white hair, a big smile and penetrating blue eyes such as Coleridge must have seen when describing his mariner.

  Yorky made a pile at Edie Creek—14,000 ounces in three months—but became involved in a historic court case with his wife. He’s nearly broke now, but he keeps a copy of the High Court of Australia Proceedings. It’s a tragic story of lives gone wrong on the gold fields. It contains an unforgettable bit of evidence on marital troubles: “I am a good revolver shot. I did not once with a revolver fire a shot through my wife’s hat while she had it on her head. Did it with a .22 rifle.”

  Yorky made several fortunes—his mines were Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Queen of Sheba—and has no regrets. He lives with a mastiff big enough to saddle and often compares notes with another famous B-4, Jockey Jack Turner, who also made and lost an Edie Creek fortune.

  Missionaries in New Guinea are often Americans. Lutherans, Catholics and Seventh-Day Adventists are common. They are rugged men, penetrating land not yet subdued by government. They suffer from a bad reputation earned by earlier missionaries. The B-4 accuses them of exploiting natives for financial gain. “They came out here to do good, and they’ve done very well.” The government remembers that during the war only mission boys betrayed Allied airmen to the Japs. And many people recall certain German missionaries who worked subversively for a Japanese victory.

  Most religious men, however, were like Father Glover. In 1942, when he had scarcely learned to fly, he escaped the Japs and flew to the central highlands in a tiny plane. He used it to evacuate planters. Then, remembering a larger plane, he walked 150 miles through jungle to get it. Soon he had collected most of the white people at a single station high up a mountainside. Then he set out to fly to Australia—an impossible trip—for help. He carried extra gas in a hospital bed pan and fed the engine with an enema.

  He lost his way and crash landed on a jungle beach. There he found a canoe and crossed the ocean until rescued by a passing ship. In Australia he persuaded the Government to send a large rescue plane. He saved hundreds of lives. Then, after the war, on his last missionary flight, he crashed into the jungle and was killed.

  As for the Government, nobody likes it. New Guinea is run by a dictatorship, benevolent toward natives. After generations of brutalization by Dutch, Germans and Australians alike, the black man is at last getting a break. (At this point the B-4 passes into a coma.) The new deal is caused partly by Russia’s embarrassing questions at Lake Success, partly by the fact that honest humanitarians have been appointed by the Labor Government to stop mere exploitation.

  The result is chaos. Reports a moderate minister, “Had there been a plan to create frustration, apathy and misery, and the destruction of civic virtues, it could not have succeeded better than the methods of this administration through three-and-a-half years of town planning.” Old B-4’s point out that the Government is doing everything to stifle enterprise. Australian meat dealers offered to establish freezer stores for each community. The Government would allot no land. At Port Moresby the butchers had to buy a ship and set up a floating market. Says one merchant, “The Government has made it impossible to invest money, difficult to hire labor, illegal to acquire land. Economic life is at a standstill.” Contempt for the Government is unlimited. The Department of Works and Housing, which fumbles with one thing after another, is known as Works and Jerks.

  Yet the individual official knows what he is doing. He appreciates that Australia must clean house—in a few years Germans accomplished far more than has been done since—or lose the mandate. Arthur Ewing, an assistant district officer, understands the score.

  He’s a slight fellow, hardly a man you’d pick to quell a native tribe. Yet when word trickled back to Lae that in a remote valley a gang of hoodlums had murdered four people, Ewing was sent inland to capture the murderers. He left by air and flew as far as possible. Then he started on foot toward territory that no white man had ever visited. Finally he reached the tribe that was being terrorized. He found that some young bucks had got hold of Jap rifles. His luck was good. He subdued the murderers without arousing tribal revenge. Then he started the long return trip with his prisoners.

  This simple police case took six months. During that time Ewing had no comforts, was rarely dry, was many times surrounded by men who still practiced cannibalism. His experience was not unusual. He was merely an official on the world’s least-explored island.

  Mrs. Angelo, wife of a Works and Jerks man, also has dealings with natives. She is a pretty Australian woman with a wonderful sense of humor. She lives, alone most of the time at the top of a steep hill while her husband, Michael Angelo—his real name, beli
eve it or not—tends his portion of The Road.

  She is famous for her piano playing and has a tremendous boogie beat. Sentimental truck drivers often stop by to hear her play “Tales of the Vienna Woods,” but her most important visitors are the natives from nearby villages.

  Because of her good humor she has become their counselor, but she is handicapped because most of the natives are members of the fantastic Cargo Cult. These savages, looking at things like kerosene stoves, radios and good beds have been unable to understand how white men got them. Adapting the Christian teaching—“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away”—they have devised the belief that everything coming into New Guinea has been sent expressly to them, but that white men intercept it—for the time being.

  They believe implicitly that within a few years all white men will be removed, whereupon cargoes which their ancestors now send them will reach their rightful owners. They were encouraged in this belief during the war by Australian Communists who worked out logical explanations of everything.

  The natives are absolutely certain that pretty soon Mrs. Angelo’s house will be theirs. She shows them pictures of cargoes being manufactured by ordinary human beings. The Government, to halt natives from rushing planes for their goods, has flown Cargo Cult leaders to Australia to let them see assembly lines. They returned convinced that God made the stuff—in Australia—and that venal whites frustrated His intentions.

  Less grave is Mrs. Angelo’s problem with the Wompit Dagens. War had a devastating effect upon these unhappy men because their women saw too much: (1) white men working like dogs at menial army jobs; (2) white nurses treated with delicate courtesy.

  When war ended the women of Wompit Dagen refused to go back to the old ways. They wouldn’t work while their men rested. The latter protest tearfully to Mrs. Angelo: “Maries no work long garden. Maries no carry water.” The Maries had a high old time, and what was worse, relayed their discoveries to tribes farther inland. Now the men of Wompit Dagen, as they plow and lug water, curse war.