Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  We were awakened the next morning by a gentle tap at the door. “Sorry to bother you,” said a teenager from the hotel staff, “but did you take the police minister’s car when you left the bar last night?”

  We went outside. A white sedan just like ours was parked where we’d left it, except that it had a different license plate and none of our clutter in back. The teenager smiled and said Rex had left the bar soon after us, only to find his car missing. He called one of his officers, who reported that his car had been seen at the hotel. The police were nice enough to leave the matter until morning. After all, where could we go?

  “It’s no problem, really,” the teenager said. “I’ll go switch them.”

  As he drove off, Roger slunk back to bed. “This is a new low, even for me. Stealing the police minister’s car. Thank God I haven’t met his wife yet. I’d probably have leered at her, too.”

  When our own car was returned, we went to collect Herman for our tour of Niue. He greeted us with a wide grin. “You’re the big news on the island,” he reported. “First car theft in years. I’m the public defender on Niue, you know.” He reached for a law book. “Let’s see, grand larceny. Are you a first offender? I could probably get you only a short sentence. Mitigating circumstances?”

  “Stupidity,” Roger said, “and five beers.”

  Herman laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m sure Rex is delighted to have an actual crime statistic to report. Parliament will increase his budget.”

  We climbed in the car and headed off in search of Cook and the hulahula. Herman stopped first at the home of a neighbor, in hopes she might know where to find the banana. When he introduced us, the woman giggled and spoke in Niuean; the only words I caught were “Palagi” and “Rex.” As to the hulahula, she was no more help than anyone else. “She says it only grows in the middle of the island,” Herman translated. “Very hard to find.”

  We drove on to the village of Tuapa, close to where Cook had first landed. Herman led us to a steep path winding down a cleft in the coastal cliff. We walked out on the reef, pink and yellow coral bursting flowerlike beneath the brilliant, Curaçao-colored water. Black and orange parrotfish swam all around us, and frigate birds skimmed the surface. With no rivers or streams, and almost no pollution, Niue was free from silt or other runoff; its waters were among the clearest in the world.

  At the Niue archives, I’d photocopied a monograph by a New Zealand anthropologist who had gathered natives’ accounts of the English landing. From this, and the journals of Cook and his men, it was possible to reconstruct the Resolution’s brief visit. Cook had come ashore near where we now stood, accompanied by a few sailors, the naturalists Johann and George Forster, and the Forster’s Swedish assistant, Anders Sparrman.

  While the botanists gathered plants, sailors raised the Union Jack (“the idle ceremony of taking possession,” George Forster mockingly called it). Then, as the landing party ventured up the chasm we’d just hiked down, several natives appeared above them. Cook’s men waved white cloth and green branches and called out friendly greetings “in those South Sea dialects which we were acquainted with,” George Forster wrote. Sparrman added that the natives “were painted coal-black, red, and white, in all sorts of horrible stripes,” and made hideous “grimaces” that reminded him of devils “in theaters and on the walls of old country churches.”

  One of the Niueans hurled a chunk of coral, hitting Sparrman’s arm. He and Johann Forster replied with musket fire, chasing away the natives but annoying Cook, who felt patience might have allowed for “some reconciliation.” The party returned to the boats and headed down the coast, looking for another place to land.

  We followed their course by road, stopping first at the site of a vanished village near Tuapa. Curiously, Niuean accounts claimed that Cook had come up here, exchanged gifts with islanders, and cooked a meal in an underground oven. “One person missed out and became angry, so he painted his teeth red, did a war dance, and scared the English away,” Herman said. This incident may actually have occurred—fifty-five years after Cook, when an English missionary came to Niue. Such errors were common across the Pacific; Cook’s landings often blurred, in local memory, with the arrival of later visitors.

  We continued down the coast to a reef called Opaahi where Cook had tried to land again. Canoes lay by the water, covered in coconut fronds to keep them from drying and cracking in the sun. Cook had found canoes here, too, and filled them with “some trifles (Medals, Nails &c) to induce the Natives to believe we intended them no harm.” Instead, men armed with spears charged down the chasm above the reef, Cook wrote, “with the ferocity of wild Boars and threw their darts.” One spear flew close by the captain’s shoulder. The English unleashed their own weapons, though Cook’s musket misfired. “I was not five paces from him when he threw his spear and had resolved to shoot him to save my self,” he wrote, “but I was glad afterwards that it happened otherwise.”

  Cook withdrew his men to the boats. “The Conduct and aspect of these Islanders occasioned my nameing it Savage Island,” he wrote. George Forster was a tad more charitable: “The nature of their country, which is almost inaccessible, seems to have contributed to make their tempers so unsociable.”

  Opaahi still looked just as Cook described it: a stony beach with “a perpindicular rocky cleft” topped by dense foliage. It was easy to see how a few determined warriors had managed to chase off the well-armed English. The crevasse was not only steep, but also littered with rocks perfectly shaped for throwing. “Even I could pick off a Pom,” Roger said, hurling a chunk of coral down into the sea.

  Cook had also chosen an inauspicious spot to come ashore. Herman said Opaahi lay close to a famed site called Cave of the Tongans. A few centuries before Cook’s landing, invading Tongans were lured to a shaft that Niueans had covered in brush. When the Tongans fell in, the Niueans buried them alive. “Cook was probably lucky he didn’t get any further than he did,” Herman said, “or he might be lying with the Tongans to this day.”

  From Opaahi, we headed inland on a narrow road fringed with moss, coconut groves, and grenade-shaped young papayas. Herman asked Roger to stop a few times so he could poke around in search of hulahula. I asked him what the plant looked like. “Very straight, thick stalk, broad leaves. The fruit doesn’t droop, it goes straight up.” Then, in a slash of open field, we saw an old man digging taro with a machete. When Herman asked him about the hulahula, the man responded with a toothless laugh and a few words of Niuean. “He says you asked the wrong question,” Herman translated.

  The farmer, a lean eighty-year-old named Kahika, said the hulahula had been common in his childhood. During weddings, or the installation of a chief, people smeared their faces with the fruit and performed a war dance. But island pastors disapproved, and gradually the custom died out. “We don’t have the old ceremonies anymore so we don’t need the hulahula,” Herman explained. “It isn’t nearly so sweet as other bananas. You could say the hulahula is cosmetic rather than culinary.”

  We asked Kahika how he felt about Cook’s name for the island. He shrugged and told Herman, “It is tradition, and sometimes tradition doesn’t work in your favor. But I am proud we fought them off. If we hadn’t, the Palagi would have taken this place much sooner than they did.” Then he returned to his digging.

  Herman had one last idea. A former legal client of his was an equipment driver who knew every inch of the island. His wife kept a bush garden. Perhaps they could point us to a hulahula. We went and knocked on the door of their ramshackle house, but no one answered. Herman raised his palms. “Maybe we could find a picture of a hulahula at the archives,” he said.

  I shook my head, and asked how much we owed him. “I have used all my skills, legal and investigative,” Herman said, studying his watch. When I paid him, he smiled and turned to Roger. “Remember to call me if you need legal counsel. Price on request.”

  By the end of the week, we’d exhausted every lead, as well as islanders’ patience. Sto
pping again at the medical school, Roger and I were greeted not simply with a cold shoulder but by a wall of them: the broad backs of government ministers, hunched over their beers in a scrum blocking our path to the bar. Other Niueans seemed weary of our ceaseless queries about Cook and the red banana. Even the New Zealand diplomats steered clear of us. “We haven’t just worn out our welcome,” Roger said, “we’ve extinguished it.”

  Retreating to the hotel one evening, we learned that a special event was about to commence: the first round of a Miss Niue pageant. Roger found us seats next to a young woman named Amanda, who turned out to be a former Miss Teen Niue. I asked her what it was like competing in a beauty contest on this modest, church-oriented island. “You have to think sexy, because you can’t look it,” she said. “No skin and no wiggling.” Even when swimming, Niuean women wore sarongs over their bathing suits.

  These strictures didn’t bother Amanda. “Westerners are very hypocritical about Polynesia,” she said. “First the Palagi sailors came to our islands and went, ‘Ooh, bare breasts!’ Then the missionaries came and said, ‘Cover up!’ Now tourists in bikinis look at us and say, ‘Why are you hiding under sarongs?’”

  The pageant began with a question-and-answer session for teen contestants clad in long gowns. By far the biggest crowd-pleaser was a girl who said she planned to stay on Niue and raise a family, “to keep the population up.” Each of the girls also performed a chaste walk and turn, accompanied by a male chaperone.

  The older contestants were almost as demure. “Greetings to you all in the name of Jesus Christ,” one began, before twirling her hips just a bit. Despite the show’s primness, Amanda said the contest had become much more Western in the five years since she’d competed. “Thin didn’t use to be in,” she whispered. “Now look how slim the girls are!”

  It seemed unlikely they would remain so for long. When the show ended, the audience swarmed around a buffet even more staggering than the one we’d helped devour earlier in the week. Roger, who sat out the initial rush, returned with his plate empty. “It’s been stripped,” he said. I noticed that several diners had wrapped food in foil and taken it back to their seats. Amanda said this was customary in Niue; guests were expected to take extra portions home to eat later.

  Roger shrugged, content to drink instead. After a week of Niuean cuisine, we’d both let out our belts a notch. “If we stayed here much longer I’d blow out to fantastic proportions,” he said. “They’d have to dismantle the doors to let me through.”

  On our last full day in Niue, I proposed one more drive around the island. Roger refused. “I’m starting to recognize every palm tree and vanilla pod,” he said. “Whenever we get in the car I feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.” So I headed off without him, idly steering past all the places we’d seen. A truck stood parked beside the house of the equipment driver Herman had taken us to visit, in hopes of locating a hulahula. Cook never turned back from the chance of discovery, however slight. I stopped and knocked on the door.

  A woman in a nightgown appeared, carrying a cleaver. She blushed, no doubt unaccustomed to greeting a Palagi stranger while barely dressed. I could smell something cooking. “Sorry,” I said, feeling intrusive and suddenly hesitant about my frivolous mission. “I was here the other day with Herman Taga—Herman the lawyer.”

  “Herman Tagaloailuga,” she said. “I am Carol.”

  “We were looking for your husband.”

  She appeared a bit alarmed. “He’s not home.” I’d forgotten that Herman had helped her husband with legal troubles. “Actually we were just looking for a hulahula,” I blurted. “Herman thought you or your husband might know where to find one.”

  Carol went inside for a moment and returned in a housedress, still carrying the heavy knife. She led me to a side yard and pointed to a thick, straight plant beside the water tank. “I bring it from the bush to save it so it won’t disappear,” she said.

  “That’s a hulahula?”

  She nodded. “No fruit now. In a few months. The bananas turn red, with spots, then black, then they fall down. No one eats them anymore. I use leaves for the umu and cook the stalk to weave things. But mostly just to look at.”

  “Why?”

  Carol shrugged. “I like it, it is from our history. When I was young, I hear the story about our men scaring the Palagi with the color of that banana. I really enjoy that story. So I went to the bush and got the seeds so I can remember how Niue scared Captain Cook with red teeth.” She studied the plant proudly. “I may be the only person on Niue with a hulahula. I don’t give the seeds to anyone else. Just for me.”

  We stood and gazed at the plant, an appreciation society of two. We fondled the stalk and studied the broad leaves. I took Carol’s picture in front of the tree. One thing puzzled me. Cook had come here in winter, as I had. But the bananas didn’t ripen at this time of year. How had the warriors painted their teeth red?

  Carol took her cleaver and whacked off a piece of stalk. Purply juice seeped out. “The weather has been cold, so it is late this year,” she said. “Soon the juice will turn very red, like blood.” I asked for some stalk, thanked Carol, and rushed back to the hotel. At the door to our room, I smeared the stalk against my lips and teeth before bursting inside.

  “You bastard!” Roger cried, bolting up from his chair. “I wanted to be there on Everest!”

  I performed a half-baked war dance and snarled until the astringent juice made me gag. “Of course it’s totally unconvincing, at least on you,” Roger said. “But the stain is there. They can’t deny it anymore. Red-teethed savages!”

  On Sunday, we headed to the airport along with almost everyone else on Niue. The handwritten passengers’ list rendered my surname as “Hatzsky.” Roger’s didn’t appear at all. No one seemed to care. Officials stamped our passports and performed the other formalities of international disembarkation, then welcomed us back into the country. “The plane is late, it won’t be in for another hour or so,” an official said. “You can go back to the hotel if you want.”

  Instead, we lolled in the sun outside the terminal, beside the crowd of onlookers. By now we recognized many of them, and all of them recognized us. A few nodded and smiled, but most looked away. “They’re here to make sure we actually leave,” Roger said. When the Royal Tongan plane finally swooped onto the runway, the crowd broke into applause. My spirits lifted, too. Niue was one of the nicest, least spoiled places I’d ever visited. But I’d begun to feel restless and confined, a sensation that expats on the island called Rock fever. Like Cook, I was ready for new territory.

  “Hatzsky and No-Name,” Roger said, handing our boarding passes to a steward. He looked at us blankly and pointed to seats beside an immense, stony-faced Tongan whose expression put me in mind of the statues at Easter Island. The pilot announced that our short flight would take us back across the international dateline.

  “It’s only two o’clock and we’re done with Sunday,” Roger said, perking up. “Thank God for that.”

  Chapter 9

  Tonga:

  Where Time Begins, and Goes Back

  Such resks as thise are the unavoidable Companions of the Man who goes on Discoveries.

  —CAPTAIN COOK, AFTER NEARLY RUNNING AGROUND OFF TONGA

  Explorers live or die by first impressions. Is the approaching inlet a shelter or a shoal-strewn trap? The figures beckoning from the beach—are they friends or foes? Act too cautiously, and you will discover nothing. Too recklessly, and you may end up dashed against rocks, or, like Magellan, lying on the sand with a spear through your gut.

  Cook was adroit at this balancing act. By the midpoint of his second voyage, he also had considerable experience on which to base his impressions. Few shores struck him more favorably than the archipelago he reached in October 1773, after his first Antarctic probe. “Without the least hesitation,” he observed, natives canoed out to the Resolution and came aboard. “This mark of confidence gave me a good opinion of these Islanders.”
>
  So did his reception on the beach. “We were welcomed a shore by acclamations from an immence crowd of Men and Women not one of which had so much as a stick in their hands.” Cook ordered his men to play bagpipes. Young island women replied with a “musical and harmonious tune.” Then a chief conducted the English to a feast of bananas, coconuts, and kava, a mildly intoxicating drink made of pepper root.

  Servants prepared the kava by chewing the plant into pulp before spitting it into bowls and adding water. Ever the diplomat and gastronomic adventurer, Cook—alone among his men—sampled the beverage. “The manner of brewing,” he dryly observed, “had quenished the thirst of every one else.” Cook described kava’s flavor as “rather flat and insipid,” but he appreciated the gesture. “Can we make a friend more welcome than by seting before him the best liquor in our possession?”

  Unarmed and hospitable, the natives also traded on very favorable terms—even hurling provisions into English boats without asking for anything in exchange. But it was island agriculture that impressed Cook most. “I thought I was transported into one of the most fertile plains in Europe,” he wrote. Every acre “was laid out in Plantations” and enclosed by “neat fences made of reeds.” Wide public roads, “as even as a Bowling Green,” cut through the countryside. Completing this air of pastoral gentility were fruit trees planted “in great taste and elegancy” beside the roads and around chiefly houses. “The air was perfumed by their fragrancy.”

  Cook was so enchanted by his “delightfull Walks” that he wrote with rare humor, even about subjects that usually irritated him. He noted with amusement that William Wales had to stumble around without shoes or stockings because natives had stolen the astronomer’s garments as he waded in the water. Cook also wrote that crewmen bartered so profligately for island curiosities that “one waggish Boy took a piece of human excrement on the end of a stick and hild it out to every one of our people.”