Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  “A blue whale,” he said one evening, “can hear another’s sonic boom across a thousand miles of ocean. Imagine what a nuclear blast must do to ears like that. Maybe that’s why their numbers aren’t recovering. We’ve deafened them all and they can’t find each other.”

  It seemed almost beyond belief that between Frank’s voyage and Jon’s the Pacific had passed from cannibal kings to nuclear powers. One lifespan: Mole’s avalanche of human time. And it came to me in a rush of historical vertigo that if Henderson had lived into his eighties, he’d have seen the atom bombing of Japan.

  Most evenings I turned in early to read Henderson, or Stevenson’s travels—he wandered the South Seas a few years after Frank. I’d spend hours listening to my Walkman. Or I’d take out Bob’s letter for the smile it gave me, the glow of him warm in his tweed over there in Vancouver watching the waves roll in, waves that might have passed beneath my bottom—and just to hear the old guy’s voice.

  Liv, my darling:

  You left a mug in my briefcase with crimson lipstick on the rim. Every morning I give it a kiss. The marks you left on me have faded (just as well), but Olivia is engraved on my heart.

  You’ve been gone … what? A week? Already I’m desolate. Your voice—I miss your voice almost as much as the rest of you. No one to call after class. And who will help me drink the Widow? You should see the students I have this term. Not a kindred soul among them. When I mention Rimbaud they think I mean Sylvester Stallone.

  If you’ve gotten this you’ll have met Lars by now. Anything he has to say is worth listening to. But don’t let his air of éminence grise overawe you. He and I got stinking drunk on Granville Island when he was here for the Writers’ Festival. He fell off one of those little bathtub water-taxis, and we had to fish him out of False Creek by the seat of his pants. Imagine that—a guy who sailed the Kon-Tiki!

  Are you off to Nuku Hiva? I want a long letter from there no matter what you find. Or don’t find. I know things look promising, but brace yourself for the worst. What you’re doing is an act of exploration that will demand as much bravery from you as any physical danger I can think of. Call me collect at work if things get rough—if you can get to a phone. Promise.

  Send a card from somewhere warm and sticky. I’ll join you anywhere when term’s over. Name the place, and I’ll invent a grand Pacific writer there, whom I need to interview before he croaks.

  Dance the obscene Lory-Lory in the moonlight and think of me.

  Already there are whiskers on my palm. XXXX B.

  With this Bob had enclosed notes for a lecture he was working on. Or so he said. I think this was really a gift to me, his ideas for my film. He even hinted I might steal his title. “Titles aren’t copyright, my love.”

  Literature 307, Pacific Authors. “Melville’s Ghosts.” Prof. Robert_____

  “In life the great whales body may have been a real terror to his foes; in death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world. Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend?”

  Moby Dick

  Widely regarded as the greatest novel written by an American, Moby Dick is the only Melville work well known to modern readers. But during his lifetime, his first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, outsold everything else he wrote.

  Closely based on the true story of his running away to sea, and desertion at Nuku Hiva, Typee brought Melville fame and scandal at the age of twenty-six. He was “the man who lived among cannibals,” who witnessed scenes of “savage” love, and took part in them with the winsome Fayaway and her adolescent friends.

  Omoo (1847) continued the yarn with the authors mutiny and imprisonment at Tahiti. Readers wanted more of the same. But not long after his thirtieth birthday Melville began Moby Dick, publishing it in 1851. Far from being hailed as the masterpiece we recognize today, The Whale (as it was known in Britain) marked the start of a long dive in its author’s reputation. After its commercial failure, and the failure of all later books, the once dashing adventurer became a customs clerk to support his wife and children. Melville’s career ended much as it began, in obscurity and genteel poverty. Twenty years after his death, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had only this to say:

  His works of fiction and travel are of irregular execution. Typee and his other records of adventure were followed by tales so turgid, eccentric, opinionative, and loosely written as to seem the work of another author.

  Such was the judgement of the 19th century. And there things lay until Melville’s rediscovery in the 1920s by modernists such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who recognized him as a visionary ahead of his time—a literary Gauguin.

  Melville’s Lies.

  Were his early books travelogues, as American readers generally took them? Or ingenious fictions, as British critics suspected? This course will argue they are both, and that in their dual nature is the key to understanding all of Melville’s writing. His “ghosts” are not only those of the Polynesians he glimpsed in their last free days but also the shades of makebelieve with which he coloured his experience.

  Melville’s Loves.

  Contemporary readers were shocked and titillated by Fayaway, the naked Marquesan girl. Modern critics have been more intrigued by homoerotic undertones, to say nothing of “Buggerry Island”—a venue purged from later editions by the authors widow.

  Melville’s Hates.

  Melville deemed the white man “the most bloodthirsty, atrocious and diabolical race in the world.” Yet he was no simple follower of the Noble Savage. He was disturbed by the evil he found in paradise, and within himself. At the moment of escape from the Typee Valley, he used violence against the Marquesans who, despite his fears, had never raised a hand against him. “Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was about to commit”—a horror heard fifty years later from the mouth of Conrad’s Kurtz.

  Melville’s Expulsion from the Garden.

  In the Typee Valley Herman Melville found a flawed Eden, a better place than the civilized world. Yet he could not remake himself enough to stay there. Neither could he leave his Eden without violating it. This dilemma, the dilemma of the Fall, would echo through his whole life’s work. Beyond Typee lay a pilgrimage of despair, not to atheism but down to the sunless deep of the old Ophitic heresy: that the world being what it is, God must be evil or mad.

  In short, Herman Melville’s encounter with Natural Man (and Woman) in the cannibal valley equipped him to explore mans place in nature so profoundly and splendidly in Moby Dick.

  It was hard to think about my film now Nuku Hiva lay within reach, a ripening presence over the horizon. I was close, close to where Jon had been (however briefly), to the one certain proof of his existence after Korea. I was consumed with dread that the authorities might reappear. I was both hunted and hunter, filled with turmoil by the mounting gravity of waters my father had sailed more than thirty years ago. Where was he now? Could he have left any trace or clue? Would I be able to recognize it if he had?

  I reread the Typee Bob gave me in Vancouver. Melville’s Nuku Hiva might beguile me, might take my mind off Jon enough to let me sleep.

  Early in October I woke to a shout at dawn, summoned on deck for a first sight of the Marquesas. The sky had cleared and the ocean glittered in Canaletto wavelets to the rising sun. The spires of Ua Pou could just be seen from the masthead with binoculars, great shafts of stone poking like a mule’s ears through a frayed sombrero of cloud. We toasted landfall in malt whisky, the ship bowling along under her spinnaker while the island rose and grew into a dizzying Gaudí ruin of pinnacles, shadows, and rank greenery.

  The Tuamotus had been a deceptive place of swirling horizontals, the rise or fall of a few yards defining land from sea. Now I saw mountaintops that might have marched here from the Andes. The Marquesas had none of Tahitis softness, no coastal lagoon behind a barrier reef. They shared no shallows, nothing that might be called a sea. Each island was vertical and solitary, standing in oceanic depths.

  Our last night at sea was cl
ear and lovely. Venus followed the sun, a sinking flare in the twilight. Later the moon rose, near to full. We motored slowly by its light, aiming to reach Taiohae Bay before dawn, before anyone could know we were there. Taiohae, where Jon’s letter had been posted in 1953, was also the place we’d have to report the death. Anything might happen then.

  At last I told them why I’d come. I couldn’t stop talking. This might be the moment of truth, a moment of contact and discovery I hardly dared imagine. Or it might prove to be the end of hope, when everything would crumble like the contents of an opened tomb. I stayed on deck all night, unable to turn in without a glimpse of Nuku Hiva, as if afraid we’d miss the island altogether and sail on round the world.

  The smell of land preceded any sight of it—damp earth, blossom, the wet bonfire scent of a village.

  In the small hours there it was, a long pallor like the bone in a ships teeth. The moonlit glow of surf on a rocky coast.

  Taiohae’s great anchorage was once a crater. Aeons ago its outer wall gave way and the ocean rolled in, forming a horseshoe bay two miles across. Most of the wall still stands, rising from a lune of beach to a dark sugarloaf three thousand feet high, mossy with ferns and threaded with tiny waterfalls shattering in the wind. From this central cusp the crater rim embraces the bay in two steep headlands, closing like crab claws on the entrance. In a finish that is almost too much, needles of rock rise sheer from the water just beyond each pincer.

  “Lost in admiration at its beauty,” Melville wrote, “I experienced a pang of regret that a scene so enchanting should be hidden from the world.”

  My own feeling was the opposite: thank heaven this place was inaccessible. If not, it would’ve become another Rio or Acapulco. And there’d be no chance an Englishman could have hidden here thirty-six years.

  We approached the police station beneath an avenue of flamboy-ants, their flames lying all around on the white dust. A pig was basking in a wallow fed by a leaky tap on the gendarmerie wall. “Vatu, old mate!” said Simon. “Do the honours with the imperialists once more, would you? I might say the wrong thing.”

  The four of us trooped into the stone building, passports and ships papers in hand. A secretary and two gendarmes: a small French sergeant, a large Marquesan constable. They looked bored stiff and delighted to see us, taking us for American yachties seeking admission to French Polynesia.

  The sergeant had the look of a man who prefers talking to listening, a square face with a small jaw, its smallness emphasized by a droopy moustache and a tall brow that gave a top-heavy impression, as if it might topple forwards like a loose façade. With growing shock he listened to Vatu’s solemn relation of events, interjecting Ça alors! Non! Mon Dieu! The other said nothing. He was rotund and shy, concentrating on a pencil in front of him, setting it on end like an obelisk, catching it as it fell.

  When Natalie began describing her post-mortem, the secretary, a matronly Polynesian in a Mother Hubbard printed with red hibiscus blooms, excused herself and went outside. Natalie handed over the roll of film she’d shot during her investigation (I was thankful the nearest photo lab was a thousand miles away), a bag with the girl’s clothes, and a padded envelope containing the forensic evidence she’d gathered—samples of blood, hair, saliva, stomach contents, and vaginal swabs sealed in plastic bags. “These should be kept refrigerated all the time.” I saw a card I recognized—on one side an aerial view of Moorea; on the other were fingerprints.

  As each relic was set out on the desk in the rustic police station, beneath an old photo of de Gaulle and a fading tricolour stirred by a fan, the dead girl came before my eyes. She was much too near life (the life of a tourist, a nurse, a volunteer?) to have left her body like these empty clothes. That was one thing. The rest of it, the theories, our fears, the evils we’d imagined, now seemed nothing but a shipboard madness evaporating on dry land. The dreaded French authorities were only a pair of village bobbies, and this sad business would soon have an explanation.

  We asked Sergeant Benoit (the talkative one) if he knew of any missing vessel, wreck, or loss overboard. Natalie also asked if there’d been any reports of foul play. He was astonished by this question. In his experience murder was extremely rare. There hadn’t been a murder on his beat for six years, and that had been like all the others here, a crime passionnel sparked off by alcohol. This was a very quiet part of the world with delightful people. Only 7,358 (he was absurdly precise) in the whole archipelago, and only a fourth of these on Nuku Hiva. His duties seldom went beyond enforcing fishing regulations and breaking up a brawl.

  “As for deaths of foreigners at sea, they too are rare. Except for losses overboard, of course, but those are seldom found. People who are ill do not go yachting. The last one was before my time, and it was straightforward. Heart attack. An elderly gentleman with a young wife.…” A smile threatened to bolt from the tottering façade and was reined in.

  “Please understand. I must report everything you have told me to Papeete, and await instructions. I expect they will require us to take formal statements, so I must ask you not to leave Taiohae for now. You have been most helpful. All this is … is most professional in the care you have taken. I commend you all. Especially you, Madame Doctor.” Benoit aimed a courtly bow at Natalie.

  The pencil man looked at his watch. The sergeant frowned at an electric wall clock, stalled at ten to five. A procession of tiny ants was ascending single file from the floor into the casing. “It is now nearly midday. Please be so good as to come back this afternoon. Not too soon after lunch. There’s no point in inconveniencing yourselves before we have some word. I can recommend the cuisine and the ambience at Chez Merivi. Madame is a charming American lady. Madame Lily. Au revoir”

  The policemen shook our hands.

  Lily McIver spoke cheerful English, fluent French, and a smattering of Marquesan, all with the same Tennessee accent. She was slim, girlish, perhaps mid-forties, and still attractive to young men. Vatu and Simon preened unconsciously when she sat at our table for a chat. She wore a bright yellow sun dress, white sandals, and had taken time with her face.

  Chez Merivi, or Melville’s Place, clung to a hillside with a broad view of the bay, the flame trees scarlet and green over the houses, blue wisps rising from backyard kitchens as the village cooked its lunch. There was a Mr. McIver in a photo by the bar. Lily said they’d come to Nuku Hiva by boat many years ago, and built the restaurant and cabins with their own hands. She’d never left. He went back to Tennessee each winter, homesick for the cold, returning in spring to Nuku Hiva, a counter-migrating bird.

  I asked her if she could think of anyone, any old island character, who might fit the description of my father. Nobody came to mind. While we ate she went to some trouble phoning and putting the word around. There was no “Britisher” of the right age on any of the islands except a priest on Hiva Oa, a Father Damian who’d arrived in the 1970s and was probably Irish.

  “I don’t go back that far myself, you understand, but if a guy’d wanted to get lost here in the fifties I guess he could have. Ask the gendarmes. They’re usually back by four. Good luck!”

  “Liv, you’re not eating,” Vatu said. “If you don’t eat up we won’t be able to see you when you turn sideways. Kana vaka levu!” He was tucking in heartily as he always did, elegant portions of swordfish soon devoured, followed by a large order of chips. Natalie was eating absent-mindedly, worrying again about the police. Not these here, but the real ones back in Papeete, and the unseen power behind French Polynesia, the military command on Hao near Moruroa.

  I wanted only for this lunch to end. I had no appetite, couldn’t swallow. My stomach was hard and swollen. I couldn’t take my eyes off the view. He had been here. The Bremerhaven must have anchored where the Tui Marama lay, tiny and far below. He had walked under that avenue of flame trees to post his letter. In truth, the only reason to think Jon had lingered on this island was his mysterious reference to a man he wanted to see. That, and the absence of any fu
rther letter or wire—though they might have been destroyed by Mother. Yet no amount of reasoning could dislodge the thought that he had stayed on Nuku Hiva. That he could be here still, beneath a tin roof, a Marquesan wife cooking his lunch. Or somewhere beyond these mountains. Or living like a bear in the wild uninhabited interior, where Melville had roamed for days, utterly lost.

  Twelve

  ENGLAND

  Riverhill. November, 1899

  I FOUND MYSELF ON A SHIP without running lights, without name on transom or bow, flying a flag seven years extinct: a blue ground charged with a white shield, dove and olive branch, a device of crown and cross, and the words: Rerevaka na Kalou ka Doka na Tui, Fear God, Honour the King. The flag of Thakombau’s old kingdom, as if I’d shipped aboard a craft sailing out of the past.

  Nothing of this did I see till daybreak, having left Bacchante in the middle of an overcast night on a still ocean, half a watch from Levuka. No questions, Thurston had said. There was no one to ask anyway, only a strange seaman at the helm, a Polynesian in a calico kilt of purple sunflowers, with a wild mane and blue eye-glasses, grasping the spokes in tattooed hands and staring at the dawn. So we were headed due east, where no land bigger than a cricket field would be met for fifteen hundred miles. No questions!

  The sun leapt smartly from the curving sea and I tumbled towards it; the Copernican order seemed as blindingly true as the sun himself. Of course that great furnace burns motionless in space; of course our wet green world merely spins like a ballerina in the court of the fiery king.

  My word, she was fast, this ship without name. She had three masts, schooner-rigged, and the sleek hull of a grand yacht. Her sails were furled. A powerful engine urged her towards the sunrise, swallowing the ocean at the bow and spewing it astern. Two furrows marked our progress: a white trace from her screw, and a black boa in the air like the breath of an express.