The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “In a way, you can only really dislike a member of your family or someone you know well,” I said. “But I think Mapo is a good fellow.”

  “That is because you do not know him,” Ataban said. “Ha!”

  He usually greeted me with, “You had a good pandle?”

  “A very good paddle.”

  “You like to pandle,” he said. “And I am so busy!”

  “You mean busy sleeping under a tree while people bring you megapode eggs?”

  He took this mockery well, and even seemed to regard it as a gesture of friendliness. “No. I am a poor Melanesian. I have to work. I am not lazy like you Americans. I have to feed my feegs.”

  Then he would sit down and talk until it was dark. Usually I pestered him to show me the tabu-groves, where the megapode birds were worshiped, but he said it was too tambu, and that it would be very bad for me to go there. After a week, I stopped asking him.

  “Tomorrow I will show you the place where we sacrifice to the megapode birds,” he said one night. “And I will tell you the story of the bird and the devil.”

  “Tell me now, Ataban.”

  He made a face. “It is too long. And my feegs are waiting.’’

  “Yu go we tude?” Mapo asked me the next day. “Yu wokabaot Kwila? Yu laik samting, yu laik kaikai?”

  It was a charade, but so as not to make the brothers’ feud any worse I said I was simply going for a walk and did not need any food.

  Ataban met me at the edge of the village and introduced me to an old man – he said he was seventy-four – who had brought him some eggs. Whenever I met someone that old I asked them about the war. The man had lived on Savo his whole life. He said that nothing had changed, and the only interruption had been the war. Ataban acted as translator.

  “The Japanese came here. One Japanese man said, ‘We are powerful and we are staying here – in Tulaghi. We will never leave. Go to your fields. Pick coconuts, make copra, grow bananas. Cultivate vegetables. Go fishing. We will buy everything you have to sell.’”

  “Did they mention the Americans?”

  “They said, ‘The Americans are very strong. They will come and try to fight. But we will beat them.’ We were frightened of them.”

  “But why?” I said. “The Japanese are little bowlegged people who can’t see without glasses. They are smaller than you. Why were you afraid?”

  The old man laughed and spoke again, and Ataban translated. “It’s true, they looked strange to us. But some were tall. And they had guns. A little while later the Americans came and it was all different. There was fighting. Many people died. I was afraid. And I still think about it.”

  “But this was a long time ago.”

  “No! It was recent. It was just a little while ago. I was already married and had children,” the old man said.

  After the old man left us, Ataban changed his mind and said that it wasn’t such a good idea for him to take me to the place of sacrifice, because it was too tambu. But I urged him and when he still seemed reluctant, I asked him why.

  “Because I believe in kastom. I am not a Christian. This place is tambu.”

  “I won’t step on it. I won’t touch it. I won’t even go near. I just want to look.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “Look at a distance.”

  We set off on a steep overgrown path and immediately saw a brown snake, the thickness of a garden hose – a four-footer – and, according to my handbook, Reptiles of the Solomon Islands, probably a venomous land snake of the genus Salomonelaps (it flattened itself when provoked, and hissed, and made a chewing movement with its jaws; “The toxicity of its venom is unknown but could be regarded as potentially dangerous to humans …”).

  Farther on, there was a big clumsy crashing in the bush, and I had a glimpse of a creature I took to be a dog.

  “No. It is a lizard,” Ataban said.

  A lizard as big as a cocker spaniel? The reptile handbook suggested monitor lizard.

  How different it was just a half a mile inland from the breezy beach! Here it was still and hot and steamy, and the air stank of wet and rotten leaves. There was a spider on every bough, and even in the daytime the air was thick with mosquitoes. Merely by grazing a tree trunk with your elbow you picked up a mass of biting ants. We had not gone fifty yards when the ants had worked their way to my neck.

  Fat Ataban walked ahead, slapping his arms.

  We came to a rectangle of stones.

  “This is the grave of the man who first welcomed the birds to Savo,” Ataban said. “He was on the hill. The bird came and wanted to stay. But the devil – the snake – would not allow it. Then the bird laid an egg. The man ate the egg and said, ‘This is good.’ So the bird was allowed to stay, as long as it promised to go on laying the eggs.”

  We walked farther; all the while Ataban was muttering in a complaining way, “This is tambu,” and waving his arms.

  “No trees may be cut here,” he said. “No ropes” – he meant vines – “may be cut.’’

  And because the bush had never been cut, and was seldom visited, it was vast and green and dark – very dense and tall. The megapodes were squawking like chickens in the tree branches. This was their haunt.

  A large black spider hung in a web just in front of the tabu-grove. The spider’s body was about the size of a silver dollar and the legs were each about three inches long. Passing it, Ataban punched the web.

  “Did you see the spider?”

  “Yes. It will not hurt you.”

  We did not go very far into the grove. There was no path, for one thing. The whole place was overgrown, and the trees were thick – their trunks averaging about two feet in diameter. It was so strange to see such old trees on a small island: normally they would have been cut for firewood or for houses. The bamboos which grew everywhere here in dense clusters, were deep green and fat, the thickness of a drainpipe.

  Ataban was nervous. He said, “It is just there. And I tell you it is very tambu. Look at it, but do not go near.”

  I saw a pile of boulders.

  “That is where they burn the feegs to ashes in the sacrifice.”

  “I can’t see very well. There are too many trees.”

  “We believe that if anyone cuts down a tree here he will get sick. He will probably die.”

  The word tambu – taboo – had a definite meaning in this creepy place. The sunlight hardly penetrated the trees, and because there was no path we had to push the bamboos aside in order to move – and the whole place hummed with insects and the kuk kuk kuk of the roosting megapodes. And as we moved slowly through the grove a pig blundered out of the sacred place and Ataban kicked at the startled creature and yelled “Yu gettim bek!” – as though the only proper way to address a pig was in Pidgin.

  We crashed through the bush a bit more, he showed me another sacred hill, and I asked, “Why don’t you have ceremonies these days?”

  “If a person carries out a sacrifice and burns a pig to ashes he can’t go to church. But I could do it, because I believe in kastom.”

  When I pressed him, saying that the megapodes were in danger of not being respected, and might fly away for ever, he said that an old woman came once a year and sacrificed a pig to the birds.

  Back on the path, badly bitten, after two hours of that tangle of spiders and vines – we were both drenched from the wet leaves and the heat – Ataban said protestingly, “I tell you I have shown many people the megapode fields, but I have never taken anyone to the tambu place. You are the first one, ever.”

  I told him that I appreciated the trouble he had taken.

  “Now you will go back to your camp and write about it in your notebook.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I see you sitting and writing all the time.”

  I thought I was alone on the beach, but I should have known better. There is no privacy in a village.

  “Don’t be silly, Ataban. I can keep a secret. Of course I’m not going to write this down.”<
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  But as soon as he was out of sight it was exactly what I did.

  I stayed on Savo longer than I intended, and after I ran out of food I simply ate yams and megapode eggs, which were the yolkiest eggs I had ever seen. One day James came by in his motor-boat and after a little bargaining – I gave him my fish spear and a full tank of gas – we went fifteen miles across The Slot to Nggela, to look at Tulaghi. The town had been captured by the Japanese in January 1942. It was retaken by the Americans in August, and because of its deep harbor, this was the headquarters for the invasion of Guadalcanal. There were rock walls at the harbor entrance. Once they had been painted with American war cries, on the instructions of Admiral “Bull” Halsey.

  “… we steamed into Tulaghi Harbor,” an American sailor wrote, remembering his first sight of the place in 1944. “There were great tall bluffs, palisades towering out of the sea on both sides of the entrance, and there painted on the bare rock in letters that were maybe a hundred and fifty feet high was a message. The top line read KILL … KILL … KILL, second line, KILL MORE ]APS, third line signed, HALSEY. We all cheered, because we were all trained killers, parts of a powerful killing machine. But later, it made me think about the ways we had been settling differences with the Japanese.”

  Now the town of Tulaghi was even more deserted and derelict than it had been in the war – beer cans everywhere, paper blowing, broken bottles, empty houses.

  As we walked around, James told me stories of his days on a Japanese long-line tuna boat, earning forty dollars a month. The boat brought the fish directly to Japan, where in Yokohama, James had fallen in with American blacks, who asked him whether he was from the States. “They didn’t know where the Solomon Islands is. But they took me to bars and bought me beer.” He found Japan expensive. He swapped cuts of tuna with bartenders for bottles of whisky. Japan bewildered him. “It is all Japanese people. There was no one like me there.”

  Eventually I loaded my boat and said goodbye to the people at Balola. I gave the men fish-hooks and the women some silk scarves. It was a perfunctory goodbye. Only the children came to the beach, and when I saw Rebecca hurrying towards the beach I greeted her, but she didn’t look up. She chucked a basket full of garbage into the water and walked away.

  Back in Honiara, I visited Bloody Ridge, where thousands of men died in 1942. I paddled up the gray-green Lungga River for five miles, but it was a much more noxious sewer than the sea, because it ran more slowly, and wherever I looked there was trash, or shit, or dead animals. The people looked wild, yet they were unfailingly courteous, and everyone I greeted said hello.

  The town was dreadful. I wanted to get out of it, but not leave the Solomons. And remembering how I had circled the green volcano in my boat, paddling slowly, and listening to Puccini, I had a strong desire to return to Savo.

  The night before I left Guadalcanal I fell into conversation with a Solomon Islander named Kipply and told him I was off to Vanuatu.

  “You will enjoy it. They are like us there,” he said, and I felt better.

  10

  Vanuatu: Cannibals and Missionaries

  I soon found myself in White Grass village on the island of Tanna, in Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides), living in a three-roomed bamboo hut with four burly, bearded New Zealanders. They murmured all night and sometimes yelped, sounding as though they had hit on an idea.

  When Glen, the battiest one, confided to me that the impending Gulf War might be Armageddon, and that all over the world silicon chips were being inserted under people’s skin – “the Mark of the Beast, see, foretold in the Book of Revelation” – I suspected that they were born again Christians, come to save Tanna, an island with a past rich in cannibalism. I was right, they read their Bibles by the light of a kerosene lantern – we had no electricity – and when it rained the hut leaked. But there was nowhere else for me to stay.

  The fundamentalists loved the rain and regarded the dark clouds with dull slow smiles of approval.

  “Behold!” said Douglas cheerfully one rainy morning. Douglas was nearly as batty as Glen. He had a suppurating sore on his leg that he bathed in sea-water every day, not realizing – though I told him – that he was only adding to the infection. “He’s putting obstacles for us!”

  Now they were all outside the bamboo hut, getting drenched, but agreeing like mad.

  “Who’s putting obstacles?”

  “The Devil,” Douglas said.

  “Why would the Devil do that to you today?” I asked.

  “Because we’re walking to north Tanna to preach,” Douglas said. “It’s an all-day hike. Very tough bush. He doesn’t want us to preach.”

  Later that morning, Glen hurried back to the bamboo hut. He was soaking wet, his face was muddy, his hair was plastered against his scalp, his hands were greasy. He told me delightedly that their Jeep had broken down on their way to the path.

  “Obstacles!” he cried.

  The rain, the breakdown, the native hostility, my indifference, the Devil’s obstacles – it all seemed a testimony to the sanctity of their mission. And I was sure that Tanna’s long anthropophagous history, its people-eating, was another factor – rumors of cannibalism are like catnip to missionaries, who are never happier than when bringing the Bible to savages. Missionaries and cannibals make perfect couples.

  Just the swiftest glance down the library shelf devoted to the New Hebrides had to be enough to convince any evangelist that these happy islanders were in need of the Christian message. A partial chronology included Missionary Life Among the Cannibals (1882), The Cannibal Islands (1917), Cannibalism Conquered (1900), Two Cannibal Archipelagoes (1900 – the Solomons included), Cannibals Won for Christ (1920), Cannibal-land (1922), L’Archipel de Tabous (1926), Living Among Cannibals (1930), Backwash of Empire (1931), Backwaters of the Savage South Seas (1933), The Conquest of Cannibal Tanna (1934), Savage Civilization (1936), Paton’s Thirty Years With South Seas Cannibals and Evelyn Cheesman’s Camping Adventures on Cannibal Islands.

  I had found circumstantial evidence for cannibalism – the liking in Vanuatu (and it had been the case in the Solomons too) for Spam. It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. “Long pig,” as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the peopleeaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor.

  But cannibalism was less interesting to me than cargo cults. Most of all I wanted to visit Tanna because I had heard that a cargo cult, the Jon Frum Movement, flourished on the island. The villagers in this movement worshiped an obscure, perhaps mythical, American named Jon Frum who was supposed to have come to Tanna in the 1930s. He appeared from nowhere and promised the people an earthly paradise. All they had to do was reject Christian missionaries and go back to their old ways. This they did with enthusiasm – booting out the Presbyterians. Jon Frum had not so far returned. The Jon Frum villages displayed a wooden red cross, trying to lure him – and his cargo of free goods – to the island. This iconography of the cross was not Christian, but rather derived from the war, from the era of free food and Red Cross vehicles.

  The believers sat in hot little box-like structures and prayed to Jon Frum. Some had visions of the strange American. They sang Jon Frum ditties in Bislama, the local Pidgin.

  I mentioned this to the God-bothering New Zealanders.

  “Obstacles!” they cried.

  I had come here from Port Vila, on the island of Efate, because I had found Port Vila too tame and touristy. It was a pretty town built against a hill, and its harbor was deep. Cruise ships from Australia anchored and then went on to Noumea, and other sunny islands, which retailed baskets and T-shirts and shiny shell necklaces and five-dollar bottles of Perrier. The shops in Vila were full of goods, the place was clean and tidy and had at least a dozen comfortable hote
ls, two or three of them luxurious. They held pig roasts. Their guests went snorkeling in the lagoon. Islanders serenaded them at night, strumming ukuleles and singing “Good Night, Irene” in Bislama.

  I was convinced that the town was profoundly civilized when I saw multiple copies of my books displayed in the Port Vila Public Library. In addition the islanders were pleasant and not at all rapacious.

  Tipping was discouraged in Vila, and throughout Vanuatu. This was usually the case in countries where most of the tourists were Meganesians – New Zealanders and Australians. Living far from Europe, they had had to be self-sufficient. No tipping was the rule in Meganesia. They had learned frugality and were eager to teach it.

  “It’s a bit of luck that you’re here, Paul,” a Vanuatu soldier named Vanua Bani said to me. “You will be safe from the Gulf War.”

  “Very true,” I said. Then we talked about the possibility of war.

  “I don’t think there should be a war,” he said, “because too many people would die.”

  “Would you fight, if Vanuatu were in the multinational force?”

  He was evasive, and then said, “I would fight for my own country, but I would not let myself get killed for another country.”

  He was not in uniform. He wore a T-shirt that said, Vanuatu – Ten Years of Peace and Prosperity – 1980–1990.

  “Did you fight the British?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “We wouldn’t do that. We like the British.”

  But it had been a circuitous route to independence. After a free-for-all by French and British land-grabbers in the nineteenth century, both countries agreed to joint responsibility and they turned the islands into a condominium government. The local wags called the condominium “the pandemonium.” It wobbled along largely because, in the words of an English settler named Fletcher, “these poor beggars have more manners and more virtues than their masters.”