The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  This might explain his reaction to the clerical error on the letters patent that described his new diocese. Selwyn’s territory should have extended just past the tip of New Zealand’s North Island—about 34 degrees south of the equator. But someone scribbled “34 degrees north” latitude where he should have written “south.” This extended his territory thousands of miles through Melanesia, past the equator and the Tropic of Cancer to well beyond Hawaii. It was a mistake, but Selwyn was as ambitious as he was willful. He studied navigation and Polynesian grammar on his voyage from England south to New Zealand. Within six years of arriving, he was hitching rides with the Royal Navy into the heart of Melanesia. He befriended chiefs, charming them with gifts of fishhooks, axes, and calico, then convinced them to let him carry away the most promising of their youngsters to his Christian school in New Zealand. (Most of the recruits were after more axes and fishhooks. In fact, the trade was so central to the bishop’s persona that islanders confused his title with the word fishhook. They called him “bishhooka.”) The strong boys, the ones who didn’t drop dead from the flu, dysentery, or homesickness, were molded into an army of black apostles and sent back from New Zealand to the islands, where to preach was to invite ostracism and, occasionally, assassination.

  Selwyn’s progress was slow at first, and his task was urgent. Catholic and Presbyterian missionaries were already trickling across the Pacific from Tahiti and Tonga, and they were keen to steal his recruits. He needed help. In 1855, Selwyn returned to England to drum up support for his mission. His sermons inspired a young man of impeccable credentials. John Coleridge Patteson was the son of a judge, and a former captain of Eton’s First Eleven cricket squad. He was also a village curate and a linguist. The latter skill would be useful: Selwyn’s potential converts spoke more than a hundred different languages. Patteson was not yet thirty when he accompanied Selwyn back to New Zealand and then into the unknown islands aboard the mission ship Southern Cross. In 1861, Selwyn handed the entire mission over to Patteson and consecrated him the first bishop of Melanesia.

  Patteson was even more ambitious than his mentor. Every year he ventured farther into the archipelago. At each new island he swam to shore from the ship’s whaleboat with a vocabulary notebook tucked inside his hat and presents tied around his neck. He picked up dozens of local languages, and in them tried to explain to the islanders that they had got the nature of the cosmos all wrong. He told them that if they learned to obey his god, they could live on after death; but if they did not obey, they would go on to endless pain and sorrow. And then he took their children away.

  In New Zealand, then later at the mission’s new base, six hundred miles north on Norfolk Island, the boys were instructed in the dignified rituals of the Anglo-Catholic liturgy, not to mention the social graces that came with an Eton education. While the students learned how to button shirts and tie shoelaces, how to use knives and forks, how to read, pray, sing hymns, and play cricket, they whispered about the world they had left behind. Robert Henry Codrington, the third hero of The Light of Melanesia and headmaster of the mission school, listened to their stories. Codrington was a scholar, a fellow of Oxford, erudite yet remarkably unassuming. The students trusted him, and he collected their secrets with the hunger of an exiled academic. He passed some of those secrets on to my great-grandfather. The rest he consigned to paper, and many of those jottings and sketches languished for years in the attic of Rhodes House. I found them, and they drew me into a world positively vibrating with supernatural power, where ghosts and spirits moved among men and miracles happened constantly.

  The boys told Codrington about mana, an invisible force that flowed through the atmosphere of life, through objects, people, and actions. It appeared without warning. It helped the ancestor spirits to speak. It could be concentrated and directed for good or evil. Everyone had a little mana in him. In New Georgia, islanders were sure it was concentrated in people’s heads. That’s why the New Georgians chopped off the heads of their enemies and carried them home. Head-hunting was quite logical, if you thought about it: a head full of mana was the most useful treasure of all.

  The Melanesians had no supreme being, but their islands were thick with spirits who attached themselves to stones, places, animals, or even words. Sometimes the spirits screamed and howled through dark nights. Sometimes, amid hidden groves of tangled banyan, they revealed their mysteries to the members of secret societies who asked for their help. The boys told Codrington about Qat, the ancestor-spirit hero of a dozen islands, who was always ready to come to the aid of seafarers. “Qat!” men shouted from their canoes. “May it be. Let the canoe of you and me turn into a whale, a flying fish, an eagle; let it leap on and on over the waves, let it go, let it pass out to my land.” And Qat would calm the sea, speeding the travelers home.

  The ghosts of other ancestors inhabited the bodies of sharks, alligators, octopuses, snakes, and birds. With secret knowledge, a man could win the favor of a shark ancestor, and that shark would come when called; it would herd schools of fish into his net. It would also devour his enemies. The ancestors rewarded allegiance with the same fierce loyalty as the Lord of the Old Testament. Just as God had smashed the enemies of Moses, so the ancestor spirits helped Melanesians sink their enemies’ canoes.

  There wasn’t just one holy ghost in Melanesia; there were thousands of them. And Melanesian spirituality was egalitarian. With the right technique, anyone could harness the power of curses, magic cures, and helpful spirits. Anyone could collect and direct mana. The ethereal realm wasn’t in heaven. It was all around you. It was in you.

  But those spirits, as powerful and plentiful as they were, began their retreat even as Codrington’s anthropological opus, The Melanesians, made their names familiar to academics around the world. Codrington’s Melanesian converts grew ashamed of their dances, their secret societies, and their ghosts. In the pidgin English picked up from traders, they began to call their ancestors by the name white men had given them: devil-devils. When the students returned home with the new teaching, they destroyed shrines and cast the devil-devil stones into the sea.

  One by one, the islands of Melanesia were claimed by the competing mission societies. Sometimes the Anglicans squabbled with Presbyterians and Roman Catholics over God’s new kingdom, but eventually deals were cut, islands were traded back and forth, and palm-thatched cathedrals rose on the shores of every major island lying in the 1.5 million square miles of ocean between New Zealand and New Guinea. By the time Henry Montgomery crossed the reef at Nukapu to pay his respects to Patteson’s ghost, a sturdy iron cross had been erected on the scene of the martyr’s last stand. He was assured that the conversion of Patteson’s murderers was a fait accompli. Perhaps that is why he left Melanesia after his three-month tour of the islands—that’s right, his was not the hair-raising adventure I had constructed as a boy. My great-grandfather, above all, was a storyteller. He went home to write, to glorify the names of his mission heroes. And the shark spirits and ancestors who had watched over Melanesians for thousands of years receded in the shadow of the new god, while the old knowledge went fallow in Codrington’s academic jottings.

  Yet something of Melanesia did follow the missionaries home to the northern drizzle. I saw it in my great-grandfather’s portrait, in the way he seemed to gaze through the shadows to some unseen light. I saw it in his writing, which was not the same after his brief tour through the region of magic. He had always insisted that the Apocalypse, the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, would be played out in every age. He may once have meant this metaphorically. Not anymore. In Melanesia he concluded that supernatural power was real, and it was usually the devil’s work. Sorcerers’ use of charms to inflict death or disease was a manifestation of the Evil One’s will. He wrote: “I see no cause to disbelieve, in fact, it seems to me reasonable, that Satan, in whose bond they are as heathen, should be able to bestow a hurtful power upon some of them.”

  Henry Montgomery was proud of the rationalist trad
ition that had influenced his church, yet he sailed back to Tasmania and then home to England a mystic, desperate to see a manifestation of his own god. He was convinced that something about England’s cold climate made it difficult for his countrymen to commune with the supernatural world. He despaired: “It seems to be a fact that the nearer the home of your race is to the Equator the easier it is for your race to see the unseen: and the further from the Equator the harder it becomes.”

  He would wait years for his own god to appear to him. But after his retirement to the family estate in Donegal, Ireland, after hundreds of communions, thousands of hymns, and a hundred thousand prayers, the vision finally did come. Henry was wandering in his garden above the shivering waters of Lough Foyle, in the half-light before dawn. He was ready.

  First came the ghosts of his ancestors, tramping one by one through the roses. He was not afraid. They spoke to Henry approvingly. They had seen his work and knew it to be good. A mistlike veil settled upon the garden. Daffodils and snowdrops began to stir as though whispering in their own secret language. The ancestors raised their faces and their hands to an unseen spirit, and they urged Henry to follow it into the stone church they had built amid the oaks. He crept to the church door, pushed against its worn grain, and slipped inside. That’s when he felt his Lord looking down on him. He fell to the stone floor and covered his eyes. God asked Henry, just as he had asked Abraham: “Lovest thou me?” Henry did not reply. He could not bring his lips to form words. All he could do was weep with shame and awe, and know that the Lord would accept that as his answer. He awoke with the light of Easter morning, feeling a new vigor for the pilgrim path he had followed to Melanesia and intended to follow all the way to heaven.

  Tales of visions are like mist and rumors. They offer nothing tangible to hold on to. Oxford gave me something more solid. I had my packet of sand. I had the name of my island. Nukapu was the place where old Melanesia had made its last stand, it was the home of the ghost that drew my great-grandfather across the water, and it was undeniably real. If Nukapu was the place where myths intersected, it might also be the place where they could be measured. I folded the packet and placed it back in its envelope.

  I left Oxford on a Sunday. A storm was dragging itself across the hills. The wind was battering the year’s first crocuses back into the earth. The bells of the cathedral were calling the faithful to consume the body and the blood of Christ, so that their souls would be washed pure and that Jesus might dwell in them. Those bells rang and rang, but the people didn’t come. I marched to the train station, thinking about cannibals, sacred dances, ancestors who didn’t vanish after death but who lived on, inhabiting rocks, sharks, sacred groves, and violent storms.

  What had become of the islands my great-grandfather’s brotherhood of gentlemen had set out to transform? Who had won the battle for souls now that the sacred fire had dimmed here at the heart of the empire? Although I knew it was the worst kind of romantic primitivism, and though I was certain that Melanesian myths were just as illusory as the ones to which my ancestors clung, I let myself imagine an island where gospel and empire had never taken hold, a place where drumbeats and painted skin and searing ritual still marked the survival of the world the missionaries sought to destroy. I imagined barefoot mystics revealing the secret light of their magic. I imagined a vision more powerful than my great-grandfather’s. My heart raced, and I was gripped by the urgent thought of secrets disappearing beneath the waves, and the idea that The Light of Melanesia might only be the beginning of a story. I boarded the express to Paddington. The train lurched forward. Rainwater streamed across my window, obscuring the spires of Oxford, the ragged sky, and the lethargic Thames, leaving nothing but the rumble and click of the tracks and the whisper of an idea. Nukapu. I was moving south.

  2

  The Business of Port Vila Is God

  Good-bye. I vanish from civilization, hoping to return a wiser man.

  —HENRY MONTGOMERY, letter, 1892

  My plan was simple, which is how adventures begin, but not how they end. I would follow the route my great-grandfather described in The Light of Melanesia, the route he and his predecessors had sailed aboard the Southern Cross. I would travel by ship, yes, and perhaps also by launch and canoe and on foot. I would find the descendants of the missionary-killers. I would find my heathens. I would cross the reefs and wade to shore on Nukapu, and I would stand beneath Patteson’s cross, where history and myth would be made utterly clear to me by someone very old and wise.

  But where exactly was I going? Melanesia refers not to a country or a single archipelago but a racial theory projected onto maps. French explorer Dumont D’Urville invented the name Melanésie to represent the swath of islands of the western South Pacific inhabited by dark-skinned people. Melas and nesos are Greek for “black” and “islands.” Unlike Polynesians (who populated the many—poly—islands to the east), the people whom D’Urville encountered from New Guinea to Fiji were so dark that he imagined they were transplanted from Africa. They weren’t, but the name stuck.

  There was a map in The Light of Melanesia on which were scattered dozens of islands, but no continents. The map had no scale, but a faint arrow pointed toward its lower left-hand corner, and along that arrow was printed TO SYDNEY: 1500 MILES. That put the islands right in the heart of D’Urville’s Melanésie. The rest of the script was so minute and so faded that it required a magnifying glass. My glass revealed that the blotches on the lower right-hand corner were the New Hebrides, and the spilled coins above them were the Banks Islands, home of the ancestor spirit Qat. The slugs inching toward the frayed upper left corner of the page were the Solomon Islands. And out in the middle of nothingness, like dust on the page: the Santa Cruz Group. And if you strained, and imagined, then perhaps a smudge next to the loneliest of those flecks read: Nukapu.

  We dream places before we search for them. It has always been that way with Melanesia. The first explorers, who are said to have migrated to the islands from Asia as much as twenty thousand years ago, must have been led by faith. They could only paddle so far east past Papua New Guinea before the horizon ran out of islands. They learned to read the waves and the stars, but it was imagination that told ocean argonauts there was more land beyond the edge of their world.

  There is less room for imagination nowadays. We have the Internet and global positioning systems to guide us. The Internet told me that the New Hebrides had been renamed Vanuatu, a republic that billed itself as “the South Pacific’s Premier Tax Haven.” There were eighty islands, four golf courses, and banks promising the utmost in secrecy. The Santa Cruz Group had amalgamated with the Solomon Islands, which were declared emphatically to be “the Happy Isles.” A crude government Web site boasted of 992 happy islands and one very large satellite telecommunications dish of which Solomon Islanders were very proud. News reports tended to focus on how Solomon Islanders were apt to burn villages and shoot each other with machine guns. “Death on the Altar” was one headline. I decided to start in Vanuatu and ease my way toward the chaos.

  This is how travel writers work: they contact a country’s national tourism bureau, they promise to write sunny stories about golf and cold beer and people who never stop smiling, and then they ask for free flights, hotels, meals, and booze. Especially booze. Yes, and then they spend weeks lounging in crisp linen sheets, watching BBC World News, and drinking guava punch. It’s called a reciprocal relationship.

  I do not care about linen sheets, but I do like the idea of flying for free, so I wrote to Vanuatu’s National Tourism Office, making promises and asking for help. I caught a 747 from Los Angeles to Fiji—free—then the weekly shuttle to Port Vila, capital of Vanuatu, on Efate Island. That was a two-hour flight, and free as well. But you are not really free when you make these deals. It can take days to extricate yourself from the mechanisms of industrial tourism.

  It was dark and humid when I stepped off the plane in Port Vila. An official from the tourism bureau intercepted me at customs
, bundled me into her car, and drove me away from the lights of the airport, through a forest, over a hill, and into the arms of Le Meridien Resort and Casino. I was greeted by a pair of giggling teens in Hawaiian shirts, bearing hors d’oeuvres and champagne. My bungalow overlooked a lagoon. The bathtub was bigger than a car, and it had six jet engines. I fell onto a king-sized prairie of linen, opened Robert Henry Codrington’s anthropological study The Melanesians, and gazed at his drawings of pagan dancers. Clad in masks and leaves, they looked like dream monsters from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I fell asleep without supper.

  At dawn, I jogged around the golf course, following the high fence that kept the riffraff away from the realm of linen sheets. I hit the breakfast buffet and sat among the Australian bankers and their families. The bankers were fat and exhausted, the wives hideously thin. The bankers stuffed their children with sausages, the wives sipped mineral water. Flies wandered across their shoulder blades. We ate steamed plums and chocolate croissants. La Traviata wafted through the palms.

  Later, the woman from the tourism office called me with a plan. There was golfing to be done. And a harbor cruise. And shopping. Anything she could do to help, she said. Anything at all. I broke out in a sweat.

  “Heathens,” I said. “I’m looking for heathens.”

  “Ah, yes, we have the photos at the cultural center,” she said.

  “Living heathens,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “This is a Christian island.”

  I hung up the phone and, neglecting to turn off the air conditioner, slipped away, past the laundry girl and the groundskeepers and the resort guards. I ran out the gate and all the way into town.