The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  Early British adventurers did not pretend their mission had anything at all to do with God. They were after hardwood, then laborers, and then the islands themselves. The traders were frequently sworn enemies of the church. They armed natives with shotguns and, according to Henry Montgomery, were indirectly responsible for murderous attacks on Anglican mission schools. “Mission work has no greater enemy than the ungodly white man, for the foes within the household deal the most deadly blows,” he despaired, finding Guadalcanal still defiantly heathen.

  Britain took the Solomon Islands on as a protectorate in 1893. Its first resident commissioner, Sir Charles Woodford, insisted the rambunctious natives needed a “firm and paternal” government. But one reason the islands were so unquiet was that Woodford was wresting land out of native hands so that it could be sold or leased to white planters. Why was Woodford so keen to sell land? He needed revenues to fund his firm and paternal government. It was a catch-22 with explosive consequences.

  Some planters did buy land from hereditary owners: one district was bought for £20, two thousand porpoise teeth, two hundred dog teeth, a case of tobacco, a case of pipes, a case of matches, one piece of calico, two knives, and two axes. But elsewhere, Woodford simply annexed hundreds of thousands of acres of supposedly “unoccupied lands,” most of which he had never seen, and licensed it out to planters. When islanders resisted the theft, Woodford or his allies responded with murderous force. For a time, Woodford’s efforts to “purify” the Solomons looked a lot like traditional Melanesian blood feuding.

  In 1909, for example, a government party shot and killed the wife and children of the warrior chief Sito on Vella Lavella. In retaliation, Sito sent his men to kill the wife and children of a white trader. Not to be outdone, Woodford sent a punitive expedition of government officers, “revenge-crazed traders,” and a militia of Malaitans, who swept over Vella Lavella in a wave of random killing and destruction.

  The missionaries frequently reaped the harvest of the government’s brutality. A story pieced together by my great-grandfather illustrates the double-whammy effect that evangelical zeal and naval power had on the islanders.

  By 1880, the mission had attracted a handful of followers in the Florida Islands, east of Guadalcanal, but most of the natives remained hostile. That year, the British naval sloop HMS Sandfly cruised into the Floridas. The ship’s commanding officer, one Lieutenant Bower, took a boat and four oarsmen and landed on the islet of Mandoleana, which he assumed was uninhabited. He was right, but his landing was noted by Kalekona, a chief on nearby Nggela. Kalekona had some past grievance with white men, and he apparently required at least one white head in order to make things right again. Such was the kastom. He sent a party, led by his son, to ambush the sailors. They killed three men with their axes, then shot Bower down from his hiding spot in a banyan tree. Four heads. The Royal Navy returned, bombing a few villages to ashes but notably sparing a Christian hamlet. More importantly, HMS Cormorant arrived the following year with Bishop John Richardson Selwyn (son of the original missionary bishop, and Patteson’s replacement) aboard. Selwyn cut a deal with Kalekona. A “ringleader” was hanged from the banyan tree where Bower had made his last stand. Others were tied to it and shot. Kalekona and his son were spared because of their new alliance with the church.

  The incident did wonders for the mission. Floridans smashed their shrines and promised to give up their old gods. By the time my great-grandfather arrived, thousands had been baptized. Islanders, who were outgunned, learned that safety lay within the mission stations. Congregations grew. Churches and mission schools sprouted in the coastal forests from New Georgia to Santa Cruz. Head-hunting and the cycle of interisland war gradually petered out. Coconut plantations flourished. This peace, interrupted briefly by World War II, lasted for a century. So, while Christianity did accompany the arrival of peace on the islands, this peace was a product of superior firepower as much as prayer. Solomon Islanders’ conversion to Christianity was about self-preservation, politics, and declaring allegiance, not to the Prince of Peace but to a god of war who was more powerful than their own.

  I did not buy the argument, much circulated on the streets of Honiara, that the current crisis represented a falling-out with the Almighty and a return to the heathen savagery of Darkness Time. How could it when all the combatants were Christian? But the preference for framing the tension in mythical terms reached even the highest levels of government.

  I was back at the Quality Motel, waiting for the pressing heat of midday to lift, when the national minister for peace and reconciliation arrived on my veranda. He lowered his fleshy frame into a deck chair and set down his grass handbag. Nathaniel Waena had come to explain the country’s troubles to me. He spoke in Cambridge English. His voice boomed with authority. But he was at a loss to make sense of the tension or its lingering consequences. Perhaps it was all the Malaitans’ fault. Or perhaps it was the fault of the British for sewing together a country out of such discordant fabric, for drawing people away from their home islands to the illusory riches of Honiara. Or maybe, said Waena, running his fingers across his spongy Afro, squinting as though trying to suppress a headache, the crisis was a riddle handed to the people by God Himself.

  “We will never be one country, one people. We will always belong to our own islands, the places where the Creator meant for us to live and survive,” he bellowed. He threw his arms in the air. “But I ask you, why did God create the Solomons the way they are? Why has He bound and separated us by the sea? Why has He made us so different from each other? What is it that the Lord is saying to us?”

  Waena brought his fist down on the table, spilling his glass of bush lime juice. A drop of sweat dribbled down the left lens of his thick glasses. He lowered his voice. “We have been wrong in our ways. We have so many riches. Where did all those riches go? What is wrong with us? What does God want us to do? How can we know His mind?”

  As the weeks passed, and as I came to know the islanders and their sadness, I began to see that there was, indeed, a spiritual element to the tension. The root of the crisis lay not in politics or logistics, but in kastom, which was the soul of the nation. Kastom had not fared well in the Solomons. For a century, missionaries had run a system of residential schools, which removed children from their home villages, much as they had done in Vanuatu. But unlike in Vanuatu, traditional chiefs in the Solomons were stripped of their power and prestige. These two changes combined to sever a link between young people and the stories and teachings of their forebears. People did not listen to the whispers of the ancestors—they had forgotten how. They remembered the martyrdom of Bishop Patteson on Nukapu, but they did not seem to remember his message of peace. The bond between islanders and all the stories that once guided their lives had been so frayed by rootlessness and change and greed that it had simply snapped.

  Only one story gave islanders hope. It had many versions, many plots, but it always featured the same band of heroes, and it always ended in a miracle. I heard one chapter of it from my new pal Robert Iroga, a reporter for the Solomon Star newspaper.

  I caught up with Iroga at the Mendaña Hotel, the once-posh resort where politicians and ex-militants now drank Johnny Walker together at the pool bar. The militants wore Hawaiian shirts. The politicians wore camouflage sun hats. There were fresh bullet holes in the ceiling of the hotel lobby. Nothing serious, said the waiter. A few of the special constables had had a party on the weekend and brought their machine guns.

  I had hoped that, as the Star’s ethnic tension point man, Iroga would give me a sober analysis of the crisis and a list of its architects. But even the hard-news man seemed to prefer myth to political scoops. I bought a jug of beer to loosen his lips. Explain the tension to me, I asked him. Whose fault is it? Iroga was a strapping young man, but he was nervous. He glanced around the room, nodded here and there, and looked back at me gravely. He assured me it was not uneducated men like Jimmy Rasta and Harold Keke who had instigated the tension. No, no.
The trouble didn’t bubble up. It trickled down from the educated “elite,” from lawyers, parliamentarians, and businessmen. But Iroga would not give me names. The one thing you didn’t do in the Solomons was lay blame on people. Stories were more dangerous than guns.

  “Look at our newspaper,” he said. “Sometimes we are so careful, we don’t even print the news. For example, the Malaitan boys who went to catch Harold Keke on the Weather Coast: I know those boys are dead, I know Harold killed them, and I know the tasiu buried them—the brotherhood even sent me a fax to confirm it! But we could never run that story. If we did, the Malaitan leaders would come and demand compensation from us for spoiling the reputation of their boys.”

  Everything in Honiara was broken, he said. Nobody could be trusted. Except for the church, of course. Except for the Melanesian Brotherhood. The country would have torn itself to bits if it weren’t for the tasiu, who walked between the armies, who were now endeavoring to collect guns from the ex-militants, and who, with God’s help, would lead islanders back to the light.

  Iroga had agreed to meet me because he was interested in studying journalism in Canada. It would be natural for him to attempt to impress me with his objectivity and his journalistic detachment. Perhaps that is what he was trying to do, in a particularly Melanesian way, when he took a deep pull on his beer and launched into the story he really wanted to tell.

  Once, while on assignment in south Malaita, Iroga was being guided through the bush by three members of the Melanesian Brotherhood. At some point, the travelers’ path was blocked by a river too deep to ford and too swift to swim across. They looked for a canoe but couldn’t find one. They considered building a raft but couldn’t find suitable timbers. So the three tasiu came together and prayed for God’s assistance. They had barely said their amens when a crocodile rose out of the murk. It was huge, as wide and long as a canoe, and one tasiu noted, it was the perfect size for riding. The crocodile was the answer to their prayers. One by one, the travelers climbed onto its back, and one by one, they enjoyed a gentle cruise across the river. When the crocodile had safely deposited all four men on the far bank, one of the brothers pulled a copper medallion from his bag. It was not the same medallion the tasiu wore. This one was reserved for the generous and pious individuals who pledged to support the brothers in their work. They hung the medallion around the crocodile’s neck and told the beast it was now a Companion of the Brotherhood.

  I laughed.

  Iroga sipped his beer solemnly.

  “I’m writing this down. You rode on the back of a magic crocodile,” I said, waiting for him to chuckle, slap me on the back, wink, step back from the story.

  “It takes great faith to perform miracles,” he said, and I knew by his furrowed brow that he was utterly serious.

  Now it’s one thing to tell fanciful stories by a campfire on the edge of the jungle. It’s one thing to believe a thousand-year-old parable or to accept that a miracle has happened to a stranger in some distant land. It’s one thing to attribute fortune or misfortune to mana or some form of divine intervention, as Tasiu Ken had done back in Vureas Bay. But we weren’t in the jungle here, and we weren’t talking about the Old Testament, and we weren’t stringing together coincidences or offering metaphors for life. Nor were we regular people. We were both trained journalists. Iroga was the closest thing I would find to a Melanesian version of myself, and here he was, swimming through myth, remembering things his five senses could not have shown him.

  Part of me wanted to jump up, grab that big man by the lapels, shake him out of dream time, berate him: These are not the sort of stories that journalists tell! But a growing part of me wanted to be him, or at least to learn the method by which I might remember things the way Iroga remembered things. Like Iroga, everyone in Honiara wrapped their war, their suffering, their pain, and their idea of redemption in tendrils of magic. Everyone told, believed, and claimed to experience equally fantastical stories involving the tasiu. Everyone was sure that it would take a tasiu miracle to save the country. I knew that these stories were the key to understanding Solomon Islanders and their journey, and yet for me they remained distant and out of focus. I wanted to see with island eyes, but it seemed the only way to do so was to close my own, and I couldn’t do it.

  I had yet to understand that there was more than one way to see, to feel, to live a story. I had yet to be readied for my own journey with the Melanesian Brotherhood.

  15

  The Bishop of Malaita

  Solitude lies at the lowest depth of the human condition.

  Man is the only being who feels himself to be alone and the only one who is searching for the Other.

  —OCTAVIO PAZ, The Labyrinth of Solitude

  I spent my days at the port in Honiara, looking for a passage to the Santa Cruz Group and thence to Nukapu. The Eastern Trader was always on the verge of sailing. So was the Temotu, its competitor. Neither ship budged.

  I watched them from the veranda at the Quality Motel, I dozed, and I barely noticed when a sturdy-looking tub took on a load of passengers, pigs, and rice, then chugged away with a puff of black smoke. I was furious when I learned the Endeavor was bound for Santa Cruz. I was less furious when I learned the ship’s fate. Someone had pinched all the Endeavor’s spare lubricant, so when she ran out of oil halfway to Nendo, the engineer poured coconut oil into the gearbox, fouling it completely. The Endeavor drifted west toward the Coral Sea, where the swell grew so big and so steep that the pigs began to slide across the deck. The rice was lashed down, the pigs were not. Each time a pig went overboard, sharks charged out from under the ship to rip it to shreds while the horrified passengers looked on. It took a week and a half for someone in Honiara to scrape together enough gas money to send the Royal Solomon Islands Police patrol boat out to rescue the survivors.

  Nukapu would have to wait. Fine. I was after heathens and magic, and Malaita, the Solomons’ second most populous island, promised both.

  Malaitans are fierce. Malaitans are warlike. Malaitans are mysterious. These are points on which all people in the Solomons agreed, especially the Malaitans themselves. It was Malaitans who controlled the police, who had outwitted and humiliated the Guadalcanal militants, who had the government under their thumb. It was Malaitans who still offered blood sacrifice to the sharks and octopuses that prowled their lagoons. It was Malaitans, or at least a few thousand villagers in the island’s Kwaio highlands, who still refused the church and the authority of the government.

  It was the mountain Kwaio people I was keenest to meet. They were not like the heathens back on Tanna; they were not recycled heathens. They had never succumbed to the missionaries’ charms. They had never abandoned their kastom. They did not put on dances for tourists. They were notoriously hostile toward outsiders. When coastal Malaitans joined the dance of blood and anarchy in Honiara, the mountain Kwaio went on tending their gardens and sacrificing to their ancestors as they had been doing for thousands of years. I wondered what stories the Solomons’ last pagans told each other about the fractured world beyond their mountain home.

  Malaita and Guadalcanal are less than fifty miles apart. On a map, they resemble two slugs crawling slowly northwest, parting just enough to make room for the amorphous Florida Group. Until recently, ships had departed Honiara for Malaita every day. This month there was a problem. A fiberglass canoe carrying eight men from the north end of Malaita had disappeared and then been discovered, half submerged, off the coast of the Florida Islands. Its bilge plug had been yanked out. The passengers were never found. The north Malaitans suspected their wantoks had been ambushed and killed by rivals from the Langa Langa Lagoon, farther south. Since it was Langa Langa men who built and sailed the ships on the run between Honiara and Auki, those vessels had become fair game in the feud. Being north Malaitan, Jimmy Rasta had taken it upon himself to pirate one of those ships, the Sa’Alia, and sail it back to his base east of Honiara. Now the rest of the fleet was afraid to make the journey.

 
So I lingered on the docks and was seduced by the port with its great silver oil tanks, its dust, its corrugated-iron warehouses, its crumbling cement piers, its milling crowds, its possibilities, its roughness. The waterfront was not delicate or charming. There were none of the gleaming sailboats that populated Port Vila’s harbor, only working craft: coastal freighters, iron barges, weatherboard hulks, converted junks and secondhand ferries, all black smoke, rust stain, bullet holes, and dripping diesel.

  The port was a crossroads for the western Pacific. Fair-skinned, straight-haired Polynesians moved among barrel-chested pygmies, dwarfs with spiral tattoos on their cheeks, fragile-looking Malays, and Indonesian fishermen, jet-black men with violently red hair or sun-bleached Afros, bony women with skin the color of licorice and eyes of mud. The Malaitan sailors were the most curious-looking and the most handsome. Their skin was like cinnamon and covered in blond down. Their cheeks bore scars from ritual cutting: spirals and stylized sun designs etched forever into soft flesh, so that Malaitan wantoks would always recognize home in each other’s faces.

  Some evenings, I wandered out past the candlelit betel nut stands to look at the Eastern Trader straining at her lines and her crew lounging like cats on the rails or slumbering in hammocks, strong arms dangling, fingernails tapping the grimy deck. They were bored. They twisted their frizzy hair to resemble the dreadlocks they had seen on TV at the video cinema before their money had run out. Their bare feet were grotesquely callused. Their teeth were crimson with betel stains, but their smiles were pure and generous. I sat with them for hours. I asked about Nukapu. They all knew that the island was the beginning of the story that bound them to their church. They could all recount the familiar details of Bishop Patteson’s martyrdom on that hallowed shore, how he had worn a smile on his face even after the islanders had smashed his skull. But none of them had actually been there. When we talked, the sailors would reach for my hand, grasp it, squeeze, and refuse to let go, even when our conversations ended. They craved beer. They told me their ancestors came from Africa, like Bob Marley. They weren’t sure how old they were. They smoked sweet black tobacco rolled in notebook paper. I would listen to them and breathe in the scent of their hard work, and I would let my hand be squeezed, tentatively at first, but later I would squeeze back and gaze into their eyes like a lover imagining more, and I would allow something resembling loneliness to leave me, let it drift away across the sound, up into the sparkling fullness of the night sky.