by Gavin Young
Charlie Savage, the other foreigners and two or three score men from Bau went ashore, climbed a hill, burnt some houses on it – and found themselves ambushed by Waileans waiting for them in the forest. What could even ‘King Charlie’ do? After hours under siege, he became impatient and decided to trust to his knowledge of Fijians to haggle his way out. With one of the Chinamen, he descended the slope. He bargained with the Waileans. But he overestimated his negotiating ability – and his mystique. When the bargaining faltered, the Waileans clubbed the Chinaman to death. Presently – when those still cowering on the rock refused to come down – the Waileans seized Charlie Savage and held him head down in a pool until he drowned. Then they cut him up, and cooked him before his comrades’ eyes, for their encouragement. In a final Wailean gesture of hate and triumph, they made his bones into sail needles. Of his companions, only three escaped to the Hunter.
The characters of the noble and humane Captain James Cook and the murderous rascal, Savage, were of course quite dissimilar. Yet reading of Savage’s end recalled the haunting eye witness account by Captain James King of Cook’s death in Hawaii (like Magellan he was cut down in an almost accidental skirmish at the water’s edge), and of the chief’s apologetic, tearful return two days later of Cook’s bones to the grieving officers of the Resolution.
We found in it [a wrapping of fine cloth and a cloak of black and white feathers] the hands of Captain Cook entire, which were well known from a remarkable scar on one of them, that divided the thumb from the forefinger, the whole length of the metacarpal bone; the skull, but with the scalp separated from it, and the bones that form the face wanting; the scalp, with the hair upon it cut short, and the ears adhering to it; the bones of both arms…; the thighs and leg-bones joined together, but without feet. The lower jaw and feet had been seized by different Chiefs….
I liked the sequel. When King asked them whether they had eaten some of his captain’s flesh, ‘They immediately shewed as much horror at the idea as any European would have done; and asked, very naturally, if that was the custom amongst us?’
As for the odious Savage, surely it is impossible not to see in his terrible death a projection of the repulsive end of Conrad’s Kurtz in his domain by the dark currents of the Congo – ‘The horror! The horror!’ Less profound, maybe, in his vileness than the fictitious Kurtz, Savage, after all, actually lived.
I stood in Levuka, this forlorn old town, hearing the put-putting of Japanese fishing vessels off the beach, and let images of Charlie Savage’s wicked time flood into my mind, like stills from a film. Tall, bushy-headed warriors, raging through the trees; a white man standing in a canoe, musket to his shoulder, gleefully picking off villagers staring skyward; dark figures against a fire stooping over the fragments of a human body; a child happily jiggling the fingers of a severed hand; and the evil white man drowned, cut up and eaten before his comrades’ eyes….
‘The horror! The horror!’
*
Opposite Burns Philp an old building belonging to another venerable Pacific trading company, Morris Hedstrom, had become a museum. Its old walls displayed fine mid-nineteenth-century engravings of massive ocean-going druas or double canoes of Ovalu – heavy, swift and ninety feet long, crewed by two hundred armed warriors whose aim was to ram other canoes and slaughter the swimming enemy. By contrast, in a billiard hall nearby, peaceful conduct was the purpose of the rules displayed on the wall:
No smoking while playing
No swearing
Do not bang cue on floor or table
No making noise
Do not stop black or coloured balls
Wear shirt or singlet while you play
Strictly no drunkenness
‘You like playing?’ A short, friendly Indian stood at my elbow.
‘I’m interested in your rules.’
‘Oh – we have too much trouble. Sometimes terrible drinking. People stop the balls and start shouting they’ve won. Then a fighting starts. People from the villages.’ He shook his head. ‘Grog.’
*
I liked the atmosphere of little Levuka – that spectral presence of the nerveless explorers, the mutinous sailors, grog-hardened traders and ragged beachcombers of long ago. I thought: Past and Present overlap here all right, and I saw the town and its bay as an old etching, like the prints in the Morris Hedstrom museum.
Further along the road, a little outside the town, under palm trees by the sea, I came upon the monument commemorating the cession of Fiji to Great Britain on 10 October 1874, at the request of King Cakobau. That afternoon, after a morning’s postponement because of driving rain and threatening clouds, the Deed of Cession was signed here in the presence of Sir Hercules Robinson, the British representative, and the Fijian chiefs, all of whom had been gathered up from their islands by HMS Pearl, acting as a sort of school bus. At one island, the two local chiefs were engrossed in a private war and oblivious of the historic moment; they had to be impatiently separated, but at last they, too, heard the announcement of King Cakobau, the grand old cannibal turned Christian. According to the Fiji Times of Wednesday, 14 October 1874:
Before ceding his country to Her Majesty the Queen … the King gives her his old and favourite war-club, the former, and, until lately the only known, law of Fiji. In abandoning club law, and adopting the forms and principles of civilised societies, he laid by his old weapon…. Many of his people died and passed away under the old law; but hundreds of thousands still survive to enjoy the newer and better state of things…. He sends his love to Her Majesty….
It was a happy time. After the cession ceremony, the rough men of Levuka took on the officers and men of HMS Pearl and her consort ship HMS Dido at cricket – a triumph, as it turned out, for Levuka, for the scores were: Levuka 109, Pearl and Dido 15 (top scorer: Martin, c. Groom, b. Brodziak, 7) and 83. ‘There was goodly array of the fair sex on the ground, and the splendid band of the Pearl greatly added to the enjoyment of the day.’ Mr H. Norris, owner of the Little Wonder Store in the Lane of Totoga, nearby down the coast, begged to. announce ‘to their friends the public that although they have been silent now for some time they have only been
*
Hushed in grim repose awaiting – ANNEXATION!’
*
Mr Norris now promised monthly mail steamer deliveries of provisions guaranteed ‘new and fresh’! Already the Royal Mail ship Cyphrenes was at Levuka port with Norris-bound supplies ranging from apples to two-pound tins of rump steak; while down the road Otty Cudlip was preparing to auction wines, spirits, bedroom furniture, beer, engines, atmospheric lamps, and ‘one of Alcock’s Best Billiard Tables (Complete)’, at the Criterion Hotel.
Two days later, another billiard table (not necessarily an Alcock) was raffled in the old Levuka Hotel and won by a Mr Huon of HMS Dido – the sailors sailed away to Sydney with one trophy at least – and an amateur dramatic show ‘fully merited the liberal patronage accorded – once one had made due allowances in favour of places like Levuka where professional theatrical talent is entirely absent’.
When I returned to Suva, I sought out Michael Scott. Over drinks in the Grand Pacific, he asked if I realized that one reason for the British Government’s agreement to cession was the flourishing traffic in plantation labourers? A ship’s captain could earn a pound sterling for every fuzzy Melanesian head snatched from the Solomons and the New Hebrides and dumped in Levuka for work in Fiji’s plantations Melanesians, smaller and more vigorous, worked better.
These thoughts about blackbirding took me back to Asterisk and to Colson. Perhaps one or two of Colson’s forebears had left their bones in far-off Levuka. I fetched my history of Fiji and Isles of Illusion for Michael to see.
‘Look at this,’ Michael put a finger on a footnote in the history. ‘The London Times in reporting a hurricane that occurred in December 1879 said: “The Stanley of Queensland, 113 tons, caught the full force of the gale. She had 150 islanders on board for Fiji, who were kept under battened hatches
for thirty hours at a time. Fifty subsequently died, and one committed suicide on being discharged from Levuka hospital.” Pretty typical.’
At least Jehovah’s fierce ancestors would have avoided such a fate. Blackbirders learnt that to land in the Santa Cruz group in the Solomons, Jehovah’s home which I had visited briefly in the Ann, was to court death at the hands of frenzied warriors, and they steered well away from it. For some savage reason, the Santa Crucians had always been scornfully indifferent to – or were roused to martial fury by – rough Queenslanders trying to woo them with glamorous bribes – ‘knives, tomahawks, cheap print, calico, turkey-red twill, small coloured beads, twist tobacco, short clay pipes, Jew’s harps, mirrors, fish-hooks, washing blue (for face paint), and scrap iron’.
What the British consul in Levuka discovered about the blackbirding brig Carl of Melbourne helped to save the harassed islanders from more of the white man’s impact.
The Crew had collected about eighty labourers by the usual methods of upsetting canoes or dropping pig-iron through them; and [one night] a disturbance broke out in the Carl’s hold … the kidnapped men breaking up the bunks and using the pieces as spears, to fight among themselves. The crew fired through the bulkheads but so far from quelling the riot the shooting only increased the frenzy and terror of the men confined below. The crew themselves seem to have panicked, for they continued firing for eight hours. At daylight the hatches were opened to expose a shambles. Of the kidnapped men, five came out unaided, twenty-five were wounded, and over fifty were dead. To make matters worse, dead and badly wounded were thrown overboard together; and all evidence of the affray was removed in order to avoid awkward questions should the ship fall in with a warship – which, indeed, happened shortly afterwards.
‘I think you’ll find that incident helped convince the Government in Westminster to accept Cakobau’s offer,’ Michael said.
*
Captain Fritz Falkner of Carpenters Shipping warned me to be ready to leave the Tasi would arrive at 0700 or thereabouts the day after tomorrow. She would sail to Samoa the next day. I had no difficulty in filling in the time. The Fiji Times advertised a rugby football match; just the game for Fijians with their great height and big bones. Today, they had a match against Sydney – a first-class side, the paper said. Where had I heard that the Fijians played in bare feet?
I sat in a good seat in a crowded stadium, on the edge of a perfect sea. Behind banked rows of fuzzy heads, the crisp white sails of yachts moved infinitely slowly beyond the surf and the reefs. It was an extraordinary scene: the sea; the striped parasols of the spectators; the swirling, speeding brown and white players, every one with boots on. The Fijian supporters whistled and yelled ‘Off side’ in high good humour. The heat was intense; the rising score remained even. Senivalati Laulau – was he six or seven feet tall? – scored one of the swiftest tries I have ever seen. Two other giants in his team were called Vilikesa Vatuwaliwali and Josefa Korovulavula and looked as formidable as their names. Take away his gun, and they could have laid a murderous ruffian like Charlie Savage dead at their feet in no time.
*
To my surprise, Michael Scott informed me that a message had reached him for me: the Prime Minister of Fiji would be pleased to see me briefly next morning in his office. It was a wonder he could spare the time with an election campaign in progress. The meeting had been arranged by a Mr Don Diment of the Department of Information, who had heard from Michael that I was in Suva and interested in Fiji. It was a gesture which I would certainly not refuse.
I found the Prime Minister in his modern office not far from the hotel. Like most Fijians I had seen, Ratu Sir Kamisese Kapaiwai Tuimacilia Mara, who was in his fifties, was as tall and broad as the rugby players I had watched the afternoon before – or the chiefs of old Fiji depicted in engravings, advancing into battle twirling warclubs. But the resemblance ended with his size. Ratu Mara looked anything but warlike in an open shirt which he wore over a fawn-coloured kilt and sandals. His hair was white and curly and he wore glasses. His expression was benign. He walked to a chair and I noticed he had a limp.
He said, ‘I got that playing rugby football at Wadham College, Oxford. I think a South African player did it.’ He laughed. ‘Not on purpose, of course.’
He looked scholarly and at the same time aristocratic.
‘Fiji is an aristocracy,’ he presently said. ‘Did you know that? And did you know that Fijians wept when the Union Jack came down in October 1970?’
I hadn’t known. I was used, in Africa and Asia, to patronizing tales, not of tears at the sight of the sinking Union Jack, but of some ‘liberation struggle’ (real or invented) to account for ‘freedom’ from colonial bondage. Here, in 1874, Cakobau had asked his friend Queen Victoria to annex the islands, and ninety-six years later Queen Elizabeth had handed them back to the Fijians. It seemed a civilized way of doing things. No one had wanted to be seen to have scored off someone else. It was a consolation to hear that. But the Prime Minister was making another and more painful point.
‘People here used to call the UK the “home country”,’ he said. ‘We valued and trusted the values of the British.’ I noticed the past tense. ‘Now, we’re losing a friend – a friend who no longer wants to be our friend.’
‘I’m not sure I understand.’
‘It’s now become virtually impossible to send our young people to Britain. The British have made it too expensive. The British Government won’t help our students with subsidies any more – the fees are impossible, unless you’re a millionaire from Hong Kong. And,’ he smiled, ‘Australia and New Zealand are not the same.’ He shook his handsome head.
‘You know, we have Fijian troops in Lebanon and Sinai with the United Nations. It helps our young people get some discipline and training.’
Later, Don Diment showed me a report on a Fijian corporal who had won a Military Medal – a British award for gallantry.
At Wadi Jilu in South Lebanon, a Fiji Battalion post came under intense small arms, automatic and grenade fire from Lebanese National Movement men…. Savu hit in the leg … refused to leave his post or have Medical Officer come to his aid…. Post surrounded…. Returned fire…. Terrorists give up. Corporal Savu displayed the highest sense of duty and personal bravery.
‘Two thousand young people have been rotated through the Lebanon,’ Ratu Mara said. ‘They have matured very quickly there. You see, here’ – he shook his head again – ‘we have young ones here with … problems.’
‘Problems?’
‘Dissatisfied. Unemployment. Drinking beer. We need jobs. Our university is churning out graduates, but unfortunately with no jobs our young people are emigrating to the United States, Canada and Australia.’ He had just mentioned one universal problem of far-off, delectable places. Who these days, with a degree in electronics and business management in his pocket, would stay on a beautiful Pacific island dependent on tourism, copra and fishing? Armies of the world’s young would go off, if they could, to where the flashy money is – to the suburbs of Los Angeles and Philadelphia, to where the ‘upwardly mobile’ people live. They would soon succumb to the Johnnie Carson Show, group psychiatry and God knows what else, and within a generation – perhaps less – they would have thrown away their mother language. And then they would no longer be Fijians….
‘Once upon a time – it was a darker time, no doubt, in some ways, but not in all – the missionaries told us, “Don’t do that. That’s wrong. You’ll never get to heaven that way.” But, you see, we now know that some of the things the missionaries wanted banned were fine for our way of living.’
‘Clothes –’ I started to say.
‘How ridiculous it is, this sickly world! The missionaires said, “Put on these clothes!” Now, it’s the Europeans who come back as tourists half naked, topless.’
Tourists: the third Fatal Impact, I thought.
‘We need tourists, of course. But we had two hundred thousand last year. We could double that figure, n
o doubt.’
‘And will you?’
‘Some people want to. But what would happen to us – we are only six hundred and fifty thousand Fijians. Hotel after hotel…. Would we all have to become waiters and cooks and disco operators?’
He had often, he said, pointed to Honolulu as a dire example of how vulnerable Pacific cultures can be swamped. ‘Do we all want to become like Hawaii?’ he had asked other South Pacific island leaders at a conference, and they had shuddered, shaking their heads.
Another South Sea preoccupation was the nuclear one. ‘I told President Mitterand of France: “As long as you explode nuclear devices in the Pacific, no one here will want to have relations with you.” Mitterand said, “Well, if you want a nuclear-free Pacific, stop the United States and the Soviet Union.”’
I thought of the T-shirt motto I had seen in Honiara: ‘Nuclear hem save killim iumi evriwan.’
Shouts floated in through the open window: ‘Fiji for the Fijians.’ The Prime Minister smiled. ‘Oh, Enoch Powell is those people’s patron saint.’ I understood just enough of Fiji’s politics to know that Ratu Mara’s ruling party was mostly Fijian, and that the main opposition party was largely Fijian-Indian. The ‘Fiji for the Fijians’ faction, shouting outside, was a tiny minority group. ‘They say the Indians, who are just about a majority of our population now, are taking us over,’ Ratu Mara said. ‘But it’s nonsense. Those people shouting are silly extremists. Nothing to worry about.’
