“If you come back and stay at my hotel,” Kelsen was saying to them, “I’ll tell you the legend behind the volcano.”
5
Ninety Hours on the MV Brisk
The religious life, then, begins with a call to this sleeping
God to awake.
—NORTHROP FRYE, Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts
It was impossible to say just how Tanna had been transformed into such a psychospiritual Disneyland, such a breeding ground for prophets and wide-eyed, contradictory faith. Perhaps it all went back to the clash between kastom and the Old Testament absolutism the Presbyterians brought to the island.
Take the Reverend John G. Paton, the firebrand who landed in Port Resolution with his wife in 1858. Paton had a taste for confrontation, retribution, and high drama. His autobiography reads like the screen treatment for the Melanesia of my boyhood dreams. He describes how he dueled with pagan warriors and sorcerers; how they burned his house to the ground and stole all his possessions; how his wife, his child, and a colleague all died within three years of their arrival; how he sat for ten days, gun in hand, guarding his dead wife’s grave to prevent islanders from getting their hands on her putrefying remains. The heathens, he insisted, were voracious cannibals who “gloried in bloodshedding” and delighted in the taste of human flesh. After one tribal battle, Paton recalled that the bodies of half a dozen men had been stewed in the hot spring near the head of the bay. This presented a unique problem: “At the boiling spring they have cooked and feasted upon the slain,” Paton’s cook allegedly reported to him. “They have washed the blood into the stream; they have bathed there till all the waters are red. I cannot get water to make your tea. What shall I do?”
Paton fled on a passing ship in 1862. His story was so captivating, he managed to wring £5,000 from church audiences during a speaking tour of Australia. It was years before anyone realized that Paton had fabricated the juiciest bits of his story. (His claims of widespread cannibalism, for example, were exaggerated. Anthropologists who bothered to ask were told that enemies were eaten not because they tasted good but as a means of capturing mana and honoring one’s own ancestors. A single corpse might be passed from village to village as a means of solidifying alliances. And cannibalism was restricted by rules of kastom and kinship. There were never more than twenty-eight families on Tanna whose members had the right to consume human flesh.) Still, Paton had no problem with violence if it was carried out in the name of his own god. He returned to Port Resolution on the warship HMS Curaçoa four years after his departure. The ship shelled the villages along the bay, then its men landed to smash canoes, burn houses, and destroy crops. Paton claimed that the attack, which killed a handful of Tannese, did wonders for the Presbyterian mission. His successors ruled the Tannese as if they were children.
Henry Montgomery shared Paton’s sense of mission and some of his sentiments about race. He was confident of Anglo-Saxon superiority. But with greatness came responsibility: “Englishmen would do well to remember that their wonderful supremacy throughout the world is due in great measure to the existence of races inferior to their own.” The point, which he made often, was that it was England’s God-given duty to nurture the lesser races, who were not quite up to the task of leading themselves.
“It would appear that among certain child races independence is for centuries impossible,” he wrote years after his journey. “The power to transmit orders is not lightly to be put into hands that are not fit to wield such privileges.”
Unlike Paton, Montgomery was fond of Melanesians, but preferred to portray them as children rather than savages. Like boys and girls, islanders required education in manners and character as well as religion. He was thrilled to discover that his heroes, Selwyn, Patteson, and Codrington, had not forgotten the lessons of Eton: “The wise founders of this mission saw that the education of their charges lay more directly in their passage from idleness and dirt to cleanliness and diligence and method than by learning to read and write…. Improvement in diligence and orderlinesswent hand in hand with knowledge of the Heavenly Father.”
Everyone agreed that Melanesians needed guidance. Yet there was fierce rivalry among Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics as to just who would do the guiding. When the Presbyterian reverend John Geddie spotted white men wearing the telltale robes of Catholic priests on the shore of Aneityum, near Tanna, in 1848, he despaired: “In this we recognized at once the mark of the beast.”
The Anglicans of Selwyn’s Melanesian Mission were as fond of gilded finery and High Church ritual as Roman Catholics—in fact they considered their church to offer a purer, even more traditional version of the Catholic faith—but they disdained the French missionaries who dropped in on their islands uninvited. Henry Montgomery warned that the work of Roman Catholic missionaries was almost always fostered by the French government, “in order to counteract the influence of England.” A mission conducted for such unworthy motives could hardly have a noble and lasting effect. Therefore the Anglican mission had to do everything in its power to “protect native Christians from unscrupulous and ruthless [Roman Catholic] propagandists.”
The rivalry was just as fierce between English churches. Selwyn, Patteson, and Codrington were graduates of Britain’s most prestigious public schools and universities. They were of a different class than the members of grassroots mission societies, and both sides knew it. The Anglicans felt that their protestant competition—lowbrows who, like Paton, were forever waving their Bibles in the air and screaming warnings of eternal damnation—lacked the necessary intellect and temper for the task at hand.
“Well-meaning Englishmen who have been brought up in a somewhat narrow circle of thought and opinion are apt to make non-essentials into essentials, to the grievous hurt of the great cause,” opined my great-grandfather—himself a Harrow and Cambridge man.
The Anglicans thought themselves so different from their Protestant peers that one mission historian dubbed them “God’s Gentlemen.” They endeavored to remain polite and unfailingly reasonable in the face of defiant heathenism, but they also adapted a tenuously tolerant stance toward kastom. Dancing, smoking, drinking kava, the payment of bride price, none of the traditions the Presbyterians banned on Tanna was seen necessarily as a barrier to Christian salvation. Bishop Patteson told converts they should make up their own minds about them. As long as they pledged allegiance to the One True God, as long as their kastom didn’t break the Ten Commandments, then islanders weren’t necessarily against Christianity, even if they weren’t altogether for it just yet. The Anglicans delighted in traditional dances and costumes. Some gained a fondness for kava. They prided themselves on their tolerance, and they pooh-poohed the Presbyterians, who had a habit of outlawing any practice that reminded them even faintly of paganism.
For decades, the doctrine of “Christianity with civilization” had been an axiom for English missionaries around the world. The gospel was just one part of a curriculum that included aesthetic “improvements” such as the introduction of clothing, homes with separate bedrooms, and encouragement to enter the market economy. But here in the South Seas, the Anglicans were concluding—at least on paper—that some Melanesian social and cultural traditions could provide a cornerstone of a strong church.
R. H. Codrington, who was the first among Anglicans to write down the Melanesians’ stories, was the most sympathetic to kastom. After years as Patteson’s school headmaster, he ventured that kastom had already equipped Melanesians with a sense of right and wrong, a belief in life after death, and a concept of something like a human soul. In other words, there was already some light in Melanesia before the missionaries arrived. Kastom had in fact provided the heathens with a good foundation for Christian teaching.
By the end of the century, many Anglicans had even dismissed the notion that “civilization” was a necessary companion to Christianity. They encouraged islanders not to adopt heavy clothing and not to become “imitatio
n Europeans.” While the Presbyterians were arresting Tannese dance troupes, the Anglicans were romancing kastom.
The Anglicans were determined to avoid the ungentlemanly squabbling that saw mission societies battling over various islands throughout the New Hebrides. As Henry Montgomery put it: “Ours is rather a godly rivalry; not to pull others behind us, but to be first honourably and fairly in the great cause.” So after a few years of haggling, they agreed to leave the Loyalty Islands near New Caledonia to the London Missionary Society, and to let the Presbyterians and Roman Catholics fight over the southern islands of the New Hebrides—including Tanna and Efate. Selwyn and Patteson promised to concentrate their efforts north of Espiritu Santo, at the top end of the New Hebrides.
After ten days on Tanna I flew back to Port Vila—of course I flew: VanAir offered daily, air-conditioned flights between Tanna and the capital—and I waited for a passage north to Espiritu Santo, the gateway to Anglican Melanesia. The Anglican islands would be different, I thought. The Presbyterians had allowed no middle ground on Tanna, no compromise between kastom and Christianity. The collision of the two systems had buried the island’s soul in an avalanche of discordant cosmology. If Presbyterian ferocity had produced Tanna’s spiritual chaos, then surely Anglicanism would have fostered a more stable, reasonable cosmology. God’s Gentlemen would have eased their converts away from ghosts and magic while ever so politely applauding their quaint dances. Part of me hoped to find a pastoral, Victorian paradise. That was the part that was weary. Most of me wanted more sparks, more rumors, more magic. I had touched the edge of a mystery. I wanted to fall into it.
I found the MV Brisk at sunset, docked—or rather, run up like a World War II troop transport—against a grassy wharf on Vila Bay. She made the Havanna look like the Love Boat. She was more barge than ship; a shallow tub with all the crude geometry and elegance of a sheep dip. I couldn’t imagine her navigating the house-high swells that we would surely hit on our four-day journey north to Espiritu Santo. But I no longer feared the sea. I had acquired a supply of motion-sickness pills.
We set sail after dusk. The two dozen passengers on the open cargo deck had built mounds of pallets and luggage on which they huddled like penguins on bergs. As we left the refuge of the harbor, I saw why. The Brisk rolled pleasantly enough in the swell, but waves spilled over her bow anyway. Gradually, the cargo deck filled with water until it was as deep as a wading pool. I climbed up to a makeshift roof of corrugated iron in front of the wheelhouse. A thin layer of cloud spread across the sky, like a veil thrown up to protect the moon from the sparkle and glare of the sea. A warm breeze ran over me. I dozed off to the murmurs of the crew, the rumbling of the engine, the whoosh of the waves, and the rhythmic click and bang of the wheelhouse door, which opened and shut with each roll of the ship.
My dreams were peaceful at first. But then I drifted away from the Brisk and a forest grew up around me, and the knocking became the sound of tree branches jostling in the wind. I peered through the forest, through shadows that shifted across the moonlit earth, and there was the prophet Fred, sitting cross-legged, mumbling indecipherably and cradling a baby wrapped in gauze. A bloodstain appeared on the cloth and spread across it. I knew that Fred was performing another spontaneous circumcision. He raised his head and scowled at me. He had known all along I would betray him. The stain turned black and broke apart into a thousand tiny wings that rose from the cloth, swarming around me, droning in my ears, dancing around my eyes, landing on my neck. The mosquitoes prodded, poked, tested the surface with their invisible probosces, and then, one by one, they injected their poison into me.
Dreams are manifestations of unconscious fears and delusions. That’s what Freud taught us. I have always sought to return to this refrain, to see my dreams as the contents of the cluttered attic of my mind, so much bric-a-brac to be considered, yes, but then filed and packed away so that I might see each new day with clear eyes.
But this dream reached past the veil of sleep. It did not evaporate in the light of dawn. My skin began to itch even before I had awoken. Spots rose like tiny red kisses on the soft flesh of my arms and torso.
I dozed on the roof for three days as the Brisk bounced from island to island, threading together villages, mission stations, and coconut plantations, running into dozens of sandy shores, dumping cement mixers, rice, and rebar, collecting sack after sack of yam, taro, and sweet potato. We headed north, following the protected lee sides of Efate and low-lying Epi. When we rounded the northern tip of Epi, we were broadsided by the southeast swell. The Brisk did not cut through the waves like the Havanna. It was lifted by them, carried up over their shivering crests and swept down again into canyonlike troughs. Those waves were unnaturally blue, the color of transmission fluid. They lumbered. They were not violent. But they carried smaller waves that jostled, broke, and exploded over the ship’s bow until the cargo deck frothed and churned like a river in flood. We passed a volcanic cone that rose steeply into the clouds. That was Lopevi. We made three stops on a dark fin of black rock and jungle in Lopevi’s shadow.
My skin burned. The dream spots on my arm had multiplied, joined, and grew into an angry rash. I wanted to leap into the ocean.
“You cannot swim at this island,” the ship’s engineer told me. His name was Edwin. He was a rough man with cunning eyes and sores on his neck. “You will be eaten by the shark.”
“They have sharks here?”
“Just one shark. A kastom shark. We call him a nakaimo. He is the spirit of a dead man, and he likes white flesh. He ate his first white man fifty years ago. I can swim here, but you can’t. Ha!”
We crossed from Paama to Ambrym, which, according to my map, was dominated by a twelve-mile-wide caldera of black ash and steaming vents. All that igneous action had imbued the island with a certain cachet. Ambrym, they told me in Port Vila, was the island of fire magic. People were uniformly terrified of Ambrymese sorcerers, whose most infamous trick was to float into the homes of sleeping enemies, cut them open and pull out their guts, then replace them with leaves and sticks. The victims showed no scarring, but they tended to cough up plenty of leaf mulch before their deaths, which usually occurred within a few days. In 1997, Prime Minister Fidel Soksok told the Vanuatu Trading Post that black magic and poison were the biggest obstacles to economic development in the country. Everyone knew he was talking about the influence of Ambrymese sorcerers, who could not abide the successes of others.
The rim of the caldera was obscured by a great mushroom of dark clouds. We slid through a gap in the reef that guarded the island’s west coast and stopped to pick up a couple of red-eyed men at a Catholic mission station. The passengers on deck stepped back—or rather, recoiled—to make room for the Ambrymese, who chuckled and cooed menacingly.
Another night. The Brisk chugged toward specks of light on the horizon that grew into shoreside bonfires as we approached. The fires, which had been lit by people who hoped to send or receive cargo, marked passages through unseen reefs. I was not permitted to read or sleep. Men gathered around to eat my cookies and do what Melanesians like best, which is storian (“story-on”). Edwin, the engineer, was the bravest. He asked me if I liked island pussy. I sidestepped by asking him the first question most Melanesians usually ask strangers: “To which church do you belong?” He was a Seventh-day Adventist. In other words, no kava, no alcohol, no promiscuity, no dirty talk, I said. Edwin admitted he broke all those rules. He was wanfala backslider.
There was another backslider on deck. Graeme was a handsome, neatly dressed man who cradled a young boy in his arms. He shook my hand and asked me what my business was. I told him I was following the route my great-grandfather had taken aboard the Southern Cross. His eyes narrowed.
“So that means your granddaddy stole my granddaddy, doesn’t it?” Graeme asked in English.
“I suppose, um, yes.”
“Yes, that is exactly what happened. I know the story. They took our granddaddies to New Zealand and taught the
m the kastom stories of Israel. Then our granddaddies came back to our island and convinced everyone to join the church. It was easy to do, because the teachers had knives and axes and tobacco, all the good things that foreigners had.”
The crowd laughed jovially, but Graeme was earnest and breathless in his monologue. His eyes reflected the flame of an approaching fire. “Most people have forgotten that we once had our own god on Pentecost. Taka was his name. He helped us work magic to bring rain and food. Only a few people can do the magic now, but I am learning it. I go to the old kastom chiefs. I drink kava with them. We storian. They teach me.”
“Teach you what? Magic? Show me,” I said, knowing he would not.
“I am just now learning magic. But I know how to make sweet mouth.”
“Show me this sweet-mouth magic. I want to see it!”
The crowd exploded with shrieks of laughter.
“Sweet-mouth is magic for love,” explained Graeme. “You rub a chicken feather on a special stone, and then you say the name of the girl four times. After four days, she will come to you. She will follow you like a puppy.”
Graeme lived on Pentecost, which I know only by the embers of its beach fires and the clovelike taste of its kava. The Brisk ran up against a soft beach, and I followed Graeme to shore while men heaved sacks of copra across the beam of the ship’s searchlight. There was a shack selling kava, but only time for one shell.
“What about flying?” I asked Graeme, licking the kava scum from my lips. “Can you turn yourself into an owl or a flying fox?”
This was not such an absurd question. The first Anglican I met in Vanuatu, a sales executive for Le Meridien Hotel, had presented an equally fantastic notion to me several nights before. The exec was a modern woman. She had a business card, an e-mail address, and a diploma from a New Zealand business school. We had met to discuss the hotel’s golf course. But after two glasses of complimentary Chilean merlot, she announced matter-of-factly that her uncle was a sorcerer. When she was just a little girl, the uncle would cross the ocean to visit her at her village on Pentecost. No, he didn’t come by canoe. He changed himself into an owl, and he flew across the water. He had to be careful never to fly over a church while in his owl body, because every church had a column of energy, like a ray of light, shooting up into the sky from its roof. If he flew over that ray, he would crash. So the uncle flew carefully, but he flew often. When he reached Pentecost, he would sit in the breadfruit tree outside the girl’s window to keep her company at night.
The Shark God Page 8
