Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  The Fiji Times advertised itself as ‘The First Newspaper Published in the World Today’, because Suva is just west of the international date line where the new day begins. I read it in a chair under palm trees on the front terrace of the Grand Pacific Hotel, a majestic pile whose colonial outline, pillared and tall-windowed, stood on the bay, visible from every ship coming in or leaving through the reef. Built rather on the lines of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, it had the same cell-block configuration with landings that ran round a deep, rectangular court. But it was a disappointment. Though you entered under a stately porch and climbed broad steps, the effect was hopelessly marred inside by a central court cheapened into a ‘video-lounge’. The sound of soap opera actors, police sirens, film music and amplified pop filled this dignified building, a monument worth cherishing but in dire need of a sympathetic hand.

  Fiji is outside the frontiers of Australian hegemony, but Suva is very evidently a tour port. A big cruise ship was in, the Oriana. Fritz Falkner had said, ‘Fiji is the biggest tourist centre in this part of the Pacific. Duty-free shops. Cruise ships with Australians and New Zealanders, mostly.’

  In Cummings Street, the duty-free market, the Oriana’s passengers surged in and out of shops like soldiers clearing houses in a street-fighting operation. ‘In here, Glenda – bargains!’ – the penetrating accent of Down South issued from Abdul Razak’s Camera and Radio Emporium, where a young Indian with a small gold ring in his ear lobe inexpertly showed off a Pentax’s semi-automatic function; failing, growing flippant at first, then irritable with the customers.

  *

  James Barclay had given me the name of a friend in Suva, a British lawyer who had spent some years in Fiji and, though still relatively young, worked in the office of the Chief Justice as – I think, though it seems an unlikely title – Sheriff of Fiji. I soon introduced myself to Michael Scott, a voluble, intelligent man with a lively humour and a desire to help. I wanted to consult him on the best way to pass my few days in Fiji, and he invited me to his small house, a modern bungalow surrounded by gardens and trees.

  He spread out a map of the scattered islands of Fiji. ‘Well, here you are – in the old Cannibal Islands, as ancient mariners called them. There’s plenty to see. Yachts and a marina outside Suva. A big pleasure resort in the west of this island, Viti Levu – modern hotels, swimming pools, scuba diving, all that jazz…. No, I didn’t think you’d want that sort of thing.’ His finger moved northwards across Bligh Water. ‘You could see the other big island, Vanua Levu. Or there are those eastern islands scattered about over the Koro Sea towards Tonga – the Lau Group. There are small inter-island ships, of course.’

  A few moments later, he said, ‘Oh, I know. There’s Levuka. That might be your place. A whaling station of the early 1800s that became the old, rough capital of Fiji for a bit, until King Cakobau, a genu-ine cannibal warrior turned Christian gentleman, ceded the islands to Queen Victoria, and even sent her his bloodstained warclub to show he’d given up that sort of thing. Lots of stories of pirates and cannibals, and slaving and all that. Picturesque spot, pretty well unchanged. Not far. Take a bus.’ It sounded like good advice. I bought R.A. Derrick’s A History of Fiji and a copy of a special edition of the Fiji Times which reproduced articles from the mid-1800s up to today (I love old newspapers) and, a few hours later, took a bus to Levuka on the island of Ovalu.

  Of course, there was a bus and a boat. Both were full of Fijians guzzling food as if it were their last nourishment on earth. Ices, soda pop, milk, currant buns, wrapped loaves – the bus floor was soon covered in crumbs. An Indian collected fares, and now and then the Fijian driver stopped the vehicle, hooted once or twice and waited for men to appear bearing enamel bowls of kava, the local grog. ‘Ivi, ivi,’ a woman said, smiling up at me, and held up in a leaf envelope what looked like a cube of potato. That was not the only offering. A child gave me a sweet and a young man offered me his newspaper. In the Solomons, I couldn’t remember anyone offering me anything much.

  A man began massaging his chest under his shirt, smearing on a pungent balsam, groaning horribly as he did so and filling the bus with a gingery smell that grew almost overpowering as the self-massage continued all the way – an hour or so – to the ferry head. The smell persisted on the smart little launch, with brass fittings in her wheelhouse, which bounced us across the narrow strait to Ovalu. The friendly woman handed out more ivi. The groaning man finished his massage and lay full length on a padded bench, covering his head with his hands as we roared through blue water shallow with reefs and round the corner of the mollusc-shaped island. Soon, we turned down its green eastern shores to Levuka. A wharf appeared, jutting into the sheltered Koro Sea, and then the white-boarded warehouses of the Fiji Port Authority, and a low stretch of buildings that retained the frontier town appearance Michael Scott had promised.

  With relief, I saw only a few trawlers moored in the huddle off the northern end of the town and another – I saw her Japanese name through my glasses – heading past us out to sea. Levuka hardly looked big enough to be called a town. I could imagine friends contemptuously telling me that Levuka is a ‘dump’. But I am a dump man. And for the moment this dump particularly interested me because I had just learnt from A History of Fiji that when the white men first erupted into this isolated, innocent South Seas world they turned Levuka into a place as wild as the wildest frontier township in the bad old American West.

  Eighteen

  I carried my small bag along Beach Street, away from the wharf and the trawlers, past low, wood-framed offices and shops with verandahs. Tall trees rose behind them, soaring up a sudden precipitous cliff. I passed Burns Philp (South Sea) Co. Ltd, which had an office here; outside a mission school a girl called out, ‘Come on, Emma. Choir pract-ees.’ I passed the Pacific Fishing Co., Choy’s Building, the Marist Church of the Sacred Heart, facing the sea at the foot of shaggy cliffs. I looked in at its wooden walls and saw over its simple altar a large Fijian warclub under the wooden cross. A notice said, ‘The Pioneer Total Abstinence Association – Central Director, Pioneer Association, Upper Sherrard Street, Dublin’. From a clocktower the machinery tick-tocked, deep and heavy, like Poe’s tell tale heart. Fijian men in sulus and Indian women in saris idled about the narrow street. One or two guided me up a lane to an hotel half hidden among trees. A middle-aged and impassive Eurasian woman gave me the key to a small first-floor room. ‘Dinner at 6.30,’ she said. ‘The girl must go home outside the town, so she’ll leave food in your room, if you want it later.’

  ‘Perhaps some sandwiches, then.’

  A youngish Indian came down the stairs, shirtless; his beard straggled down his neck to meet the wool of his chest. ‘Is there, by any means,’ he addressed the woman, ‘a pressing facility in the hotel?’

  ‘No,’ the woman promptly said.

  ‘Give me an iron, I’ll do it.’ His hair was brushed forward over his eyebrows, straight and thick like black thatch.

  The woman looked with distaste at his matted bosom. ‘No iron,’ she muttered with finality, and left us.

  He turned to me. ‘I didn’t see you coming over on the plane.’ He sounded suspicious. I was on the boat, I told him.

  ‘I sat under a great big hail of rain,’ he said accusingly, his wet, red lips pouting through his beard. ‘It poured down through the roof of the plane. Just onto my head. A shower of water. Onto my head.’ Before I could ask him what he meant, he turned and stumped frowning up the stairs with his unpressed trousers over his arm like a mutinous valet. Rain in an aeroplane? ‘I’m in insurance,’ he called back defiantly

  I sat in a dim lounge over a cup of tea with A History of Fiji on my knees. In 1849 the white population of native Levuka was a mere fourteen or fifteen. But the settlement grew as more British and Americans sought its sheltered harbour and cool breezes, and by 1870 its population was six hundred, mostly British. Up to then it had been a rough-and-ready foothold on a cannibal island – a mere straggle of weatherboard and
corrugated iron stores, grog shops, hotels, dwellings and huts. The beach was ‘unsavoury’, horses, cattle and pigs roamed Beach Street and, with no sanitation, the place smelt, according to a Dr Messer of HMS Pearl, like some filthy Turkish village. Behind the buildings, behind the mountain that hemmed it in, lived wild and aggressive tribes who raided the settlement at frequent intervals.

  The first European navigator had arrived off Fiji in the year 1774, in the no-nonsense shape of Captain James Cook. Cook merely brushed the islands, however – he left nails, a knife and a few medals (what would the Fijians have made of those?) on a small island in the Lau Group, Vatoa, which he called Turtle Island. From there, he sailed west to the North Hebrides. Lieutenant William Bligh RN had been with Cook, and fifteen years later he was in the same region again as master of HM armed vessel Bounty, gathering young breadfruit trees for transplanting in the West Indies. The famous mutiny of 28 April 1789 took place off the Tongan island of Tofua, south-east of Fiji, and Bligh, with eighteen loyal officers and men, was set adrift in the ship’s boat, twenty-three feet long, with some bread, water and cutlasses but no firearms.

  Bligh turned his boat’s bows towards the Fiji Islands – he had heard of them from the natives in Tonga – but the particular Fijians he ran into were not friendly and pursued him in swift, thirty-foot double war canoes, the finest canoes in the Pacific. Was Bligh aware that every local chief launched his war canoes, according to immemorial ritual, over the bleeding bodies of his enemies? Had they been caught, there is no doubt that Mr Fletcher Christian’s castaways would have been dispatched by Fijian warclubs – or perhaps served as slipways for new canoes before being cooked and eaten. (The hearts and tongues, I read over my cup of Lipton’s tea, were reserved for the chiets; children carried off the hands; the heads were buried.) By a stroke of luck, a favourable wind enabled Bligh to escape through the reefs and islands north of Viti Levu, across what is now called Bligh Water, and into the deep ocean to the west. If he had not, news of the mutiny on the Bounty might never have reached England, and Christian and every one of his fellow mutineers might have lived out their lives in uninterrupted serenity (as it was, only ten were tried for mutiny, and three executed). Certainly Bligh would never have made his extraordinary voyage in that open boat across three thousand six hundred miles of sea to Timor in the Dutch East Indies. Equally certainly he would not subsequently have become Governor of New South Wales.

  Even in extremis among the reefs of Fiji, Bligh calmly took sightings on the islands around him, and his charts were used by later Europeans. These soon arrived, drawn by reports of two valuable local products – sandalwood and bêches de mer. Both were much prized in China: sandalwood was made into joss sticks; bêches de mer (from the Portuguese bicho do mar), eight-inch, slimy, sausage-shaped sea cucumbers very common in the Pacific, were smoke-cured in Fiji for the Chinese, who supposed them to possess unusually potent medical properties. For these products, European and American whalers bartered the teeth of the Cachalot or sperm whale, elephant tusks from India, and ray stings from Tonga to tip the Fijians’ spears. One chief released a boat’s crew on payment of fifty whale teeth, four axes, two plates, some fish hooks and cloth. The bona fide traders were soon equalled, if not outnumbered, by arrivals of a much more sinister nature: escaped convicts, deserters, marooned sailors, the derelict scourings – in the words of the History on my knee – of the ports of the Old World. Between them, traders and scallywags brought two gifts to the Sandalwood Coast which Fijians could well have done without. The first was a spectacular range of European diseases: measles, whooping cough, syphilis, influenza, smallpox, dysentery. The second was firearms.

  The Fijian chiefs, constantly at war among themselves, took to firearms with the utmost enthusiasm. They were desperate to procure them – their possession established their owner’s power over a weaponless, merely club-bearing chief in next to no time. Soon, all the most important chiefs had firearms, and because they barely understood how to fire them they employed down-and-out white men to shoot and maintain them. The chiefs spoke of their tame white riff-raff as proud owners talk of pedigree pets. Runaway sailors, convicts from wrecked Australia-bound transports and other ‘low whites’ found themselves personages of importance and standing in various cannibal courts throughout the islands.

  Mutineers, murder, cannibalism, shipwreck! One ruffian in particular attracted my attention in this extraordinary story – a man named Charles Savage, a Conradian figure if ever there was one outside the pages of An Outcast of the Islands –

  The thought was oddly interrupted. A tall Oriental with a sad, long face came in. Japanese?

  He seemed about to pass me by, then he cautiously approached. ‘Hello. You are staying long?’

  ‘Only a day or two,’ I said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh, I am here already two weeks. One month more. I work for fishing company. Japan.’ He looked pathetically lugubrious. ‘What you read?’

  ‘History. About Levuka. Very interesting.’

  ‘History?’ He looked at me as if he had discovered a madman. ‘No history here. No nothing.’

  ‘You don’t like it, then?’

  ‘Oh….’ His gaze wandered about the furniture as if he had left something here and was looking for it. ‘Oh … ha!’ Again his narrow eyes stared at me in dismay, and he shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘It … is … not easy.’

  ‘Lonely, I suppose.’

  ‘Very lonely,’ he nodded desperately – and even before I could offer him a cup of tea he left me without another word. Presently I heard his solemn footfalls on the wooden floor of his room overhead. A serious case of homesickness. There was a Japanese fish-canning factory here – Japanese and Koreans have fishing rights and canning agreements in many places in the Pacific. It was difficult to think of many people more different from Japanese than Fijians. And now Levuka had nothing to offer a visitor but its history.

  I took up my book and strolled out through the trees, down the lane towards the sea, and into Beach Street. Levuka Central Store (‘the shop of fancy wear’), shops ‘licensed to sell patent medicines’, Rachhod’s Liquor Department. Every second store had sold alcohol in the early nineteenth century – ‘gunbarrel’ rum and moonshine whisky, mostly. The beach itself was unsavoury no more, but little Beach Street still had a distinctly Wild West look. It might repel a Japanese visitor, but it was easy to conjure up Charles Savage here.

  This Charles Savage was an interesting prototype of the cruder Fijian-European rascals of his age, and I retell here the story I found in Mr Derrick’s book.

  In May 1808, at Tonga, two ragged sailors, John Husk and Charles Savage, begged Captain E.H. Corey of the American brig Eliza to take them aboard, claiming to be the sole survivors of the massacred crew of another ship, the Port au Prince. The captain obliged, but shortly the Eliza was run onto the Mocea Reef near Levuka, the crew managing to save from her forty thousand Spanish dollars and a quantity of muskets, powder and cutlasses which they rowed ashore in the ship’s longboat. Here Fijians were waiting for them, quite uninterested in the dollars – they preferred coloured trinkets. They stripped the sailors of their clothes, providing them with bark loincloths instead, and were perfectly friendly. Captain Corey and four of his crew were allowed to sail away in the longboat with six thousand dollars. But the Fijians took a fancy to Charlie Savage, who spoke quite good Fijian and Tongan after eighteen months in Tonga; they adopted him, and carried him off to the nearby island of Bau. As tame white man to Naulivou, the chief of that time, he set about rehearsing the eager warriors of Bau in the use of the strange firesticks called muskets – with terrible success. Before long he obliged the chief by leading an attack on a village called Kasavu. An eye witness described the massacre: ‘Savage stood on his canoe in the middle of the river, less than a pistol-shot from the reed fence of the fortification, and fired on the inhabitants, who had no means of defending themselves’ – except, he went on, by crouching down, terrified, behind the pile
d corpses of their friends and relatives. Soon, the ‘village stream ran red’. The Bauans were overcome with gratitude, and Savage organized many more such attacks. There was at first pathetically little opposition. In one village he shot the defenders down as they stood gazing at the sky; they thought the noise of the muskets was thunder.

  As Derrick says, Savage and his like, with their muskets (and later cannon) led Fiji into an era of bloodshed and civil war inconceivable in the days of club and spear. Savage became something of a god; depending who you were, you spoke of him with the utmost reverence or with infinite horror. After a while he was joined by other renegades, some of them his shipmates from the Eliza, runaways from sandalwood ships – all with muskets and a handful of dollars. This army of ruthless scallywags assured the supremacy of Naulivou. But eventually their numbers were much reduced by drink and homicidal jealousies. Even the Bauans they served were finally disgusted with their barnyard morals, and once, when an opportunity occurred at a feast, they swiftly clubbed several of them to death where they sat. (The question of whose morals were worse was not generally agreed. Savage shot Fijians whom he found eating human flesh, yet he thought nothing of cold-blooded murder, and he took to polygamy ‘like a rooster in a henhouse’.)

  The unholy reign of ‘King Charlie’ lasted for about five years, spent in alternating periods of beachcombing idleness and bloody campaigning. Then he decided to visit the Sandalwood Coast to work the boats of a Calcutta ship, the Hunter, and he took with him a few of his mercenaries from Bau. (Derrick’s list shows what a mixed bunch they were: two Chinamen of the Eliza, an ex-convict from New South Wales; William Parker, an American deserter; a seaman discharged from the Hunter a year before; Michael Maccabe and Joseph Atkins, both discharged from another vessel; Martin Bushart, a German; a Lascar; a Tahitian; and a Tongan carpenter.) At the same time, Naulivou sent two large canoes with 230 men and two other chiefs from Bau to bring back Savage and his men once the work was completed. Unfortunately for all concerned, Captain Robson of the Hunter had fallen into dispute with some local Wailean tribesmen and felt obliged to destroy their canoes before landing his men.