The Miss Tutti Frutti Contest

by Graeme Lay

  The scene that so inspired Herman Melville was Taiohae Bay on the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands. In 1842, weary of the privations of shipboard existence on the whaler Acushnet, the twenty-three-year-old American jumped ship in the bay. Taking advantage of a tropical downpour to conceal his movements, he and another young deserter, Toby Greene, slipped away from the other sailors, who were sleeping in a canoe shed, and plunged into the tropical bushes which lay just beyond the beach. They made their way inland, through dense undergrowth, and along sheer-sided mountain ridges, and on the fourth day descended into the valley of the Taipivai people.

  The valley was an imprudent destination, being home to a tribe whose ferocity was unparalleled, even by the standards of the Marquesas, where inter-valley warfare, tribal slaughter and cannibalism were endemic. ‘Their very name is a frightful one,’ Melville wrote later, ‘for the word “Typee” in the Marquesan dialect signifies a lover of human flesh.’ Each of the many deep valleys in the islands supported a large population who lived in fear and loathing of those in the other valleys. War clubs called u’u, carved from hardwood trees, were used in battle. Human sacrifice and cannibal feasts were part of the culture, and prisoners could expect nothing but violent death.

  However, instead of being killed and eaten, Melville and Greene were seized and kept under a kind of house arrest for three and a half weeks, before being taken separately from the island by other sailing ships. Melville eventually made his way back to the United States, where he was legally discharged from sea service in 1843.

  Melville’s experiences in the South Seas, heavily embellished with romanticism and invention, were published as the novels Typee (1846), Omoo (1847) and Moby Dick (1851). Moby Dick was Melville’s magnum opus, but Typee remains his most popular book. In the novel the young deserter discovers love with the Princess Fayaway in the valley of the Typee, extols the life of the Marquesan people and rails against the brutality of European intervention in their lives. Melville’s writing is overwrought and didactic in the nineteenth-century manner, but through it shines his idealism, and his disgust at the way European ‘civilisation’ had shattered the lives of the indigenous people. And there was much to be disgusted about.

  The twelve islands of the Marquesas, today part of French Polynesia, lie 1,200 kilometres north-east of Tahiti. An archipelago of volcanic monoliths, and further from a continental landmass than any other islands on Earth, they were first settled by Polynesian voyagers from the west – probably Samoa – about 2,000 years ago and became a dispersal centre for further migrations, to Hawaii, Easter Island, the widely scattered islands of southern Polynesia and, eventually, New Zealand. The Marquesan language is more akin to New Zealand Maori than to Tahitian.

  Even today it is not difficult to imagine the exhilaration of those early discoverers when they first sighted the islands they called Te Hunua Enata, The Land of Man, for they are like no others in the South Pacific. Lying from seven to ten degrees south of the equator, their profiles are not softened by encircling white sands, nor is the force of the Pacific’s waves kept at bay by barrier reefs or languid lagoons. Instead, the sides of the islands are perpendicular, plunging sheer to the floor of the ocean from which they erupted, millions of years ago, during a tectonic spasm. Ocean waves, driven by southeasterly trade winds, dash themselves against the basalt cliffs, but fortuitously there are many inlets and sea-filled indentations – like Taiohae Bay – and these provide some of the finest anchorages anywhere in the Pacific.

  The valleys on Nuku Hiva, which became home to those Polynesian immigrants, are deep and luxuriant. At their heads are waterfalls that spill hundreds of metres from a central plateau, then become streams flowing through forests of miro, mango, mimosa, bamboo, banana, breadfruit and coconut palms. Wild goats, pigs and horses forage among this lush vegetation. In the valleys the Marquesans tended food crops of coconuts, taro, bananas and, most crucially, breadfruit. If the breadfruit crop failed, as it did sometimes through drought, the people starved. The inhabitants emerged only to catch fish from the sea or to wage war on tribes in other valleys. The Marquesans also built great platforms, which they called paepae, out of volcanic stone, and on these the houses of their priests and chiefs were built, carved stone tiki gods were worshipped and human sacrifices made. Another distinctive cultural trait was the elaborate tattoos with which the people adorned parts of, or in the case of some men, their entire bodies.

  In 1595 a Spanish voyager, Alvaro de Mendana, came upon the archipelago and renamed the islands the Marquesas, in honour of the Marquise of Mendoza, wife of the Viceroy of Peru. Captain James Cook spent time in their waters in 1774, and in 1791 an American, Captain Ingraham, and later in the same year a Frenchman, Etienne Marchand, visited. In this way the Marquesas were brought to the attention of the outside world.

  This marked the beginning of a physical and moral onslaught by Europeans against the indigenous people which, although paralleled in other parts of the Pacific, was exceptional in its brutality. A motley crew of whalers, sailors, traders, ships’ deserters and zealous missionaries descended upon the islands, bringing with them a toxic brew of alcohol, avarice, lust, gospels, firearms and infectious diseases. Local men and women were kidnapped and taken to sea on whaling ships. Most never returned. Epidemics of diseases like smallpox carried off thousands more. The population of the group, estimated to be 80,000 in Cook’s time, dropped to 20,000 by the 1820s and just 7,000 by the end of the nineteenth century. Even today the population is only 7,500.

  The Marquesan holocaust was therefore well under way when Melville and Greene jumped ship. In fact, at the same time the Acushnet anchored in Taiohae Bay a French fleet was also there, completing France’s annexation of the islands. The chauvinism that accompanied this action drew scorn from Melville, who wrote of it, ‘Floating batteries, which lay with their fatal tubes ostentatiously pointed at a handful of bamboo sheds, sheltered in a grove of coconuts!’ He understood that what was unfolding on the Marquesas was nothing less than the destruction of an entire culture – the same process that painter Paul Gauguin was to witness and rebel against on another Marquesan island, Hiva Oa, sixty years later. In half a century the Marquesans’ traditional culture had been extirpated by the missionaries, their paepae and carvings looted, often by church and colonial authorities.

  It took Melville’s ship one and a half years’ hard sailing from the United States before it reached Nuku Hiva. Today the island is a three-hour flight from Tahiti. Apart from the Tuamotu archipelago, which appears like coronets of coral against the dark blue ocean, the plane crosses empty sea. The only flat land on Nuku Hiva is in the extreme north-west, so the airport is located there, and after I arrive I have to make the transfer to Taiohae in a hired, four-wheel-drive Chevrolet owned by Pascal, a rangy, nut-brown Frenchman with a blond ponytail.

  It’s like no land journey I have taken before. There are no sealed roads in the Marquesas, and the trip takes three gruelling hours. Nothing but the gruntiest vehicle could handle these roads, and Pascal’s can only just cope. To describe the roads as rough is to be charitable. The experience is like being driven slowly along the bed of a dry, rock-filled stream bed which goes uphill and around precipices and hairpin bends. ‘Très raboteux, n’est pas?’ mutters Pascal as he wrestles with the steering wheel and the Chevrolet bumps and grinds its way over small boulders. We cross a broad, semi-desert plateau where a few cattle graze, then begin to climb again. After another hour of grinding upwards, near the top of Mt Muake, Pascal stops the vehicle. ‘Regardez,’ he commands. And, suddenly, I am aware of the literal meaning of the word breathtaking.

  The land falls away, sheer on all three sides, forming a huge bowl whose slopes are covered in coconut palms. Taiohae Bay is an enormous caldera, flooded by the ocean on its southern side, sheltered by two enormous rocky headlands and forming that superb harbour. In its grandeur and scale, the bay is utterly majestic. The town and houses lining the curve of its shore appear like mu
lti-coloured embroidery stitched around the hem of a wide green skirt. Pascal shoves his vehicle into gear again, and we begin a long, zigzag descent into Taiohae itself.

  Later, in the bar of my hotel by the bay, I meet a tiny Frenchman of about forty. A pixie figure who speaks quaint English, Jean-Marie is obviously a semi-permanent fixture. He tells me he has fled to Nuku Hiva from Hiva Oa, where he was assaulted in a bar by a large Tahitian. Jean-Marie opens his eyes wide and mimes the fracas. ‘We quarrel, over a woman,’ he says, ‘and ’ee ’eets me, twice. Boom! Boom!’ He ducked the third blow, but still fell unconscious. It was time to change islands.

  Jean-Marie prefers Nuku Hiva now, but until the fight had liked Hiva Oa. Particularly, he liked learning about Gauguin, and admired what the artist did in Atuona, taking on the French authorities. He pours himself another beer and says, ‘Gauguin, ’ee tells every-wan about the bloody gendarmes and priests and what they do there, stooling the artefacts from z’Marquesans.’

  ‘What about Herman Melville?’ I ask. ‘Do you know about him?’

  ‘’Erman Mel-veel? Of course I know ’eem. ’E wrote the story of Moby’s Dick.’ He points towards the bay. ‘There is a stele to ’eem, just over there.’

  ‘A stele?’ I don’t know this word.

  ‘Yes.’ Seeing my confusion, he throws his hands in the air. ‘A plaque, a sign.’ He screws up his eyes, searching for the right word. ‘A mon-u-ment.’

  And indeed there is, a large, impressive sculpture and plaque, describing Melville’s activities on Nuku Hiva.

  Sculpted by a local carver, Kahee Taupotini, the monument was commissioned by the Herman Melville Society in the United States to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Melville’s coming ashore at Taiohae Bay on 9 July 1842. The monument seems to have suffered neglect in recent years, and the ironwood trees that line the bay have closed in around it. Still, when I stand on the spot and look up at the ridge high above the bay, I can understand what a feat it was for the two young Americans to have scaled the slope, let alone made it to the Taipi valley.

  Even today it is not easy to reach the Taipi. I’m taken there by my host from the hotel, a large Marquesan man called Bruno, in his four-wheel-drive Toyota. These gargantuan four-wheel-drives are the only vehicles that can cope with the Marquesan terrain. Nearly all are Toyotas or Mitsubishis, diesel-fuelled, four-doored, with big-foot tyres. They cost over US$50,000, Bruno tells me as we drag up the mountain. If they’re bought on time-payment, the cost rises to about US$75,000. Many Marquesans borrow lots of money to buy one, then can’t afford the interest payments, so the bank repossesses the vehicle. Bruno erupts into giggles as he tells me this, indicating that Marquesans share the Polynesian schadenfreude-type sense of humour.

  It takes us half an hour just to drive to the top of the amphitheatre of rock that surrounds Taiohae Bay, then another hour of tortuous climbing and winding before the valley appears below us. But it is well worth it. The Taipi valley is a long gouge in the landscape, and its steeply sloping sides are covered with innumerable coconut palms. The crystal-clear river that drains it passes between stands of breadfruit and citrus trees, mangoes and banana palms. The air is scented with wild mint, basil, vanilla and wood-smoke fires; the tidy houses are surrounded by frangipani and hibiscus; the concrete road passing through the village is lined with yellow crotons. Pigs, goats, chickens and roosters roam the valley, while chestnut-coloured horses graze contentedly beneath the trees.

  The people are devoutly Catholic, yet the carving of tiki and war clubs is an important source of income, and nearly every adult male is tattooed with traditional motifs. The Marquesan culture proved far more resilient than the nineteenth-century missionaries ever imagined. And the physical remains of the old culture are also very close. The forested hillsides are riddled with relics of the old gods, the paepae and tiki of pre-Christian times. Some modern houses have been built directly on to these ancient paepae, which make rock-solid foundations. Bruno leads me into the forest to see a paepae only a short climb from the road. It’s like something out of an Indiana Jones movie: huge slabs of mossy rock, gripped and split by the talons of rain-forest trees, awaiting clearance, excavation and restoration.

  One by one the ancient paepae are being reclaimed from the forest and their lithic secrets deciphered. One just out of Taiahoe has been completely restored. As we climb up and over the stone platform, Bruno explains that the Marquesans traditionally buried the skulls of their dead in the aerial roots of banyan trees, so that the remains were slowly borne upwards as the tree grew. He points out a banyan tree next to a paepae that recently caught fire. When its core burnt, the ground beneath the tree was showered with skulls.

  When Typee was published in 1846, Melville was attacked by reviewers who accused him of faking his chronology and setting. For example, in one memorable scene his heroine, the Princess Fayaway, sails a canoe on a large lake, her body making a human mast and her tapa mantle spread wide to catch the wind. Because there is no lake in the Taipi valley, the critics used this to question Melville’s general verisimilitude, in the process confusing fiction writing with travel writing and greatly undervaluing the role of the writer’s imagination. I am certainly not disappointed when Bruno drives me to the place where the valley opens out and meets the sea. Here a small backwater has been formed by a sand bar blocking the place where the river debouches into Controllers Bay. Was this Melville and Fayaway’s ‘lake’? It may well have been. Even if the subject of a literary conceit, the Taipi estuary is undoubtedly a scene of loveliness: verdant, serene, remote, hemmed in by mountains, forest and sea.

  Herman Melville was eventually saved from the critics who labelled him a liar by one Richard Tobias Greene, who wrote a letter to the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser testifying to the accuracy of Melville’s account. The writer was Toby, Melville’s fellow deserter. He had been uplifted from Nuku Hiva before Melville by a French ship and, until learning of Melville’s book, had assumed his former companion was dead. A grateful Melville sought out Greene and chronicled his experiences as The Story of Toby, which was published as an appendix to the later editions of Typee.

  Just as the Samoans still claim Robert Louis Stevenson as one of their own, the Marquesans retain an affection for Herman Melville because of his stout defence of their way of life when it was caught in a pincer between ruthless imperialism and missionary bigotry. And the American literati come to Nuku Hiva to see Melville’s valley. Bruno tells me that a local guide, using the ‘facts’ of Typee as a reference, even claims to have located the site of the house where ‘Marheyo’ was held captive. Bruno takes me to the site and points to a paepae just below the road in the upper reaches of the valley. Its close-fitting stones are smothered by trees and vines. ‘Will it have a plaque like those writers’ houses in Paris?’ I ask Bruno, and he laughs. ‘And how did the guide prove it was the site of Melville’s house?’ I persist. ‘Did he question the old people?’

  ‘He told me he asked the old people of this valley whose forebears could remember Melville,’ Bruno says. Then his face splits into a grin. ‘But when I asked them how they knew, they said, “Oh that must be Melville’s place because the guide told us it was.”’

  At the head of the valley, past a spectacularly high waterfall that also features in Typee and that today generates hydroelectric power, the road climbs tortuously, then crosses a saddle to disclose another breathtaking scene – a panorama of Nuku Hiva’s north-east coast and a vast slope of mountainside, entirely covered in coconut palms, which sweeps down to the bay of Hatiheu. The road then snakes down through the forest to the bay and the village on its shore, where there is so little traffic the locals use the main street for petanque. Hatiheu Bay is overlooked by towering volcanic outcrops like cathedral spires, one of which is crowned with a white statue of the Virgin Mary, erected in 1872.

  During a long cruise through the Pacific in 1888 in search of a tropical sanctuary to ease his tuberculosis, Robert Louis Stevenson and his family
anchored their yacht in this bay. Stevenson extolled the lonely beauty of the place in his writing, lending further literary provenance to Nuku Hiva. Today’s Hatiheu’s most prominent buildings are a Catholic church, a seafood restaurant and a community hall. Carvers shape tiki and clubs in home workshops, and villagers toss petanque balls on the waterfront street, while the surf surges against the boulder beach only metres away. And deep in the forest behind the village, the paepae of the early Nuku Hivans are being laboriously cleared of their jungle cover.

  Driving back from the valley, we pass a young Marquesan man whose upper arms and back are adorned with tattoos. The man’s hair is brown, his skin very fair. ‘Many white Marquesans, uh?’ observes Bruno, who is pale himself. The genes of those nineteenth-century whalers and renegades endure. Later, exploring the village of Taiohae on the edge of the bay, I come across a framed photograph, ‘The Last Nuku Hivan Cannibal’, hanging on the wall of the mairie, or town hall. It shows an elderly man with a flaring white moustache-less beard who stands staring wide-eyed at the camera, looking more terrified than terrifying, although he bears over his shoulder a hardwood u’u – the great club with which the Marquesans crushed the skulls of their enemies.

  On my last night on Nuku Hiva, I’m having a few beers with Jean-Marie and Bruno when a thin Frenchman of about sixty walks in and orders a bottle of red wine. He has a narrow, flushed face and a markedly receding hairline. He speaks excellent English, and tells me his name is Serge and that he is married to a local woman. We chat about the Marquesas and he tells me how many of the young people – his own children included – have moved away to Papeete, or even France, for their future. The Marquesas Islands, so geographically massive and imposing, are, Serge explains, economically unsustainable. It’s only the territorial government in Tahiti, lavishly funded by France, that keeps them going. Virtually everything – transport, education, medicine, power generation – is subsidised.