The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  On the King’s face was something like a smile, the sort of mirthful expression that beholds abject stupidity.

  “Your Majesty, did you make your opinion known?”

  “At the time I had no opinion,” the King said. “What is your opinion now, sir?”

  “Nuclear testing must stop in the Pacific,” the King said without any feeling, and in the same monotone he went on, “The French must leave. They import everything from France. It is ridiculous. Although it will be hard financially for the people of those islands, they must decolonize French Polynesia.”

  “Do you mean soon, or all in good time?”

  “Soon,” the King said. “Soon.”

  He was staring at me.

  “The atom bombs can be tested elsewhere. Testing is needed. And bombs are needed to stop people like Hussein. To frighten him. He is like Hitler.”

  “Are you saying, Your Majesty, that they should use an atom bomb on Saddam Hussein?”

  “They should put a bomb under him,” the King said. “And you trust the French to test their nuclear devices elsewhere in the world?’

  “I don’t trust the French at all!” he said, and saying so, he roared with laughter. It was so unexpected, that I twitched with surprise.

  Intending to exploit his sudden emotion, I said, “The French are usually self-interested, so they are – in foreign policy at any rate – insincere, unprincipled, and unreliable.”

  “Totally unreliable!” he roared and he laughed again. “I have been rereading the history of the Franco-Prussian War. Do you know how that war started?”

  But it was a rhetorical question; he then summarized the events of 120 years ago that led to the outbreak of war, specifically the so-called Ems telegram sent by King William I of Prussia to his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. After deliberately editing and publishing the telegram so as to offend the French government, Bismarck succeeded in outraging the French, who declared a war that the Germans wanted (and so did Napoleon III of France, to boost his sagging popularity). In the end the Germans won a humiliating victory over the French.

  All this, and more, the King of Tonga told me of the Franco-Prussian War.

  “So it was on that little detail of the telegram that the French started the war, which they lost,” the King said.

  “The French make a detail into a principle,” I said. “But they are just as likely to make a principle or a murderous event into a detail. Look at the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior and the murder of the photographer on board by the French saboteurs in New Zealand. The French government said it was nothing – they regarded it as nothing. Yet if it had happened to them they might have used it as a pretext for a war.”

  “But New Zealand can’t go to war with France,” the King said.

  “There was nothing that New Zealand could do.”

  “No one went to bat for New Zealand, though,” I said. “The British have a rather ambiguous attitude towards the French. They like the food, they feel somewhat intimidated by the French people.”

  “The English overlook the French weaknesses,” the King said, “and so do your people in the United States.”

  “Since we are generalizing about national characteristics, what about the Japanese, Your Highness?”

  “They are building a new terminal for us at the airport.”

  “Do they mention wanting to buy islands from you?”

  “We will never give our land away,” the King said. “That is the worst problem in Hawaii – the loss of land. It now belongs to other people, and the Hawaiians have so little left.”

  Another silence ensued; I simply listened to its drone.

  “The Japanese work very hard,” the King said. “It is strange – they think they are pure but they are not pure at all. Their culture is derived from the Chinese. Their language is full of foreign words.”

  He gave me the foreign derivations of arrigato and tempura and I gave him kasteru and pagoda.

  “Would you like to see Tonga develop into a great tourist destination?”

  “Already we receive many tourists –”

  Twenty thousand a year – nothing.

  “But when the terminal is in place there will be many more.” He clasped his hands, making a great meaty pile of fingers on the table. “We will soon have three television stations. And oil. We have oil in Tonga.”

  “Oil, Your Highness?”

  “Yes. I have seen it myself – gushing from the reef. We will soon have someone drilling.”

  And not a moment too soon: fuel oil was very expensive in Tonga, and also very scarce. But this could not have been much more than a seep hole from an oil pocket under the reef – hardly a commercial proposition.

  We returned to the subject of Polynesia, and I asked whether he felt an affinity with other Polynesians.

  “I do. The Samoans are very close. My second son is married to a Samoan. And of course we have a common origin. There is a fellow here at our university who is from Sumatra, and he has told me that there is a village in Sumatra where the language is very similar to Tongan.”

  I said, “The Polynesians have a sense of having come from a distant place. The Fijians are muddled about that. The Melanesians I’ve met speak of having come from sharks and snakes and birds. Some people say they came out of the ground.”

  “We have a sense that our ancestors were voyagers and explorers, that is true.”

  “But of all the Polynesians you are the last absolute monarch, Your Highness.”

  He laughed his roaring laugh. “I am not an absolute monarch.”

  “With all respect, Your Highness, surely you are. In what way are you not?”

  “I have a,” he said and produced a mashed-potato word. It stayed in his mouth, it had no echo, it was a swallowing sound.

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  He repeated the word three times. The word was parliament. But of course the assembly was no more than a rubber stamp, and half of it was appointed by his allies the Tongan nobles.

  Soon after this I asked him whether he had committees that were looking into tourism and oil and television.

  He said, “I am the committee!” and he laughed very hard.

  “We always have a majority!”

  Another laugh, and I of course obsequiously joined him. “No dissenting voices!”

  By any account, the King of Tonga is one of the few absolute monarchs in the world.

  He asked me – it was his only question to me – whether I had any news of the Gulf War. I told him what I had heard on the BBC that morning.

  The King said, “America could use this as a chance to put their resentments aside and make an ally of the Iranians. America needs allies in the Middle East. Iran is not the same country that humiliated America during the hostage crisis. They have a new government – a good one, I think.”

  “The Israelis tend to dominate our thinking on the Middle East,” I said.

  “America should be objective. And Israel has a big responsibility to be fair to the Palestinians. The Israelis should leave the occupied territories and stop killing Palestinians. Israel is strong and the Palestinians are weak. They are a problem because Israel has made them a problem.”

  We talk some more, about his children, about his liking for French food, about his exercise (he cycled up and down the runway at the airport – he was trying to get his weight down). He then lowered his massive head and said, “I have another appointment.”

  I scrambled to my feet and thanked him, and then Joe was summoned to lead me away across the weedy lawn.

  A day or so later, Afu and Salesi killed and roasted a piglet in my honor and the burned creature was hacked apart and distributed to a number of Tongan men sitting under a mango tree. The women were under a different, smaller tree.

  There was no beer. I drove with a man named Meti to the next village and bought a case. He said we would share it – that was the Tongan way. But he kept the beer in his car. I had three bottles, he had two, none was offered
to the others, and in the end Meti went off with nineteen bottles of my beer.

  “Me I don’t drink beer,” Alipate had said. He was stuffing his mouth with a pig’s muscley bum. “I’m a Methodist.” And in almost the same breath he said, “You try any Tongan women?”

  No, I said, I hadn’t.

  “I like palangi pussy,” Alipate said, and rubbed pig fat from his mustache with the back of his fleshy fist.

  “What a delicate fellow you are,” I said. It annoyed me that this slob should say that to me. “I’ll bet palangi women are devoted to you.”

  “I be careful! I got da wife! She cut da neck! She cut da ball!”

  This word palangi, the euphemism for white person, was interesting. It meant “sky-burster.” In the seventeenth century, Tongans and Samoans believed that their islands lay in a great and uncrossable ocean. The long overseas migratory journey was conjectural in Tonga and absent in Samoa, where the local creation myth described how they had risen from a knot of twitching worms in the soil of their islands. So when the first Europeans appeared in this part of western Polynesia – Tasman in 1643, and later Roggeveen and Cook – the only possible way for them to have arrived was from the sky, exploding from the heavens.

  It is one of the paradoxes of language as living culture that a vulgar man like Alipate used this poetic and allusive expression all the time – there was no other word for white person except “sky-burster.” Alipate was a stone-mason. He frequently boasted of the money he had made laying bricks in Hawaii. He liked hoisting his shirt and cooling his belly with the night breeze, and talking about women he had had, or money he had made.

  “What you talkeen to da King?” he asked me. His T-shirt was hoisted. His brown hairy belly glistened with sweat.

  “He told me you’re going to have television.”

  “In his dreams,” Alipate said. He translated this into Tongan and everyone laughed. “Da King all the time dreameen.”

  They mocked the King for a while. They were like a different race of people altogether. Socially they were another species. A little over a hundred years ago such Tongans had been slaves – King George Tupou I had abolished slavery in Tonga. Alipate saw that I had not touched the clutch of pig ribs on my plate and without saying a word he reached over and snatched it, and when he finished chewing it he went on cooling his belly and jeered at the King some more.

  15

  Tonga: Alone on the Desert Islands of Vava’u

  In the way tardy and negligent people are often blame-shifting and chronically mendacious, many of the Tongans I met in Nuku’alofa were unreliable, and some outright liars – or, to put it charitably, they meant very little of what they said. This could be tiresome in a hot climate. My solution was to take my boat to a part of Tonga where there were no Tongans.

  I resolved that I would find a desert island in the middle of nowhere and live a beachcombing life for a while. My ideal island would have a sandy beach, and coconuts, and jungle, and no people. About fifty islands, remote and empty, fitted this description, and they lay in Tonga’s northern archipelago, called the Vava’u group. I knew somehow that there would be fruit bats. There were bats on every Tongan island. It was said that these islands were among the most beautiful in the Pacific, and many of them were desert islands, utterly uninhabited but pristine – dream islands, each one like a little world.

  “The trouble is,” a Tongan on the small plane to Vava’u told me, “you’ll have to find someone to take you out to the islands.”

  I did not tell him about my boat, that I could assemble it and paddle to any island, and that I had a nautical chart of the whole group, and survival gear.

  This man, Aleki, had with him a video cassette of the Gulf War that had been taped four days before from the news footage shown in New Zealand. The war was still being fought, but the Tongan interest in this sort of footage was not very different from their interest in Rambo videos. Aleki gave me his address and said that if I cared to, I was welcome to come over to his house in Neiafu – Vava’u’s main town – and watch the video of American planes raining bombs down on Iraq and Kuwait. This seemed hospitable enough, though I did not take him up on his offer.

  Everything about the Vava’u group pleased me – the islands were not far apart, there were plenty of sandy beaches on them, there were stores in Neiafu where I could stock up on food, and although it was windy I could paddle in the lee of a long chain of islands and stay out of trouble. Most of all, the Tongans on the main island in Vava’u seemed friendly. If they had airs the airs were different from those I had had to contend with in Nuku’alofa. This was not a place of nobles and landlords and peasants, but of hard-pressed islanders – apparently one class – who managed by fishing and farming. Most of the Tongans I met in Vava’u said they hated Nuku’alofa – “The fast life, the noise, the always hurry-hurry,” one named Siole said, summing up the Vava’u objections to the royal city. Though I hardly recognized this frenzied Nuku’alofa of their description – it seemed to me a place without any events, except for church services and the occasional funeral or coronation – I came to see that, by comparison with Neiafu, which was very nearly fossilized, semi-mori-bund Nuku’alofa could seem a trifle hectic.

  Siole (Tongan for Joel) had a car, a prized possession in Neiafu, where there were never more than two or three in sight – people tramped the dirt roads of the main island confident that they would never be run down. Siole also had gas, and this was amazing, because there had been no fuel at all in Vava’u for almost a week. No one knew when the next shipment would arrive. Everyone blamed the delay on the Gulf War, which was probably not the reason, though the Gulf War was certainly to blame for the high price – about six dollars a gallon, and rising.

  In his old car, Siole took me to the market and the stores, so that I could buy provisions.

  We passed a fat pig – very fat, perhaps hundreds of pounds.

  “What is a pig like that worth, Siole?”

  “Six or seven hundred.” He meant pa’anga, and this amounted to about five hundred dollars.

  “How would you eat it?”

  “At a feast. Maybe a funeral,” Siole said.

  “Only when someone dies you eat it?”

  “If someone, say your mother, gets bad sick, you feed your pig a lot of food. Get him fat.”

  “Because you might need him for your mother’s funeral?”

  “Right.”

  I could just imagine a sick Tongan’s sense of doom when he or she looked out the hut window and saw the family pig fattened.

  “Also your horse.”

  “To be in the funeral procession?”

  “Not the procession but the feast. We eat the horses.”

  He was driving slowly along the dirt road of the main street – slowly, to avoid flattening a dog that was sleeping in the patch of shade thrown down by the leafy bough of a tree.

  “What about them – you eat dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You eat flying foxes – fruit bats?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you cook them?”

  “Pigs, horses and dogs we put in the umu oven. It makes the meat very soft. But flying foxes we can just barbecue.”

  It seemed to be a general rule on Pacific islands that there were few, if any, food taboos. Wherever I went I asked about diet, and except for the Seventh-day Adventists in Kaisiga Village in the Trobriands, no one was very fussy. In Oceania you ate every living thing that fitted into your mouth.

  Dogs had been cooked and eaten in the Pacific from the moment the Pacific was inhabited. The dogs had come in the canoes of the voyagers from South-East Asia (where they were – and still are – also eaten). There was no game to be found on the Pacific islands, and so the dog was prized – for its taste, its food value, its scarcity (pigs greatly outnumbered dogs). Its fur was used for decoration, its skin was turned into articles of clothing, its teeth into necklaces and ornaments, its bones into implements – hooks and needles. On
various islands, Hawaii in particular, dogs were fed with vegetables or poi – thus the term “poi-dog” still current – to sweeten their flesh, and some were breast-fed by women. Gobbling the left-over sweet potatoes or scraps of greens, snuffling in the undergrowth for an edible root, most of the dogs and cats I saw on my Pacific travels seemed to be vegetarian.

  All the early European explorers in Oceania mentioned dog-eating. These men had come from societies in which dogs had status as sympathetic companions with precise personal names – in Claude Levi-Strauss’s description, “metonymical humans.” Invited to feast on dog meat in eighteenth-century Hawaii – the Sandwich Islands – a scandalized Englishman wrote, “The idea of eating so faithful an animal as a dog prevented any of us joining in this part of the feast.” He added, “Although to do the meat justice, it really looked very well when roasted.” Some tried eating dogs – Georg Forster, the German scientist and chronicler who accompanied Captain Cook, said dog meat was indistinguishable from mutton. On one occasion in the last century a group of Hawaiian jokesters served up a dog with a pig’s head replacing the head of the mutt, in order to fool the American visitors who happily devoured the animal. In the Pacific, a dog might be a household pet but never the sort of companion that possessed an implied taboo against its being eaten.

  In Man and the Natural World, the Oxford historian, Keith Thomas, lists three features that distinguish eighteenth-century pets in England (“privileged species”) from other animals; they were encouraged to enter houses and churches; they were given individual personal names; and they were never eaten – “Not for gastronomic reasons … it was the social position of the animal as much as its diet which created the prohibition.” In 1616, the first Dutchmen to reach the Tuomotus, Le Maire and Schouten, who had earlier named Cape Horn, called one island Honden, because of its dogs, and they noted that the dogs caught and ate fish and were themselves on the menu and did not bark.