12
Hawaiki
During that year in Boston I struck up a correspondence with an old friend of my parents. They had all grown up together in the thirties in Southern California; I have a picture of the three of them as teenagers, standing shoulder to shoulder on the beach. They stayed in touch over the years, despite ending up on opposite sides of the country, but it was I, in the end, who had the most in common with Henry. Although we saw each other only rarely, we became frequent correspondents.
Henry had been born wealthy and had never had to work. He did have one job, though: not long after the Second World War he served briefly as governor of American Samoa. He was a curious choice by any measure, young and completely inexperienced, but his father was politically well connected and I imagine he wanted something for Henry to do. As it turned out, the experience had a profound effect on him.
In Samoa he met the girl he was to marry, an American administrator’s daughter, young, good-looking, stylish, a little bored, no doubt, with the limited society of the islands. They celebrated their wedding on the veranda of the governor’s house, the men in navy dress whites, the women in silk cocktail dresses in shades of magenta and plum. They had only been married a year when they moved back to California. Henry, I think, might have stayed, but his wife was understandably unwilling to start her family in such a remote place. It had not been her choice, after all, to go there. So, back they went to Los Angeles, where they settled into a large, handsome house with a pool and an aviary that had been given to them as a wedding present by Henry’s father.
But that was not the end of it, at least for Henry. For the next fifty years he collected books and journals on the places and peoples of the Pacific, until he had one of the finest private libraries of its kind. He never went back to Samoa but instead bought a large piece of land in a remote corner of the Hawaiian Islands and built a house there, modeled on a Samoan fale, with a high, pitched roof and an airy feel and a wide, cool balcony facing the sea. He filled the house with books and artifacts and furniture made from rare Hawaiian wood. The tiles on the floor were blue like the ocean, the walls were white, and the roof beams were dark, and below the house were gardens and potting sheds filled with palms and orchids and every kind of bromeliad you can imagine.
I had known Henry all my life and Seven and I often saw him, in Hawaii or California, when we traveled back and forth. But it was not until that year in Boston that Henry and I started writing to each other. I was missing the Pacific and he—his wife by then had passed away and his children were grown—seemed to enjoy the exchange. As we came across subjects of mutual interest, Henry and I traded notes. I would send him the publications list of the National Research Institute in Boroka, Papua New Guinea; he would send me articles on ethnobotany, or political tidbits from Pacific Islands Monthly, or gossip from the Maui News. We both subscribed to the Journal of the Polynesian Society, though he was the more thorough reader.
“Dear C,” he wrote. “Just in case your subscription to JPS hasn’t caught up with you, I copied this article.” Enclosed was a photocopy of “The Early Human Biology of the Pacific: Some Considerations” by Philip Houghton of the University of Otago in which the author makes the case for the action of natural selection upon voyaging proto-Polynesians. “In the historical record,” Houghton writes, “a picture of a large-bodied, strongly muscular people distributed over a wide expanse of the Pacific is repeated almost monotonously.” Henry had made a slight mark in the margin beside this passage. This was sort of a joke between us, Seven being such a classic example of the type.
The gist of the article was interesting. Throughout Polynesia, in Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti, New Zealand, Hawaii, the Cooks, the Tuamotus, and the Marquesas, the prehistoric record provides strong evidence of a distinctive Polynesian body type: heavily muscled with a long torso, proportionally short legs, and a round or brachycephalic head, all of which are suggestive of cold-climate adaptation. The larger, stronger, and more compact the body, the better it conserves heat. But, asks Houghton, does this make sense? One might expect this sort of body type in the Arctic or on the steppes of central Asia, or in North Dakota for that matter, where people are exposed to cold temperatures and strong winds. But the vast majority of Polynesians live in the tropics. Their islands are warm, even sultry in some seasons, leading many early European visitors to conclude that indolence and luxury were a Polynesian way of life.
But if we think more creatively, suggests Houghton, we will see that Polynesians are not so much an island as an oceanic people, and that the environment that has shaped them is not the solid one on which they live but the watery one through which they had to travel. No matter how warm it seems in the tropical Pacific when you are on dry land, it is cold when you are wet and exposed to the wind on the open ocean. And these are precisely the conditions to which every early Polynesian voyager was exposed. “Whatever the mean air and water temperature,” he writes, “the environment of Remote Oceania is effectively the coldest to which Homo sapiens has adapted.”
Dear Henry,
Thanks for the article on Polynesian morphology. Who knew that what was really going on was selection for the perfect rugby player! Remember Jonah Lomu, the six-foot-five, 2.66-pound Tongan who ran the 100 meters in 10.8? I remember watching him crash through the South Africans in the 1995 World Cup. He was absolutely unstoppable. Good genes, yah?
Seriously, though, I wonder if Houghton’s take on this is widely accepted. It makes sense, but how fast can that kind of adaptation occur?
Hope the orchids are blooming.
Yours as ever,
C
The Polynesian triangle stretches from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south, and from Tuvalu in the west to Rapa Nui (a.k.a. Easter Island) in the east, an area of ten million square miles. So far apart are some of these islands—Easter Island is nearly 900 miles from the nearest speck of land, Hawaii is 750 miles from its nearest southern neighbor—that for a long time European scholars refused to believe that they were intentionally colonized. Right through the 1960s a handful of historians insisted that the people who became Tahitians, Marquesans, Cook Islanders—not to mention the far-flung Hawaiians, Maoris, and Easter Islanders—must have drifted to these islands accidentally, having been blown out to sea by storms and lost their way. The distances were too great, the technology too primitive, the environment too unpredictable, they argued. How could a neolithic people possibly accomplish such a thing?
But the idea of accidental colonization is surely even more preposterous. Almost every habitable island in the eastern Pacific, and there are hundreds of them, shows signs of Polynesian occupation at some time. Could they plausibly have drifted to them all? And did these accidental voyagers just happen to have with them all the domesticated plants and animals—the dogs, rats, pigs, chickens, taro, kumara, paper mulberry—that also migrated to these islands? Did they have women and children? Priests and gods? Did they set out to go fishing with everything it takes to reconstitute a civilization?
Today it is accepted that, for reasons that will forever remain obscure but that probably had to do with tribal conflict, overcrowding, perhaps climate change and a shortage of resources, as well as curiosity and “the wandering spirit,” the ancestors of modern Polynesians began island-hopping eastward from the western edge of Oceania about three thousand years ago, eventually reaching Tonga, Samoa, and Fiji. Then, in roughly the first millennium (from about A.D. 100 to 800), a people who can be clearly identified as Polynesian from the similarity of their languages, myths, and technology made a series of daring exploratory voyages eastward into central Polynesia—to Tahiti, the Cooks, and the Marquesas. These were followed in time by the truly radical forays that led them to Rapa Nui, Hawaii, and New Zealand, until, as Cook observed in astonishment, they had succeeded in spreading themselves across “a fourth part of the circumference of the Globe.”
There are marvelous accounts of crossing the Pacific written by Europeans who
sailed in ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The sentiments they express are a mixture of wonder and fear, amazement at their own insignificance, humility in the face of the sublime. For the voyaging European, the Pacific was a vast, inscrutable emptiness, an endless horizon, a sky full of light. It was the opposite, in every respect, of the place he called home, a cozy, terrestrial cluster of cities and farms, busy with human activity. The Pacific, by contrast, seemed dreamlike, a liminal space, a place of clouds and shadow. “We may now consider that we have nearly crossed the Pacific,” wrote Darwin, as he made the long passage from Tahiti to New Zealand.
It is necessary to sail over this great ocean to comprehend its immensity. Moving quickly onwards for weeks together, we meet with nothing but the same blue, profoundly deep, ocean. Even within the archipelagoes, the islands are mere specks, and far distant from one another. Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a small scale, where dots, shading, and names are crowded together, we do not rightly judge how infinitely small the proportion of dry land is to water of this vast expanse. The meridian of the antipodes has likewise been passed; and now every league, it made us happy to think, was one league nearer to England. These antipodes call to one’s mind old recollections of childish doubt and wonder. Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our voyage homewards; but now I find it, and all such resting places for the imagination, are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch.
To the voyaging Polynesian, however, it must have been quite different. The oldest words in any Polynesian language, the core that every migrating group carried with it from the ancestral lands—the elemental lexicon—are words for sea creatures, fishing techniques, various parts of canoes. One might almost reconstruct a complete history of the Polynesian diaspora on the evidence of fishhooks alone. For early Polynesians, the ocean, far from being a “trackless waste,” as so many Victorians had it, was crisscrossed by sea roads and pathways. Over every horizon lay islands, some near, some far, some big enough to colonize, some barely big enough to offer respite on the way to somewhere else. For two thousand years knowledge of these islands, where they lay and how to reach them, constituted the core of their arcana. Traveling in large, double-hulled sailing canoes, they navigated by the stars and the ocean currents, the winds, the swells, the birds, the look and feel of the sky and water. They knew hundreds of constellations, identified dozens of winds, could feel the interaction of as many as five different swells through the deck of an oceangoing canoe. They knew which birds flew out from land in the morning and returned to it at dusk. They knew that a high island would disrupt the trade winds, and that the lagoon of a low island would cast a greenish glow on the underbelly of the clouds.
They traveled over the ocean the way we traveled over the land, with all our belongings bumping along beside us, with our breeding stock and our favorite seedlings, a Bible and a change of clothes. They carried paste made from taro and breadfruit, dried fish, young coconuts, and water stored in gourds. They shipped cargoes of flintstone and seed tubers, sacred stones and feathers, parrots and piglets and dogs. Stories in the Maori tradition tell of babies born on long voyages, of disputes that erupted over sailing directions, of canoes that were wrecked on atolls or wandered into dangerous regions of the sea. Few of the voyages are without incident: canoes get sucked into giant whirlpools, swamped by terrible storms, cast away upon islands that have since disappeared beneath the surface of the sea. Sometimes the voyagers are guided by whales or birds, or by taniwha, mythical sea monsters. Often there are supernatural components, and yet the detail of these stories is too prosaic—words to be said while bailing water, lists of members of the crew—to be mistaken for myth.
And then, about six or seven hundred years ago, longdistance voyaging ceased. Although Polynesians continued to build canoes and make short, interisland and coastal voyages, they never ventured out onto the sea roads again. Ka kotia te tai tapu ke Hawaiki, they say in New Zealand: “The tapu sea to Hawaiki is cut off.” All over Polynesia the specific memory of where they had come from and how to get there disappeared, leaving no more than an echo, a myth of an ancestral homeland reachable only by supernatural means. In the Maori tradition this land is known as Hawaiki, a name that was carried throughout the islands by the earliest migrants and appears in every Polynesian language in some cognate form. The land of Hawaiki is an otherworldly place, sometimes in the east, sometimes in the west, sometimes in the sky or underwater. It is a land of origin and a source of life, a place of plenty, a paradise. But it is also a place of death and separation, and those who pass over to Hawaiki are lost to this world.
In three places the name has been given to actual islands. The first is Savai’i in Samoa, thought to be the original of them all, in part because Samoans are the only Polynesians who do not describe themselves as having originally come from someplace else. The second is a highly tapu, or sacred, island in the Society Islands commonly known as Ra’iatea, the island from which Omai came. And the third is the Big Island of Hawaii. Settled late in Polynesian prehistory, Hawaii (or Hawai’i, as it is properly known) is not the Hawaiki of myth but an echo or reflection of it. Like Plymouth or Essex or New England, it was named, perhaps hopefully, perhaps nostalgically, in remembrance of a former home.
When Aperahama was six months old, we moved again, this time from Boston to Honolulu, where I had a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at a research institute called the East-West Center. We were completely strapped for money, paying three quarters of my stipend in rent for a run-down, three-room bungalow on the side of Punchbowl Hill. The built-in cupboards had been eaten by ants and the bathtub was stained, but the floor was a curious and wonderful kind of polished concrete, silky smooth and cool, and we sat high enough on the hill to catch the trade winds and to see the lights of Waikiki.
The house was stuccoed and solid, with large rectangular windows and a wide, overhanging roof that kept out the sun and the rain. For such a small house, it was elegantly conceived. The front door opened directly onto a large airy room that stretched the full width of the building. On the back wall were two doors: one to the left that led into the kitchen, and one to the right for the bedroom and bath. In back the house butted up against the hill, but in front it had been terraced with black lava-rock walls, so that between the house and road was a perfectly level lawn, which ended abruptly in a drop of six or eight feet to a tangle of weeds and creepers. Then there was another eight-foot drop to street level. A narrow stone staircase with an iron gate led up to the house, which was entirely invisible from the road. It was our private sanctuary, hidden from the world.
Dear Henry,
Hawaiki nui, Hawaiki roa, Seven has discovered the ancestral homeland! He is learning to surf and has found an ancient brown Ford LTD wagon to carry his board around. Last week he rode his bike down Punchbowl with Aperahama in the seat behind him. What a maniac! I, on the other hand, have taken to walking (not wanting to drive the LTD) up and down Punchbowl with the groceries, carrying an umbrella to ward off the sun. The only other people who do this are elderly Asian ladies. We nod genteelly to one another as we pass.
You’ll be glad to hear that the monetary crisis has eased. Seven has found a part-time job in an office with a bunch of big Hawaiian ladies who talk about him in Hawaiian—or at least they did until they heard him laughing and realized he could understand what they said. Mother is throwing in her social security check. My father says, “Consider it a grant from the federal government.” So, between the three of us, we’ll meet the rent.
We love Hawaii and can already imagine how sad we are going to be when we have to leave. It will be like being sent forth from paradise—again!
Thanks for the piece by Marshall Sahlins, always an interesting guy.
Henry’s reply came almost by return post.
Dear C,
Your address indicates that you are located across the street from where a friend of mine once had an apartment. She liv
ed in the big condominium on the makai side of Prospect. I remember looking down on the bungalows across the street and imagining that they must be inhabited by old Chinese-Hawaiian grandmothers whose families would come and stay there when they were in Honolulu for the night. With your umbrella you might almost resemble one of them—at least from above.
Not long after we arrived in Honolulu, Seven and I paid a visit to the Bishop Museum, an institution founded in 1889 in honor of the last descendant of the royal Hawaiian family. We wandered through the rooms looking at paddles and grinders, the ubiquitous fishhooks and lures, and some more exotic-looking objects, including a necklace of braided hair. Eventually, we found ourselves in a picture gallery. There were a series of landscapes: romantic views of Manoa Valley, a pond with a few waterfowl, some desultory coconut palms, the jagged outline of the mountains with their deep ravines. We saw a sketch of Diamond Head from Punchbowl, seen from just about where we lived, and a curious painting called View of the Smallpox Hospital, Waikiki. The story was all there, in pictures, the views of vessels lying at anchor, the canoes plying back and forth, the Honolulu Fort, circa 1853, with its neat companies of red-coated royal guards and Governor Kekuanaoa in a cockaded hat.
Rounding a corner we came upon a little alcove hung with mid-nineteenth-century portraits of Hawaiian royalty. On the opposite wall a young queen in a high-necked black silk dress with a lace collar looked out at me from the canvas.
“Seven, look! She looks exactly like Kura.”
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 16
