by Tony Horwitz
He flopped on his side and lit a cigarette. “Maybe they’re poisoning us so we won’t find a hulahula.” He puffed meditatively. “I’ve been thinking about it. There’s a conspiracy here to hide the red banana because of people’s shame over the name Savage Island. Everyone says they used to have these red bananas, but not anymore. Very suspicious.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“No I’m not. We’ve gone straight to their greatest national sensitivity in a blunt, brutal way—as usual. We’re reminding these pious people of their violent past and their attacks on innocent people.” He paused. “If you don’t write about it, I will. The Hunt for Red Banana: A Fruit Thriller. Tom Clancy fans will love it. You could have a terrorist cell called the Red Banana Faction.”
Rain pelted down outside. A bad day for banana fishing. Roger lolled in bed reading Beaglehole. “We’ve got six more days here and we’ve already seen most of the island,” he said when I tried to dislodge him. “Our productivity is way too high. We have to stop this manic dashing around.”
I drove without him to Alofi, searching for some indoor distraction. A sign caught my eye: “Niue National Library and Archives.” This led me to a one-room building with dusty, half-empty shelves. I read everything on Niue, which amounted to a few slim books and monographs. Among other things, I learned that the island was basically one big volcanic rock with a bit of vegetation pasted on top. It had no beaches and no harbors; waves crashed right into the high cliffs circling the entire island. Niue had originally been populated by voyagers from Samoa and Tonga, and its name meant “Behold the Coconut,” apparently an expression of relief by early settlers upon finding something to eat on the inhospitable islet.
I also learned that Niue had always been more egalitarian than other Polynesian societies. Islanders eschewed hereditary kings and chiefs, elevating leaders on the basis of merit—and deposing or killing them when famine, drought, or other disaster struck. Niueans’ fierce defense of their shore was due, in part, to a fear of imported diseases, which had ravaged the island at several points in its history. This dread of epidemic may have explained the hostile reception accorded Cook.
The captain’s unfavorable report on the island deterred other visitors; in the half century after Cook, while missionaries, traders, and whalers swept across the Pacific, Westerners steered clear of Savage Island. When passing ships did anchor offshore, Niueans sent men aboard, one book said, “with their faces blackened, their bodies smeared with ash, their hair tangled and matted, shouting, and gesticulating wildly. This strategy brought about the speedy departure of many ships.” Fear of disease wasn’t the only source of native enmity. Nineteenth-century visitors included slavers, or “blackbirders,” who kidnapped Niueans to labor in guano mines on other islands.
At a small museum across from the library, I learned of another sad chapter in the history of Niuean/Palagi contact. In October 1915, without prior warning, a New Zealand transport steamed into Niue and carried off 150 men for service in World War I. The recruitment was more political than practical: an effort to bolster morale by demonstrating to white New Zealanders that even their “dusky” brethren (including Maori and Cook Islanders) were doing their bit for king and empire.
During their training in New Zealand, however, many Niueans quickly fell sick. “It has been found that they are very susceptible to cold,” an official confided in a cipher telegram to his superiors in Britain. “Should they be found unsuitable for the climactic conditions of Europe it is suggested that their services be utilized in Egypt or Aden.”
This warning was ignored. By the time the Niueans reached France in April 1916, their ranks had dwindled by a third. Within weeks, almost the entire unit fell ill with pneumonia, trench foot, and other ailments. One died in combat, several more from disease, and the survivors were evacuated to a hospital in England. More died there, and during the long ride back to the South Pacific.
“They return to their homes proud no doubt of the valuable service they have rendered in assisting to consolidate the Empire,” read an official letter of appreciation sent by New Zealand to the people of Niue. It was accompanied by engravings of the king, the queen, and Lord Kitchener for display in island schoolrooms. Not until long after the war did a New Zealand official acknowledge: “There is a sadness of lonely Niuean graves in countries the names of which were hardly known hitherto to the Natives.”
When I asked a woman at the museum about Niue’s history since World War I, she recommended I visit an elderly doctor who lived nearby. I found Harry Nemaia, a slim barefoot man, on the back porch of his home, fixing a fishing rod. His wife sat weaving a stiff black-and-white “church hat” of coconut leaf. “No plan,” she said, when I asked her about the beautiful design. “Just did it.” As soon as she was finished, she started sewing.
I commented to the doctor that Niueans struck me as unusually versatile and industrious people. He smiled and said, “We have to be. There are so few of us here that everyone must do several jobs.” His career bore this out. Though trained as a dentist, he’d served for many years as the only doctor in Niue: setting fractures, performing appendectomies, delivering babies by kerosene light. “I wasn’t very expert at any one thing,” he said, “but I could get by at everything.” He was even called on to treat mental illness. “I had no training for this, so I relied on common sense.”
Harry had made his rounds twice a week, circling the island on bicycle and later by truck. The sick in each village would gather in one building, or, if they were too ill to leave home, put a red flag in the window. Conditions were much better today; Niue had a small, well-equipped hospital, and planes flew in from New Zealand to evacuate emergency cases. Many once-fatal conditions could now be treated safely.
But Harry feared that Niue itself was a dying community. “In New Zealand, the money is big, people get used to the bright lights, the sports, the pubs. It is difficult for them to come home.” In the “old days,” meaning before about 1960, life on the island had been simpler but more secure. “If you had no money you didn’t care. There was coconut and fish to live from, you had a house and some land.”
Niueans also had a long tradition of rugged self-reliance. This individualism explained, among other things, the roadside graves I’d seen all over the island. Most people buried family members on their own land rather than in cemeteries, and they personalized the graves with possessions of the dead (including, in the case of some deceased women, their sewing machines).
Christianity was the one powerful communal force on Niue. In Harry’s childhood, the church was so strict that food couldn’t be cooked on Sundays (it was prepared before dawn and then reheated). People apprehended making “bush beer” were jailed for six months, and sexual “crimes” were also harshly punished. Even today, Niueans rarely displayed affection in public; husbands and wives didn’t so much as hold hands.
“We are restrained people, except when eating,” he said. As a doctor, Harry didn’t approve of islanders’ fondness for feasts like the one Roger and I had attended the night before. “When I was young, we walked or biked to the fields and labored from dawn to dusk. People don’t live like that now, but they still eat as if they do. No wonder so many are fat.”
One starch, however, had disappeared from islanders’ diet: the red banana. “Hulahula is not a good eating banana,” he explained. There was also its connection to Cook. Harry brought a doctor’s perspective to stories about the English landing. While red teeth may have scared the English, Niueans had probably found the foreigners just as frightening. “They must have looked very abnormal to our people. Perhaps their pale skin made us think they were sick and would bring disease.”
Harry glanced at his watch. Though he was seventy-eight, he still performed eye checks at his home and had several patients to see. He did this on a voluntary basis, as a service to the community, and to himself. Niueans liked to stay useful and self-reliant, even in old age.
“Going fishing later?”
I asked, pointing at the rod he’d been working on.
The doctor shook his head. “I used to go very often,” he said. “But no longer. I cannot carry my own canoe anymore.”
While I’d been out, Roger had done some research of his own. “I found out there’s a Palagi joint on the island that serves Australian beer,” he said. “I need a break from rum and coconut.”
We discovered the Wicked Wahoo Bar at the far end of the island. It was a pleasant open-air establishment overlooking the sea. A half-dozen patrons perched on stools with their backs to the water, facing a bar fridge adorned with bumper stickers: “You’re Ugly and Your Mother Dresses You Funny” and “The Problem with Political Jokes Is They Get Elected.”
I ordered a glass of wine. “Château de Cardboard all right?” the bartender asked, reaching for a cask. The man beside me started telling jokes about his hometown in outback Australia. “The local prostitute is still a virgin,” he said. “That’s how small and poor it is.” The others smiled wearily and stared into their beers. The place had the stale, disaffected air of expat bars the world over.
Then I noticed a periodical on the counter headlined Niue Economic Review. Given what we’d seen of the island’s economy, I assumed this was another feeble bar joke. Flipping through it, though, I found lengthy, well-written stories about the latest doings on “the Rock,” as Niue’s handful of expats called the coral island.
“Where can I find Stafford Guest?” I asked, reading the editor’s name from the back of the review. The others laughed. “You’re looking at him,” said the balding, mustachioed barman. Stafford turned out to be a journalist from New Zealand who had married a Niuean and lived here for decades, running the bar and an adjoining guest house as well as publishing his journal.
He deposited two years of back issues on the bar. They were filled with muckraking stories on astonishing scams. A small airline had secured a loan from the Niue government and vanished without ever providing service to the island. A man wanted for fraud in three countries had convinced the government to give him land for a fanciful “Cyber-City” on the island, which was never built.
There were also stories on the curious enterprises we’d glimpsed in Alofi. The offshore company registry had earned Niue a place on regulatory blacklists, as one of fifteen countries accused of international money laundering. The grandiosely named Lord Liverpool University George Washington School of Medicine didn’t actually qualify anyone to practice medicine. The Canadian Roger had met at the bar was the school’s dean of medicine; though he was a chiropractor, not an M.D., he wore surgical scrubs to impress government ministers, who had showered the school with subsidies.
“You have these carpetbaggers flying all over the Pacific peddling get-rich-quick schemes,” Stafford explained. “They come with a smile and a tie and an alligator briefcase and the government gives them everything—laws, land, loans. If these con men don’t succeed at one island, they just fly on to the next.”
Given all this, I was curious why Stafford chose to stay in Niue. It couldn’t be easy to live in such a small place while exposing his neighbors’ dubious dealings. But Stafford said he’d lived on other Pacific islands and disliked their pervasive emphasis on clan and hierarchy. “Here, the attitude is, ‘I come first, my family second, my village third, Niue last.’ People say, ‘Don’t tell me what to do, I’m free to do what I want.’”
Niue had another advantage: its laws were modeled on New Zealand’s, making it comparatively open and democratic, with a Westminster-style parliament and elections by secret ballot. “On a lot of islands they’d have shot me by now.” He laughed, gathering up the pile of reviews. “Anyway, where else in the world would I find so much weirdness to write about?”
Stafford stirred my journalistic juices. I resolved to crack the red-banana story before leaving the island. If nothing else, this mission would give Roger and me something to do other than going to church or expiring at the Wicked Wahoo Bar. So the next day we headed off to tour Niue again, searching the roadside foliage for red bananas.
It’s hard to find a plant you’ve never seen. Nor were there many people to guide us, only the occasional rooster or dog or coconut crab skittering across the road. “Another ribbon of tar, another coconut tree,” Roger said, as we completed our second circumnavigation of the island. The only breaks in the monotony were the ubiquitous graves, many of them curiously inscribed; one memorialized a woman “who fell on sleep May 30th 1917.”
Then, as we were preparing to retreat to the hotel, we passed a small house with a sign in the yard:
NIUE CONSULTING AGENCY
GENERAL CONSULTING SERVICE
LAND MATTERS
SHELL COLLECTION
Even by Niuean standards, this seemed strange. We knocked on the door and were met by a madly barking dog and a small, muscular man in shorts and a cut-off T-shirt. “Sorry about Sweetie,” he said, holding back the hound. “He loves Palagi blood.” The man thrust out his hand. “Herman Tagaloailuga. How can I help you?”
“We were curious about your sign,” I said. “What exactly do you do?”
“I’m private sector. Accountant. Economist. Legal consultant. Also a conchologist.”
“A what?”
“Conchologist. Student of shells.” He wrestled Sweetie aside and welcomed us into a small living room with a bare bulb dangling from the ceiling. At one end stood a low table covered with legal papers and tomes titled Niue Fish Protection and Concise Law Dictionary. Against another wall perched a shelf filled with books such as Mollusca and Cowrie Shells of the Pacific. Tourist pamphlets lay scattered on a side table. “I am also in the travel trade,” Herman said, handing us a brochure.
I asked if we could see his shell collection. “Museum,” he corrected me. “Five dollars each.”
Roger handed him ten New Zealand dollars. I expected to be shown into another room. Instead, Herman went to his law desk and threw back a tablecloth to reveal a glass case beneath. Inside were several dozen shells: gold, pink, speckled. “This one is very rare,” Herman said, showing us a golden cowrie. Roger asked how much it was worth. “Price on request,” Herman replied. He let the tablecloth down. “Do you need any consulting services?”
“Actually, yes. We’re interested in Captain Cook and the red banana.”
Herman frowned. “I wish the world would forget all that.” Herman had attended a boarding school in Samoa, and once performed a war dance with other Niuean students as part of an “island night” show. “We painted our teeth red and danced with sticks, singing ‘We are savage people!’ We didn’t know any better.”
Like other Niueans, Herman hated Cook’s name for the island, which had survived on maps and in some books well into the twentieth century. “We’re actually much cleaner and better educated than other islanders,” Herman said. “In Tonga they still have pigs running down the roads. In Fiji the villages are very poor. Tahiti is full of whores. But we’re the red-teethed savages. Anyone who tours the island will see that’s not so.”
“We’ve toured it, but didn’t know what to look for,” I said. “Will you show us around?”
“I’m a professional guide,” Herman replied. “Price on request.”
“Okay, how much?”
“Depends what you want to see.”
“Cook-related sites. And a hulahula.”
Herman shook his head. “This is hard. It will take some research.” He paused. “Fifteen dollars an hour, and you drive. I don’t have a car.”
“Fine. When can we go?”
Herman went to his desk to consult a calendar. “I could probably fit you in a week from Friday.” I told him we were in Niue for only a few more days. “Tomorrow morning, then,” he said, showing us to the door.
As we drove off, I read to Roger from the tourist brochure Herman had given us. The listed attractions included “Village Visit with Enthusiastic Resident.”
“Only one?” Roger said. “The others fucked off?” We passed a
row of roadside graves. “Either that or they ‘fell on sleep.’ The headstones outnumber the living here, it’s depressing. They should call this island Gravesend.” We entered a village seemingly devoid of inhabitants. “Where’s Enthusiastic Resident?” Roger quipped. Then he saw an old lady snoozing on her front porch. “Oh, there’s one. She’ll be lying by the road before long, too.”
At the end of the day we stopped at the Lord Liverpool University George Washington School of Medicine. It was just as Roger had described. The only items of medical equipment we could find were an elastic bandage and a blood pressure machine. The library had a few medical texts wedged between self-help books such as The Keys to Growing in Love and The Inspirational Writings of Pat Robertson. There were no students or instructors in sight.
But the bar was crowded with large men in coats and ties. This turned out to be the bulk of Niue’s government, including the premier and several of his ministers. The premier handed me his business card, which listed his portfolios: finance, economic planning, customs and revenue, offshore banking, external affairs, civil aviation, shipping and trade, tourism, philatelic and numismatic coins. I’d never visited a place where so few people held so many jobs.
Like everyone else we’d met, the ministers were open and friendly—until we asked about the medical school, the sex lines, and other island business. Roger didn’t help matters by regaling the ministers with loud and rather lewd praise of two Niuean beauties he’d met at the Panamanian law firm and offshore business registry.
“One’s my daughter, the other’s my niece,” the police minister, Robert Rex, observed rather coolly. Roger changed the subject. “Can you tell us where to find a hulahula?” he asked.
It was dark when we wobbled outside. Roger fumbled in his pocket for the car key, then saw that he’d left it in the ignition, as was the custom on this small, safe island. “Why do they have a police minister, anyway?” he wondered. “Unless it’s to arrest oafs like me for ogling the local crumpet.”