Getting Stoned with Savages

by J. Maarten Troost

  NOW AND THEN, I LIKE TO THINK THAT WE HUMANS ARE understandable, that for every conceivable action there is some reason driving it, some underlying cause or instinct that makes our behavior, if not logical, at least comprehensible. Lust, for instance. That’s a big one. Where would we be without lust? I daresay we wouldn’t be here at all. Hunger, power, a desire for security—primal, animalistic impulses—these too are all great motivators of behavior. Were one to listen to the grim reductionism offered by evolutionary biologists, one might conclude that all behavior is coldly guided, driven by a simple need to ensure that our genes continue on without us. That seems inadequate to me. Think of all the ways teenage boys, for example, conspire to take themselves out of the gene pool. They do this because, periodically, we are all stupid, and I am willing to acknowledge that simple, base stupidity can explain a lot of behavior. I speak with some experience.

  Thinking on a grander scale—and why not fly those lofty airs?—one might ask why societies do what they do. What motivates them? Why, for instance, does one culture send men to the moon (to play golf, of course), whereas another culture will worship it from afar, now and then quivering in terror during a lunar eclipse? This is the territory covered by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, a very satisfying book for people like me, who like to think there is a reason behind everything. Diamond argues, very persuasively, that society is shaped by its environment—that its direction is determined by soil fertility, the surrounding animal life, its relative isolation from other societies, even its continental axis—and that nothing changes a culture faster than a change in its environment. I found this very compelling and, finishing the book, I thought, Well, there you have it. Humanity explained. Finally. But then there is Vanuatu, which has many peculiar customs, and if there was one custom that defied my book learning, that confounded my understanding of human nature, it was cannibalism. What to make of it? What would compel someone to eat another person?

  Most people are aware of instances of cannibalism that result from extreme deprivation. We are familiar with the Donner party and their unfortunate travails in the High Sierras. Hollywood has given us Alive, a dramatization of the events that befell a rugby team when their plane crashed in the remote Andes. Grisly as those events were, we can empathize with those who, having no other means to remain alive, take it upon themselves to eat the bodies of their dead companions. Remaining among the living, by any means necessary, is an instinct that is easily understood. No doubt cannibalism of this nature has occurred since we first became carnivores. But as I noted the banana trees and papaya trees that sprouted like weeds in our yard, and as I snorkeled among a million fish, I thought it unlikely that the cannibalism that prevailed throughout Vanuatu had anything to do with sustenance. Nor was it the case, as it was on some islands in Micronesia, that cannibalism in Vanuatu was a form of ancestor worship. In Kiribati, for instance, when someone dies, it is customary for family members to partake of the flesh of the decomposing corpse, ladling it into a kind of soup, which is then consumed, ensuring that, for those in bereavement for Grandma, she will always remain a part of them. I’d prefer a wake of a different sort, but as someone raised as a Catholic, I could get my head around the custom. That starchy wafer produced by nuns, given to us toward the end of Mass—provided, of course, that we had confessed our sins and performed our penance (four Hail Marys and three Our Fathers, typically, for not making up my bed, being mean to my sister, and having unholy thoughts)—was, we were assured by Father David, the very flesh of Jesus.

  “But it’s just a wafer,” I had exclaimed during one of the question-and-answer sessions Father David held for us sprites each month at St. Bonaventure.

  “It is the body of Christ,” he assured me, and sensing some Protestant proclivities on my part, he went on and explained, once again, what the Holy Eucharist was about, a lesson that to this day remains a little fuzzy for me.

  “But…it doesn’t taste like a person. It tastes like a wafer.”

  Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday. And, stretching my capacity for understanding human behavior about as far as it would go, I could see how eating the flesh of your dead family members might not be an appallingly deviant thing to do. But this was not how cannibalism was practiced in Vanuatu. Cannibalism there was more like the cannibalism practiced by Jeffrey Dahmer: very disturbing.

  Until very recently, island life in Vanuatu had been characterized by a state of endless war. This is where my struggle to understand cannibalism begins, for no war seems more pointless to me than the kind traditionally waged in Vanuatu. Typically, the men of a particular village ambushed the men of another village. The goal was to capture one man, who would then be triumphantly carried back to the attackers’ village, clubbed, and chopped into pieces. Good manners dictated that an arm or a leg be sent off to a friendly village. Again here, I sputter in disbelief. Imagine receiving such a package. “Oh, look, honey. Bob and Erma over in Brooklyn have sent us a thigh. So thoughtful.” Of course, now you are obliged to reciprocate, and so you gather your friends and off you go, hunting for a man, and when you capture one, you will thoughtfully hack an arm off and send it along to Bob and Erma, together with a note—Thinking of you. Meanwhile, no village will tolerate the loss of a man or two without seeking vengeance, and so off they go, looking for you, and just as you’re taking your leisure underneath your favorite banyan tree, perhaps digesting a meal, you may find yourself surrounded by fierce-looking men wearing nothing more than leaves around their penises and carrying heavy, knotted clubs, and suddenly you know that this day is not going to end well. You will be carried, kicking and screaming, to the enemy’s village, a village that once contained men named Henry, Kenny, Luther, and Jeremiah, but they’re not there anymore, and you know why. You ate them. And now it is your turn to be devoured. If you are very lucky, a good solid blow to your head will the end the misery right there and then, sparing you the sensation of feeling your body treated like a boiled lobster as your flesh and bones are plucked and torn, carved and diced, cooked in flames, until nothing remains of you except the faint odor of a satisfied belch. But worry not. Bob will avenge you.

  When Westerners began to arrive in some numbers in the nineteenth century, they too found themselves participating in Vanuatu’s exciting culinary world. John Williams, the very first missionary to arrive in Vanuatu, landed on the island of Erromango on November 18, 1839. Sponsored by the London Missionary Society, which had had considerable success in converting much of Polynesia to Christianity, Williams stepped ashore, no doubt confident that very soon he would be breaking bread with the islanders. Within minutes, he was dead, killed by a fusillade of arrows. And then he became lunch. A half-dozen other missionaries would suffer the same fate, and it wasn’t long before Erromango came to be known as the Island of Martyrs. In 1847, the British Sovereign had the great misfortune of finding itself wrecked off Efate. Twenty crew members escaped the sinking vessel on a small boat and made their way to shore, where they were happily received by the islanders. And who wouldn’t be happy to see such a feast? In the end, only two of the unfortunate sailors managed to elude the dismal fate of their companions, who could last be heard asking their hosts, “You’re having what for dinner?”

  In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the blackbirders began to visit the islands of Vanuatu. Little better than slavers, they were recruiters searching for indentured workers to toil in the mines of New Caledonia and the sugar and cotton plantations of Fiji, Samoa, and Australia. Many Ni-Vanuatu were kidnapped. Most suffered through years of appalling brutality, but if they survived their years of service, they were returned to their islands. Survived being the operative word. Of the forty thousand Ni-Vanuatu
lured to Queensland, Australia, fewer than thirty thousand lived to return. Of the ten thousand who were sent to New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa, it is unknown how many lived, though the mines in New Caledonia were known to be a graveyard. Some of those who did manage to return, quite naturally, held a grudge against white men.

  In 1878, on the island of Ambae, a returned laborer named Sikeri was in need of victims. For men in Vanuatu, prestige and influence were obtained by passing through demanding grade-taking rituals, which allowed a man to move upward in class. On most islands, a chief earned his position by participating in ceremonies that called for an ever-greater sacrifice of pigs. Pigs equaled wealth in Vanuatu. Now and then, however, a grade-taking ritual required the sacrifice of men, and so when recruiters from the Mystery arrived one fine morning, Sikeri and his followers decided that they would do nicely. Six men were slaughtered and eaten. Three years later, a similar fate befell the crew of the May Queen when another chief on Ambae needed victims to commemorate the death of his child.

  But why eat people? Killing people I could understand. It happens all the time. A quick glance at the local news suggests that human beings kill one another for the most trivial of reasons. Indeed, I daresay I too have felt the urge to kill, particularly when I’m driving. If the driver of the white Ford F-150 pickup truck that cut me off last Tuesday is reading this, you should know that I’m looking for you. And in Vanuatu, when one considers what happened subsequent to the arrival of Westerners, it is a wonder that the Ni-Vanuatu did not kill every missionary, sandalwood trader, and colonist who landed upon their shores. Perhaps no country suffered more cruelly from the diseases introduced by Westerners than Vanuatu. Living in such isolation from the rest of the world, the Ni-Vanuatu had not acquired immunity to influenza, measles, whooping cough, and a half-dozen other ailments. What caused a sniffle in London killed in Vanuatu. When the unfortunate Mr. Williams arrived on Erromango in 1839, there were approximately 4,500 people living on the island; by 1930, there were only 500. Aneityum Island had a population of 3,500 in 1850; in 1905, there were 450. On every island touched by Westerners, epidemics followed, and the depopulation of Vanuatu was appalling. In 1800, an estimated one million Ni-Vanuatu lived on the islands. By 1935, there were only 41,000. “Why should we have any more children?” asked one woman on Malekula. “Since the white men came, they all die.”

  Local medicine and magic were no antidote to the apocalyptic waves of disease that swept through Vanuatu during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On many islands, epidemics were understood to be the work of sorcerers who had the power to both cause and cure illness. This was a belief that did not work well for missionaries. The death of John Williams had hardly hindered their efforts to convert the Ni-Vanuatu, though the London Missionary Society did think it prudent to send Samoan missionaries for a while to soften the heathens up, as it were, rather than lose another Englishman. For those missionaries who did manage to establish a presence on an island, their work tending to those overcome by measles, smallpox, and the other epidemics of the day was regarded as evidence that they had caused the disease, and for this many were killed and eaten. Some missionaries even went out of their way to take responsibility for an epidemic. When measles swept through Erromango in 1861, George Gordon, an obstinate Presbyterian from Canada, declared that it was his god who did this—a little payback for their stubborn heathenism. Now that the mystery of who was to blame was all cleared up, the islanders felt free to carve up Gordon and his wife for dinner, a fate that befell innumerable missionaries during those dark years.

  It is grim stuff. Perusing the country’s history, one begins to realize that Vanuatu is like the Russia of the South Pacific, a place of endless calamities. Most of the misery that befell Vanuatu, alas, is hardly unique. To this day, as Rwanda and Yugoslavia demonstrate, we still find a reason to kill our neighbors. And the diseases that wiped out the Ni-Vanuatu were the same diseases that brought the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the cusp of extinction. A first encounter with someone from the Eurasian landmass was very often the equivalent of a death sentence for the rest of humanity, who had the misfortune of residing in places bereft of the cows and horses and other domesticated animals that conferred a measure of immunity. All this I understood. What continued to baffle me, however, was cannibalism. Not the occasional ceremonial cannibalism, not cannibalism as vengeance, not the I really need to eat kind of cannibalism. What perplexed me was the almost casual nature of cannibalism in Vanuatu, its everydayness. As far as I understood, there was neither shame nor reverence attached to the eating of people. A body was just a meal. Clearly, there must be something more to it, or at least I hoped there was. To find out, I figured, I would have to ask a cannibal. And if there was one island where I thought I might find a cannibal, it was Malekula.

  UPON INDEPENDENCE in 1980, Vanuatu shed its colonial designation—the New Hebrides—and assumed its current name. Vanuatu derives from vanua, the word for “land” in many Pacific languages. Most newly independent nations would take this as just the beginning. The names of towns would change. Street names would no longer honor King Leopold or some other distant tyrant. Islands and provinces would assume their original, precolonial place-names. Not so in Vanuatu. Indeed, our neighborhood in Port Vila still retained the name given to it by American soldiers in World War II: Nambatri, pidgin for “number three.” Nambatu was just down the road, which led to Nambawan, or downtown. It was much the same throughout the islands, where many bays, lagoons, points, and even mountains retained the names given to them by Westerners. Even many of the islands themselves kept the names bestowed by the first foreign visitors. Captain Bligh didn’t even set foot on the Banks Islands, which he named for Joseph Banks, the naturalist. Of course, he was in a hurry at the time, having recently lost his ship The Bounty to Christian Fletcher and his fellow mutineers, and after his open longboat was chased by cannibals when he passed through Fiji, he knew that this was the wrong neighborhood for dillydallying. There have, however, been some modifications to island names. Pedro Fernandez de Quirós, when he landed on Vanuatu’s largest island in 1606, believed he had discovered the mythical southern continent, and he named it Australia del Espíritu Santo. The Australia part was dropped, however, when someone found another Australia, and today the island is called Espirítu Santo, or just Santo.

  One can understand the reticence of the Ni-Vanuatu when it comes to changing their islands’ names. If, for example, the people of a particular island speak twenty languages, there are likely twenty different names for the island, and so settling on a local word for their home is bound to be difficult. Nevertheless, if there is one island where one would think that its inhabitants would make the effort, it would be Malekula. Like so many islands in the South Pacific, Malekula was named by the intrepid Captain Cook, who stumbled upon it in July 1774, during his second great voyage of discovery when he was captain of the Resolution. He called the island Mallicullo, and it is generally understood that this was a play on the French expression mal a cul, which translates as “pain in the ass.” I found this a little fanciful, a little out of character for Captain Cook, who is widely regarded as having been particularly humane and tolerant in his relations with people in the South Pacific. It seemed unlikely that he would name an island in a fit of petulance, but after reading his notes on Malekula, I wasn’t so sure. “The people of this country are in general the most Ugly and ill-proportioned of any I ever saw,” he wrote. “They are almost black or rather a dark Chocolate Colour, Slenderly made, not tall, have Monkey faces and wooly hair…We saw but few Women and they were fully as disagreeable as the Men.”

  Sadly, the Malekulans did not write, so we do not have any notes that could tell us what they thought of Captain Cook and his crew, who had spent the previous two years tightly confined in a rat-infested wooden ship, much of it spent in the tropics, without access to a shower or deodorant, and as they were Englishmen in an age before sunscreen, their skin must have been of pa
rticular interest to Malekulans. “These Creatures are the most Repellent beasts we have yet encountered,” one can imagine a Malekulan writing. “They have Red skin that flakes and sheds like a serpent, except for the parts that they cover, which is a Hideous white. Many are Furry like our swine and they exhibit a most Malodorous stench. They have no Females among them, and we take them for Sodomites, with an Unnatural appetite for Buggery.”

  In the end, Cook did not stay long. Though he was in need of food and water, the Malekulans had made it clear that they really rather wished that he and his men would just mosey on and leave their island. Presumably, they thought Cook was a ghost, and who could blame them for wanting little to do with the Undead? As they left, Cook and his officers dined on a couple of fish they had caught, which caused them to be “seiz’d with Violent pains in the head and Limbs, so as to be unable to stand, together with a kind of Scorching heat all over the Skin.” Perhaps this was his pain-in-the-ass moment.

  As I made my arrangements for Malekula, it occurred to me that if I had the choice, I would much rather sail to the island in a rat-infested wooden ship than fly Vanair. I do not like to fly. A 747 reduces me to sweaty palms and heart palpitations. A Twin Otter in a mountainous third-world country is basically a full-on cardiac event for me. Not long before, a Vanair Twin Otter had crashed into the ocean near Port Vila, downed by a violent squall. Though miraculously four people were able to swim to shore, eight died. A few years earlier, a Vanair Islander had slammed into a mountain on Aneityum. There were no survivors. That’s two planes lost by a four-plane airline. I wondered whether I should pack a defibrillator.

  At the time, Sylvia was on a business trip to Bali. It’s rugged work, international development, but if someone was needed to attend a weeklong conference on coral reefs at a beachside resort in Indonesia, Sylvia was willing to do it. With a week to myself, I had decided to spend it in a hut on a malarial island far away from the resorts on Efate. But as I caught a minibus to the airport I began to regret Sylvia’s absence immensely. No man likes to be reduced to a quivering, sobbing wreck in front of his wife, and in the past, whenever we had flown on small planes together, it was that fact alone, I felt, which had prevented the onslaught of panic. I had some dim hopes that I would be flying the ATR, a forty-five-passenger prop plane, the largest in the Vanair fleet, but I knew that those hopes were misplaced. The ATR required a proper runway. Malekula didn’t have a proper runway. It had a clearing in the bush. And so I boarded a Twin Otter with about the same enthusiasm I’d feel if I were settling in for a root canal. To my mild surprise, I wasn’t the only Westerner aboard. There were two missionaries, a middle-aged couple from Australia. ELDA WOODRUFF, said the man’s name tag, and if his black pants and white short-sleeved shirt didn’t give it away, the name tag did. They were Mormons. Like me, they were probably hoping to find cannibals, too.