by Paul Theroux
The Aranui first stopped at Omoa, and the walkers among us trekked seventeen kilometers over the high ridges among wild horses and wild goats to Hanavave and the Bay of Virgins. The interior of the island was perfectly empty. Walking was something Marquesans seldom did. They sat, they hung out, they rode four-wheel-drive vehicles and sometimes horses; but I never saw any islanders hiking the up-country paths. Some frankly said they were afraid of the tupapaus that lurked in the dense upland foliage. That could have been one reason. But Marquesans also seemed a sedentary lot and were never happier than when sitting under the palms on the seafront, near one of the pompous and vainglorious French plaques (“To the French Dead”), holding a big blue can of Cheez Balls between their knees and munching.
The Bay of Virgins was a misnomer, but deliberate. The bay is surmounted by several unmistakably phallic basalt pillars, and was originally called Baie des Verges – Bay of Dicks is a fair translation of that. But outraged missionaries slipped an “i” into the word, making it vierges, virgins. If they had been English missionaries they might have slipped an “r” into the word, turning Dicks into Dirks (“because they resemble knives”).
At the tight little harbor of Hanavave there were children and dogs running in circles – I counted twenty dogs in one place alone – and big bulky Marquesans waiting for the ship’s cargo. They had been without beer for two weeks, they said. They had run out of gasoline. The snacks had been gone for some time. The whaleboats came and went, leaving provisions, taking away fish. A Marquesan woman watched wearing an AC/DC T-shirt, a man watched in a baseball hat that read Shit Happens. As Gauguin indicated in the androgyny of his portraits, the men and women physically resembled each other, and became almost indistinguishable as they grew older.
The island of Fatu-Hiva was without doubt the most beautiful of the Marquesas, not just for its great vistas, and the wild horses scrambling on the slopes, the sheerest cliffs, the greenest ledges, and the beautiful bay. It was its greenness, its steepness, its emptiness; the way daylight plunged into it only to be overwhelmed by the darkness of its precipitous valleys, and the obvious dangers of its entire shoreline gave it the look of a fortress or a green castle in the sea.
The Marquesans were gloomy and laconic, and they lived quietly, out of the sun, in the depths of their damp valleys. They seemed to be gentle people. They harvested coconuts. They fished. They raised kids. On Sundays they went to church and sang the whole mass. They tattooed themselves and ate breadfruit and fish. They grew fat, and then their children served them. It was not a bad life.
Still, the islands seemed paradoxical to me. The soil was fertile, but the vegetable gardens were small and insufficient. The people were intensely proud of their ancient Marquesan culture, but they were also God-fearing Catholics. They spoke proudly of their ruins and carvings in the jungle, but did nothing to preserve them, letting them fall into greater ruin. They said they disliked the French, but they let the French run all their affairs. It made no difference to them that eighty-five percent of their food was imported as long as the few really important items like rice were subsidized. They loved eating loaves of French bread, but there were only a handful of bakeries in the islands; they let the Aranui deliver bread from Tahiti – it was stale and expensive coming by ship, but that seemed preferable to their baking it themselves. They lived hand to mouth, but no matter how hard-pressed they were for money they would not accept a tip. They were eager for tourists, but there was hardly a hotel on the islands that was worth the name. The Ministry of Tourism – no doubt this is a blessing – is almost wholly ineffectual where the Marquesas are concerned.
There are all sorts of little guidebooks to the Marquesas, but the liveliest and the most informative, for all its fiction and inaccuracies, is Herman Melville’s Typee. Give or take a few roads, and one video store, the little post office and the usual curses of colonialism, not much has changed in Nuku Hiva since Melville fled the cannibal feast almost a hundred and fifty years ago. There is no cannibalism in the Marquesas anymore – none of the traditional kind. But there was the brutality of French colonialism. Gauguin had noticed the peculiar hypocrisy, and Gavan Daws quoted him as hectoring the bourgeoisie of French Polynesia.
“Civilized!” Gauguin cried. “You pride yourself on not eating human flesh, [yet] every day you eat the heart of your fellow man.”
Now the islands are emptier, the valleys are silent, the tabu-groves more ghostly, and at the head of most valleys there is an enormous waterfall – and sometimes three or four – coursing hundreds of feet down from the cliffs.
About that water. Seeing those cataracts often made me thirsty. One day in Nuku Hiva I went to a bar and asked for a drink of water. A half-liter of Vittel was opened for me, and I paid – $2.50. It was unthinkable that I should want the vile water from the pipes of Taiohae, and no one questioned the absurdity of buying this little bottle of Vittel from halfway around the world. That it is available at all is something of a miracle; that it might be necessary is a condemnation of this lovely baffling place.
The French praise and romanticize the Marquesas, but in the 1960s they had planned to test nuclear devices on the northern Marquesan island of Eiao, until there was such an outcry they changed their plans and decided to destroy Mururoa instead. It is said that the French are holding Polynesia together, but really it is so expensive to maintain that they do everything as cheaply as possible – and it is self-serving, too. Better to boost domestic French industries by exporting bottled water from France than investing in a fresh water supply for each island. That is what colonialism is all about. You can hear the bureaucrats say, “Let them boil their water.” The French have left nothing enduring in the islands except a tradition of hypocrisy and their various fantasies of history and high levels of radioactivity.
So what is this part of Polynesia today except France’s flagpole in the Pacific, and a devious way of testing nuclear devices?
“The people are helped, but the help is not handed over – it is bounced to them,” Señor Pillitz said – another Argentine expression, la agaro de rebate, meaning that something is grudgingly given.
When France has succeeded in destroying a few more atolls, when they have managed to make the islands glow with so much radioactivity that night is turned into day, when they have sold the rest of the fishing rights and depleted them of fish (already in Tahiti the surrounding islands have been over-fished), when it has all been thoroughly plundered, the French will plan a great ceremony and grandly offer these unemployed and deracinated citizens in T-shirts and flip-flops their independence. In the destruction of the islands, the French imperial intention, its mission civilisatrice – civilizing mission – will be complete.
20
The Cook Islands: In the Lagoon of Aitutaki
I was paddling in the huge lagoon of Aitutaki, which was green sea ringed by tiny islands and a reef that was like a fortification made of coral and sea foam. An old man fishing from a dugout canoe called out to me.
“Why are you paddling there, listening with those earphones?”
I was listening to Chuck Berry.
“Because I am unhappy,” I said.
“Where is your wife?” he yelled.
Then the wind took the rest of his talk away, and it also separated our boats.
I had come to this lagoon in the Cook group from the Marquesas for a reason. The Marquesas were the dispersal point, from about 300 A.D. onward, for people who populated the three corners of the Polynesian triangle. They sailed to the top of it, the Hawaiian Islands; to the Cooks and beyond, to New Zealand; and to Easter Island. No one is certain why the Marquesans embarked on these long and difficult voyages, some of them over two thousand miles. The people were skilled in the arts of warfare, gardening, navigation and boat-building. They had found every island of any size in the eastern Pacific, bringing to it their arts, their gods, their chiefs, their domestic animals and their favorite vegetables. They worked in stone, they made tools, they wov
e ingenious baskets, but they did not make pots. They civilized these islands with a peculiarly harmonious culture that combined a reverence for flowers, a fondness for music and dancing, and a predilection for cannabalism.
Letting these old discoverers determine my itinerary, I had decided to leave the Marquesas to paddle in the Cook Islands. After that I planned to paddle around Easter Island, and finally Hawaii.
It was a short flight from Papeete to Rarotonga, the main island in the Cook group. I arrived late at night in a cold drizzle and was watched by heavy Maori-looking people with big fleshy faces, large and not very dexterous hands and bulky bodies. They looked like unfinished statues and were handsome in the same sculptural way, with broad open faces and big feet. Every adult, whether man or woman, had a rugby player’s physique.
“This is camping equipment?”
“It’s a boat.” I had checked “camping equipment” on my arrival form.
“Is it clean or dirty?”
“Very clean.”
“You can go.”
Two different New Zealanders, seeing my boat bags and my gear, said sarcastically, “You travel light!” But the Cook Islander heaving them off the baggage cart said,
“My woman weighs more than that.”
It was like landing at an airstrip in the middle of Africa – one plane, three small buildings, few formalities, only one person around, seeing to everything. It was easy to get information because there was so little to know. It was nearly midnight. I asked the only person there whether I could fly the next day to Aitutaki.
“The first flight’s at eight o’clock. I can put you on it.”
The speaker was Mr Skew, a New Zealander. He told me about the political system, which seemed simple enough. Then he asked where I was staying. I saw the name of a hotel on the wall, and said, “There.” He drove me to the place (“And that’s the Cook Islands Parliament House,” Mr Skew said, as we passed a very small wooden shed beyond the airport).
Viv, the dour New Zealand clerk at the hotel, at first pretended she wasn’t glad to see me, and then said, “We have plenty of rooms. Do you want a sea view?”
“I’m getting up at six.” It was now twelve-thirty.
“You should get one of our cheap rooms,” Viv said. The room had a Soviet look, chipped paint, plastic chairs, easily-tipped-over lamps and a blocked drain in the sink. And it was barely furnished. I had last stayed in a room like this in Wellington, but this made pretty Polynesia seem chilly and frugal. The Cooks were still informally linked to New Zealand, but the smug and self-denying Calvinism of Kiwi-land was at odds with everything Polynesian, and the Kiwis themselves looked rather out of place here, so beaky and pale, with short pants and knobby knees.
“I’m from Aitutaki myself,” a Cook Islander said to me the next morning at the airport. He had a strong New Zealand accent. His name was Michael Rere.
“There’s supposed to be a great canoe-maker in Aitutaki,” I said.
“Probably my father.”
“Is his name Rere?”
“Yes, but they call him ‘Blackman,’ because he’s always out fishing. That makes him black.”
Cook Islanders were standing in a light rain, holding garlands and crowns of flowers, watching passengers disembark from a flight that had just arrived from Auckland, watching lots of bundled-up and brightly dressed people hurrying through puddles towards the arrival building. Fat people greeting even fatter arrivals – happy families.
Inter-island planes began to arrive. Besides the high volcanic island of Rarotonga, the most populous (ro,000) and developed, there are fourteen other islands in the Cook group, ranging from coral atolls like Suwarrow (with six inhabitants) to Mangaia, which is nearly as large as Raro. Small planes flew to most of these islands. Aitutaki had been recommended to me as a friendly and pretty place, and so I decided to go there with my collapsible boat.
A woman was yapping in Maori, and among her unintelligible mutterings I caught the phrase, no place like home.
That same hour I was flying in sunshine over the lagoon at Aitutaki, looking down at its wonderful configuration of reefs and motus, and after lunch I was paddling there.
It was then the old man called out to me, “Where is your wife?”
I spent the night at a small seedy house by the shore called Tom’s. Camping was forbidden, because all the land was spoken for and constantly being quarreled over, subdivided and renegotiated. Mr and Mrs Tom were islanders; they were out but their daughter had shown me around. The walls of the house were plastered with religious pictures, and copies of The Book of Mormon were lying about, bristling rather ominously with bookmarks and dog-eared pages.
“You can cook here,” Winnie said, showing me a greasy stove. “You can put your food here.” She opened a dusty cabinet. “You can share this bathroom,” and she shoved a plastic curtain aside, “with the others.”
But what I felt most keenly was the absence of beer. And even if I found some in town, how could I guzzle it in front of this pious family of Mormons?
It was next to the lagoon, so I stayed awhile, and I became friendly with the three fearfully solemn evangelists who could usually be found conferring on the porch, their black ties dangling – a Cook Islander, a Maori from Auckland, and Elder Lambert, from Salt Lake City.
“I’m from Massachusetts,” I said on first meeting them, and when they gave me blank looks I added, “which is not far from Vermont.”
The big booby face of the islander was in marked contrast to the consternation on the face of Elder Lambert. “And you know who was born in Sharon, Vermont,” I said.
“Who was born there?” the Maori asked.
After an uneasy pause, the Cook Islander laughed. “I doon know eet!”
Elder Lambert said, “Joseph Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont.”
They were so transfixed by the fanciful details of their absurd millennialism (Jesus’s visit to the Mayans in Guatemala, golden tablets buried in New York, the prophecies of the Angel Moroni, God encouraging polygamy, and so forth) that they had lost sight of the simplest facts, such as where the founder of their Church, their prophet, was born.
I urged them to read No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, by Fawn Brodie, and they said I should look into The Book of Mormon.
“I will,” I said. “I want to read about the Lost Tribes of Israel sailing into the Pacific.”
This made Elder Lambert hitch his chair forward and begin pointedly tapping the air with his finger.
“In the first chapter of Nephi, Lehi went east from Jerusalem. His descendants are in the Pacific. And in the last chapter of Alma – sixty-three – Hagoth and many others built ships and sailed into ‘the Western Sea.’ Those are the very words. The Pacific, in other words. They were Nephites.”
“Sailed from where?”
“America. Central America.” Tap-tap-tap went his finger. “‘A narrow neck of land.’”
“And they made it to Polynesia.”
“Yes. The Polynesians are descendants of these people.” The Maori was beaming. His expression said: Take that!
“What about the Melanesians?” “Sons of Ham.”
“What about the Micronesians?”
Elder Lambert narrowed his eyes at me. He said, “Corrupt defilers.”
After all this disputation I needed air. I thought: You had to admire Joseph Smith for trying to come up with a home-grown faith – it was the most Americanized religion. (Christopher Columbus and the American Revolution made appearances in The Book of Mormon.) But Mormonism was like junk food: it was American to the core and it looked all right, but it was our version of food; and it wasn’t until after you had swallowed some that you felt strange.
I strolled into Aitutaki’s town, Arutanga. It was a very small town – hardly a town at all, more a village, and its small size and its dullness kept it pure. It was the post office, two shops, four churches, a muddy harbor, a school, some houses. The shops sold only canned goods: fish, be
ans, corned beef, cookies, crackers – the South Pacific standbys.
Poo, the postmaster, was sitting on the post office steps. He told me he disliked Rarotonga for being too busy and stressful.
“Are you busy?”
“Not really,” he said.
Eleanor at Big Jay’s Take-Away fried a fishburger for me, a chunk of wahoo in a bun, and said she had lived her whole life on the island, but that she was trying to make a go of this business.
“Are you busy?”
“Not really,” she said.
It began to rain very hard, and walking back to Tom’s I had to take shelter under a big tree. A girl of about twenty, who had been headed out of town on her motorbike, was doing the same thing. The rain crashed through the branches and leaves.
“You mind this rain?”
“Not really,” she said.
But it let up after an hour, and the sun came out, and I went paddling again.
On the beach, near Tom’s, I met two enormous women, Apii and Emma. They looked elderly, but they were exactly my own age. They referred to me as a papa’a – a white man.
“What if I were black – what would you call me?”
“Then you would be a papa’a kere kere.”
“What if I were Chinese?”
“You would be tinito.”
“What if I were from another island?”
“You would be manuiri – a stranger.”
I asked them whether there were community activities on the island. They said there were the churches and sometimes there were festivals.
“We used to have a cinema in Aitutaki, but videos are better,” Emma said.
“Do you think that videos from America make the young people violent?” I asked.
Emma said, “Maybe. But the young people in Aitutaki are all right. The problem is with these Cook Island kids who come home from the holidays. They live in New Zealand and they learn bad habits. They are troublemakers. We call them ‘street kids.’ They give a bad example. Cook Islanders go bad in New Zealand.”
