The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

None of these early dogs barked. This was also remarked upon by European visitors. Apparently, wild dogs never bark – they howl and whimper, as dingoes in Australia do – but only the domesticated dog goes woof-woof.

  Right here in Vava’u, a young English castaway (fifteen years old when he first arrived), William Mariner, was adopted by a Hapaai chief, Finou ‘Ulukalala the First, and went native. He lived in Tonga from 1806 until 1810. Much of what we know about early life in Tonga comes from a detailed account of his adventures taken down by a London physician and published in 1820. In this book he remarks on his benefactor, Finou’s, love of cooked dog meat, “but he ordered it to be called pork, because women and many men had a degree of abhorrence at this sort of diet. The parts of the dog in most esteem are the neck and hinder quarters. The animal is killed by blows on the head, and cooked in the same manner as a hog.”

  My new pal Siole agreed that dog meat was delicious. He was a friendly fellow – relaxed, and helpful, and not rapacious. I needed to buy food, and then to find a place to stay the night and launch my boat. We had struck a simple bargain – for ten dollars he would ferry me around the small rambling town. He took me to the Oceanic provisioners – Burns Philip, Morris Hedstrom – and then to the market, where I bought a basket of small pineapples. Because there was no gas in town I bought kerosene for my camp stove. All this took an hour or more, but Siole did not complain, not even when the rude Tongan woman at the hotel said, “Your taxi-driver can carry your bags.”

  The hard part about arriving in such a place, with little prior information, was that I did not know what the hazards were – the winds, the reefs, the shoals, the tides, the currents, the unfriendly villages, the bad beaches, the creatures – if any. Some hazards were obvious – the pounding surf, the frothing chop of a channel that looked like a river in spate; others might not be apparent until it was too late. I always remembered those awful boys in the Trobriands who shook spears at me and said, “Run you life, dim-dim!” or the island of arsonists in Fiji. I made a point of bringing detailed maps and charts. I often had a guidebook. But there was no substitute for local knowledge.

  So I was lucky in meeting Leonati, a sturdy Tongan who was also a diver and a fisherman. He watched me put my boat together beside the little pier, under the limestone cliff where my hotel was situated.

  “How much water do you draw?”

  “A few inches,” I said, unrolling my chart.

  “Why not go this way?” he said, and put his finger on a tiny break between two islands on my chart. I would not have seen it had he not pointed it out.

  “I was thinking of going this way out of the harbor,” I said, and showed him my proposed route through the Port of Refuge, named by Don Francisco Mourelle, the Spanish discoverer of this place in 1781.

  Leonati made a face and said, “It’s all villages there.”

  He was the first person I’d met not just in Tonga but the whole of Oceania so far who had said anything like that.

  “This island is empty,” he said, and circled a small island. “And this one – no people there. This one is small but very beautiful. And this one” – he tapped another – “paddle there and the wind will take you back.”

  Everyone else had said: Make for the villages. I liked Leonati, the only loner I had come across. He said he sometimes took his own boat out and camped on those islands.

  “Who owns them?”

  He shrugged.

  “No one will bother you,” he said.

  It was a hot and steamy morning in the Port of Refuge, and the yellow light of early dawn slanted through the haze, hanging like smoky vapor on the water, where thirty sailing yachts lay at anchor, their wet laundry drooping where their sails should have been. I was stowing gear in my little boat and swatting mosquitoes that had been vitalized by the humid heat. The mosquitoes frisked around my ears.

  It had rained hard in the night, and when I commented on this to an American on the pier coiling a line, he said, “Of course,” and seemed surprised that I had bothered to mention it. This was after all the hurricane season – and it was also why there were yachts in the harbor. Most of them had come in November and they would remain moored there until April, when the weather moderated. No one sailed the South Pacific in this dangerous weather.

  “I used to work on Cape Cod,” the man said, when I told him where I was from. “Camp Seascape in Brewster. It was a summer camp for fat girls. I helped run it.” He became reflective, as though he had not thought about this for years. “The average weight loss was twenty pounds.”

  He drifted away, while I finished loading my boat. My heaviest single item was water, because I was not sure whether fresh water would be available on my desert island. I carried it in two – and three-gallon bags, a week’s supply, which I stuffed under the bulkheads, with my waterproof bags containing food, my dry clothes, my stove, my pots, my tent. On the deck, in a plastic holder, I had my map of the whole archipelago, and a water bottle, and a compass. Close to hand I had emergency flares.

  I had given my life-jacket to the old Kula man, Meia, in the Trobriands. I had swapped my spear in the Solomons. The last of my fishing gear I had handed out in Vanuata. My Walkman had been stolen in Nuku’alofa. I had broken my spare paddle. I was now so worried about having only one canoe paddle that I usually put on a leash, a line running from its shaft to the deck. It was not theft that I feared but rather the thing being blown out of my hands by a strong wind.

  Unnoticed, I slipped away from the shore and paddled south along the inside of the harbor, which was walled by high cliffs and surmounted by tall wet trees. Small boys were jumping from the black rocks, swimming in the early morning. About a mile farther on was a narrow break in this jungly wall, just a slice of air, with birds squawking and flitting on the steep green sides, and water so shallow that the bottom of my boat rubbed against the rocks. This was Leonati’s suggested short-cut, Ahanga Passage.

  Once I was through it I was in the wind and waves, and I saw surf breaking out on the reef and in the distance a chain of islands. I used my map to keep to the deeper parts of this bay, and paddled out far enough so that I could identify the islands. There were islands everywhere – close to me and on the horizon at various distances, and I knew from what Leonati had told me that most of them were uninhabited. Just to keep my bearings I headed for one called Tapana Island.

  I chose that island because it was distinctly noted on my chart. There were islands in this archipelago that were not on it. Fafini and Fanua Tapu, shown as insignificant reefs, were a pair of high hefty islands. My chart had been drawn “from a British survey in 1898” – but was it possible that islands could form and grow in just under a hundred years?

  The wind was blowing about ten to fifteen knots, brisk and steady enough to whip up the waves and give them frothy peaks. I dug out a line and tied it onto my paddle as a tether, and I put on the secure storm spraydeck, so that I was completely watertight. This was just as well, because I could see in the distance billowy black clouds, and long gray curtains of rain.

  The rain crept nearer and was soon on me, and I was paddling among the faint outlines of islands in a heavy downpour.

  Leonati had said, “We had a drought until December, but it has been raining ever since –”

  It was no fun paddling in the rain, but the worst of it was the possibility of losing my bearings. Now, in the heaviest rain, a solid sheet of slashing water, all the islands were eclipsed. It was as though I were paddling beneath a waterfall, like The Maid of the Mist under Niagara. I used my compass to get to Tapana-following the needle until the gray island emerged. There was no shelter, no beach, only cliffs, so I headed through the crackling rain to a nearby island that I could just discern among the flailing drops of rain. This was Lautala, which Leonati had told me was deserted. It was, but there was no beach; I had no way of landing.

  Each island in Vava’u is a limestone block that has been pounded into a dangerous and unapproachable shape by the waves an
d wind, giving them straight sides, spikes and crags, a ten-foot wall of spiky stone around most of its edge. But on some the wave action had pushed sand behind them – I could see beaches at the backs of other islands farther into the archipelago.

  I found a little cleft at the side of Lautala where I sheltered, with water dripping from the peak of my hat. And sitting there miserably dripping I was approached by curious birds – brown noddies that looked like dark terns, and big fearless shearwaters.

  Trying to spot these birds with my binoculars I looked around, into the rain, and saw two canoes – four men in each – making directly for me, or perhaps for the island: I would soon find out.

  The canoes were ten-foot dugouts with outriggers – vessels for paddling rather than sailing – and experts said they were “the only surviving sea craft of indigenous origin in Tonga.” I usually made sketches of the dugouts on particular islands – and I noted the islands where canoeing and canoe-making had been abandoned. These Tongan canoes had a feature I had never seen before – the outrigger attachment (securing the outrigger float to the booms extended from the dugout) was U-shaped. I had never seen this before – all other canoe-makers used a V-shaped attachment, or just a pair of lashed struts. It may seem a small thing, but after seeing so many canoes made in much the same way, this difference, and especially such an elegant object, appeared remarkable to me. And Tonga was a place where no one carved with any precision or troubled themselves to make anything substantial in a traditional way.

  When the canoes drew up beside me – they too were sheltering from the sudden storm – I said hello and pointed to the well-made fixture. What was its name?

  The men laughed. One mumbled something – mockery, I was sure; fucking palangi, something like that – and the other men laughed again.

  The rain came down. I asked how they had bent the wood into this U-shape. They shrugged, they mumbled again, more laughter.

  You think: They don’t speak English. But I was sure they did – most people in Tonga did; and Vava’u with its influx of palangis in yachts was even more English-speaking than the main island, Tongatapu. Along with the precepts from the Golden Tablets, Mormons also taught volleyball and English to all the islanders they converted.

  “Are you fishing?” I asked plainly.

  “Yes,” one said, and turned his back on me.

  This is not necessarily a hostile gesture, but considering that we were sheltering from a heavy rainstorm at the edge of a remote, deserted island in the distant Tongan archipelago of Vava’u – miles from anywhere – it seemed a trifle unfriendly from an inhabitant of the Friendly Isles.

  They had no interest whatsoever in me, nor in my reactions to the storm – they did not inquire (islanders sometimes did) as to whether I was okay, or my boat was leaking, or the waves were too high for me. They talked among themselves. They were incurious, indifferent, probably mocking – because I was alone, and a palangi, and posed no threat to them. Had I been big and dangerous, or well-connected, they would have groveled and paid fond attention to my butt, exclaiming upon how the sun shone radiantly out of it.

  We sat bobbing in the heavy rain, saying nothing to each other, though they muttered obscurely to themselves from time to time. My consolation was that if they posed a threat to me (Tongans had a reputation for violence) I could quite easily outpaddle them – my light kayak was far faster than their clumsy outrigger canoe.

  “Up yours,” I said to them, smiling, when the rain eased, and I paddled away.

  Later I found out that Vava’u was the only place in the Pacific where this lovely outrigger attachment existed and that it was called a tukituki.

  I headed across a two-mile stretch of water for a crescent-shaped island which, when I came close, turned out to be two distinct islets joined by a spit of sand: Taunga, where there was a village, and Ngau, which was uninhabited. Beyond it, according to my map, was another uninhabited island, named Pau.

  As I approached Pau, two fat fruit bats flew erratically overhead, making for the island. And now I could see through the gently falling rain that the island was small, uninhabited, jungly, and had a narrow sandy beach on its protected western side. It was just what I was looking for. It had another pleasant feature – a grove of coconut palms only eight or nine feet tall, with clusters of green coconuts on top, each nut containing the best drink in the world.

  I paddled to the beach and pulled my boat above the tide mark, but before I could locate a camp site the rain increased, pouring straight down, the heaviness of its fat stinging drops making it fall vertically. I found a large green leaf and put it on my head, and there I stood, dripping under a dripping tree, watching the black sky, the churning sea, listening to the deafening tattoo of the rain, and feeling miserable.

  Two hours passed in this way, very slowly. To add to my discomfort, clouds of mosquitoes, loving this cool rain-sodden thicket, emerged and began to bite me all over. I had insect repellent but it made no sense – and it was ineffective – to spray it on while I was standing in the rain.

  The nearby islands had disappeared in the rain and mist. I was on a tiny corner of Pau Island. There was nowhere to walk to: ahead was a wall of jungle, dense with thorn bushes; behind me was the sea. I stood on a strip of land, with that silly leaf on my head, and began to shiver.

  To whip up my circulation I took my paddle and cleared the branches and rubbish – and spiders – from the area around me. I awaited a break in the rain, so that I could unpack my boat and put up my tent without getting everything wet.

  When the rain eased, I hurriedly set up camp, stuffing the items that needed to be dry (clothes, sleeping-bag, radio) into the tent, and hanging up the food sack and the water bag. Then I took off my wet bathing-suit and T-shirt and got into the tent naked and warmed myself in my sleeping-bag, until the raindrops ceased to patter on my tent.

  I had had no lunch. I had planned to eat on the water, but those unfriendly fishermen had prevented me from eating at that halfway point on Lautala Island. I unpacked my stove, intending to light it to boil water for noodles. But my matches were wet, my lighter wouldn’t spark. I began to curse out loud – after all, this was my island.

  It would be impossible for me to live on this island for a week or more without matches, and I remembered the village I had seen on Taunga. I got into my boat and paddled two miles to that village, which was a pleasant place – about fifteen simple houses at the sloping edge of a pretty cove. Two motor-boats were drawn up to the Taunga beach, giving the place a look of prosperity. But there was no one in sight.

  I walked to the nearest house, where, just inside the front door, an enormously fat woman was weaving a mat from pandanus fronds. Her skirt was hiked up and I could see that her vast thighs were gray and dimpled, and hideously bitten, with many open sores on her legs – perhaps from her scratching them. She was a woman of about sixty and her name was Sapeli.

  “Is there a store on this island?” I asked, knowing there could not possibly be.

  “Nudding,” she said.

  “Do you have any matches?”

  Without a word, and without rising, she reached to a shelf and picked up a matchbox, removed half the matches in it, and handed the box to me.

  She called out, “Lini!”

  A group of children, led by two pretty girls, emerged from a nearby house.

  The oldest girl introduced herself as Lini Faletau. “Faletau means ‘house-something,’” I said.

  “House-war,’’ she said. “People fighting in the house.”

  “A delightful name.”

  Since I had paddled all the way there I thought I might as well ask permission to camp on Pau, which – being so near by Vava’u standards – was probably their island. Lini said the chief was in Nuku’alofa, but we could ask someone else.

  We traipsed into the bush-girls in front, kids in back, me in the middle – and along the path encountered barking dogs which tagged along, howling and snapping at my bare legs.

&nbs
p; “Please eat those dogs,’’ I said.

  Lini laughed. She was seventeen. Her sister Deso was fourteen but taller, with a long elegant face and a slender body and a guffawing way of laughing – deep in her throat. Deso’s looks reminded me that the prettiest women I had ever seen in the Pacific had been here in Tonga; the loveliest, and also the ugliest – fat hairy things with bad skin. And many of the men were hulking and horrible.

  After a fifteen-minute walk through the wet grass we came to a house. Like the others it was a simple box, with a porch and a flat roof. A woman inside was weaving a mat – the room was strewn with dead palm leaves. I said hello. The woman looked at me in an uncertain manner.

  “Ask her if I can sleep on Pau Island.” This request was conveyed.

  “She said yes.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “She is my wife,” Lini said.

  Deso gave one of her deep attractive laughs. “Your mother surely?”

  “My mudda.”

  “Thank her for me, and tell her that I have brought a present for her from the United States.”

  I gave her a silk scarf. I had given Sapeli one, too. I never entered a village, no matter how suddenly or how small, without bringing a bag of presents – usually these scarves.

  Deso began to bawl out one of the little kids. It was a small boy, who began to cry. Tongans could be very fierce with one another – screeching and scolding.

  On our walk back to the beach we were joined by an obviously effeminate young man, possibly a faka leiti, who demanded a scarf. He asked me my name, and then I asked him his.

  “My name is Russell Go-For-Broke.”

  “Liar!” Deso shouted at him. “Your name is Ofa.”

  “But I changed it. Because of Cindy Lauper.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. He had a lisping voice and a coquettish manner and he asked me to stay a while.

  “I’ll come back some time,” I said. “You have a nice village.”

  The beachfront and the boundaries of the village were lined with the bleached valves of the giant Tongan clam.