The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey

by Diane Stuemer

  Still, we had a great time. Herbert and I took turns at the helm in an exhilarating blur of wind and spray. There was no opportunity for boredom; the job required full concentration and a great deal of muscle power. It was a rich sensory experience – the roar of our bow wave, the billowing of the sails, the hiss of the breaking crests, the bucking of the boat as she slogged her way to windward, the splash of the spray, the wild, fragrant wind whipping into our faces, and the raucous calls of petrels and boobies as they circled hungrily over passing schools of fish.

  This was really sailing. This was really living. This was great!

  We spotted the high peaks of Tahiti almost a hundred miles away. It was incredibly exciting, even more so than our first sighting of the Marquesas. It was hard to believe that we were actually closing in on this fabled island of captains Cook and Bligh. As the sun went down and illuminated the sky in shades of vermilion, those enticing twin peaks grew both taller and darker against the horizon. I turned to Herbert and said, “You know, 90 per cent of the world would love to trade places with us right now.”

  This thought echoed in my mind again, not twenty-four hours later, as we fell asleep, safely anchored in Papeete harbour surrounded by the sounds of Polynesian drums beating out their thrilling rhythms in the darkness of the cool Tahitian night.

  One of the reasons we had looked forward to Tahiti was that we were expecting to receive a very special package there. There was nothing quite as fun as receiving a care package from home, complete with news, letters, videos, spare parts, gifts, and a few favourite food items. This package was especially important, though, for it would contain a new inverter as well as a spare laptop computer.

  My father happened to know a Calgary businessman who owned a resort in French Polynesia and would carry a package and save a thousand dollars in courier charges. In the weeks before our arrival in Tahiti, I had compiled a list of special requests, things like the kids’ favourite game of Magic Cards, Lego, brown sugar, Tuna Helper, Breton Crackers, and, yes, perhaps a few Hershey’s Kisses. For the children, naturally.

  On the morning of July 9, we turned out of the boat neatly dressed and freshly scrubbed. We were to meet our contact at the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel. We’d never seen him before, but we had his description: 5’11”, grey hair, big smile. There was, however, only one person in the lobby, a woman reading a newspaper. I went to the desk clerk and told her we were there to meet a man.

  “Let me check and see what room he is staying in,” she offered helpfully.

  “No, no, that’s all right,” I interjected, not knowing whether he was actually a guest in the hotel, “don’t bother checking. I’m sure he’ll be along.”

  “Perhaps you should go talk to that woman over there,” she offered. This was, I thought, a dumb thing to say. Hadn’t I just told her we were waiting for a man?

  “No, thank you. We’ll just wait for him over here.”

  “I really think you should talk to that woman there,” she said, pointedly.

  “No, thank you,” I repeated even more firmly. Wasn’t she listening? “There’s no need. We’ll just wait right here.”

  While I was busy standing my ground, trying to argue as best as I could in French, Michael began jabbing me urgently in the side. “Mom! There’s an Ottawa Citizen! Someone over there has an Ottawa Citizen!”

  I waved him away impatiently. I was busy with more important things, like fencing with an obtuse hotel desk clerk. Finally, the clerk gave up on her unwelcome efforts to be helpful and suggested, with a strange little smile, that I sit down while waiting for my friend. Over by that woman.

  Relieved, I headed over to the chairs, kids and Herbert in tow. Michael, however, was still poking me and jabbering on about the newspaper he had seen.

  He was right: there, straight ahead of us, was a woman sitting behind an opened copy of an Ottawa Citizen. I stopped for a moment, puzzled, trying to figure out what this meant. Then it came to me.

  This was no 5’11” grey-haired smiling stranger. This was my own mother!

  “I recognize those legs!” I shrieked, and out from behind the paper emerged my tearful and smiling mom. Then, from around a corner, where he had been secretly videotaping the whole scene, strode my grinning dad.

  We all trooped to their room, and out of duffle bags and suitcases poured a whole cornucopia of goodies: all the treats we had ordered, including four whole bags of Hershey’s Kisses, gifts and letters, our new inverter, and, best of all, a brand-new, state-of-the-art laptop computer with all the bells and whistles, a present from my parents. We were in a state of breathless shock for most of the day. We called our new computer Happy Lappy.

  My parents had booked a hotel in Moorea, Tahiti’s sister island about twenty kilometres away. Later that evening they took the ferry over, while we got Northern Magic ready to leave the next morning for the three-hour sail to what is surely is the most beautiful island in the world. We tied ourselves up to a small public dock in front of my parents’ hotel, where for the next week we alternated between nights on the boat and days with my parents – exploring the island, visiting pineapple plantations, ancient archaeological sites, waterfalls, craggy peaks, and deep bays.

  On the final day of my parents’ visit we found our way to the three sacred waterfalls of Faarumai, back on Tahiti. The first of the sacred falls plunged hundreds of metres down the steep face of a mountainside into a clear, cold pool before bubbling its way down through the thick forest of Tahitian chestnut trees to the sea. On our way back from this awe-inspiring scene, a dozen young Tahitian men and women, dressed in matching suits and dresses, passed us. I stopped one of the men and asked if they were a wedding party. No, he answered, they were a singing group, there to have their picture taken.

  So that is how we found ourselves, standing at the base of the sacred falls, the plunging water making a surreal white backdrop, thrilling to the clear harmonies of voices raised a capella in joyful Tahitian song. They invited us to stand among them as they sang. The leader of the group was a handsome young man named Ambrose. He became the next link in our chain of friendships.

  On Monday night, Ambrose arrived at the boat with his wife, Mariella, his three-month-old baby son, Manahiva, and his sister, Natacha. They brought with them some guava pie and conserves made by Mariella’s mother. At the end of the evening they invited us to spend a day with them touring the island. Two days later we set off with them in a four-wheel-drive pick-up truck with Michael and Jonathan bouncing around gloriously in the back, their hair streaming out in the wind.

  Together, we circled the island and discovered more of the marvels of Tahiti: grottos carved in leafy mountainsides where trickling water created natural pools full of exotic water lilies; black sand beaches born only a year before, when the terrible forces of a cyclone had ripped out of the mountainside a brand new beach; a lofty mountaintop, where we stepped literally into the clouds and watched them swirl past at arm’s length, and, best of all, a stream full of giant carnivorous eels, who snapped their toothy mouths at the fish that was offered, but let the children gingerly touch their backs.

  Another of our highlights was our visit to a dance celebration. We were treated to an unforgettable spectacle when hundreds of elaborately costumed Tahitian girls wiggled and swivelled, while an equal number of muscular brown men thrilled us with ancient dances of lust and conquest. I was spellbound. The hairs on my arms rose up of their own accord to the sight and sound of dark-haired maidens and warriors undulating to the beat of wooden drums. Their rhythms seemed to reach inside and resonate within me. That night, through its music and its dance, the sensuous land of Tahiti wove its magic on us. To see the dancers of Tahiti is to remember life as it was thousands of years ago. To hear the drums is to resurrect ancient stirrings long since forgotten. The rhythms haunt me still.

  7

  We Were Kings on Palmerston Island

  We continued from Tahiti to Bora Bora, and from there to Palmerston Island, which pee
ked over the horizon at us after six rolly days at sea. Part of the Cook Islands group, Palmerston Island was home to fifty-three people, all of whom were descendants or married to descendants of a single Englishman, William Marsters, who had three wives and twenty-one children. Today, his progeny are in their sixth generation, number in the many hundreds, and are scattered all over the Cook Islands and New Zealand.

  Marsters, reverently called The Patriarch by his descendants, ruled his little empire with an iron will and established a male-dominated and hierarchical administrative structure that still survives on Palmerston – although not without dispute – a century after his death. Every family living on Palmerston, as well as every gravestone in the cemetery, shares the same last name. The island has no airstrip, and is visited by supply boats only three or four times a year. Its only visitors are yachties like us, whom they have the reputation of treating with unparalleled friendliness and hospitality.

  When we arrived at the coral atoll – seven exquisite coral islands in a necklace seven miles wide and five miles long, enclosing a protected turquoise lagoon – a motorized skiff containing three smiling men and a boy waved us over and instructed us exactly where to plant our anchor. Two of the men had ample bellies showing through multiple holes in their well-worn T-shirts. One of them was Bob Marsters, our local host, whose full-time job was simply, in his words, to be friendly.

  Palmerston Islanders compete for the privilege of being the first to escort an arriving yacht. During the sailing season, they scan the horizon with binoculars, and the first to see a new yacht claims it as his own. Then the family gets to host the yacht and its crew during its stay at the island. Only about fifty sailboats stopped at Palmerston each year, so competition for our attention was fierce.

  Before we knew what was happening, Bob had whisked all of us ashore, introduced us to his wife and two daughters, was serving us refreshments, inviting us to dinner, and escorting us to the daily volleyball game underway on a sandy court fringed with coconut palms.

  Bob and his wife, Tupou, were friendly but reserved, but voluble little Taia, aged seven, was our instant friend and inseparable companion. Her smiling three-year-old sister, Monukoa, loved to be tickled and spoke shyly in the quietest of voices. I always cringed when I looked at her, because what remained of her teeth were only little brown stumps. Later, I learned that the children of the village were fed sweetened condensed milk from a bottle, and all the other young children’s teeth looked just like Monukoa’s.

  On our first day, I joined in the volleyball game, grateful for some exercise after six days cooped up on the boat. The islanders loved volleyball and played every afternoon, rain or shine, from 5:00 p.m. until dark. The most delightful thing was the way they giggled almost continuously throughout the game. They giggled when they made a mistake. They giggled when someone else made a mistake. They giggled when they scored, and they giggled when someone else scored. They giggled all the time. It was impossible not to join in.

  One of the opposing players was an absolutely stunning young woman of about twenty. She was the picture of a Polynesian beauty, the kind you’d see on a calendar, with a willowy figure, long, shiny black hair, and a lovely face. When we were finally introduced, I couldn’t help but blurt out, “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  Her eyes lit up in delight and surprise, as if no one had ever noticed her great beauty before. “I am?”

  Later we were to learn why she had been so surprised: because of her slim, athletic frame, the other Polynesians considered her far too thin. Their ideal of feminine beauty was more Rubenesque, and they scornfully called this undiscovered pearl “the skinny one.”

  On our second day, Bob and Tupou invited us to lunch. Their house was a little three-room bungalow with concrete floors, unfinished wood-framed walls, and a corrugated tin roof. Although it had electricity – for ten hours each day – it had no running water. I saw no food on the shelves under the kitchen counter, no food of any kind other than what we ate. Bob’s fishing boat had been out of commission for a year and a half, so his freezer was empty.

  Nonetheless, Bob and Tupou put on an excellent feast for us: roast pork, papaya, rice, baked beans mixed with canned spaghetti, corned beef fried with onion, toboi (a kind of dumpling made from germinated coconut), and the rather astonishing blackened toothy head of a giant wahoo fish.

  Over the next days, the one square mile of Palmerston Island became our personal playground. Every house was open to us, every doorway contained a friendly wave, and everyone we saw was our friend. In the company of the island’s child population of ten, who, since they didn’t attend school, were free to play all day, our kids ran all over collecting giant hermit crabs. Christopher hit it off well with our host family’s two girls and another little girl named Pearl, and they ran around giggling with no interference from us.

  We were befriended by a second village family, Bill Marsters and his companion, a lovely, plump young woman in her early twenties named Metua. Metua gathered us in her ample arms and made us her own, treating us to a nightly food extravaganza while refusing every offer of gifts in return. She threw together giant feasts consisting of chicken, crab, wahoo, parrotfish, rice, and doughnuts for about a dozen visitors and family members every night without apparent effort.

  Not only did Metua invite us for supper every day, she also washed all our sheets and dirty clothes, she delivered freshly baked bread and doughnuts on a regular basis, and she even offered us the luxury of hot showers collected from rainwater and heated by the sun.

  On the one evening when we declined her supper invitation, we were stunned when Metua prepared a take-out supper of breaded fillets of wahoo, fritters, and breadfruit and delivered it to us on Northern Magic. She categorically refused any attempt to give her gifts or repay her for all her hospitality. Finally, I managed to get her to accept a bottle of laundry detergent, but even that with difficulty. I also snuck her some Hershey bars, as well as some fabric I had intended for a tablecloth and napkins. Fortunately, Herbert was faring better than I at making a contribution and spent most of his days with the island’s men, repairing a tractor, an ancient computer monitor, and various outboard motors.

  Christopher and Metua hit it off famously, especially after he had a sleepover at her house. He spent almost every day at Metua’s side, chatting inexhaustibly, as he always did, while they watched videos or she did our laundry. A few months later, Christopher confessed to me, “Mom, if you and Dad would ever die, I know where I would go. I’d go back to Palmerston. Metua would take care of me.”

  Our magical days on Palmerston Island raced by one after another – feasting, playing volleyball among the palm trees, combing the beach for giant clam shells, snorkeling, and observing all the other natural wonders of an unspoiled tropical island. We were, however, disturbed that the island’s children did not go to school. We spent hours discussing these difficulties with Bill, who opened up the little schoolhouse for us and described the problems he had in attracting a Cook Islander to come to a backwater like Palmerston. It seemed to Herbert and me that many Canadian teachers would jump at the chance to spend a year or two in the idyllic surroundings of a South Pacific island. We promised Bill we’d do our best to find him a teacher for the kids.

  The Ottawa Citizen agreed to publish an article I wrote about the situation, and for weeks afterwards, my sister Linda was flooded with e-mails from prospective teachers, some days receiving more than thirty requests. From our little boat far away in the Pacific, we communicated with these potential teachers by shortwave radio e-mail, answering their questions as best as we could. A few months later, a teacher from Ottawa was chosen to go to Palmerston to re-establish the little school there.

  In the meantime, two other teachers from Ottawa visited the Cook Islands on a vacation and brought with them some school supplies. Their generosity was reported in the Cook Islands press. Much later, from Australia, I phoned the Palmerston representative in the Cook Islands
government, who was delighted about the response and thought that some of the other applicants might be going to other outer islands that also needed teachers. All of this was very gratifying to us, the feeling that we had delivered on our promise and had done something to help the children of Palmerston. Although we heard later that the schoolhouse on Palmerston had burnt down, this didn’t deter us from making a promise to ourselves to continue to offer help, and “pay forward” the hospitality others were so freely giving us. (The school is now being rebuilt.)

  The men of Palmerston invited Herbert to participate in a ritual that takes place every year: bird picking. Bird picking? Yes. Every four weeks between June and September, the islanders head over to a nearby islet to collect nesting bosun birds for food. Bosun birds, large, handsome water-fowl with black and white spotted feathers, are protected everywhere else in the Cook Islands, but on Palmerston they remain an important food source. That year’s young, fully grown but still flightless, are literally picked out of the trees, tossed in a pile on the beach, and put, screeching like cats, into sacks. The mothers also shriek in helpless rage, but there is no mercy for their offspring, who are noisy but stupid and make no effort to escape their captors.

  The birds are brought in wheelbarrow-loads to a central location, where they sit quietly, awaiting their doom in a dignified fashion. Only if you approach too closely do they emit their unearthly feline scream. The birds are then divided up among all the families, an equal number for each person on the island. In this case, there were one and a half birds for each of sixty-two people, including the five in our family and four other visiting yachties.

  We were concerned that, despite the birds’ status as a threatened species, the islanders were culling all the young before they could reproduce. Several times, Herbert and I asked how the bosun birds were going to survive as a species if the islanders kept on taking all the unfledged birds every month. “It’s not a problem,” was the constant answer, delivered in wise and reassuring tones. “You see, we don’t take the mother birds.”