Coconut Chaos

by Diana Souhami

  Defeated, the Tahitians gave the English all they wanted: water, hogs, sex, fruit, vegetables. In exchange they were given nails, bits of iron and beads. A woman was brought to the cutter where this barter was taking place. Two men had to support her, for she kept collapsing. She stared in wonder at the English strangers, then wept. Her husband and three of her sons had been killed by their gunfire. She shook Wallis’s hand and gave him two hogs but would accept nothing from him in return.

  8

  Because supply ships called so rarely at Pitcairn and there were no shops, I wanted the blouse I’d bought in London to be a memorable present, stylish and special. Bligh, when he sailed to Tahiti, took cheap gifts to buy favours – a hundred pounds of glass beads, 168 mirrors, 72 shirts. But he knew that above all else the islanders wanted iron, for they had none of their own. ‘For traffic with the natives’ he took 1000 lbs of nails, 576 cheap knives, 2808 custom-made axes and boxes of saws, drills and files.

  All that the Tahitians made came from their island. Their most effective armament was a slingshot of plaited coconut fibre, filled with stones and swung with terrific force round their heads. They made clubs, lances and spears from wood and shell, chisels from bone, nails from wood, needles from bamboo or fishbone and hammers and anchors from stone. They used conch shells as megaphones and built ocean-going boats from trees hollowed to hulls and joined by transverse beams. The largest of these accommodated 150 paddlers, surpassed any western boat for speed, and could withstand the most violent seas.

  They fished at night by moonlight, their canoes illuminated by candle-nuts,* with lines made from coconut fibre and hooks of mother-of-pearl. They used the glittering hooks as artificial flies without bait. In the reefs they speared fish with sharpened bamboo. If they caught a large fish they hauled it with ropes from the sterns of the canoes on to an outrigger.

  When weird-looking sailors arrived from nowhere in a magnificent floating town, they saw at first encounter how transforming iron might be. On his visit in the Dolphin, Wallis described a test he devised. He laid out a Johannes (a twenty-two-carat gold coin), a golden guinea, a silver crown, a Spanish dollar, a few shillings, some brass halfpennies, and two large nails, then invited the Tahitians to choose. They always took the nails first, then the halfpennies. They had no particular interest in the other coins. ‘Their thirst after iron is irresistible,’ he wrote. His crew then stripped the ship of its nails because they could buy any imaginable sexual favour for the price of a nail. ‘The men even drew out of different parts of the ship those nails that fastened the cleats† to her side.’

  Bligh, in return for nails, wanted a thousand breadfruit plants from the Tahitians, he didn’t tell them why. His crew, like Wallis’s, wanted every imaginable sexual favour, as well as fresh water, wood, fruit, fish and hospitality in the sunshine. I, with my blouse for Rosie, signalled my desire for friendship with her in the hope she’d treat me well.

  * The kernels of spurgewort, Aleurites triloba, the candleberry tree.

  † Wedges of wood for securing ropes etc.

  9

  On Tahiti Bligh was the celebrity guest, the visiting dignitary, bearing gifts from an unimagined land. He called the island ‘The Paradise of the World’ and said he’d travelled far but found nowhere more beautiful. Chief Otoo fêted him with great goodwill and rejoicing and gave him hogs, breadfruit, fish, capsicums, pumpkins and so many coconuts that none of the crew drank water any more. Otoo’s wife and sister spread mats for him to recline on, draped him in their finest cloth, held his hands as they escorted him round the island and brought a picture of Captain Cook in a broken frame for him to repair.

  Otoo asked if Christian was Bligh’s tyo – his special friend. Bligh offended Christian by saying he wasn’t, that King George the Third was his tyo. It was one offence of many. He convinced the Tahitians he was doing them a favour by taking their island’s breadfruit as a present for his king. He warned the crew not to divulge the true purpose of the visit in case this increased the cost, nor were they to mention Cook’s death for fear of creating unease.

  Bligh wooed the Tahitians with nails and beads. ‘They appeared extremely satisfied,’ he wrote in his log. They also loved cast-off British clothes, would discard their clean, bright-coloured wraps for a dirty old English shirt, and were ‘mad’ for strong liquor and getting drunk on rum, brandy or wine. Bligh showed them the workings of the ship and they shouted with excitement when he fired the great guns across the sea. When they saw a swallow shot it was ‘impossible to describe the pleasure they evinced’. They picked up the spent bullets in amazement. Bligh promised, when he next visited, to bring arms and ammunition from the king. To reciprocate, Otoo had two dresses made for George the Third.

  Bligh was given permission to set up camp at Point Venus. Tahitians were barred from this area. Christian supervised the erecting of tents and a bamboo shed to house the saplings and made sure that sea shells were put in the base of the pots for drainage.

  Because so many plants were wanted, Bligh, Nelson the gardener and a party of men went inland to the deep valley to persuade chiefs of different regions to give them trees. That his king should want a thousand breadfruit saplings was one of the many things the Tahitians found mystifying about Bligh. They asked bemused questions about the Christian god he spoke of. Did he come from the wind or the sun? Who was there before him? Who was the mother of his only son?

  With reciprocal curiosity Bligh noted Tahitian customs in his log: how they bathed each morning in fresh-water streams, how small children were such adept swimmers they could pick up any tiny bead thrown into the water, how women often slept and ate in different houses from the men, and how the ‘favours’ of married women and of unmarried women of ‘the better sort’ were as hard to obtain as in any country. But he also wrote of parents who bargained ‘the untasted charms of their child’ for a couple of shirts and three strings of beads, of women who ‘danced with their fore part Naked to the Company making many lewd gestures’, of men who bound their penises with twine and stones to the sound of flute and drum music. He expressed surprise at the islanders’ laughter at such displays.

  The Tahitians lived on an island of plenty and in harmony with the sea. They built ocean-going boats bigger than the Bounty. Their diet was varied, their culture rich. They didn’t need these visitors who brought viral infections and rats from their ship. Venereal disease was passed to them and in time children were born with it. Bligh’s favoured lads, Fletcher Christian and Peter Heywood, who was sixteen, were treated for it by the egregious Dr Huggan. If Bligh was treated, it was not recorded.

  The Bounty crew all found tyos and sexual partners. They bought sex with girls for beads or a shirt and anything for a nail. They got ornately tattooed and lived indulgently. But Bligh’s temper didn’t improve in this ‘Paradise of the World’. He reacted savagely when things went wrong. He’d reached Tahiti in the monsoon season so he couldn’t leave until the following April. It was difficult for him to control his crew on the island for nearly six months and he continued to view them as riff-raff. He called his petty officers neglectful and worthless and chided them for inefficiency and incompetence.

  Anything unguarded on the ship and its boats, if deemed useful, was taken by the Tahitians. What was perceived by the English as pilfering was viewed differently by a society that shared material things. Bligh conceded that, ‘were the ship lying in the river Thames a hundred times more would have been stolen’. Polynesians saw a distinction between casual pilfering and clever theft. Hiro, the god of thieving, inspired only the chosen with real skill.

  Within days the Bounty’s best-bower anchor was taken, then the rudder, the gudgeon from the cutter and the butcher’s cleaver. On Bligh’s instruction the boat-keeper, Robert Lamb the butcher and William Muspratt the cook’s assistant were then all lashed a dozen times for neglect of duty. The Tahitian women were shocked to witness these harsh punishments. Matthew Thompson was lashed for insolence and disobedience. Wil
liam Purcell was confined to his cabin for refusing to make a whetstone. When a small Tahitian boy got injured as he helped haul the launch to the shore, Dr Huggan was too drunk to attend him. The boy survived, but Huggan died of alcohol poisoning. Bligh didn’t grieve. Huggan, who spent most of his time in bed, had given capricious treatment for fanciful ailments – pneumoniotha or cholera morbus.

  In the months on Tahiti Bligh’s discipline eroded. The spare sails he’d wanted aired became mildewed, the ship’s timepiece was left to run down, the azimuth compass was stolen. He said if he’d had anyone to replace the master and boatswain, ‘they should no longer occupy their respective stations’.

  Resentment among the crew festered then burst out. On 5 January 1789 Charles Churchill master-at-arms, and able seamen William Muspratt and John Millward, loaded the ship’s cutter with guns and ammunition then sailed it to the bay. They intended to escape by canoe to the island of Tethuroa. Bligh let the Tahitians know that unless they were captured he’d ‘make the whole country suffer for it’. Thomas Hayward, the officer on watch, was put in irons, and Bligh, armed with pocket pistols, went with a party of Tahitians to round up the deserters. He found them in a house five miles from the ship and the arms were retrieved, apart from a musket and two bayonets. Two lots of flogging followed: twelve lashes on each occasion for Churchill, twenty-four for Muspratt and Millward. They were kept in irons until their skin healed enough for the second round.

  That same week Bligh gave the seaman Isaac Martin nineteen lashes for striking a Tahitian. A few days later the ship was almost wrecked when it ran aground. Then someone almost severed the anchor cable. Had they succeeded, the ship would have foundered on the reef. The vehemence of Bligh’s anger alarmed the Tahitians. Otoo was mystified by it, his wife Iddeah wept and his parents left for the mountains even though it was raining heavily.

  Bligh had a platform built in the fo’c’sle for a sentinel to guard the cable night and day. He suspected sabotage, as a ploy for his men to stay on Tahiti. Vanity barred him from thinking they might be tired of his rages and punishments. Hayward’s tyo was implicated. He was thought to be vengeful of the punishment meted to his friend, or at least to have agreed to do the deed for him. He was given a hundred lashes, his back swelled and the skin broke. He was put in irons but escaped and dived overboard.

  On Friday 27 January the gardener began to load the breadfruit plants into the Bounty conservatory. Roots were pushing through the containers. There were 774 pots, thirty-nine tubs, and twenty-four boxes of saplings. There were also exotic Tahitian specimens for Joseph Banks’s botanical collection at Kew: the chestnut-like rata, peeah which the Tahitians ate as a pudding, ettow and matte which gave them a red dye, and the oraiah, a sort of plantain. Bligh and the crew were given leaving presents: wooden carvings, musical instruments, black pearls and cloth. Otoo wanted to be saluted with the great guns as the Bounty pulled out to sea, but Bligh was afraid this would disturb the plants. Instead, he ordered all the men to gather on deck and give three cheers for Tahiti as the ship sailed from the bay.

  10

  Verity stayed with friends. The rooms we’d shared looked empty. We were polite when we met, but politeness seemed like proof of distance. One evening she mooted her plan to move to a provincial town, and asked if I’d keep this place on or go to Mill Cottage until I decided what I wanted. I thought of Bligh’s contention that his crew had no attachments in their home country, so they mutinied to stay on Tahiti.

  I talked of my problems in getting to Pitcairn Island. ‘This is the twenty-first century,’ Verity said. ‘If you want to go anywhere on the planet you buy a ticket then get on a plane, train, ship or bus.’ I said Pitcairn was not like that. ‘But why go there anyway?’ she asked and not for the first time. ‘There’s enough about Pitcairn on the net and in the news. Why choose somewhere so weird and far away?’ I said it was a question of living connections, of being dissatisfied with virtual reality, of letting the real world impinge. I again expounded on random correlations that challenge ideas of linear narrative, predetermination or contiguousness. I told her how, in a deterministic system, later states evolve from earlier ones according to a fixed law, whereas in a random system the move from earlier to later states is not determined by any law. She gave me an appraising stare and said that in her view love was a fixed connection and that narrative without it was bleak. As for life as a series of random happenings, that was OK if I didn’t mind loneliness and loss.

  I reflected on this alone in my room. I feared I’d sounded pretentious. It was my choice to go to Pitcairn. It was not essential. Verity’s view of life was directional whereas I shook all the bits, like in a kaleidoscope, to see how they’d arrange themselves next. I wondered if I was as mutinous and impulsive as Fletcher Christian, scuppering the ordinary unmomentous journey that might have been my life because of some reckless dissatisfaction or need to subvert.

  Self-doubt wasn’t helped by a call from mother. She’d sacked Wendy the latest Country Cousin, and the phantom persecutor had painted her red azalea pink and left a single footprint in the bath. She’d been to the police. She intended to barricade herself in the house with a poker to hand to bludgeon the assailant when next she appeared. I felt the chaos of her irrational universe and in a troubled dream I tried to get through the checkout without a ticket to fly.

  I visited mother, who gave me a tour of her vandalised house. My resolve to fly away hardened. The phantom had put cheese parings down the back of the Chesterfield, stolen the feathers out of a favourite cushion and painted the paws in a print of Renoir’s Girl with Cat a darker shade of white.

  I had a blouse for Rosie but no ship to carry it to her. She emailed her disappointment in Wragg and didn’t know what he’d done to get into trouble with the French authorities. The only alternative boat from Mangareva was the Braveheart, chartered by the British government solely to carry judges, police officers and government officials to Pitcairn for the trials.

  From his cellphone in Auckland its captain, Nigel Jolly, said I could sail with him at the beginning of August. He’d need clearance from the British authorities because he didn’t want to jeopardise his contract with them, but there was no problem with the French – he was a friend of the customs officer in Mangareva. Vic Young, great-great-great-grandson of the mutineer Edward Young, who went to Pitcairn with Fletcher Christian, would be a passenger too. I rebooked flights with Harold Wing – a flexible return to Tahiti and a five-Polynesian-island pass. But Jolly was never there when I phoned and didn’t respond to my messages. I decided to try to sail to Pitcairn from Auckland on a cargo ship, though this would mean bureaucratic scrutiny, a licence to land and the cost of again changing tickets.

  Disclaimers and conditions on the Pitcairn Council application form for a licence seemed designed to discourage. Licences were rarely granted. Anyone who landed without one was liable to a fine of a thousand dollars. The Council accepted no responsibility for damage or loss of property, personal injury, accident or death during any visit or while landing or departing. Return travel arrangements were a matter of chance and visitors might be marooned for months while waiting for a ship. Charter yachts from French Polynesia were prohibitively expensive. There were no hotels, banking facilities or medical services on the island. Licensees must be of good behaviour and obey the island’s laws.

  I cited an interest in Pitcairn’s flora and fauna as my reason for wanting to visit. Herb Ford of the Pitcairn Islands Study Center in Angwin, California, had advised me not to mention anything about writing books. ‘I must warn you’, he wrote, ‘that if you brag in any way of your authorial feats you may be escorted summarily off the island.’ I wondered how this could happen in the absence of a ship.

  Shirley, the commissioner’s personal assistant in the Pitcairn Office in Auckland, was discouraging about shipping from New Zealand. It had never been more difficult. The once trusted P&O liner no longer sailed. There was a cargo ship in September but no free berth on it: Pi
tcairners returning home and officials had priority. The company Seatrade New Zealand took all bookings and she never knew until three or four weeks before departure if there was any space. There might be two small cruise ships, Amazing Grace and Clipper Odyssey, calling at the island, but all was vague.

  Verity said the journey wasn’t meant to be and I should find a calmer approach to life. I thought that if Bligh had been calmer with Christian and made him feel valued, perhaps he wouldn’t have found himself in an open boat at the edge of life and at the mercy of the violent ocean. He’d have taken the pot plants to the West Indies, then they’d all have gone home to Deptford.

  Still I longed for a ship and the wide sea. I went on preparing as if a journey was assured. I bought a medical kit, water purifying tablets, Deet and Imodium, a silk vest, a compass, a woollen hat and a dual-faced clock that told the time in two chosen parts of the world.

  On a morning when I was thinking of something else an email came from the Pitcairn Office in Auckland. Shirley had news, she wrote, that would turn my day upside down. A supply ship, the Tundra Princess, was leaving the port of Tauranga in seven days. There was a berth on it. It was carrying a cargo of kiwi fruit to Amsterdam via Panama and it would make a brief stop at Pitcairn to unload supplies for the islanders. I should email my passport and credit card details if I wanted to go. I’d need warm clothes, wet-weather gear, stuff for seasickness and something to do on the journey. ‘There’s a lot of water to cross,’ she wrote. She’d book a hotel for me in Auckland. I should get to Tauranga by 26 June, but the crew wouldn’t load the kiwi fruit if it was raining. She again warned there was no assured passage off Pitcairn. On two occasions people marooned there had been so desperate to leave they’d paid Seatrade, at great cost, to divert a ship to pick them up.