Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  At sunset we pulled in at a guest house by the water. The rooms, simple bungalows perched over a shallow lagoon, were open-air, like the Tahitian homes in which Banks and Cook often slept. We sipped rum as the moon rose over the water and felt, finally, as though we’d drifted into the Polynesia of lore. I lay on a mat on the floor, Roger climbed into the bungalow’s loft. The air had grown sticky and hot. Then rain sheeted down. When it stopped, the air felt even heavier than before.

  I kicked away my sweat-stained sheets and lay naked on the mat. Even the pillow became unbearable, like a hot water bottle at the wrong end of the bed. Then the insects arrived, silent and pitiless. We’d been warned about Tahitian nonos: microscopic bugs that don’t so much sting as gnaw. But nothing had prepared me for the torment we now endured. I felt like one of Sydney Parkinson’s canvases, my flesh standing in for paint.

  “What are these fiends?” Roger gasped. “They’re so bloated with my blood they don’t even buzz. They’re just whacking against my body and falling down. It’s like Gallipoli up here.” He turned on a light and fumbled in his pack for the “Safari Strength” repellent he’d bought in Sydney. Studying the fine print, he reported, “It kills elephants.”

  Unfortunately, it didn’t kill nonos. No matter how much repellent we slathered on, the insects kept coming. “No wonder the English had so many things stolen,” Roger said. “They were knackered by the heat and the bugs. Cook had his stockings nicked from under his head, for God’s sake. He was in a coma.”

  The last thing I heard was Roger croaking, “Pass up the rum, if I’m going to die I don’t want to do it sober.” Then I somehow drifted off, to wake at dawn feeling deranged by blood loss, sweat loss, and lack of sleep. Roger sat on the balcony staring into his drawers. “I’ve still got black sand in my crotch from Point Venus. Jock rot can’t be far behind. And I’ve probably got dengue fever from all those bugs.” He lit a cigarette. “I won’t forget this thatched sweatbox for the rest of my life, all five days of it remaining to me.”

  We fled to the Panda and continued our circumnavigation of the island. At midday, we pulled in at the Musée Gauguin, a tribute to the painter’s life. Abandoning France and his family for Polynesia, the forty-three-year-old artist had hoped to live “in a primitive and savage state.” Arriving in Papeete in 1891, he discovered instead “the Europe which I thought to shake off…. It was the Tahiti of former times which I loved. That of the present filled me with horror.” Gauguin found some solace in the arms of a fourteen-year-old mistress whom he lived with and painted near the site of the present museum. But the art he produced didn’t sell in Paris; he contracted venereal disease and died in Polynesia in 1903, a bitter and impoverished man.

  Disillusion seemed to come with the territory in Tahiti, beginning with the Dolphin’s men aboard the Endeavour, who declared the island utterly changed from their visit just two years before. Cook, returning to Tahiti on his second and third voyages, lamented its descent into prostitution and greed. The writers and artists who flocked to Tahiti in the nineteenth century traced a similar parabola. “God’s best—at least God’s sweetest—works: Polynesians,” Robert Louis Stevenson exulted, only to later despair: “I don’t much like Tahiti. It seems to me a sort of halfway house between savage life and civilization, with the drawbacks of both and the advantages of neither.”

  Tahiti was a victim of its extravagant hype, and of the Western ills this hype had produced. “It’s always the same story, isn’t it,” Roger said, once we’d toured the Gauguin museum. “You try to escape, to find simplicity, and end up bringing all your baggage with you. So you end up turning paradise into the same hellhole you left.” He bent himself into the Panda, scratching his nono bites. “Then again, you can’t blame the West for black sand and bloodsucking bugs.”

  We drove on, toward the remains of the enormous marae Cook and Banks had described during their own circuit of the island. I’d picked up a booklet at the museum called “Sacred Stones and Rites” and read aloud to Roger as he sat grumpily behind the wheel. “It’s a hundred and twenty degrees out,” he moaned, “I’ve got one pint of blood left, and you want to go look at a pile of rocks!” As we neared the marae, Roger did an abrupt U-turn and pulled in at a roadside café called Beach Burger.

  “‘The coastal maraes were formed in steps,’” I read on, as Roger drank beer, “‘generally three or four, but capable of reaching ten or so in number and 15 meters in height.’”

  “I’m riveted,” Roger replied. Desperate to stall the field trip, he tried out his French on a man drinking espresso at the next table. The man smiled and corrected Roger’s grammar. “I teach English at the local school,” he said, holding up the papers he sat marking. He seemed as delighted to be distracted from his task as Roger was to skirt ours. “It is very depressing,” he said, showing us samples of his students’ work on a multiple-choice test.

  Question: “Is she going to invite the Garretts?”

  Answer: “Sorry, I’ve only got some green ones.”

  Question: “Have you got any French cigarettes?”

  Answer: “No, they’re not warm enough.”

  The man smiled wanly and invited us to join him at his table. “It would be a pleasure to speak proper English for a while. May I offer you a warm cigarette?”

  James Pouant resembled a storybook fox, intelligent and squinty-eyed, with thick spectacles and graying brown hair. Raised in a village in Bordeaux, he’d been teaching in French Polynesia since 1969 and planned to stay when he retired in a few years. “I came here as a young man, for adventure,” he said. “Now I am becoming an old man, and all I want is to sit in the shade, drink my wine, look at the sea. That is what happens in Tahiti. You lose focus. Or maybe your focus changes.”

  He pointed at a young woman standing by the entrance to the café, staring into space. “That is one of my former students. She looks content, no? And see that one?” He gestured at a man by the road, leaning against a tree. “He was here when I arrived at noon. It is now two. He has not moved a muscle. He will be here another hour, probably.”

  James, who spoke fluent Tahitian, said islanders had a word for this state, one that didn’t really translate into any other tongue: fiu (pronounced “phew”). On one level, fiu signified “fed up” or exhausted. “Someone will start to mow your lawn, do half, then never come back to finish or collect money because they are fiu,” James said. “More often they will not show up in the first place because they are already fiu.” In this sense, the word also connoted boredom, blankness, lack of motivation. “Gauguin painted it on the faces of his women. It is a sort of ennui, except drained even of ennui.”

  “A Zen state,” Roger suggested.

  James laughed. “For us, Zen means to empty our minds. For a Tahitian to have Zen, he would first have to fill it up.”

  This sounded harsh, but James didn’t mean it that way. He showed us a few more test papers, some of them covered in bright drawings of rainbows and coconut palms, the questions left unanswered. “They feel they can do without all this learning, and live in the old way,” he said. “Without electricity, cars—just fish and breadfruit, a simple life, like hippies in the 1960s.”

  In the years James had spent in Tahiti, this attitude had started to change. It was still true to a degree for families living in the country, as many of his students did. But the exodus to Papeete brought money and exposure to Western goods, and upset the traditional balance of power within families. Women tended to stay in school longer than men, found better jobs than their husbands, and felt more at ease in the wider, French-influenced world.

  “The men have an inferiority complex, they’re shy, their language is not so good, they keep their distance,” James said. This helped explain the difficulty we’d had initiating conversations with Tahitian men; I’d tried a dozen times and rarely got beyond pleasantries, except with government officials. The women were another matter. “We’re looking at them all the time, even when we do not realize it,” J
ames said. “Our eyes just drift to the women. And they know it. Their beauty and charm give them power.”

  I told him about our interest in Cook, and the strong impression that Tahitian women had made on the sailors. James smiled. He said that much of what Cook and Banks wrote still applied, particularly Tahitian frankness about what the English called “indecent” topics. “I have had Tahitian girlfriends,” James said. “In the villages, they tell everyone the shape of your sex, what you are like in bed. And you are sure to be cheated on within a year. You must accept this. One girlfriend, when I was away, boys were jumping through the window to see her. We have a sense of guilt, we impose limits. They do what they feel like doing.”

  James glanced at his watch. He had to return to the school. “Why don’t you come tomorrow and talk to my students?” he said. “It would be good for them to hear examples of English speakers.”

  “Can we ask them about Cook?” I asked.

  James gathered his papers. “You can ask. Just do not be disappointed by the answers.”

  At the end of his Tahitian journal, Cook began a practice he would repeat throughout his voyages, appending a summary description of each land he explored. His “Description of King Georges Island”—Samuel Wallis’s name remained—reads rather like a guidebook, filled with useful tips for travelers: the best anchorages and approaches, the finest watering spots, the scarcity of firewood. With a farm boy’s eye, Cook also noted the quality of the soil and plant life and saw past the island’s superficial splendor. “Notwithstanding nature hath been so very bountifull to it yet it doth not produce any one thing of intrinsick Value or that can be converted into an Article of trade,” he wrote, “so that the value of the discovery consists wholy in the refreshments it will always afford to Shipping in their passage through those seas.”

  This analysis is vintage Cook: shrewd, mercantile, and modest, weighing the true value of what he’d seen rather than inflating it to impress his superiors. He was equally precise in describing the island’s man-made resources, devoting pages to the making of tapa, or bark cloth, and the construction of canoes. “They manage them very dextrusly,” he wrote of Tahitians’ skill with the largest crafts, some of them seventy feet long and rigged with triangular sails. “I beleive [the Tahitians] perform long and distant Voyages in them, otherwise they could not have the knowlidge of the Islands in these seas they seem to have.” Here, as so often in his judgments, Cook was correct, and far ahead of his time. Only in recent decades have scholars appreciated the astonishing voyages undertaken by Polynesians, centuries before Cook, without the assistance of compass or sextant.

  Equally characteristic was Cook’s habit of telling the reader what he did not know. “Religion,” he wrote, “is a thing I have learnt so little of that I hardly dare touch upon it.” Cook, unlike other observers, also avoided hyperbole in describing Tahitians. He studied people rather as he surveyed coasts and currents, calmly noting their shape, length, and tendencies. “They are a very cleanly people,” he wrote, “always washing their hands and mouths immidiatly before and after their meals…their features are agreable and their gate gracefull, and their behavour to strangers and to each other is open affable and courtious.” Except, of course, for their thieving, in which they displayed “such dexterity as would shame the most noted pickbocket in Europe.”

  But Cook strenuously avoided passing judgment, even on the delicate matter of sexual behavior. In noting young girls’ performance of a “very indecent dance which they call Timorodee” (a rendering of the Tahitian phrase for intercourse, ti moro-iti), he nonetheless added, “in doing this they keep time to a great nicety.” And he neither romanticized nor condemned the practice of free love. While Banks and others flattered themselves with their own seductive powers, Cook suspected that many, if not most, of the women who offered themselves to the English did so “merely for the lucre of gain.” Expanding on this topic later, he cautioned against judging the whole population from the behavior of the few whom sailors met on the beach. “A stranger who visited England might with equal justice draw the Characters of the women there from those which he might meet on board the Ships in one of the Naval Ports or in the Purlieus of Covent Garden.”

  Banks compiled his own summary, titled “Manners & customs of S. Sea Islands.” Reading his words alongside Cook’s, it becomes obvious that the two men compared journals and in some cases plagiarized whole sections from each other, almost verbatim. In virtually all such instances, it appears that Cook copied Banks, adopting turns of phrase that are much more the botanist’s than the navigator’s. Banks, free of shipboard duties, had time to wander the island and closely observe customs such as tattooing in a way that Cook did not, and his linguistic skills—Banks recorded dozens of Tahitian words, even whole songs, with remarkable accuracy—gave the botanist insights the commander couldn’t hope to match.

  The affinity between their journals also speaks to the remarkable collaboration, even friendship, that had developed between the two men. The effects of this unlikely union would become much clearer in the course of the long voyage. Cook gradually opened up to matters well beyond his established talents as a navigator and surveyor, even writing at times like a natural philosopher. After Tahiti, he leaned much less on Banks when summarizing his own impressions.

  Banks, in turn, matured under Cook’s steady hand, discarding some of his “airy dreams” of entertaining the salons of London and gradually becoming an inspired scientist. Later in the voyage, it was he who often cribbed from Cook, relying on the navigator’s precision in geography and other matters. To put it a way that Banks and Cook never would, the two men found themselves in the course of their vast discoveries.

  James Pouant’s high school stood a few yards from the beach. A warm tropical breeze wafted across the water, and waves tumbled against a distant reef. We found James cleaning a blackboard between classes. Thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds filtered in, the girls with flowers in their hair, the boys wearing baggy shorts and baseball caps. James began by asking students to read dialogue from a dated English text, its content comically remote from tropical Tahiti.

  “‘Good afternoon! I’ve come for the flat in Park Street. I read your ad in the Evening Standard. Can you tell me how much the rent is?’”

  “‘It is eighty-five pounds a week.’”

  “‘Do you often go to the ice rink?’”

  “‘Yes, I love skating. What about you?’”

  Then James handed the class over to us. Roger explained that he’d been born in England, puffed out his chest, and sang “God Save Our Gracious Queen.” The students laughed, a trilling, high-pitched giggle. Roger asked if they knew any English songs. A few girls began singing, “Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on!” One of them came to the blackboard and wrote in careful block letters: “Les Beetles.” Roger asked how old she was. “Thirty-three!” she exclaimed, writing her name, Vai Ana, which James translated as “Shining Water.”

  It was my turn. “I’m from America,” I began. “What do you know about my country?”

  A boy with two earrings and a necklace raised his hand. “I am surfer dude. Okay, man, hey brud.” He turned his cap backward. “This is la mode skateboard. I drive boogie board also.” His classmates collapsed in giggles. I told them that Roger and I had come to Tahiti to learn about James Cook. Roger assisted me by putting on the wig he’d worn at Point Venus.

  “Is that him?” a boy asked.

  “No. Cook is the man who is very dead,” another said.

  “Cook came from Australia.”

  “He was hungry. He wanted our food.”

  “He was the first taero here. A bad man.”

  James explained that taero was Tahitian for the pulp of a coconut. It was used as slang for white men, and also for smegma. Then he gave examples of Tahitian words influenced by English. Hammer was hamara. Nail was naero. And a common greeting, yoana, was believed to have derived from the English “your honor.”

  All island words
ended in vowels, and certain English consonants had no precise equivalent in Tahitian. This explained why the English journals recorded that islanders called Cook “Toote” and Banks “Opane.” Tahitian words, many of them impossibly crowded with vowels, gave Westerners just as much trouble. James asked us to try pronouncing a few for the amusement of his class, such as faaaanoraa, which means “widening,” and mauruuru, meaning “thank you.”

  When the class ended, James told us another word, one that had relevance to Cook’s visit: horoa, meaning “to give” or “to lend.” Tahitians, James said, made little distinction between the two. “When someone uses “horoa” it means, ‘I may return it to you, I may not. I’m not sure.’ Behind that you see their sense of property. They will take my markers and books without asking, and never return them. It is the same if I leave clothes on the line at home. To us this is stealing, but to them, if you leave something out it is theirs to ‘borrow.’”

  James walked us around the school during the break before lunch. On one wall, an art class had painted a huge mural of a bare-breasted woman. Nearby, teenaged girls gathered round a boom box and performed a hip-thrusting dance much like the one we’d seen at the Captain Bligh nightclub. Then they ran to outdoor showers and soaked themselves, fully clothed, emerging like contestants in a wet T-shirt contest. “They are very casual about sex, even at this age,” James said. He gave us another Tahitian word: taurearea, a period of adolescent license during which young people were permitted to indulge their desires. “We must constantly remind them that they are not allowed to kiss or hold hands in class.”

  Lunch was even more of a surprise, at least by American standards. James led us to an outdoor table set with silver, wineglasses, and a vase of hibiscus and bougainvillea. Six other teachers joined us, and two coquettish teenagers in short black dresses announced the menu: salade verte, followed by mussels, shrimp, veal, and assorted desserts—all of it prepared by a chef from France. “This is the best restaurant in Tahiti,” James said, pouring us rosé. The waitresses, he explained, were students training for hotel jobs.