Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  ‘I’ll have to.’ Graham and Steve came up and suggested a drink and after that I felt a little better. At least Cook, Melville, Gauguin were just ahead. I wasn’t going to let General Galtieri or Mrs Thatcher give me grey hairs yet. I would pray to Raphael Tixier. He was only twenty miles away.

  *

  The entrance to the harbour of Papeete was as narrow as Chris Macdonald had said. The curved volcanic ridges were creased like stiff, crumpled paper. A UTA jet took off with a roar over the lagoon. A small warship lay between the Pacific Islander and the beautiful silhouette of Moorea. The blue in the French tricolor matched the blue of the water.

  In his office Raphael Tixier said, ‘Anything we can do, just say,’ and my spirits rose. For a start, he was the part-owner of a vessel plying to the Marquesas and back. ‘The owner’s cabin is yours,’ he said, smiling. Jim Hostetler, his American assistant, had hope of a passage to South America. A new line was sending a ship, the African Star, quite soon. She would go to Valparaiso, the port of Chile, after one stop in Ecuador and another in Peru.

  ‘It looks as if you’re in luck,’ Jim said, and we went to have a farewell drink aboard the Pacific Islander.

  *

  A furtive figure put a ratlike head round Tony’s cabin door and hissed ‘Capitaine?’

  A man came in who might have been on a starvation diet for a week. His blond hair was en brosse, his trembling hands were calloused and he had sores on his legs. A Victorian writer would have described his eyes as haunted. He might have been twenty-five or thirty-five. In accented English he said he was an Austrian deserter from the French Foreign Legion base in Tahiti.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Carter.

  The man wanted to escape. He had done seven months in the Legion, he said, and could take no more. He had been two weeks on the run. It didn’t look as if he could take much more of that either.

  ‘Sit down,’ Carter told him kindly, and pushed a can of beer towards him.

  There were five of them on the run, French and German, the man said, lapping the beer – they were dodging the cops round Papeete.

  I wondered why he had not waited. It seemed idiotic to desert in Tahiti, an island in the middle of the Pacific. Why not wait for Europe?

  ‘Where d’you sleep at night?’ Carter asked.

  ‘In a garden, sometimes. Sometimes with a Tahitian girlfriend. The Legion hates men who escape.’ He stretched a hand towards Carter. ‘Please take me. I do any work. Any kind. No matter how hard, how dirty.’

  Over his second beer, and very gently and patiently, Tony told him about crew lists, the seamen’s unions, the terrible penalties for harbouring wanted men. ‘I have a Chinese crew – you see? They wouldn’t like it either.’

  He would get at least a year’s hard labour in a military prison, the Austrian said lugubriously. He had no papers; none of any kind. He was bound, he told us, to be caught.

  ‘I am truly sorry,’ Carter said with real compassion.

  It was harrowing but hopeless, and the Austrian didn’t insist. It was evidently not the first time he had begged captains to help him escape from the biggest mistake of his life. And when he knew it was hopeless, he began to relax. His hands stopped shaking, he drank his beer, and he sat back and smiled with evident interest at photographs Carter showed him of a recent holiday in Gstaad, nodding his head as if he were looking at photographs of some lost paradise. ‘Wunderbar, wunderbar’, he murmured.

  Docile, he shook hands before going back to his bolthole. I pointed through the window. ‘Try a yacht,’ I suggested. ‘Find a couple of American hippies about to sail. They might like to take you just for the adventure.’ I had no idea how he would manage at the other end without papers, wherever they dropped him, but it would get him off the island. He nodded, and went down the gangway.

  Later, when the Pacific Islander had sailed, I met a legionnaire called Luigi (‘Or Louis, if you prefer’) in a bar called the Jasmine and heard his view of the Austrian’s chances. The legionnaires stood up at the bar. They tilted their white kepis to the back of their heads and leaned across to kiss the Polynesian bar-girls. I was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee when two of them joined me by chance.

  Luigi was not young – in his late thirties, perhaps; Salvador, his copain, was not much younger, small, thin, taciturn. We shook hands, and after introductions I told them about the deserter. Luigi said he’d heard there were three or four at large. Everyone heard about escapees. They’d be captured, of course, he shrugged. It was clear he had no sympathy for them. I was surprised. I had thought that all legionnaires, like prisoners of war and convicts, dreamed of a Great Escape and made heroes of those who got away. That showed how little I knew of the Legion’s esprit de corps, Luigi said.

  ‘A deserter has broken his word. He is not to be trusted. You said, try an American yacht. Even if he is lucky, that mec, and makes it to San Francisco, as you say, and tries to publish his story there – eh b’en, quoi donc? – will anyone buy it? Won’t the flics just ship him back?’

  ‘It’s an old story,’ I said, ‘that Legion escape.’

  ‘Oui, it’s an old story anyway,’ Luigi agreed. ‘And to desert in Tahiti! The young guy is crazy. The Legion offered him a regular life – in exchange for what? For one thing. For loyalty. Now he’s broken his word. Now no one can respect him.’

  I don’t know why the idea of honourable obligation to the Legion surprised me. I suppose Beau Geste had created an impression of press-ganged desperadoes in uniform, whose loyalty was exclusive to themselves; men without a country or a code, except the code the Legion imposed through its brutal drill sergeants. I had forgotten that legionnaires were not press-ganged. They had volunteered. They owed something.

  Luigi had a hard, dignified face. It could have belonged to a Mafia hit man or a head waiter in a swanky Italian restaurant. His father and brothers, he said, were of Italian origin, miners in eastern France. He himself was saving up to retire to Brittany, beside the sea. Tahiti? It was too enfermé. Claustrophobic. Of course, there were some nice-looking women. Fickle enough. Take silent Salvador, for example. He had a beautiful Tahitian woman; had had her for a few years. Now, unfortunately, she was beginning to play around, not looking after his baby son. ‘The neighbours are always telling him that she’s out. And the baby’s left alone,’ Luigi said. ‘That’s not good. So Salvador slapped her around a bit yesterday. He’ll send the baby’s allowance money to her parents in future.’

  Salvador heard all this and managed a smile.

  ‘Oh, he’s très colérique sometimes, is Salvador. Spanish. He has a small old car,’ Luigi said sadly. ‘He drinks and then drives. One day he’ll smash himself up.’ He had wanted to go straight, and for that he needed papers. ‘Yes,’ laughed Luigi, ‘he joined the Legion for the papers. Well, the Legion gave him the papers. And now at last he knows who he is – eh? Don’t you?’

  ‘At last,’ murmured Salvador. They were his first words.

  ‘Hey, you,’ Luigi called to a passing waiter. ‘You dance beautifully. Comme une belle dame. Please bring three beers here when you get tired.’ The waiter shrugged disdainfully.

  ‘See there,’ Luigi pointed behind the bar. ‘That’s a disco that has everything. Travélos.’ Transvestites. ‘People go pour tirer un coup, eh? Pour faire la pipe.’ For screwing; for oral sex.

  ‘Pour moi, les gonzesses, the good-time girls.’ The waiter came with the beer. ‘Tu es fait pour les fêtes, chéri,’ Luigi told him, winking at me.

  We had dinner together in the end: raw fish, calf’s head sauté, red wine. For a legionnaire Luigi was a revelation. He talked of books. ‘La Condition Humaine, yes, good – pas un mot, eh!’ But the writer he really liked was Pearl S. Buck. ‘The Good Earth, ah, ça….!’

  *

  I had no desire at all to hang about the streets and tourist hotels of Papeete. It was not unpleasant, but it just wasn’t interesting. It belonged to France – after all Tahiti is in French Polynesia – and it was
the least ‘Pacific’ place I had seen so far. With its palm trees, its Corniche, its cafes, its yacht harbour, it was like a French Mediterranean town with a naval base tacked on. The beauty that makes Papeete ‘Pacific’ and memorable belongs to Moorea, the island with the fingerlike mountains across the blue bay. An island like that could only be in the Pacific Ocean.

  Of course, writers had been bewailing the demise of old, traditional Tahiti for well over a hundred years. Alan Moorehead wrote in The Fatal Impact that, at the time of Cook’s arrival in 1769, ‘they [the Tahitians] were probably happier than they were ever to be again’, and by 1830 New England whaling ships called at Tahiti regularly, with the usual calamitous results. The rape of the Pacific had followed the same pattern here as elsewhere. A surgeon on a whaler told people back home that the nightly brawls and riots in Papeete would have disgraced the most profligate purlieus of London. That was only sixty years after Cook. ‘In the slovenly and haggard and diseased inhabitants of the port, it was vain to attempt to recognise the prepossessing figure of the Tahitian as pictured by Cook.’ By 1830 a listless aimlessness had overtaken natives ravaged by tuberculosis, smallpox, dysentery and venereal disease. Even European food was a menace – it decayed the fine Tahitian teeth.

  By the time Paul Gauguin arrived in 1891, Papeete was a place dominated by officious second-rate French petits fonctionnaires – all the competent ones seem to have gone to North Africa or Senegal. ‘When you reach Tahiti, the travellers who are going back, get off the ship. The new arrivals must be inspected; the Governor is there (the top-hat is indescribable) and all the riff-raff … but very graciously, they ask, “Have you any money?”’

  *

  The Tahitian chambermaid at the Tahiti Hotel saw my book of Gauguin’s writings, painting and sketches lying on a side table.

  ‘C’est M. Gauguin, le peintre?’

  I opened the book and showed her colour photographs of modern Tahiti, somehow expecting her to admire those most. But no – she gazed for a long while at the reproduction of a Gauguin painting of two women.

  ‘Oh, elles étaient jolies, les femmes de cette époque,’ she cried. ‘She is the maman of the other. Or the sister.’

  She liked the wood carving of the Tahitian moon goddess, Hina, and the earth spirit, Fatu.

  ‘Hina and Fatu!’ she repeated. ‘Hina and Fatu!’

  There had been many stone carvings of gods and ancestors in the Marquesas Islands; Stevenson had seen them. Herman Melville’s valley of Typee was on the island of Nuku Hiva. Paul Gauguin’s tomb was on a hillside on Hiva Oa; in the Marquesas – that was where I wanted to be now.

  Twenty-six

  Off to Typee!

  A young Chinese in Tixier’s office had made out my ticket for the Marquesas Islands, and Raphael Tixier went with me to the harbour to watch the ship sail. The Taporo was not large; she had a red and white hull, a French flag on her stern, and a yellow funnel with two thin blue horizontal rings. She had two hatches forward and two large ventilators like bat’s ears. Her captain was a short, moderately dark-skinned man with a gravelly voice and a hand which shook mine powerfully. ‘Captain Alphonse,’ he said, without smiling.

  The cabin Raphael Tixier had given me was under the bridge across a stairway from the captain. Relatively large and smelling not unpleasantly of varnish, it had a window to each of its bulkheads and so was extremely light. There were a number of tables and chairs. Just right, I thought, and ‘De luxe,’ I said to Tixier. Compared to the Ann, she was de luxe. And in a small vessel you were that much nearer to the surface of the sea; you could feel part of it. I preferred her to relative monsters like the Chengtu and the Pacific Islander.

  ‘Jim has sent a telex to the owners of the African Star in Sydney. We should have an answer by the time you get back.’

  So that was taken care of – as far as it could be.

  Tixier waved from the shore. The Taporo began to move to the entrance of the lagoon.

  Now I could imagine I was Herman Melville in the whaler Dolly, turning my face towards a group of longed-for islands.

  ‘Hurra, my lads! It’s a settled thing; next week we shape our course to the Marquesas!’ The Marquesas! What strange visions of outlandish things does the very name spirit up! Naked houris – cannibal banquets – groves of coconuts – coral reefs – tattooed chiefs – and bamboo temples; sunny valleys planted with breadfruit trees – carved canoes dancing on the flashing blue waters – savage woodlands guarded by horrible idols….

  Coconuts, coral reefs, valleys of breadfruit trees, carved canoes – these I could say I had already seen something of since abandoning the South China Sea. I had even, come to think of it, been befriended by a tattooed chief. I hoped – if it was too late for naked houris and ravening cannibals – for at least one or two horrible idols. I had no plans, though, to jump ship.

  Dolly was the fictional name Melville gave to the whaler from which he and Toby Greene deserted in the Marquesas. In reality, he had signed aboard the Acushnet, under Captain Valentine Peace Jr, at Fairhaven on 3 January 1841 – becoming one of the crew, he said, of ‘twenty-five dastardly and mean-spirited wretches’. Eighteen months later, the Acushnet arrived at the Marquesas Islands with only salt horse and sea biscuit left to eat. Eighteen months! – but this was not unduly long. The progress from New England to the Pacific sperm whale grounds included the rounding of Cape Horn and calls at ports in Chile or Peru for provisions. ‘The longevity of Cape Horn whaling voyages,’ Melville wrote, ‘is proverbial, frequently extending over a period of four or five years….’ I liked his story of the whaler Perseverance which, after many years’ absence, was given up for lost. At last she was glimpsed somewhere in the vicinity of the ends of the earth, her crew composed by now of venerable Greenwich Pensioner-looking old salts, who just managed to hobble about her deck. Herman Melville and Toby Greene had had no intention of ending up as grey-heads, dastardly or not, on the Acushnet.

  I found Captain Alphonse on the bridge in nothing but a pair of white shorts. As soon as we were out at sea, ‘Une bière?’ Good. A crewman appeared with four bottles of Heineken. The biggest man I had seen so far in Polynesia, from the point of view of sheer girth, came in from the wing and introduced himself: the chief engineer, Aroma Huri. Beside him Stan Laurel’s Oliver Hardy would have looked like the undersized fish you throw back.

  We headed NNE, through the Tuamotu Archipelago, making for the Palliser Islands, King George Island, Disappointment Island. Low lines of palms appeared from time to time in the distance, grew moderately and faded rapidly. No wooded hills, no volcanic shapes here. This is the region of atolls – erratic rings of coral barely higher than the surface of the ocean, on which the tousled heads of coconut palms soar up like petrified distress rockets over waterlogged ships.

  The officers and crew of the Taporo were far from resembling Melville’s ‘dastardly and mean-spirited wretches’. Gruff Captain Alphonse turned out to be a most friendly man. I taught him some English – although he knew some to start with. He looked round my small collection of books, picking up Typee while I poured him a whisky. When I explained about Melville’s visit to Nuku Hiva in 1842, the warriors, the bamboo houses, the description of the people, he nodded.

  ‘No vrais Marquises people any more. They are mélangés with Europeans. Or maybe there are a few old ones!’ He laughed. ‘Listen. Never involve yourself with une marquisienne. Take my word. Never. I’ve known these islands for – ouf! – many, many years – tu me crois? Can’t be trusted. Talk, talk, talk – bla, bla, bla! Behind your back.’ He made an unmistakable gesture. ‘And this, whenever you’re away. Toof-toof!’ – the gestures multiplied – ‘with everyone!’ He downed the whisky with a flourish. ‘Avoid the marquisiennes…. Attention! I should know.’

  Had I any books on French, he wanted to know. Only a life of Gauguin.

  ‘Why do people pay so much for his paintings?’ the captain sighed, giving me a second local opinion on the man whose grave I longed t
o see. ‘I don’t like them. Not at all. The drawings – so ugly.’ He pointed to a sketch of a breadfruit tree and said, ‘Capitaine Bligh was here to buy this. They built a double canoe, the traditional Tahitian kind, in the Marquises, just for the film The Bounty [he pronounced it ‘Boonty’]. Le Capitaine Bligh! The film was not too good.’

  ‘Marlon Brando has an hotel on an atoll, is that right?’

  ‘He keeps well hidden. Tourists go to his hotel, but it’s very expensive. Of course, I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Papeete is expensive.’

  ‘That’s because Tahiti is run by the Mafias.’

  ‘Mafias! French? Tahitian?’

  ‘Both. Half and half.’ He explained that kava, for instance, was forbidden here because the beer importers were against it. ‘Big potatoes, cabbages, other things that grow easily on some islands here, have been “suppressed” by men who have an interest in importing. The entrepreneurs.’

  Kava forbidden? It was legal all over Samoa, Fiji and Tonga, I told him, and was universally considered a much less harmful drink than the Europeans’ alcohol.

  The captain said in astonishment, ‘What? Kava legal?’

  ‘Why not? It is an honourable drink. The Samoans use it ceremonially at important functions. It doesn’t make people fight as alcohol does.’

  Alphonse called in a loud voice to the chef, ‘Hey, Capitaine Cook! Venez ici!’ He winked at me. ‘Capitaine Bligh vous parle!’ And the chef remained Capitaine Cook from that moment.

  We ate marinated fish, tomatoes and onions with tabasco sauce, then meat and potatoes mixed with rice. Five of us filled the little mess. Captain Alphonse; the mate, Eric Maamaatua; the supercargo, Michel Tiareura, a grey, helpful man; the gargantuan chief engineer, Aroma Huri; and myself. At noon we squeezed into Eric’s cabin and drank beer or whisky. Then we drank Fontel, vin de table supérieur, from plastic bottles. It went down well with marinated fish. ‘At sea, no Tahitian is fighting when he drinks. Never. But ashore….’ Michel’s stomach heaved with mirth. ‘Oh, la, la!’ But the officers left the booze alone at dinnertime, because they all shared the night watches and would not take risks with reefs in the darkness.