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Blue Latitudes

Page 12

by Tony Horwitz


  On the next afternoon, the sun finally emerged, and not a moment too soon. The Courbet had become a seaborne bachelor pad, its deck draped with sodden clothes, the sink filled with dishes (the faucet had stopped working), cigarette butts floating in the bilge, everything reeking of salt and sweat. “Nothing dries in this humidity,” Roger said, wringing out his shorts. He tapped his wristwatch; it, too, had expired.

  He bailed out the dinghy with a salad bowl and rowed ashore to take on supplies, as Cook had done, trading Jean-Pierre our spare briquettes for a bottle of gin. Then he unfurled a chart and plotted our course to Tahaa, and on to Bora-Bora. The former lay just a few miles from Raiatea, across a passage filled with barely submerged rocks. From there we’d have to exit through a break in the reef and sail across open ocean to the narrow passage through the reef circling Bora-Bora. Roger tapped his dead watch, then glanced at the sky. “Four hours of light,” he guessed. “Should be just enough.”

  We cast off from the mooring and I hoisted the jib while Roger raised the mainsail. We glided along the coast, threading between motu, tiny satellite islands with straggles of palm trees. While Roger negotiated the channel markers, I alternately peered over the bow for shoals and consulted the color chart in Roger’s sailing guide. If the water appeared midnight blue, it was very deep; if dark turquoise, we still had plenty of draft. Pale green signified only five or six feet of sea. Yellow meant the water was dangerously shallow.

  This seemed an easy and entertaining way to navigate—except, as the sailing guide warned, the colors rarely became obvious until you were right on top of them. “Green, blue, green—yellow!” I called out. A rock poked just above the water in our wake. We skirted Tahaa, then sighted a break in the reef. Approaching it, we were lifted up and almost spat through the coral by a current flooding out to sea.

  So far so good, except that it was later than we’d realized. We were sailing straight into the sun, which hung just a few degrees above the horizon. Long purple swells carried us out to sea, while a vanilla-scented breeze rolled off the mountains of Tahaa. The jagged peaks of Bora-Bora loomed in the distance. Maybe sailing wasn’t so bad after all. “I’m intoxicated,” I said.

  “I’m nervous,” Roger replied. He was studying his Pacific sailing guide. Of Bora-Bora’s reef, it said: “A night entry would be inadvisable for a stranger.” Inside the reef, there were shoals all around. “Night sailing is strictly FORBIDDEN in the lagoon,” the guide went on. At the marina, Roger had also learned that the French Navy regarded boats entering Bora-Bora in the dark as probable drug smugglers. Nor was the Courbet insured for sailing at night.

  “We could smash against the reef and be dead,” Roger said, “or wish we were dead once the bill for the damage comes in.”

  “You’re right. Turn back. We can go hang at the bar with Sophie and Jean-Pierre.”

  Roger groaned. “I’d rather drown.” He plotted a course for Bora-Bora and cracked two beers. “Might as well enjoy the sunset.”

  We’d barely hoisted our drinks before the sun slipped beneath the sapphire horizon. The travelers’ tales I’d read about the South Pacific often mentioned the speed of tropical sunsets. As I understood it, the sun angles down in temperate latitudes: near the equator it plunges. Gazing at the sun’s descent was rather like my earlier task: watching the lagoon color change over the bow. The sky went pink, scarlet, and gray in quick succession. In the momentary twilight, the jagged peaks of the Society Islands were silhouetted all around us. Frigate birds swooped low across the sea, and the air turned soft and caressing, all trace of humidity draining from the sky as quickly as the light.

  “The whole Polynesian cliché,” Roger said, watching a full, tangerine moon rise behind us, casting a beam across the water bright enough to steer by. For a long while we sailed in silence, propelled by a fine breeze, the swell lapping gently against the hull. Then we heard another sound, a distant roar. As we sailed closer to it, the moonlight picked up the froth from waves crashing against Bora-Bora’s reef.

  Roger steered well away from the coral and hunched over charts, pencil and ruler in hand, consulting the boat’s global positioning system, or GPS. “Okay, we’ll go north of the island until we pass the break in the reef, cut back, and shoot the reef on a 113-degree course,” Roger said, “then follow the harbor lights exactly a mile into the lagoon, then turn sharply left between the shoals and go due north for four hundred meters, then sharp right and due east for three hundred meters and we’re in. At four knots, one mile takes fifteen minutes. Got that?”

  “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” I lied.

  “Good. You check the GPS and keep track of our bearings while I steer.”

  Running parallel to the reef, we saw the red and green lights marking the pass through the coral. But it was hard to judge distance in the dark: at one moment the lights seemed right before us, the next moment they vanished behind ocean swell. Roger hit the instrument lights on the cockpit. They didn’t work. He searched the cabin until he found a flashlight. It flickered for a moment and went dead.

  “Miss Tahiti to the rescue,” he said, reading the panels with the lighter we’d been given on Huahine. Then he handed it to me so I could check the GPS and scribble the latitude and longitude readings onto the chart.

  As I chanted our position, Roger swung the wheel and guided us through the pass. Surf crashed against the reef a few yards to either side of us. We coasted into the lagoon, flat and gray in the moonlight. Roger navigated past a thumb of coral marked on the chart but invisible to us, then swung left, threading between shoals we also couldn’t see. Then he turned right and straight toward the yellow buoys just visible on the gleaming skin of the lagoon. After blundering around in the dinghy with a broken boat hook, we snagged one of the buoys and tied up, secure and exhausted.

  As tense as this was, we’d had it easy compared to Cook. Someone had already laid out the track we needed to follow; we had green and red lights, like giant traffic blinkers, guiding us in; and we steered a boat full of instruments, at least some of which worked. Even by day, Cook had sailed almost blind, creating his own chart as he went along.

  “This is one of the great achievements of my sailing life,” Roger said, reaching for the gin bottle, “and it doesn’t hold a bloody candle to Cook. All he had were tired men with knotted ropes and lead lines bawling ‘six knots’ or ‘sixty fathoms deep and fine hard sand.’ Every day and every night. For three years. Here I am with a GPS, compass, depth sounder, charts, a radio, flare gun, life raft, and fifty-horsepower engine—and still I was about to crap myself.”

  Drums throbbed on the dark shore. I glanced at Roger, wondering for a moment if I’d hallucinated the noise. “Another restaurant dance show,” he said, closing his eyes. “Been there, done that.”

  He was probably right. Still, it seemed eerily resonant of Cook’s travels: a strange shore at night, drums sounding in the distance. I coaxed Roger into the dinghy and we rowed to a pebbly beach. Roger, scrambling ahead of me on a dirt path through the brush, turned and said, “Oh my God, it’s real!”

  I glimpsed what he’d just seen: a clearing in the woods, fringed by palm trees and lit by the moon, with fifty or so women dancing while shirtless men banged drums. The women were barefoot, wearing halter tops and wraparound skirts, which they hitched to their thighs as they shook their hips, side to side, front to back. It was the same dance we’d seen at the Captain Bligh nightclub. But out here in the moonlit woods, performed by women of all ages and sizes, sweat streaming down their faces, it was the most erotic thing I’d ever seen.

  We crept forward into the clearing and found ourselves beside a middle-aged islander named Richard. I asked him what was going on. He said the women were practicing for an upcoming heiva, or festival, in which dance troupes from across Bora-Bora competed. They gathered three times a week in this clearing, which was set aside for the express purpose of dance. Richard was one of the heiva judges. I asked him what he looked for.

  “To see if
they move together, and how each one moves,” he said. “And how well they tell the story.” As he explained it, the dance we were watching told a Romeo-and-Juliet tale of a princess from Bora-Bora who falls in love with a Raiatean prince. The families, from enemy clans, oppose the courtship, but in the end the lovers elope. “Then, as you see, they make love,” Richard said, as fifty women thrust their hips forward in unison, their eyes glazed, soft smiles forming on their lips. “It is the usual story.”

  Richard, whose day job was also as a judge, said that traditional dance had gradually reemerged in the 1900s, after a century of missionary suppression. At first, women performed only on holidays, in their cover-all Mother Hubbards. Then, in the 1950s, a schoolteacher researched the old dances and re-created the choreography as accurately as possible, from oral tradition and from the writings and drawings of early European visitors, including Cook.

  “It is strange, no?” Richard said, as the drums died and the women collapsed in exhaustion. “The first Europeans, with them came disease and so many other things that destroyed our culture. But now we are using them to take it back. If I may speak as a judge, Cook and the others, they leave us the best evidence we have of our own lives before the white man came.” He paused. “Still, they are guilty men.”

  Cook finally landed at Bora-Bora on his third Pacific voyage, and then only briefly. He’d planned to anchor within the lagoon for a few days, “but the tide as well as the Wind being against us, after making two or three trips I found it could not be done.” Instead, he took a boat ashore and traded with the natives before quickly returning to his ship. “The island which at a distance looks like a barren rock, seemd to be very fertile and to have a good deal of low land about it that was well covered with fruit trees & plantations.”

  That’s about all Cook wrote of Bora-Bora. The islanders dwelled in relative obscurity until World War II, when thousands of American servicemen descended on the Pacific. Among them was James Michener, a reservist and naval historian who tapped out Tales of the South Pacific on a typewriter in Vanuatu. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and spawned the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific and a hit movie of the same name. This helped ignite an American craze for everything Polynesian, from mai tais to hula hoops.

  A myth also arose that Michener had modeled his fictional isle of Bali Ha’i on Bora-Bora, which he once called “the most beautiful island in the world.” In fact, Michener wasn’t posted to Bora-Bora until after he’d written his book; Bali Ha’i was a composite of islands he’d visited earlier. No matter. Cruise ships and airplanes swarmed the island, and travel writers churned out endless stories with “paradise” in the headline and openings so ripe they made Michener’s prose seem minimalist:

  “The peaceful Pacific kisses feet, its lagoon-snuggled surface warm as a lover’s touch. Beneath toes stretched a blanket of sand that could have spilled from a celestial hourglass….”

  “Crooning ‘Bora Bora,’ the barefoot driver skimmed his outrigger canoe across milky aquamarine waters of beauty defying description….”

  “As I bathed in Pacific waters the color of Cameron Diaz’s eyes…”

  During our moonlit sail into Bora-Bora, I’d wondered if these stories, which I’d clipped and brought with us, might actually have credibility. By day, as we tied up at the island’s main wharf at Vaitape, I quickly came to my senses. Vaitape was a tourist-clotted sprawl of “curio” shops stuffed with mass-produced junk: beads, wooden tikis made in Indonesia, loud Hawaiian shirts. Across from the wharf, we rented the only transport available: a three-wheeled, golf cart–like vehicle called a “fun car,” equipped with a lawn mower engine and tooth-loosening suspension.

  “I never thought I’d miss the Panda Jolly,” Roger said, as we bounced south along the potholed road circling the main island, only six miles long and about the same across. In a few miles we came to Bloody Mary’s bar and restaurant, named for one of Michener’s characters. Outside, a board listed celebrity visitors, mostly Hollywood and TV stars. Inside, the bungalow décor included a sand floor and stools made of tree trunks. We joined a few expats at the polished lychee bar, and asked them about life on the island.

  “It’s great as long as you live in a five-star bungalow,” quipped a ponytailed Californian who repaired visiting yachts. Bora-Bora, thickly settled with resorts—and a population of seven thousand on only twenty-three square miles of land—was on the brink of environmental collapse. With only one break in the encircling reef, the lagoon couldn’t flush the sewage pumped into its once-crystalline water. If the wind and tide ran the wrong way, scum coated the surface. Overfishing had killed off much of the marine life. Fresh water was so scarce it had to be cut off each night from nine P.M. to five A.M.

  But new hotels kept going up, even as others closed. Club Med had erected a sprawling new resort, leaving its old one, damaged by typhoons, to decay by the water like a ruined marae. Another abandoned complex was known as the Hyatt slums. A disconsolate beach-comber sitting beside me at the bar likened the island to Waikiki, Honolulu’s overbuilt beach strip. “I’m headed for Mururoa next,” he joked, Mururoa being the atoll that had been used for French nuclear tests. “I reckon no one’s going to develop that.”

  We climbed back in the fun car and motored past elegant boutiques, black-pearl shops, and gated resorts. At one, we poked inside just long enough to watch bare-chested men paddling canoes filled with flowers and fruit to $700-a-night bungalows perched over the water. Puttering on, we reached Bora-Bora’s eastern flank, a terrain as abject as the western shore was luxe. The one path we followed toward the water ended at a trash dump. Many of the homes were little more than shacks, lacking even windows. Their inhabitants, perched in door-frames, waiting for a breath of wind, stared sullenly out, and didn’t bother to return our waves. Bumping past them in the fun car, dust and exhaust trailing behind us, I felt alien and voyeuristic: an intruder from Bora-Bora’s tourist “paradise.”

  At the end of the day, our circumnavigation almost complete, we searched for something to eat in Faanui, site of the main World War II base on the island. American servicemen left behind Quonset huts, gun emplacements, and 130 half-caste children, many of whom perished, my guidebook said, when “forced to switch from their accustomed American baby formulas to island food.” Now, even island food was scarce. Settling for Cokes and candy bars, we navigated an open drain in the street and wandered down to the water, accompanied by mangy dogs.

  Roger lit a soggy cigarette with Miss Tahiti and gazed out at the trash-strewn beach. “The whole world’s been sold a pup,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “A raw prawn,” Roger said, reaching for another bit of Australian slang. “Conned, gypped, sold a bill of goods. Polynesia’s a swindle, probably always was.”

  The dogs scratched at our feet, hoping for a scrap of candy. “Think about it,” Roger went on. “Those blokes on the Dolphin? They were scurvy-racked, sex-mad, fed on biscuits full of weevils. Anyplace off that ship would have looked like paradise.”

  He tossed a dog half his chocolate bar. “Then came Bougainville and his ship full of Frogs. They’re sex-mad, too, only they write better than the Brits. So the myth takes off. Noble savages, New Cythera, the whole romantic rot. No mention of human sacrifice.” He fed the dog the rest of his chocolate. “Cook, he’s clear-eyed, but no one listens to a lowly Yorkshireman. So we get Gauguin, another French wanker, painting his fourteen-year-old crumpet. Fifty years later, Michener and the Yanks show up. Then come the travel hacks, who have to justify their fancy rooms and plane fare by telling us this shithole is paradise.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette. “Come to think of it, paradise probably is a shithole. The missionaries sold a pup with that one, too. At least I hope they did, because I’m certainly not headed there.”

  We motored back to our yacht mooring. In twenty-four hours we’d be flying off the island. As we walked out on the pier, our legs still vibrating from five hours in the fun car, I ask
ed Roger if he planned to come with me to Cook’s next landfall.

  “To New Zealand? Good God, that’s a pup even the Frogs couldn’t sell me.”

  I told him that French explorers barely went to New Zealand, and the first who had gone there ended up being eaten by Maori.

  Roger laughed. “Frog legs? Can’t blame the Maori for that. Wait till you try New Zealand ‘cuisine.’ You’ll be pining for fafaru.” He slumped in the stern of the Courbet, idly flicking his lighter. “Me, I’ll be like Cook’s men, pining for Tahiti.” He flicked again. “She loves me. She loves me…not.”

  Chapter 4

  New Zealand:

  Warriors, Still

  Notwithstanding they are Cannibals, they are naturaly of a good disposission and have not a little share of humanity.

  —JOURNAL OF JAMES COOK

  Cook left no record of when he opened the sealed packet of secret orders he’d been given by the Admiralty. But on August 9, 1769, as he left Bora-Bora and the other Society Isles behind, Cook put his instructions into action. “Made sail to the southward,” he wrote, with customary brevity. Banks’s entry had more sense of occasion: “We again launched out into the Ocean in search of what chance and Tupia might direct us to.” The next day Banks managed only four words: “Myself sick all day.”

  The Endeavour’s track wasn’t quite so aimless as the botanist supposed. Cook’s orders were to sail to 40 degrees south, well inside what theorists believed was the boundary of the fabled southern continent. If Cook failed to encounter land, he was to turn west and keep searching the same latitude until he reached a shore once glimpsed by the Dutch and believed by many cartographers to be part of terra australis incognita.

 

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