The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  At one point Michael said, “The nineties will be a hot decade” – he seemed to mean by it, lots of action – volcanic activity, earthquakes, storms.

  In New Zealand, I had noticed how my memory was provoked by travel – I think this is perhaps true of many people – and how remote places could induce in me the most intense reveries of home. This little conversation at the edge of the lagoon cast a spell upon me. I paddled on in this Cape Cod reverie, my mind was in Nantucket Sound, and so I was startled a few minutes later to see naked Fijian boys with water droplets glistening in their hair, clambering on rocks and flinging coconut husks at each other.

  Soon I was in open water, being driven by the same stiff wind that had sped Captain Bligh on his way. I found an empty beach at the western tip of the island, and had lunch, cat food – as this Japanese mackerel now seemed to me – and fruit. I had a nap in the shade of a tree and afterwards went snorkeling. About sixty yards offshore there was a ledge and then great black depths of cold water. Parrot fish and tiny fish, brilliant yellow and blue, glittering like jewels, massed along the ledge of coral and crown-of-thorns starfish, nibbling and darting with a thousand other fish.

  I drifted and watched the fish, but I did not linger. Now I knew enough about the features of Oceania to recognize a perfect habitat for sharks. Normally when I snorkeled I kept looking behind me for a shark and this day I was especially careful. And I did not press my luck. I soon swam back to my camp on the beach, and when it was cooler I continued around the island.

  Just at dusk, in a lovely orangey-pink lagoon off the last point in the island, wavelets lapped against black rocks. Lingering here, before my last push to circle the island, I marveled at the play of light and shadow, the way the water glowed, and I soon realized that two of the waves were a pair of sharks, with spots on their dorsal fins – epaulet sharks. They were mottled and elegant, and I had a sense that they were playing – simply fooling in the water.

  I reached for the spear that I kept tied down on the deck of the kayak. The sharks were each about five feet long, and they were side by side in only a few feet of water. How could I miss? Already I could see myself paddling into the bay, and Ken under his tree with a beer would stand up and goggle at me in my kayak, with two plump sharks slung on my thwarts. Fijians would be dumbstruck seeing my prowess with the spear, my fearlessness at facing sharks. I would say to them, I learned to deal with sharks in the Trobriand Islands.

  I threw the spear as hard as I could at the nearer shark, and it hit the thickest part of the creature’s long body just behind its head. Both sharks thrashed and were gone. No damage was done: in my hurry I had not removed the lump of coconut husk I had rammed on the end of my spear-point – I had been afraid that this sharp trident would puncture my boat. I might have given one of the sharks a bad bruise, but nothing worse than that – and when I thought about it I was glad. The sharks had not menaced me or even bothered me. They were apparently enjoying themselves. But in trying to kill them – so impulsively, from a sense of power and domination – I was behaving with the sort of malicious wickedness that we always attribute to sharks.

  One island in this north coast group was often on my mind, because it was visible even at night. This was Malake. It was constantly on fire. During the day it smoked – gray and black smoke billowing from the steep sides of its hills – and at night it was lighted with the flames of circling fires, creeping sideways towards the summits. On my map the island was not much more than a mile long and a half a mile wide. The parts of it that were not on fire were already black.

  “They’re always burning that bloody island,” an old-timer said to me. “They got nothing to do, so they set fires.”

  I wanted to visit the arsonists of Malake. It was ten miles down-wind – too far to reach and get back on one of these very hot days. So I decided to make an expedition of it, and bring water and food and my tent, and a bunch of yanggona. I left early one morning, and helped by the wind I moved swiftly along, listening to the old rock-and-roll songs on my Big Chill tape.

  It had seemed an unpopulated island – its fires had given it a strange character – but nearer I could see a little settlement, where the arsonists lived, and that it had a distinct reef. The tide was ebbing and the coral protruded so near the surface that in places my boat bumped and snagged. Closer stilll, I could see signs of cultivation – taro patches, papaya trees, cassava plants. But these were small and they were in the isolated parts of the island. The rest had been burned. I could see the blackened grass, the new erosion, the scorched trees, and the newly dead pines with orangey needles.

  The settlement faced the north shore of Viti Levu, but what had seemed a busy village of huts was up close no more than a cluster of tin shacks on a littered beach. I paddled behind the island – the northern slope of the mountain and the foothills that were black from the grass fires.

  I paddled out to sea, to avoid the sharp coral that I thought might tear the hull of my boat. And, paddling, I began to feel weary. Until then I had felt healthy, but I had caught a cold somewhere – perhaps at my camp site in Vanua Levu, perhaps from that damned kava, where we all drank from the same coconut shell. Anyway, I was sure that I was coming down with a cold – I had a headache, my eyes hurt, my throat was sore, my nose was blocked, and my muscles ached. The best thing, I felt, would be to go ashore and make camp and simply stay there, resting and keeping out of the sun. I had enough food and water for three days.

  Looking for deep water on this coral shelf, I heard a chopping sound from shore – like that of someone cutting wood – and so I paddled away, and put in farther down the coast, on a little bay. As I was tying up my boat on a mangrove root five men materialized from the bushes, brandishing the bush knives that looked like pirates’ cutlasses. So these were the arsonists of Malake. They had come out of nowhere.

  I was about to get into my boat and paddle away when they surrounded me. I felt foolish. If I tried to escape from them they could easily have stopped me – the water was shallow for some distance, I would have had to paddle carefully because of the coral. One swipe of a knife would sink my boat anyway. So I brazened it out. I said hello. I smiled.

  They were ragged Fijians, with the jutting cannibal jaw of the rural Fijian, and the sloping forehead, the tiny eyes, the crow-black mustache. They wore torn shorts and T-shirts.

  “Where you come from?”

  “Nananu-i-Ra – over there.”

  “No. What country?”

  “America.”

  “America is very rich.”

  I was unshaven. I felt ill. I had a collapsible boat. I slopped along in soggy reef shoes, wearing a baseball hat.

  “You think I’m rich?”

  They stared at me. They were among the poorest Fijians had seen – they were dirty, their clothes were rags, several of them had teeth missing, which is not only a sign of poverty but suggests violence. Most of all I was wary of their rusty cutlasses.

  I said, “Look at me. I am not rich. No money.”

  They were touching my boat, poking their fingers at its canvas and rubber hull. They could have chopped it – and me – to pieces in a few seconds.

  “What are you doing with those knives?”

  They did not answer. “Cutting trees?”

  They smiled, meaning no.

  “Cutting coconuts?”

  The stockiest and toughest and dirtiest one of them had done all the talking so far, and I guessed that only he knew English. Pidgin was not spoken here.

  This grubby little man said, “You want coconuts?”

  I said yes.

  “You come.”

  Two walked in front of me, three walked behind, and once we were off the beach, walking through the dry yellow bush, the breeze was cut off and without a breeze it was very hot and buggy. There was no path, just the semblance of a track, littered with rubbish from the trees, dead boughs and piles of leaves.

  I had not wanted to go with them, but somehow I had agreed. I ha
d thought it would seem unfriendly, not to say cowardly, to refuse. And I had been curious – I had a fatal nosiness in places like this. This was in a sense the ultimate Fiji – the offshore island of an offshore island, where nothing grew except vegetables. No sugar cane, no tourists, no cars, no roads, no electricity. Just a heap of grassy hills burned black and still burning, because the people had nothing better to do. Like the Trobrianders, they called the big island that they could see “the Mainland.”

  These strange, silent, grubby men had a disconcerting habit. Whenever we passed a particularly shapely bush they assaulted it, and hacked it to pieces. Even before we had left the beach one of the men had attacked a mangrove, smashing his cutlasses against the frail branches, whipping at the leaves and the trunk – his nostrils flaring – and finally demolishing the tree, leaving the white slashed bits of it lying in the mud.

  He had cut it for the sheer wicked hell of it, just like that, vandalized it, the way kids in big cities snap the trunks of saplings that have recently been planted.

  I found that alarming, the suddenness of it, a filthy little man going to town on a tree with his rusty knife. It was nasty-mindedness, and a show of strength, and ill-will. They weren’t clearing a path or anything like that – it was just dicking around. But it also reminded me of that moment in the Melville story, Benito Cereno, when the mutineers smile and sharpen their knives – and come to think of it, these men looked malevolent enough to have been members of that mutinous crew.

  I was dizzy from the heat, and it was odd to be with five other people when I was usually alone. This part of the island was penetrated with a smoky odor and I could see some of the burned hillsides – the burned areas looked much worse up close. The landscape looked devastated. It was as though they were simply destroying their island.

  “Why do you burn the trees?”

  “Yes, we burn the trees. We burn. We burn.” The little man gestured with his knife.

  We were well into the island now, walking across the lower slopes of the hills. I thought about turning back – inventing an excuse and taking off. That was when I saw the palms.

  “There are the coconuts,” I said.

  This seemed to confuse them. It was as though they had forgotten why we had come here.

  “Who will climb the tree?” I asked. There was some mumbling.

  “That boy will climb.”

  But the boy was hacking at a stunted tree, whacking its fragile trunk apart. He turned, he looked up, he spoke some words – mumble, mumble – in the sulkiest way.

  I am not climbing that tree for anyone.

  The stocky little man said something more, and the young man mumbled again and hacked the stunted tree with his cutlass.

  If that white man wants a coconut he can climb the tree himself.

  The funny thing was that I actually did want a coconut. I was thirsty, and I still felt faint. But we stood in silence in the heat. I tried to take a deep breath and realized that my lungs were congested. So I had creeping bronchitis. I wheezed and sat down. I hated this. I thought of the time in the Trobriands when I had had a paronychia – infection of my thumbnail – and I had had to boil my thumb twice a day to keep the infection down. And small children would gather round, watching me pump my stove, and fill my pot, and boil my thumb.

  I put my head in my hands. “No. We go.”

  It was another one, speaking English – a fat man, with teeth missing, slashing with his knife.

  I said, “I can’t go with you.”

  “Yes,” he insisted.

  “No. Because,” and now I was thinking hard, “I want to bring you yanggona.”

  They chewed their lips and smiled, recognizing the word.

  “And my yanggona is at my boat. In my waga, see.”

  I pointed through the yellow bushes towards the shore.

  “You give us?”

  “Yes. I give you. But first” – and I was smiling in terror, like a hostage promising his ransom – “I have to get it for you.”

  I kept talking, promising, smiling, trying to sound reasonable – I had an irrational thought that as long as I kept talking they wouldn’t kill me. It seemed rude and unsporting to stab someone to death while he was talking to you. Still, I felt uneasy with these men walking behind me, and the idiots kept whacking innocent trees.

  I handed over a bunch of yanggona wrapped in the Fiji Times, and while they clawed it open, I untied my boat. One of them called out, “Come back!”

  “I’ll be right back!” I said, and climbed into my boat.

  Sure, I thought. But I still felt rotten. Instead of heading away from the island I paddled towards its western tip, where there was a rocky headland. Near shore I heard someone mumbling, not to me, nor about my approach; it was the monotonous yammering of someone talking to himself – just blabbing aimlessly. I kept going until, on an isolated beach, surrounded by rock, I found the sort of sheltered area that had the look of a camp site that fishing parties probably used. It was secluded, a cubbyhole against a cliff, with part of it open to the sea.

  Thinking that hot liquid might be good for my cold, I boiled some water and made green tea and soup. After that I began to perspire. I lay down and went to sleep I was so tired.

  When I woke, it was too late to go back. I carefully made a circuit of the perimeter of the little beach. I looked and listened for strangers. There was no one. And I knew no one would come out at night – no one wandered out in the dark here.

  I waited until the last moment, sitting, listening carefully, and just before night fell and the mosquitoes swarmed, I pitched my tent and crawled in and slept for nine hours, waking just before dawn to the smell of burning and then I remembered that I was on Malake, island of arsonists. The sleep had restored me. I made more green tea, and had beans and bread for breakfast and set off around the other side of the island, to pass the settlement of Malake village.

  I paddled near it, but when I saw the ragged people waving me to shore, and the old men, and the small children, their faces shining with snot, I turned my boat to catch the incoming current that would take me east and away from here.

  Farther on, feeling freer, I experienced something that had happened to me in the Trobriands, in the Solomons, in Vanuatu, and again and again in the offshore waters of Fiji. Paddling along, the sound of the paddle or the slosh of the boat would startle the fish, and they would leap from the water and skim across the waves, shimmying upright, balancing on their tails – more than one, often eight or ten fish dancing across my bow as I paddled towards a happy island. It entranced me whenever it happened, because it was comic and unexpected, as though the fish had been bewitched into unfish-like behavior, walking upright on the surface of the water.

  But I had not been wrong about feeling unwell. Soon after, I ran a temperature of 103 and the doctor diagnosed pneumoma.

  “Bloody Indians, what do they know?” a Fijian said.

  I suffered for a few days, and then took antibiotics and simply felt frail and lonely, but after a few weeks I was breathing normally. Oceania was a wonderful place if you were healthy, but it was the worst place on earth if you felt sick.

  PART THREE

  POLYNESIA

  14

  Tonga: The Royal Island of Tongatapu

  A big square-headed Tongan official in a blue skirt with a hem below his chunky knees, after asking me the usual questions about my boat bags, said, “You must pay wharfage.”

  Wharfage? He had to repeat it several times before I understood. And then I jibbed. Wharfage was payment for a boat’s use of a wharf, surely, but my boat was in two canvas bags and where was the wharf?

  We were standing in a wooden shed at the Fua’amotu Airport on the island of Tongatapu with other burly jostling Tongans, many of them wearing big crunchy mats around their waist to celebrate their arrival home. Some of them carried Desert Storm videos – the war so far – that they had bought in Fiji, from Indians who had pirated footage from CNN television news which th
ey then sold for sixty Fijian dollars each.

  I told the man that it was a rather small collapsible boat, and I described it.

  Ignoring me, he began to fill out a form which was headed Kingdom of Tonga and under “Description of goods” he wrote, “I boat” and under wharfage he wrote “Two pa’anga, fourty cents”. Two dollars. That calmed me. I paid in Fiji dollars, the handiest cash I had.

  Then I declared on my printed form that I had no “potable spirits … fruit or micro-organisms … used bicycles … obscene books … indecent photographs fireworks … noxious, stupefying or tear gas.”

  What struck me was how sturdy these Tongans were and what a filthy little place this terminal was. That contrast continued to puzzle me in Tonga, the physical power of the people – their big solid bodies, in great contrast to the decrepitude of their flimsy houses and island structures.

  “What you are doing in Tonga?”

  “Just looking around,” I said. “A little paddling.”

  I want to see the King, I almost said. I intended eventually to go to the northern archipelago, called Vava’u, and camp on a desert island – there were many in that group. But what I wanted to do on this island was meet His Majesty, King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, the King of Tonga.

  Salesi and Afu Veikune and their friend, Mrs Vahu, I was told, might be able to help me in my royal audience. Like many Tongans, Afu had spent some years as a house servant for a family in Honolulu. Salesi had been a driver for Budget-Rentacar – his sign read Your Courteous Driver is Salesi Veikune. Mrs Vahu had worked for Budget in San Francisco.

  Menials and drivers, you would say. But that was in America. In Tonga they had royal connections. Afu, a mediocre cook, scorching eggs and Spam in Honolulu, had been the lady-in-waiting to the famous and much-loved Queen Salote of Tonga, the present King’s mother. Afu’s father was a Tui, a chief, and a considerable landowner. Their son had married a royal cousin. The King had come to the wedding. They were closely acquainted with princes and princesses. The present Queen often visited their house. Never mind that in Hawaii one drove a bus and the other did housework; in Tonga they were highly regarded, they had land, they had power, and they owned more fat black pigs than I had ever seen snorting and oinking in one place.