Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  The teacher sitting to my right taught history. He said he devoted only a few hours each year to Bougainville, Cook, and other explorers. “You must remember, Cook fought the French in Canada, so he is not so popular for us,” he said. “The winners write the history, no? In Canada, we lost, but in this place, we won.” He took a sip of wine. “But really, Tahitians care very little about these old Europeans, it does not seem relevant to them.”

  He had much better success with ancient history. “They like Greece best, they see parallels to Tahiti. A land of many islands, tall mountains, great gods, and brave sailors. They also like Egypt and its sun god. This means much more to them than Cook or Louis Fourteenth.” He suspected that this fondness for myth and story had contributed, in the nineteenth century, to the success of Christian missionaries. “The great tales from the Old Testament, this would have had meaning to their life.” Though the evangelical hold on islanders had loosened, he said many Tahitians still thought of their history as an evolution from pagan darkness to Christian light.

  The literature teacher sitting on my left had also adapted her curriculum to suit island students. “They love romance and cry very easily, they like the sweet stuff,” she said. Romeo and Juliet went over well, as did farces such as Molière’s Tartuffe. “But they do not like Molière’s miser, they cannot understand why someone would keep money to himself.” Most of all, though, her students loved poetry and song. “The oral tradition is still very strong here, they prefer action and theater to reading.”

  After lunch, stupefied by food and wine, we walked to the Panda with James. I asked him for directions to the marae I’d planned to visit before we’d met him at the café the day before. “It is nothing now,” he said. With the encouragement of missionaries, Tahitians had long ago torn up the temple’s massive stones and used them to pave roads. “The Tahiti of Cook’s day,” James said, “it is entirely gone.”

  Chapter 3

  To Bora-Bora:

  Sold a Pup

  Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

  —TITLE OF A PAUL GAUGUIN MURAL OF POLYNESIA

  Exploration generally springs from grand ambitions, however basely these dreams play out in practice: saving heathen souls, honoring nation and Crown, advancing scientific knowledge. It comes as a surprise, then, to read Cook’s rationale for exploring an island cluster near Tahiti before proceeding in search of the Southern Continent.

  “The Ships company,” he wrote, “were in a worse state of hilth then they were on our first arrival, for by this time full half of them had got the Venereal disease.” Judging his men “ill able to stand the cold weather we might expect to meet with to the southward,” Cook “resolved to give them a little time to recover while we run down to and exploar’d the Islands.” In other words, the famed isle of Bora-Bora and its neighbors would appear on English maps thanks to a raging case of the clap. Venereal disease was generally treated—if treated at all—with mercury, which often took care of the visible symptoms but caused side effects such as drooling and loss of balance.

  With the high priest Tupaia acting as pilot and intermediary, the Endeavour sailed two days west of Tahiti to the small island of Huahine. Cook “set about surveying the Island” while Banks botanized. Neither man was impressed. Cook found few provisions, and Banks no plants or customs worth noting. “The people were almost exactly like our late friends, but rather more stupid and lazy,” Banks wrote. “We should have gone much higher up the hills than we did if we could have perswauded them to accompany us, whose only excuse was the fear of being killd by the fatigue.”

  Invidious comparisons of this kind recur in English journals throughout Cook’s voyages. From Polynesia to Australia to America, Tahiti became the standard by which all other places and people were judged—and invariably found wanting, most often in the beauty of their women. Tahiti lingered in the crewmen’s minds like first love, a dreamy romance whose innocent intensity could never be replicated.

  The Endeavour’s landings after Tahiti brought another new element: the solemn theater of “discovery.” At Huahine, Cook presented a chief with coins, medals, and a plate inscribed “His Brittannick Maj. Ship Endeavour, Lieut Cook Commander 16th July 1769.” Cook wrote: “This we thought would prove as lasting a Testimony of our having first discover’d this Island as any we could leave behind.” A few days later, the Endeavour reached Raiatea, the largest and most central of the island group. Soon after landing, Cook “hoisted an English Jack and took possession of the Island & those adjacent for the Use of His Britk Majestys, calling them by the same names as the Natives do.”

  This small act, which Cook would repeat at countless shores, remains a subject of contention. The Admiralty instructed Cook that “With the Consent of the Natives [he should] take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country.” The Royal Society’s Lord Morton, in his “Hints” to Cook, added that natives were “the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors” of their land. Europeans couldn’t occupy that territory “without their voluntary consent.”

  Both the Admiralty’s and the Society’s advice begged the question of what “consent” meant, and how Cook might gain it, given the barriers of language and culture. How could natives accede to an act that must have mystified them, made in the name of a sovereign and country they couldn’t possibly imagine? In any event, there is no record of Cook having gained consent before raising the flag at Raiatea, or at many of the other places he visited. Some modern scholars and critics have used this to indict him and his mission; ostensibly on a voyage of scientific discovery, Cook acted instead as the advance man of Empire. He also overstepped his own orders, making the act of “possession” invalid even by the standards of his imperialist masters.

  With hindsight, the case is easy to make. Many of the lands Cook claimed for Britain became wretched colonial outposts. Dispossession, like disease, must be counted as one of Cook’s legacies. From today’s perspective, the notion of “discovery” also rings hollow; apart from a few empty islands, every place Cook landed had already been inhabited for centuries. In Polynesia, the true discoverers were pioneers who set off from Asia in sailing canoes several millennia before Cook, eventually settling the vast triangle of ocean bounded by Easter Island, New Zealand, and Hawaii.

  But if Cook wasn’t the uncomplicated hero of nineteenth century statuary—spreading “civilization and the blessing of Christian faith among pagan and savage tribes,” in the words of one memorialist—neither was he a purposeful despoiler of natives and their culture. Cook’s attempt to limit the spread of the “Venereal distemper” at Tahiti, and his regret at failing, gave early evidence of his regard for islanders.

  In a small way, so too did his behavior upon raising the flag at Raiatea to mark his first claiming of inhabited islands untouched by Europeans. Rather than honor king or country, as European explorers typically did, he called the islands “by the same names as the Natives do”—however much these names might challenge English tongues. Raiatea, for instance, appears in the crew’s journals as “Ulietea,” “Uliatoah,” “Olyatea,” and “Yoolee-Eteah.”

  Cook displayed similar restraint in his naming of the archipelago to which Raiatea belonged: the Society Isles. Nineteenth-century historians assumed that Cook intended this name to honor his patron, the Royal Society—a myth that persists in Pacific history books to this day. Cook clearly states in his journal that he called the isles Society “as they lay contiguous to one a nother.”

  While Cook later honored his superiors with countless bays and bluffs, the signature he left on the map of the Pacific was, for the most part, as unvarnished as the man: Hen Island, Bald Hill, Beaver Inlet, Celery Cove, Foggy Cape, Wet Jacket Arm. It wasn’t Cook’s style to christen a place New Cythera. Nor, for that matter, did he ever name a place after himself or any member of his family.

  From Raiatea, Cook sailed to the small nearby island of Tahaa and then headed to Bora-Bora, distinguished
by the dramatic, twin-peaked volcano at its center. The Endeavour reached “close under the Peek,” Cook wrote, describing the mountain as “so perpendicular that it appears to be quite inaccessible.” But contrary winds and a heavy swell kept the ship from threading a channel through the reef encircling the island. Having already provisioned his ship at the other Society Isles, and apparently having given his venereal men time to recover, Cook swung the Endeavour “to the Southward the way I now intend to steer.”

  Roger set the helm on autopilot and slumped on the deck, lighting a cigarette. “You can smoke twice as much at sea,” he said, “because the wind smokes half the tobacco for you. No sailor ever gets lung cancer.”

  “I’m reassured.”

  “Don’t be. I’ve never sailed through a pass in a reef.”

  Huahine lay just ahead. Our French chart showed the island ringed by a ragged line marked “Recif.” Sailing through the hazardous reef hadn’t been my idea. A few days before, Roger had mutinied while I tried to doze through a rainy, nono-infested afternoon in a sweltering bungalow. “I can’t face another night of this,” he declared, disappearing into the rain and returning, a few hours later, having rented a forty-two-foot yacht for the rest of our island stay. “The boat’s called Courbet, very classy, very French,” he said.

  And very much like the Fiat Panda Jolly. During our first day at sea, the lever on the vacuum toilet snapped, cleats dislodged, and the dinghy towing behind the yacht sprang a leak. “Every product that has proved an utter failure in metropolitan France has been shipped over here,” Roger complained, tossing loose screws into the bilge that seeped through the hold and onto the deck.

  Still, it was nice to be out on the water. I’d learned enough knots and maneuvers on the replica Endeavour to be of marginal use to Roger. Anyway, he could pretty much sail the yacht without me. As we approached Huahine, I lay on the bow and read what the English had written about tropical reefs. “The Rock is every where full of small holes,” an astronomer marveled, “which are larger underneath the surface & every one contains a Shell with a live fish in it.” To the artist Parkinson, coral seemed a magnificent species of “sea mushroom,” or “a grove of shrubs growing under water.”

  The print was small and hard to read in the rocking boat. After a few pages, my head began to feel heavy. When I closed my eyes, the weight shifted to my stomach. I got up to make a cup of instant coffee in the galley. It tasted like caffeinated fish broth. “They even send the bad coffee over here,” I gasped.

  Roger dipped a finger in my mug. “You filled the kettle from the saltwater tap,” he said. The swell had increased, steady and inevitable. I moved to the rail. Roger sniffed at the saltwater coffee. “Smells a bit like that fafaru we tried last night.” Fafaru, also known as “stinky fish,” was a Tahitian delicacy made from fish heads and fish guts, soaked in seawater until they formed a pungent sludge. “Looks like the milk curdled, too,” Roger added.

  I retched over the side. Chunks of poisson cru, the raw fish in lime juice we’d eaten with the fafaru, floated in the water. What felt like a piece of spongy breadfruit clogged my nose. Roger handed me paper towels and bottled water. “You’re pathetic,” he said.

  The reef loomed just ahead. Waves swirled against the coral, creating a brilliant, aquamarine froth, almost a mouthwash color, unlike any hue I’d seen in nature. The surf skipped along the reef rather than over it, rippling in a dead-straight line as if strafed from an airplane. Then the sea swept through a break in the coral, marking the channel we needed to enter.

  Roger deftly steered the yacht through, and a moment later we glided across a lagoon as placid as the sea outside the reef was agitated. Coconuts floated in the jade water and the craggy hills of Huahine rose all around us. I felt instantly cured of seasickness, and of the lingering malaise that had afflicted me during much of our stay in French Polynesia.

  We moored a short way offshore and motored the yacht’s dinghy to the dock at Fare, the same harbor Cook had visited. Kids fished off the pier while a few people milled along a street of low shop fronts. We wandered over to an open-air café and settled in beside a young French couple, Guillaume and Isabelle. They were waiting for the ferry that ran several times a week between Tahiti and Huahine (an island administered, like its neighbors, by the colonial government in Papeete).

  “When does it come?” I asked.

  Isabelle shrugged and pointed at a notice by the café door: “The boats arrive when they are here. And leave when they are ready.”

  The couple had been bumming around the Pacific for months, recovering from a stint as aid workers in Rwanda. Like us, they’d found Tahiti a disappointment. “You see the posters on the Paris Métro, the Gauguin paintings at Musée d’Orsay,” said Guillaume, a gaunt, goateed man with wire-rimmed glasses. “You expect the reality to be better than the pictures, but the pictures are the best of reality, almost a hyperreality. So you are let down.”

  Still, they’d enjoyed their two days in Huahine. I asked what they’d done. “Very little. Mostly sit and stare at the sea,” Isabelle said. “Comment se dit, ‘When in Rome…’”

  Roger smiled and ordered a beer. “My kind of place. People’s heads stuffed with polystyrene balls.” After a few rounds, he headed for a bench by the water and lay down. I was about to do the same when a woman bounced into the café and spoke to a patron in American-accented English. She was fiftyish, with olive skin and long black hair, turquoise earrings, silver bangles on each arm, and a long cotton dress. She wouldn’t have looked out of place at an antiwar rally in Berkeley, circa 1969.

  “Went to college in Santa Barbara, actually,” she said, when I asked if she came from the Bay area. “But I’m sort of a mutt.” Dorothy Levy’s father, a Hollywood writer, had come to Tahiti during the production of the first Mutiny on the Bounty, in 1935, and married a French-Tahitian Jew. Dorothy had shuttled between California and Polynesia for most of her childhood, then settled in Huahine after college and married a local. “I went back to California for the first time a few years ago and felt like a Flintstones character,” she said. “All those freeways and tense faces and right-wingers. It blew my mind. Like, what happened to America?”

  Dorothy ran a café at Huahine’s small airport, at the other end of the island, and had to go there in time for the arrival of the evening flight from Papeete. I asked if we could tag along. “That’s groovy,” she said. I collected Roger from his bench and we piled into Dorothy’s Land Rover. A half-empty beer perched in the cup holder. “Want a hit?” she asked.

  Unlike Tahiti, Huahine—only ten miles long and six miles across—was still largely agricultural, and more fruitful than I’d imagined from reading Cook’s journals. We drove past farms of breadfruit and pineapple as Dorothy played tour guide. “Hua means ‘genitals’ and hine refers to female fertility,” she said, “so the name of the island translates roughly as ‘Pussy.’” A mountain thrusting up at one end of the island was known as Ite Ure Na Hiro, or Hiro’s Dick, she added. “Penises are very important to the culture. When I learned to speak Tahitian I realized all the jokes and half the chat were about sex.”

  “Just like the dances,” Roger said, perking up in the backseat.

  Dorothy nodded. A few years before, she’d escorted a group of island dancers to a folklore festival in Seattle. The American emcee asked how he should explain to the audience what the dances were about. Dorothy told him, “‘What does it look like they’re about? Making love and how good we are at it.’” She laughed. “I think he ended up saying something like, ‘It’s about the rhythms of the South Seas.’”

  At the tiny airport terminal, Dorothy slipped Tahitian music into a tape deck while she made coffee and sandwiches. “In the sixties, I would have thought a job like this was very bourgeois. Now it suits me. I can work hard for a few hours a day and be free to do other things. Also, it’s a good place to people-watch.”

  She pointed at two women sitting nearby, one with a toddler in her lap. “Typic
al demis,” she said of the French-Tahitians. “Slim, long perfect hair, honey skin, gleaming teeth, not a nose hair out of place.” The women were the most striking I’d seen in French Polynesia, or anywhere in the world. “At first I felt demoralized being surrounded by all these beauties,” Dorothy went on. “I’ve gotten over it, but I’m still not sure the attitude here is healthy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like a beauty cult, right from birth. They massage the babies with oil, put ribbons in their hair, dress them up in perfect clothes, just like that child.” She pointed again at the women, and I tried not to stare. Dorothy laughed. “Stare at will—that’s the whole point. It’s probably been fifteen minutes since they looked in a mirror. They need another fix. The men are the same, they oil themselves and put flowers in their hair. It’s very sensual. But at some point you wonder if there’s more to life than looking good and making love.”

  “Is there?” Roger asked.

  “Why don’t you go and ask them?”

  When we hesitated, Dorothy half-dragged us to the women’s table. She spoke to them in Tahitian. They nodded and invited us to sit down. “I am Hinarii,” one of the women said in English, holding out a perfectly manicured hand with scarlet fingernails. “This is my cousin Tania. Dorothy said you had a question for us.”

  Roger coughed. I didn’t know what to say. “They want to know about Tahitians and sex,” Dorothy said, getting up to tend the café.

  “You are American, yes?” Tania said to me, without a hint of embarrassment. “I have been to Hawaii and L.A. If you want to have sex you must go to a nightclub and wait for a man to pick you up. They are very blunt, they drink too much and rub against you. No subtlety.”