Henderson's Spear

by Ronald Wright

  The rain ended by dawn. I wriggled from my cocoon into a world of mist. Somehow I got a fire going and made tea. After that I pressed on miserably, each step bringing down a shower of drips. At last, around midday, I saw open light through the trees: a track, presumably the road to Taipivai. But Muake seemed too close.

  I sat under a mango tree and ate some nuts and chocolate. Revived, I left my pack there and took a look around. I could hear the roar of a waterfall; if I could see it, it might fix my position. The central plateau of Nuku Hiva is a raised dish of swamps and streams overflowing in three great waterfalls, two of which drop into the forked canyon of Typee.

  This high wilderness had been a no mans land in ancient times, avoided by the Marquesan tribes except when they swarmed up here to make war in clearings strewn with bones and broken weapons. Again it struck me how Balkanized these islands had become, as if the history of whole continents had had to be repeated here in miniature. The people might know themselves to be descended from a single fleet, yet still they divided and fought—as if human enmity must always fill the space allowed it, whether an island or a world.

  The roaring strengthened until I was certainly above a large waterfall. But all I could see was a swollen river, narrow, deep, and fast, vanishing over the lip of a chasm brimming with spray. I went closer, lured by an illusion of safety spun by the mist. The edge was dangerous, an overhang of slippery grass, loose stones, and clay. Suddenly the mist rose in an updraft, revealing a long canyon gouged a thousand feet deep into the land. This great waterfall had to be Vaiahu. Not far from here, Melville had pushed aside a bough and looked “straight down into the bosom of a valley” like “a glimpse of the gardens of Paradise.”

  He had seen thatched houses, bleached and glistening, but now there was no sign of human beings at all. Jungle covered everything except the steepest cliffs. Small clouds were sailing like balloons between the sheer green walls.

  I wondered if Jon had seen this. I felt certain he had. He sought out such places—for their own sake and for photographs. I felt him with me, looking through my eyes. And I thought of you. If you were like me, you’d want to see this too.

  There was no way down. It took Melville and Toby several days and nights of great hardship to cross the Vaiahu River higher up, reach the second branch of the Y-shaped Typee Valley, and literally drop into the canyon, launching themselves from a precipice onto the crown of a palm tree as if it were a safety net.

  By then Melville was feverish and lame, his leg bitten by some “congenial inhabitant of the chasm,” probably a centipede. “The continual roaring of the cataract—the dismal moaning of the gale through the trees—the pattering of the rain, and the profound darkness, affected my spirits to a degree which nothing had ever before produced. Wet, half famished,… nearly wild with the pain I endured, I abandoned myself to frightful anticipations of evil.”

  I went back to where I’d had lunch and started along the road towards Taipivai. After an hour I came to the slide, a cone of red earth and chunks of basalt. It wasn’t hard to scramble across. I’d not gone much further when I heard a vehicle. A Marquesan family went past in a red pick-up, inspected the barrier, and turned round, giving me a welcome lift to Typee.

  They were free with smiles, but taciturn as the rest. I thought: Getting people to speak to me (let alone to camera) will be difficult. No one here seems even faintly curious about outsiders. I suppose they’ve had enough of us.

  Fourteen

  ENGLAND

  Riverhill. January, 1900

  HOW STRANGE TO WRITE THE DATE of a new century, tho’ mathematicos tell us we’re stuck in the old one for another year yet. What will it bring, one wonders? Or should I be sanguine and ask, What wonders will it bring? Twelfth Night last night, and we gathered—the whole tribe and sundry neighbours—for our yearly reading of the play in Mothers drawing-room. Ivry was a radiant Olivia, and Admiral George a salty Antonio. Gertrude read both Viola and Maria, equally well. Henry had great fun as Aguecheek. But I believe I can honestly say, without fear or favour, that I stole the show with my Sir Toby Belch. Ivry says that’s nothing to be proud of, since I didn’t have to act! Well, she’ll soon have a break from my coarse male presence about the house: back to Kumasi in a month. And she has hinted, though I hardly dare hope—and the news brings almost as great apprehension as joy—that when I return, a little stranger may have joined us.

  So much in the future! But back, now, to that anonymous landfall in the South Pacific, and the conclusion of my voyage in troubled waters of the past.

  I had to admire Skinner’s midnight seamanship when I went on deck next morning. Cirrus raced across a turbulent heaven, but we lay snug as any ship in a bottle. He’d brought his vessel several miles up a narrow reach gashed into the steep island as if by a titanic axe, and had anchored in water scarcely deeper than her draft in the one spot where no passing vessel beyond the reef could see us, because of an intervening motu, or islet, tufted with coconuts.

  The cleft (a “tickle” he called it) resembled a firth or fiord, though cold northern words can’t convey the luxuriant verdure draping the cliffs: here a tracery of ferns on pillowed basalt, there an overhanging rainforest, the great trees nearly touching across waters Skinner had navigated in the dark. Phaetons wheeled far above between the cliffs, snowy plumage flashing and their long tailfeathers trailing like kite ribbons, white and pink. Silver torrents threaded down from a peak lost in cloud, vanishing into dark ravines and leaping from ledges in bridal veils.

  I was roused from contemplation of this scene, which I longed to paint at the first opportunity, by a shout from a double canoe emerging from the river at the head of the gorge. It held three big men attired in red-and-white kilts, who came alongside, shouting Karani! Karani! until Carny emerged and bade them aboard. From the hearty greeting and warm embraces the diminutive skipper received from these bronze giants, it was clear that Skinner was a frequent visitor to this smugglers’ cove. All went below for “calibogus.”

  After half an hour or so Prince Eddy, Dalton, and I were called. Skinner introduced us to the islanders, one of whom had a smattering of English. “These gentleman,” he said to them, “have business of their own to discuss with you. So I’ll take me leave. Con permiso.” His manner with us had become more respectful since Dalton had at last told him who we were. There could be no keeping the secret now that Eddy would have to play a ceremonial role, for if Skinner didn’t treat the Prince with due deference it would have disparaged him before the natives.

  The name of the island was never divulged to me by Dalton, though I know very well it was Raiatea. I would recognize instantly, should ever I see them again, its turquoise reefs, dark woods, and lofty mountains. While Tahiti itself had been lost to the French beyond any hope of recovery since Pomare V’s abdication, affairs in the Leewards hung in the balance, and this island of our landfall was the key, in Dalton’s view, to the outcome for the whole Leeward group.

  The French had suborned the chief of neighbouring Tahaa, setting him up with a flagpole and two hundred marines as “King” of both. His dominion, however, extended no further than a cannon shot from the only haven deep enough for a man-of-war. The rest of Raiatea and others in the group were united in their opposition to French designs by a guerrilla leader operating from the mountains, a man named Teraupoo.

  My latest intelligence is that these islands remained in a state of warfare throughout the 1880s and ’90s, the native faction opposed to France yielding to the tricolore only a year ago as I write, its leader packed off to New Caledonia in chains.

  Dalton explained to the skippers guests that we were British, that one of us was a grandson of Queen Victoria, and that we had weighty matters to discuss with their chief. When the three men grasped that Eddy was a Prince, they fell prone before him and launched into a long harangue. The gist of this, conveyed by Skinner, was that they were commoners who had come aboard under orders to obtain certain supplies; they had never expecte
d to meet an Arii Peretani, a High Chief of Britain. They were not worthy to welcome him, and begged our leave to alert their own chiefs, in order that a suitable reception might be prepared.

  So we waited several hours, and I got in my painting after all. Skinner minded his own business, which included the swift unloading of heavy kegs and boxes. He warped his vessel round neatly until she faced the sea. During our whole time on that island, he kept fires lit and steam up—a wise and prescient precaution.

  Not long after midday there emerged from the shade of a coconut grove near the river a crowd of several dozen Polynesians attired in a mix of foreign and local fashions—top hats, pandanus wreaths, phaeton-plume headdresses, bustles and ponchos of tapa cloth, cotton pyjamas, silk waistcoats. The mature women wore decorous cloak-like dresses of Wesleyan couture, but their black hair was gay with orange blossom, gardenias, and hibiscus blooms. The nubile girls had on nothing but the pareu, a bright rectangle of muslin or calico wrapped tightly round their slender forms and knotted like a bathtowel just above the bosom.

  What caught all eyes, as we rowed ashore, was a tableau of Britannia sitting regally under a breadfruit tree, so startling and incongruous a sight it seemed an hallucination induced by Skinner’s grog. The goddess was posed more or less as she appears on the back of every penny: a lovely statuesque young girl draped like Athena, a long spear in one hand and her other resting on a shield emblazoned with the Union Jack.

  Dalton and myself stayed in the gig, but the Arii Peretani was hoisted out bodily by a man standing in the water. This giant, who wore a Norfolk jacket and deerstalker but no trousers, and who proved to be seven feet tall when he strode ashore, bore Eddy on his shoulders as a man might carry a three-year-old along the beach at Weston-Super-Mare.

  “Not so much an honour, Henderson, as an insurance policy,” Dalton commented, citing Reverend Ellis. “In the old days, if a high chief’s feet touched ground it immediately became his properly. So they kept visiting dignitaries aloft. Hard work. Many of them weighed three hundred pounds.”

  Once Eddy was safely deposited on a stool, his white suit a trifle wet about the ankles, Britannia approached to lay her shield and spear gracefully before him. Smiling and uttering maeva, “welcome,” the dusky avatar of our national goddess placed a garland of petals around his neck, as is done among the Hindoos. We too were given the same honour as we stepped ashore. This, said Dalton, was not merely a welcome but a precaution against the islands ghosts and spirits, unusually plentiful hereabouts because the mountain above us was a sort of elephants’ graveyard for migrating souls from all over the Societies.

  “But they’re Christians!” Eddy exclaimed.

  “So are we,” replied his tutor. “But how many in England do not believe in ghosts?” The evangelization of this place, he added, had been done in an irregular way by a pair of Cockney Dissenters, a blacksmith and a ham actor.

  “They set themselves up as little kings, as that type of missionary often does.” He sniffed disdainfully. “Fellows were out of their depth. Here they were, in the very Mecca of heathenism, with a temple to Taaroa on one side and to Oro, God of War, on the other. It was all too much for our East End divines. The actor went native, or off his head, or both—I forget—and the blacksmith became more interested in building schooners than toiling in the Lord’s vineyard. He kept sailing away, years at a time, seeking softer ground in which to plant the Wesleyan seed. The islanders made do without him, cobbling together heretical beliefs from the new faith and the old.”

  Dalton’s voice fell confidentially. “I have no doubt that half the people gathered here today could, if pressed, recall the last great sacrifice to Oro, when a hundred enemy were slain. Including a Frenchman or two. Anyone over thirty might have seen it.”

  I ventured a predictable joke about French cooking.

  “Actually, you’re wrong there, Henderson. The Tahitians were not cannibals. Strictly speaking. But a high chief might exercise the privilege of swallowing a victim’s eye. They say Cook had to do it when he was here, to show what a great man he was. Down the hatch like a Brightlingsea oyster!”

  The day’s ceremony consisted mainly of feasting, though a few abstained altogether on the grounds of some taboo. The Fijian dines heartily and quickly, keen to resume the important business of kava drinking. These Tahitians made a great show of food—course after course of fish, yams, breadfruit, tubers, baked pork, corned beef, bananas, and paw-paw—until all of us were full as ticks. One saw how the person of a chief might easily attain three hundredweight.

  We were asked to be patient while their leader readied himself to greet us, which would happen on the morrow. At dusk we returned to the ship, had brandy and cigars, and went to our bunks. Britannia insisted that Eddy keep her regalia, and when these were brought aboard we saw that the shield was a large green turtle shell over which an old Union flag had been stretched. The spear seemed to date from earlier times, when the islanders had no iron. It was wholly of a hard, dark wood, very finely worked and polished, with a shaggy braid of human hair set into a groove at its base.

  With dawn came a moaning of conchshells, the sound wavering, for wind was scudding down the firth in broomstrokes. A whale-boat came alongside while we breakfasted. Sensing that a certain buoyancy might be required of Eddy, Dalton made no objection to a round of calibogus.

  We proceeded under oars to the mouth of the bay. Skinner came with us, having again enjoined Oputu to keep up steam even if we were gone several days. As the gorge widened, the forest on the cliffs began heaving and tossing, shedding many a leaf and frond into our boat. Skinner seemed worried by the weather but otherwise at home. I admired the views of island and reef as we passed between the two, the land rising in bold sweeps from the inside waters, choppy now but nothing like the open sea, where rollers ran murderously upon the reef and spent themselves in gouts of spume with a report of heavy guns.

  Cook wrote that these shores, when first he saw them, were so thickly ringed by habitations that he could hardly tell where one village ended and the next began. Now a house was a rare sight. Dalton remarked that civilization was threatening to exterminate the native race. A thousand had died on Tahiti in the last ‘flu epidemic, while not a single European perished. Jeremiahs had arisen, preaching that the white man sent these plagues intentionally, and it was only a matter of time before the last survivors would be rounded up and shot like pigs.

  In mid-morning we drew into a bay, beaching below a village of burnt and ruined houses, testimony to a recent French bombardment. We were asked to follow on foot along the beach and up an overgrown path through young woods reclaiming former cultivations. As we climbed, this bush gave way to primaeval fern trees, gloomy banyans, and gnarled Tahitian chestnuts whose buttress roots snaked along the ground like spilled intestines. These moody trees had stood here long before the white man. A chill ran down my back and I had the notion of trespassing on Druidical groves.

  We emerged at length into what had once been a large paved clearing, now half covered with scrub. Here and there were ancient buildings—walls of basalt blocks, platforms with seats made of slabs, and a standing stone of phallic shape and heroic size, being taller than myself. Here, on their ancestors’ thrones, sat three men of aristocratic bearing arrayed in feathers and tapa. They rose to greet us. All were arii, or chiefs, and one a deacon of the church. Their military commander was not among them, for which they apologized, saying Teraupoo would join us at dusk, if not before.

  The gathering was small: these three, we four whites, and a dozen other natives of both sexes. Eddy was enthroned on a stone seat, but the rest of us, not being arii of any sort, were obliged to sit on the ground. Skinner presented our hosts with a massy kava root from Fiji, which struck them as a gift beyond price, for the sacred plant had died out on their island. Expecting another gargantuan feast, we had eaten little at breakfast, but no food was in evidence. Instead, a girl approached Eddy, a tall beauty who might have stepped from the romant
ic pages of Rarahu. Her slim body was wound in pale muslin printed with large crimson flowers. Behind each ear was a hibiscus of matching hue, and her dark hair, which flowed abundantly to her waist, was studded with the small white stars of tiare tahiti, the wild gardenia whose heady fragrance beggars all description. So different was her attire and manner that it took me a moment to recognize this nymph as the very same who’d played Britannia.

  Dalton glanced at her longingly, perhaps in expectation of her effect on the Prince. But instead of singing a pretty song of welcome, or planting a wreath on Eddy’s head, or a kiss upon his cheek, the girl knelt opposite him, put her face within a few inches of his, and opened her mouth with her fingers as if displaying her ivory to a dentist. One of the chiefs whispered something in the Princes ear. An astonished Eddy then performed a minute oral inspection, pronouncing the damsels mouth to be flawless and spotlessly clean. She then approached each one of us and did the same.

  Though the procedure struck me as a shocking intimacy, the girls youth and beauty outshone any awkwardness when her eyes met mine. She had the large liquid eyes of Polynesia, dark and clear as forest pools, radiating a calm dignity as if to say that this was an honour for both of us, a happy meeting, the most natural thing in the world. Her nose was typical for her race, soft and wide like a baby’s, and I caught a trace of mischief in her glance as she inspected my much sharper organ. I heard her inhale, and at the same time I breathed the gardenia scent of her hair, the coconut oil and cinnamon on her golden skin.