On any trip to a new island I scheduled two or three days for an exploration. And this allowed me to attend in a village near Pago Pago a meeting of the high chiefs—nine or ten in a total island population of about twenty thousand—and while listening to the chiefs’ orators, men who would report with great fury what their superiors were thinking, since the chiefs themselves did not orate, I had my first taste of the extremely bland island liquor, kava, a whitish drink of some thickness ladled out from a huge carved bowl into individual halves of coconut shell, also carved and polished into cups that were works of art. I was most eager to taste this liquor that was famous in island stories. It was supposed to have a mildly narcotic effect, and I found it cool and pleasingly prickly to the tongue and gums. But I lost my enthusiasm when I saw how it was made: older women chewed the root of a shrub, Piper methysticum, of the pepper family, until their mouths were filled with saliva, which they then spat into a big bowl from whose accumulation our drinks were ladled out. I did not imbibe much beyond that first tasting.
I was in some strange way disappointed by American Samoa. It lacked size, both geographically and in the behavior of its islanders, who seemed cramped and almost afraid of themselves. I found none of the spaciousness of spirit that was supposed to mark the natives of Polynesia, and since this was the first island with such people that I was seeing outside Hawaii, which I had been able to visit only briefly and in wartime, I was not much impressed. I remember telling my bunkmate in Navy quarters: ‘If this is the famed Polynesia that Stevenson and the Frenchmen wrote about, someone’s been lying.’ I saw few memorable characters, no beautiful women, and certainly no way of life that would have allured me; but I must hasten to add that this was wartime, the hand of the U.S. Navy was heavy upon the land, and the islanders were not a happy lot. I judged that in peacetime, when they were living under their own rules, the atmosphere might have been a lot more congenial. But I certainly did not ‘go Asiatic,’ as the enlisted men phrased it, over the Samoa I was allowed to see. I remember it mostly as a dark, cold, rainy place.
At the end of a brief stay I was assigned a small plane that would fly me westward over the Pacific on the short flight to British Samoa, each of whose two islands, Upolu and Savaii, was much bigger and supposedly more beautiful than the American one. I was not aware when I climbed into that plane that I was about to fly into paradise, but when, a short time later, I was deposited at the far western end of Upolu, the island nearest Pago Pago and the one on which the American troops were stationed, I found myself set down amid tall palm trees that edged a handsome shoreline stretching east and west on the great Pacific Ocean. It was a magnificent setting, but represented only a small portion of the glory into which I was about to be initiated.
When my gear was out of the plane, the American island commander, a Navy man who had been alerted to my coming, greeted me. He assured me that every courtesy would be extended, and indicated a smiling Samoan driver with a jeep: ‘Samosila will see that you get wherever you have to go,’ and with that he saluted after instructing Samosila: ‘See that he gets what he needs.’ I felt certain that the island commander and I would get along without either causing the other any trouble, and during my extended stay I had no cause to modify or retract that early conclusion.
‘Where am I to bunk down?’ I asked Samosila as I climbed into his jeep, and he said: ‘We got Navy quarters on base but ever’body think mo’ betta’ you stay in Apia.’ I recognized this as the name of the capital town of Samoa, some two dozen miles to the east. I liked the idea, for I wanted to give the Samoan Islands a chance to redeem their reputation after my dismal introduction at Pago Pago.
The next hour was one of the most wonderful of my life, for as we headed eastward on a coral-topped road as smooth as Navy engineers could make it with their huge scrapers, we had on our left that flawless beach with small white-sand coves appearing here and there, lined by the tallest palm trees I had ever seen. There was no monotony to the road, for we were in the hour before sunset, and a golden light suffused everything, edging the palms with iridescent fronds against the deep blue sky. Even the waves that reached the shore not twenty feet from us as we drove seemed kindly, with no hint of the way storms could lash them into a fury.
But even if nature had not conspired to make the shoreline incomparably lovely, views inland would have made this journey to Apia unforgettable, because perched in the midst of huge coconut plantations stood tiny villages, or more typically, collections of two or three of the most exquisite human habitations I had ever seen. On moderately high stone platforms generous in size and built of coral rock perfectly fitted to produce a firm level foundation, stood the famous Samoan fales whose name was so reminiscent of the character of Polynesian life. Fale in Samoa, hale in Hawaii, whare in New Zealand, the word is always the same and pronounced pretty much the same, for the f isn’t sounded like f, the h isn’t really an h, and the wh sounds nothing like an ordinary wh, while the l and r represent only one independent sound much like a sigh. But if a Samoan fale is beautiful to hear pronounced—fah-lay—it is even more so to the eye, because it is roofed by palm fronds woven into exquisite patterns and supported by seven or eight huge upright coconut trunks that show golden when the sun strikes them. The fale is thus a kind of huge altar set upon a handsome platform, and its salient characteristic is that it has no walls; the upright coconut trunks stand like pillars or a committee of ancient gods convened to oversee the behavior of the mortals who occupy that platform.
Privacy is obtained at night by pulling cords that drop wide curtains made from woven fibers taken from the coconut palms, and when one sees those curtains fall gracefully at night, one has the feeling that peace and benediction have descended upon that house. An unbroken chain of Samoan fales at dusk, strung out under the palms and not concentrated in villages, is a sight of humanity at its aesthetic best and a warming reassurance that not all humans are either ugly or stupid, for the ancient people who devised that pattern of living were artists of the highest order.
But I am not being completely accurate. What really made the first drive along the Samoan lagoons so unforgettable was not the domestic architecture on the right but the human spectacle on the left. As night approached, men and women from the fales came down to the beach to bathe and, throwing off their sarongs, waded out into the soft white breakers to splash themselves with water and frolic aimlessly in the ocean for a while before settling down for the night. Many others before me had said that the men and women of Samoa were among the physically perfect specimens of humanity: very tall, robust of limb, elegant in posture, with golden skin, luxuriant hair, dazzlingly white teeth, expressive eyes, and a serenity of movement, they were truly gods from some happy earlier age.
My duties in the South Pacific had given me the rare and almost unequaled opportunity of knowing intimately the three great human types of the far-flung area. I would ultimately serve on forty-nine different islands, covering each of the major groups of inhabitants. To the northwest lay the islands of Micronesia (from the Greek words micro, small, and nesia, islands), bearing historic names like Guam, Saipan, Palau and Truk. Its people, descended from a very mixed stock containing Spanish elements, tend to be medium-sized and light brown in color, and have long been capable of self-government.
The next sizable area to the southwest is Melanesia (mela, black) containing the larger islands like Guadalcanal, Bougainville and New Caledonia that became known in wartime. Its people tend to be small, very black, widely scattered on tiny islands and late in developing any forms of self-government. However, the big islands of Fiji at the extreme eastern border of Melanesia have produced people who are gigantic in size, most handsome in appearance, and long capable of self-government.
The third major grouping, Polynesia (poly, many), occupies the eastern portion of the South Pacific; it contains glorious islands like Tahiti, Rarotonga, Samoa and Hawaii, and is populated by the attractive people made famous by Paul Gauguin, Pierre Loti an
d Robert Louis Stevenson. The line separating Melanesia from Polynesia is delineated by a remarkable pair of coincidences: one an arbitrary, geographical coincidence, the other an inherent, genetic one. World geographers, acting in rare harmony, decreed in 1884 that the International Date Line would create the least confusion if it ran down the middle of the Pacific Ocean, between Samoa on the east and Fiji on the west. Thus, when it is 11:59 P.M. on Tuesday in Samoa, the passage of two minutes makes it 12:01 A.M. in Fiji, but not Wednesday as might be expected, but Thursday. The world’s day begins in Fiji and ends in Samoa, so that Thursday in Melanesia is always Wednesday in Polynesia.
The other aspect of this arbitrary line is the more dramatic: Polynesians, regardless of the island group on which they live, are relatively light-skinned, tallish and historically have been well able to govern themselves, while everyone west of the line—except the Fijian—is dark-skinned, shortish and up to now not well trained in self-government. Polynesia has been favorably treated by writers and artists, Melanesia has been largely ignored, and to a lesser extent the same can be said of Micronesia. When European writers exclaim about the beauty of South Pacific maidens, they invariably mean those of Polynesia.
I would in time become familiar with all the different peoples of Polynesia, including the very handsome Hawaiians and Tahitians, as well as the powerful Maori of New Zealand,† but none surpassed or even equaled those majestic people I saw bathing in the ocean that first night in Samoa; and years of travel and comparison merely confirmed that early evaluation. To see a group of Samoans, men and women, walking serenely along the road from the airport to Apia was to see a procession on Olympus or in Asgard of the gods moving in stately procession to some meeting of importance.
Of course, much of the charm of that panorama unfolding beside the sea lay in the fact that half the people rising from the waves clothed in nothing but golden sunlight were young women of remarkable beauty and grace of movement. Each emerged and shook off the salt water, then deftly wrapped herself in a many-patterened sarong with a swaying movement so lovely that I was enraptured. Often in the past I had laughed at Hollywood’s overuse of sarongs, especially on actresses who knew very little about how to use them effectively. Now I saw that for a Samoan, man or woman, to rise from the sea and swing a length of cloth about the body was truly an act of control and grace and beauty.
It was well after sunset that first night when Samosila deposited me at a kind of hotel that in the years ahead I would come to know intimately and with growing affection. It was a modest place in those first years, but it had already achieved well-deserved fame throughout the Pacific, especially wherever American troops who had served on Samoa went. It was run by a magnificent woman in her late forties who would become known as the queen of the South Seas, honored by writers of several nations and by her own government, which used her portrait on its most popular postage stamp. She was Aggie Grey, daughter of a Scottish adventurer and a Samoan maiden, and even before the war she was well known for the comfortable and relaxed manner in which she ran her boardinghouse in Apia. The influx of people caused by the war led her to expand her operations tremendously, building one small shack after another near her house and transforming the whole into a rambling tropical hotel that would have delighted Somerset Maugham or Joseph Conrad.
If I made no impression on her that first night, and she could never remember how we first met, she certainly had a deep impact on me; I recall staying up with her and her musicians and singing girls until two in the morning. Tall and fine of feature, she had great skill in dancing to her own deep-voiced singing. The prototypical Samoan dance was called the siva-siva and consisted of solo dancing by a man or a woman—others could join in as separate participants—the graceful movements accentuated by a kind of hauteur that seemed to ignore the physical surroundings. No one did the siva better than Aggie, and as the evenings wore on she would be called upon many times to join some admiral or general as he tried in his inept way to copy her movements.
Aggie Grey’s featured three prized assets in this haven from the shooting war: cold beer, great island music and a bevy of the most delectable young Samoan women, who seemed to have come from all parts of the island. At that time I didn’t have the rank, the money or the courage to participate in the nightly activities, but I came to know the island girls and to marvel at the easy manner in which they bandied with the numerous American officers who came to woo them. Years later, I gave an interview to a New Zealand newspaper during a visit to Auckland in which I said that I could still remember the names of these young goddesses and I rattled off a few. Some half dozen of them were then living in New Zealand and they phoned one another and came as a group to my hotel, where Aggie, lively as ever, joined us. We held siva-siva and the women told me about the men they had married and how life had been: ‘We remember you so well. The American who sat mostly in the corner, watching everything, until finally Aggie would go over and make you join her in siva-siva and you sang “Tofa, My Felengi,” “Goodbye my Friend,” and were very strong on “You Are My Sunshine.” Those were wonderful nights, and the war ended, and in Samoa nobody was dead and life continued.’ They were handsome women, still tall and slim and vivacious.
I think that half the good stories I heard about the war reached me at Aggie Grey’s, where I laid over whenever I got the chance. I liked staying with her much more than being in my quarters out at the American airfield, and I met there a host of American military people who found one excuse or another for stopping over in British Samoa. And no matter how many came or how elevated their rank was, Aggie made them all feel at home, and in time, in return for her courtesies, acquired American refrigerators and generators and tires for her car and books and canned goods and bottles brought in secretly from far places. She was extremely openhanded and shared her treasures generously. At the close of one stay I figured that I owed her more than a hundred dollars, but she told me to keep my wallet closed. I said: ‘No other choice. There’s nothing in it,’ and she said: ‘No matter. You ate only the food you brought me from the PX.’
I had the greatest admiration for Aggie, for she was a woman who could adapt to anything. If some other event of magnitude instead of a war had disrupted her life, she would have adjusted to it just as easily as she did to consequences of the Japanese attack in the Pacific. One enemy submarine on a suicide mission did lob two shells into Samoa, but they caused no damage, and each year Aggie’s hotel increased in size and importance.
Halfway through my first stay with her I was distressed to learn that the Samoan woman I was supposed to report upon, the one to whose fale on the far side of the island the lovesick general had built the road at enormous expense to the American taxpayer, was Aggie’s younger and very beautiful sister. When I asked in Apia about the matter, I was met only with silence, and since I was afraid to tackle Aggie on the subject, I left Apia after my stay with only meager information. Yes, it was Aggie’s sister. Yes, the road had been built. Yes, the general who built it had left the island for frontline duty farther north. Yes, they were fine people and everyone regarded both her and him with the deepest affection. My investigation of this very costly road was diverted by one of the strangest episodes of the war. I shall endeavor to be absolutely precise in what I am about to relate, for as you will guess when I am through, I deemed it improper to report any of this during wartime.
When I returned to the west end of the island to occupy military quarters at the informal air base, I found that whereas there were some five or six dozen young American men on duty during the daylight hours, after sunset there were only six, and it occurred to me that if a Japanese submarine surfaced off that end of the island at any time after six in the evening, a handful of its commandos could capture not only the air base but the entire island. As a quasi-representative of Admiral Halsey I had to do something about that.
The commanding officer was a middle-aged lieutenant colonel, proud of the fact that he ran a well-organized base with an
absolute minimum of trouble: ‘No drunkenness, no brawling, no scuffles with natives.’ Before I could interrogate him about his men, or their absence, he said: ‘Come with me to the fence gates at seven tomorrow morning and you’ll see what I mean.’
At six-thirty he roused me and at seven we were at the gates, throwing salutes to three different open-sided trucks as they rolled in from different parts of the island, each carrying some twenty happy enlisted men, a few of whom bothered to toss salutes back at us. For the next eleven hours, 7:00 A.M. till 6:00 P.M., that base was as well run as any I had visited, but at dusk those same three trucks went back through the gates, each with its twenty-odd enlisted men while six remained behind to guard the fort.
On my second day at the base I said: ‘I’d like to ride out with one of the trucks tomorrow night and see what’s happening,’ and since no objection was made I climbed up front to find to my surprise and pleasure that the driver was my own Samosila, and I wondered what kind of trip I was embarking on. It took me only a short time to learn, for when our truck came to a collection of three fales, their sidewalk up and the stark coconut poles bright in the sunset glow, four men jumped off and hurried to the fales, where lovely young women, barefoot and wearing sarongs, came out to greet them and welcome them to the quarters the men had made their own.
The World Is My Home: A Memoir Page 5