The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “I could never steal your magic, chief.”

  “My grandfather met him and shook his hand. This was my mother’s father – he was prominent in the Jon Frum Movement. My father’s father was a Presbyterian minister.’’

  We were alone. I no longer disputed over the Bible at night with the evangelists from New Zealand. They had now based themselves among some tenacious heathens at the north of the island. The great number of obstacles they had encountered on the way convinced them that the Devil did not want them to go there; and so, wishing to defy the Prince of Darkness, they had hotfooted it to North Tanna, to preach.

  “How did Jon Frum get to Tanna?”

  “In a plane. There was no airstrip. He landed his plane in the tops of trees.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At Green Point.”

  Examining the map, I saw that if I had a lift past this rocky part of the coast, where there was no break in the reef, I could launch my kayak and paddle to Green Point.

  I managed this the following day. Peter – Chief Tom’s son – gave me a ride in his jeep on the understanding that when I was back in Vila I would send him any information I could find on “Bodywise,” the female attractant that made you “a magnet for women.”

  “Listen, Peter, do you have trouble meeting women?”

  “No trouble,” he said. “But me want dis.”

  He regarded the stuff as a sort of magic that would give him power over women. I said I would do what I could.

  The wind was discouragingly strong, and the absence of any canoes offshore was the unmistakable sign that it was a bad day for small boats: not even the local fishermen dared to go out. But I found that by staying just inshore, paddling along the cliffs, I was out of the strongest wind and waves. I crept around the black walls of the island, past the blowholes, and found a dark gravelly beach near Green Point, where I went ashore and ate the bananas I had brought for lunch.

  I had the absurd thought that I might be seen by a Tanna person and mistaken for Jon Frum, and I was half-fearful and half-eager that my arrival at this significant place might provoke that reaction in an onlooker.

  As it turned out, some children fishing there asked me to give them my Walkman. I was listening to Chuck Berry – rock-and-roll here made paddling as pleasurable as opera had in the Solomons. I said to the children, no, I needed it, and so they simply ignored me, and went on fishing.

  It was not until I was on the point of leaving (I had been procrastinating, because there was so much paddling ahead of me) that I ran into a man. He asked me the usual questions about my boat. Where did it come from? How much did it cost? How had I brought it here?

  The man’s name was Esrick – at least that was what it sounded like. He was a teacher at one of the schools on Tanna. He was presently on vacation. He said he neither believed nor disbelieved in Jon Frum.

  “I think he was one of our old speerits appearing in the shape of an American white man.”

  “Why would one of your spirits want to come back and visit you?” I asked.

  “Because at that time Presbyterianism was very strong. So he appeared at the right time, because the foreign missionaries had banned kava drinking, magic stones, and dancing. Jon Frum said, ‘Destroy what the missionaries gave you. I will give you goods.’”

  It was a fortuitous visitation. Just when Protestantism had taken hold of the islanders and the missionaries had begun to write their Cannibalism Conquered and Cannibals Won for Christ memoirs, the strange little man with piercing eyes had popped up here at Green Point and said: Lose those Bibles. He urged the people to revive the important traditions – kava-drinking, dancing, and the swapping of women for sexual purposes. About three years after Jon Frum’s first appearance in 1938, half the island had abandoned Christianity.

  “They forsook Christianity,” Esrick said. “Because he said he would be back with plenty of goods if they went back to their old ways.”

  I said, “So when do you think this will happen?”

  He laughed at me. “It has already happened! In spirit! Jon Frum’s spirit is everywhere. He is in every village.”

  “But you said you didn’t believe in him.”

  He accused me of being literal-minded, without using that expression.

  “You see,” Esrick explained, as though speaking to a moron, or one of his schoolkids, “he has come back in the form of development and progress. We have goods now. Go to the shops. Go to Vila. You will see that we have what we want. We have kava. We have dancing. He is back in spirit. He knows he has won!”

  Was Jon Frum a friendly American pilot who had brought supplies here and shared them around? And perhaps he had said, I am John from America. And then had the war convinced the villagers on Tanna how wealthy America was?

  It hardly mattered now. The dogma of the movement seemed to suggest that Jon Frum was a sort of John the Baptist, preceding the savior, who was a redeemer in the form of cargo – every nice and useful object imaginable. And the important aspect was that it had come to the island directly, without the help of missionaries or interpreters. No money, no tithing was involved; no Ten Commandments, no Heaven or Hell. No priests, nor any imperialism. It was a Second Coming, but it enabled the villagers to rid themselves of missionaries and live their lives as they had before. It seemed to me a wonderfully foxy way of doing exactly as they pleased.

  On my way back along the coast, the wind was behind me.

  I was still listening to Chuck Berry on my Walkman.

  Get a house

  Get married

  Settle down

  Write a book!

  Too much monkey business!

  I rode the swells, slipping forward on the faces of the waves – and rather breathlessly, too: if I turned over here with the surf breaking on the rocky shore I was out of luck. I was fearful until I was past the shoaly headlands and the biggest breaks, and then something just as bad happened.

  I felt a sharp knifing against my fingers, like ten bee stings, and I saw a gooey, spittle-like substance that had wrapped around my hand dripping like snot from my paddle shaft. Blobs of it hit my arm, stuck to my elbow and stung me there, and when I tried to flick it off it became molten and blistering, hurting me more.

  It took me only a short time to work out that it was a cluster of jellyfish tentacles – they were so misshapen and long it was impossible to tell how many. I had picked them up with my paddle blade and they had slipped down the shaft and over my right hand and forearm and elbow, shooting stingers into me. A neurotoxin, marine biologists say; and if a swimmer gets wrapped in one of these creatures it is serious illness, if not certain death.

  Probably a Portuguese man-of-war – just my luck, in this wind, on a rocky coast, in a heavy swell off Cannibal Island. My whole arm burned with pain, and I could not flex my fingers. The folk remedy is urine. I clawed my earphones off and pissed into my left hand, and rubbed the burning area. There was a slight momentary relief, but the pain returned.

  It was a good thing the wind was at my back. I was able to steer the boat with my good arm. After an hour or more I saw the headland where I had put in, and when I landed I looked for a papaya tree. This is folk remedy Number Two for jellyfish stings. Papaya sap is generally reckoned to be good medicine for much of what ails you in the tropics – the flesh and seeds are good for diarrhea, the leaves contain an enzyme that acts as a meat tenderizer, and the sap is said to ease the pain of stings. I found a tree, I squeezed the sap onto my arms, and again I noticed a slight lessening of pain. But it came back, and it burned for three hours more, and then it was gone.

  Hearing that the Kiwi God-botherers had returned to White Grass village, I decided to stay on this southeastern part of the island. Here I ran into a mad Irishman, Breffny McGeough. Breffny was a yachtsman who had come ashore here with his girlfriend; and they were in the process of creating a resort hotel of little bungalows from what had been a rather derelict venture run by a man known as Bungalow Bill.

>   One day, in a heavy rain, Bungalow Bill had heard a strange noise. Leaving his wife in bed, he had rushed out of his bungalow and listened hard. The sound came nearer and nearer – a rumbling, like a tremendous herd of wild pigs moving through the forest. The sound soon revealed itself to be a wall of water, tumbling down the creek bed towards his bungalow. Bill jumped back and saw the water smack the side of his bungalow and carry it off its foundations and into the bay, where it sank, with Mrs Bill and everything he owned.

  “Hell of a way to go,” Breffny said. “In bed, in a bungalow, in a bloody gale. Poor old thing probably never knew what hit her.”

  Breffny had recently given up smoking and drinking. But when the urge was on him he drank kava (which was not the same as beer – quite the opposite), and smoked the sort of local reefer I had seen being passed around by the naked Little Namba people in Yakel village.

  I let Breffny play with my kayak and for a small fee he let me sleep in a deserted house, full of dead flies, at the top of a hill nearby, where the only sound in the day was a bird that peeped like a microwave timer, and at night barking dogs in the woods and the odd but unmistakable lolloping and thrashing, in bushy boughs, of fruit bats.

  “We eat them,” a villager named Carlo told me. “We boil them or throw them on the fire. They taste like birds a bit.”

  “Tanna kava is the greatest drink in the world,” Breffny said a day or so later. “There’s of course the two-day kava which puts you out for twenty-four hours – I mean, you’re paralytic. Nothing like it. And there’s the village stuff. We’ll go up there some time, what? Have ourselves a few shells, what?”

  And he winked his Irish wink.

  “Seen the volcano, have you?” he asked. “It’s marvelous, it really is.”

  Near sundown one day, he arranged a ride across the island for me with a Tanna girl named Pauline who came from a village near the volcano. The volcano was called Yasur in her language (twenty-nine different languages were spoken on this small island), and this meant “God.” The winding bumpy road soon came to a strange, poisoned-looking area of smooth bald hills – it was downwind from the crater, where the prevailing wind flung the hot, sulfurous ashes from the volcano, killing every living thing. In the distance I could hear the volcano grumbling and eructating, the amplified belches like those of a fat man after an enormous meal; and these sounds of digestion were accompanied by distant crepitating rumbles like those of loosened bowels. The expression “bowels of the earth” just about summed it up.

  We parked in a lava field up-wind of the stope and walked to the rim of the crater. Here the farting and belching of the thing was explosive – more like cannon fire. It was a far cry from the steaming cone of Savo Island, where grinning villagers harmlessly boiled megapode eggs.

  The crater of Yasur the godly volcano was almost a mile wide and half a mile deep, and at times it was like a vision of hell. It was full of smoke and fumes, and at its deepest point, like two malevolent eyes, were a pair of fiery holes, each of them gurgling wickedly and tossing out red gobs of molten lava.

  Under me, against the steep side of the crater, about halfway down near a ledge, there was another hole that was hard to see. But roughly every five minutes it gave forth a thunderous explosion that echoed inside the crater’s hole and this mighty crack cast forth a shower of lava, all red and orange, that twisted and lighted the entire crater, and then flopped and blackened as it cooled. This eruption added to the plume of ash that continuously rose from the volcano and wandered off, enlarging the blighted area of the island.

  Later I heard that there is a theory that Jon Frum lives deep in the maw of the volcano with an army of five thousand men.

  There were no other islanders here. I mentioned this to Pauline.

  “The local people don’t come here,” Pauline said. She knew – she had grown up only three miles away in one of these benighted, African-looking villages. “They are afraid. They say that when you die you come here and you remain inside.”

  So the volcano was God, Heaven and Hell, all at once; like Tuma Island in the Trobriands – the bourne from which no traveler returned.

  “Did the people in your village talk about how this volcano started?”

  “Yes. They say that two ladies, Sapai and Munga, were making lap-laps one day –”

  The New Guinea Pidgin word for a sarong was the local Pidgin word for vegetables wrapped in palm leaves.

  “– and then an old lady appeared and talked to them. She said she was very cold. Could she sit by their fire, she asked. Sapai and Munga pitied her, so they said yes. The old lady sat near the fire. After a little while she began to make noises. She was growing. She was bigger and bigger. She covered the two ladies and turned into the volcano.”

  “What was the old lady’s name?”

  “We do not know,” Pauline said.

  Meanwhile, the volcano was filled with cannon booms and such diabolical fire and noise that the frightening thing prompted Pauline (perhaps without her realizing it) to ask me whether I knew anything about the situation in the Persian Gulf – did I think a war was going to start?

  It was a difficult coast for paddling; the wind was strong, usually blowing twenty-five knots and roughing up the sea. Tanna was just a rock in the middle of the western Pacific. And there were not many places to launch a boat from – Breffny’s was one of the good sheltered coves. But I had brought my boat, so I was determined to use it.

  One of the advantages of paddling was that I could listen to music as the shoreline unfolded – and the lava sections of this shoreline were full of blow-holes: incoming waves washed under the lava shelf and burst through the hole, making a twenty-foot spout of water. Another advantage was that, in my boat, I did not have to swat flies. Tanna was as fly-blown as the Australian Woop Woop and the Solomons had been. Flies were the curse of villages. Insect repellent did not have a noticeable effect on them. It was a relief to be in a kayak, away from these tiny biting flies.

  I was dismayed that no fishing canoes were out – when I saw them upturned on the cliffs of black porous stone.

  Encouraged by the sight of some boys paddling small canoes and dawdling in a little bay, I asked them how far out they went. They said they didn’t go out far at all.

  “Who made these canoes?”

  “My father made them,” one boy said, speaking English clearly. “He goes out far.”

  “How far?”

  “Sometimes he goes outside” – and he pointed.

  He meant outside the reef, in the open sea, the water that has a different name.

  Usually I thrashed into the headwind, knowing that if I got tired or if something went wrong, I would have this same wind to bring me back. Often I got to where I wanted only to find that, because of the heavy dumping surf, it was impossible for me to land my boat. On two successive days I tried to get to a place called Imlao, but on reaching the beach had to turn back, not daring to risk a surf landing. The waves were high dumpers, and if I miscalculated my boat would be smashed. Since the only intention I had in landing was to eat and then shove off again, I ate in my boat, and then headed back.

  Captain Cook landed here on his first Pacific voyage. The Tanna people defied him, and after one encounter Cook wrote, “One fellow shewed us his backside in such a manner that it was not necessary to have an interpreter to explain his meaning.”

  One day I saw a man in an outrigger canoe riding the swell about a mile offshore. He was not paddling – he was simply letting the wind take him, and fishing with a handline.

  I headed towards him and when he looked up I waved. Nearer, I said hello, and asked him whether he wanted a drink of water.

  “Me have water,” he said. He showed me the corked bottle lying in his dugout. But when I took a drink of mine, I offered him some and he had a swig.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Me stap long Tanna.” Then he hesitated. “My home Futuna.”

  Futuna is an island east of Tanna, a smal
l rock with not more than three hundred people on its eight square miles of surface. And yet it is a distinguished place, for this tiny spot in the middle of Melanesia is inhabited, like the atoll of Ontong Java in the Solomons, by Polynesian-speaking people. In his book about Pacific migrations, Islands of the South, Austin Coates explains that wandering Austronesians avoided large, mountainous islands, preferring smaller and more isolated atolls.

  “Such was the people’s prestige that these dots on the ocean map became more important than the substantial islands, including New Guinea, which they embraced like a chain of distant sentinals. In the framework of an ocean civilization, these dots were the centers, mountainous islands the periphery.”

  They had settled on small wild islands that had been considered uninhabitable (because of course the islands had been known to Melanesians). And they regularly conducted family business and contracted marriages between islands a thousand miles away – from Futuna to Ocean Island, from Ontong Java to the Gilberts. There was a good reason for their being fearless on these lone rocks and atolls. They were brilliant navigators, they were great seamen and skillful canoe-builders.

  “Never before or since was there an age when people were so at ease in the ocean.”

  Wishing to talk to this Futunese fisherman I rafted up, tying a line to his outrigger. He did not mind – my rafting up did not hinder his fishing; and what else was there to do, a mile or so from shore on this windy day, except drift and talk?

  His name was Lishi. He had some Melanesian features but not so strong as those of the Tanna people. I might have assumed that he was part Polynesian if I had had time to consider the matter, but really the physical aspect was minor compared with the language.

  I said, “Do you say moana for this?” And I slapped the ocean with my paddle.

  “This tai,” he said. He pointed out to sea, beyond the reef. “That is moana.”

  I said, “What is this?” – indicating my kayak.

  “Wakha,” he said. A version of the Aboriginal word I had heard in Australia, and in the Trobriands and elsewhere.