Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Nearby stood another impressive stone, labeled “Sitting Mound and Stone Backrest.” A sign explained that Tu’itatui, the ruler who oversaw construction of the trilithon, was so fearful of assassination that he shaped his coral throne as a gargantuan backrest, to protect against attacks from behind. He also used a stick to ward off anyone who came too close while serving kava: hence his name, which translated as “King-Strike-the-Knee.” Tu’itatui was a huge man, the sign said, with “an exceptionally large (big long) head.” I wasn’t sure what this meant. But when Sione leaned against the stone, even he seemed puny against its coral bulk.

  I was curious to learn more, but the historic park enclosing the site had the same air of abandonment as every other such place we’d seen. The strangely worded sign sat on rusted poles and had been made almost illegible by age and grime. The grass was uncut, and the souvenir stalls by the park entrance were unattended.

  Sione drove a different route back to Nuku’alofa, taking us first through thinly inhabited countryside. We saw a few traditional houses similar to those Cook and his men observed, oval-shaped and thatch-roofed, with sidings made of reed. We also passed women making tapa much as they had in Cook’s day, beating the bark on a log with heavy sticks and then laying it out on the grass to dry.

  The other side of the island appeared much more modern and prosperous. Sione drove us past brick ranch houses and Spanish-style villas that looked as though they’d been transplanted from southern California. He said most of these belonged to people who had worked abroad, or to noblemen and their families. But none of the houses could compete with the churches, some as grand as cathedrals and ringed by acres of manicured grounds. As we passed a flying fox sanctuary where royals, and only royals, were permitted to hunt the immense bats, I thought back to my conversation with the government spokeswoman. She’d been right. Tonga was England in aspic—England, that is, circa 1400.

  In the wake of Cook’s voyages, Europeans looked to the Pacific to understand their own “primitive” past, as noble savages or barbarous heathens, depending on the writer’s perspective. Tonga in the twenty-first century offered something else: a portal into premodern Europe, with its absolute monarchy, its barons and serfs, its union of church and state. Tonga wasn’t the land where time began. It was the place where time had gone back.

  That night, while Roger watched weird documentaries, I read the Tongan constitution. Drafted in 1875 by an English reverend who had served as the king’s adviser and later as prime minister, the constitution included lines such as “The person of the King is sacred” and “All the land is the property of the King.” No prospective heir to the throne could marry without the king’s consent. One of the current princes had done so, and forfeited his right to succession. The king also handed out hereditary estates as he saw fit. There was a legislative assembly, but the king could “dissolve it at his pleasure.” Not that he needed to bother; nine noblemen, and eleven ministers appointed by the king for life, held an unassailable majority over nine representatives elected by commoners. “My inheritance consists of God and Tonga,” read the motto on the royal seal.

  The next day, I made the rounds of Nuku’alofa’s foreign consulates and learned that Tonga was even more feudal than I’d supposed. Diplomats said that it was still almost impossible for commoners to own land; most Tongans lived as tenants of the nobility. The nobles also asked for periodic “contributions” from their vassals, such as food for a daughter’s wedding. Churches made even greater demands, exacting donations that often totaled a fifth of a household’s income, and publicly announcing each family’s giving. The annual budget of the Mormon Church alone was half that of the Tongan government’s.

  While most Tongans accepted this system, the diplomats said, there was growing discontent over the islands’ collapsing economy. As in Niue, emigration had long served as a safety valve, providing jobs to young people and remittance money for their families in Tonga. But young Tongan men were renowned for overstaying their visas and joining gangs. As a result, Western countries were now deporting them in large numbers. These youths returned home, angry and unemployed, to a country where jobs were scarce and ill-paid, labor unions banned, and social customs much less libertine than in the West.

  This partly explained the surliness of some Tongans we’d met, and it had also contributed to a rash of attacks on foreigners. The government’s passport-selling scheme, and the king’s recent embrace of Beijing (which had helped Tonga enter the U.N.), had brought an influx of Chinese, some of whom took over small retail shops once run by Tongans. A number of the stores had been looted and burned, and their owners beaten. Tongans’ ingrained xenophobia also undercut tourism, on which Tonga claimed to stake its economic future. “They want tourism,” one envoy said, “but they’re not sure if they want tourists.”

  A small but vocal democracy movement was also stepping up its dissent, charging the regime with corruption and demanding to know why royals and nobles lived grandly while so much of the country lay in shambles. The heir to the throne, whose vast mansion we’d passed, was a playboy who spent much of his time on the Riviera. He was famed for making disparaging comments about ordinary Tongans; “left to their own devices,” he once declared, they would “urinate in elevators.” His sister had made a fortune as head of a company that leased Tonga’s satellite space above Asia.

  Their father, meanwhile, was becoming ever more eccentric with age. He’d issued a royal decree naming as “court jester” an American Buddhist who was also entrusted with managing the country’s trust fund. The jester gambled most of the fund on America’s unregulated “viatical industry”—buying the insurance policies of elderly or terminally ill patients, in hopes they’d die while the policy was still worth more than its cost—and promptly lost $20 million U.S., or more than half the annual budget of Tonga’s government.

  Despite such scandals, the royal family showed little sign of acceding to demands for accountability and democracy. “Power is delightful,” one diplomat concluded, “and absolute power is absolutely delightful.”

  While I was out, Roger had received a call in our room from the king’s secretary. My interview request had been granted—for the next morning! I was to appear at ’Eleni ’Aho’s office at 9:30 sharp, and the dress code was specific: coat, tie, and a shirt with a collar. “Guess that means I can’t come along,” Roger joked. “I’ve only got T-shirts, and my shorts need pressing.” In fact, he had to fly back to Sydney the next day to go back to work.

  My wardrobe wasn’t in much better shape than Roger’s. The coat and tie I’d packed in hopes of meeting the king lay rumpled at the bottom of my bag. The one decent shirt I’d brought was on my back: a sweat-stained rag. It was six in the evening. There was no iron in the room, and I didn’t relish trying to wash and dry my shirt in the mildewed bathroom.

  I went to the hotel desk and shamelessly pulled the only string I had. “I’m seeing the king first thing tomorrow.” The receptionist reluctantly allowed as how the hotel laundry might iron my jacket and tie by breakfast, but that was all. So I sprinted several blocks to a clothing store and managed, as the shopkeeper pulled down his shutter, to purchase a white shirt, tightly packaged in plastic and labeled “medium.”

  When I unwrapped it the next morning, I discovered that “medium” meant something very different in Tonga than elsewhere. The arm and neck holes could easily accommodate two of each. The fabric, if you could call it that, felt like cardboard and caused me to sweat the moment I put it on.

  “One hundred percent man-made fiber,” Roger said, checking the label. “The collar makes you look like a starved chicken.” Meanwhile, the hotel had returned my jacket and tie with shiny scorch marks, stiff and glossy. “They go nicely with the shirt,” Roger said.

  He charitably agreed to carry my jacket as far as the palace before catching a cab to the airport. On the way, we stopped for coffee and chatted with a New Zealand businessman at the next table. When I told him I was headed to th
e palace, he shook his head sympathetically. Royal audiences, of which he’d had several, ranged from good to shocking. “During the shocking ones, the king sits there and says nothing.”

  By the time we’d shuffled the last humid blocks to the palace, my oversized shirt was stuck in damp clumps to my torso. My tie had turned rigor-mortal, curling from the bottom and tonguing straight out. Roger couldn’t glance at me without cracking up. “You look more ridiculous than I’ve ever seen you, which is saying a lot.” He helped me into my oven-fried jacket, then convulsed with laughter again. “Maybe you can apply for a job as the new court jester.”

  He left me at the private secretary’s office. The door was locked, and no one answered my repeated knocks. I went outside and looked through the window. ’Eleni ’Aho sat at her desk, ignoring my waves and taps on the glass. I went back inside and waited as patiently as I could in the hall by her office. The only furniture was a swivel chair with a wheel missing; as soon as I sat down I was dumped on the floor. I knocked again. Still no answer. Was the interview off? Had the secretary caught sight of my clothes and decided to cancel?

  I saw a woman down the hall and almost tackled her, babbling about my nine-thirty appointment. It was now almost ten. She shrugged and showed me into a room with royal portraits, most of them askew. Ten minutes later, a man in an olive military uniform appeared and asked for my passport. This was a member of Tonga’s two-hundred-man army. “How do I pronounce your name for the king?” he asked.

  “Horwitz. Whore-wits.”

  “Howid?”

  “That’s fine.”

  The soldier led me outside, past a stretch Cadillac with a crown on the license plate, and through a side gate to the palace grounds. I asked him how I should address the king. “‘Your Majesty’ and a handshake is fine,” he said. Only Tongan subjects had to crawl in his presence. Another guard escorted me across the lawn to an airy room of the palace, just off the porch. It was furnished with a long table and a massive chair of heavy oak, etched with a coat of arms. The décor included a book titled Songs of Worship, a satellite photograph showing “oil seepage” on Tonga (another of the king’s obsessions, though no consequential oil deposits had ever been found), and a topographical map of the islands signed by Ronald Reagan.

  I heard heavy breathing in the hall and a moment later the king appeared, a cane in each hand. He wore a lemon Nehru jacket over an ankle-length robe from under which poked heavy sandals. Very stooped, he looked much less formidable than in his portraits. Exercise, as well as illness, had diminished his stature from his Guinness World Records days. Still, at six foot three and three hundred pounds, he was very large, particularly for a man of eighty-two. As he slowly settled his bulk into the high-backed oak throne and gazed in my direction with hooded eyes, I felt as though I were seated before a Buddha.

  “Mr. Howid,” he said, extending his hand and enfolding mine, as if with a boxing glove.

  “Your Majesty.” I waited for him to speak again, but the onus was evidently on me. I’d been told that it was customary to bring the king a small gift. Unable to think of anything I could buy in Tonga that the ruler of the land didn’t already possess, I’d taken a cue from other writers and brought a copy of a book I’d written about the American Civil War.

  Passing the book across to the king, I told him about my reason for coming to Tonga and recited the first of my prepared questions: How was Cook’s visit remembered? My query hung in the air. The king remained absolutely silent and still, eyes trained on the table. He wore gold watches on both wrists and I watched them tick, and tick, for three minutes. I thought of the businessman I’d just met at the coffee shop: the word “shocking” echoed in my head.

  Then the king mumbled something. I’d been warned of this too: not a speech impediment, exactly, but a tendency to slur his words.

  “Pardon?”

  “They built the first submarine,” he repeated, slushing the “s.”

  Submarine? Perhaps he’d misunderstood my question. I was pondering a polite way to rephrase it when the king pointed a hot-dog-sized finger at the book I’d given him. The cover showed a man in Confederate uniform.

  “The submarine was hand-cranked,” he said. “It sank on its first trip after destroying a Union vessel. The men inside just breathed the air they took down with them and quickly ran short of oxygen.”

  He was referring to the Hunley, a Confederate submarine that sank in Charleston Harbor in 1864. This was an arcane bit of naval history known to few except Civil War buffs.

  “It was a pioneering effort, a productive failure,” the king continued. “In World War One, the Allies had such a failure during the invasion of Gallipoli. They didn’t know how to land troops on beaches. But they learned from that, and the success of the Normandy invasion came in a way from the failure at Gallipoli. It was the same with the Confederate submarine.”

  I was relieved, and, at the same time, alarmed. The man was obviously clear-headed, he knew his history, and he seemed in a voluble mood. Then again, I had only an hour, and I sensed that the king could easily fill it with musings about the Confederacy. I steered us back to Cook and asked the king what he’d learned as a child about the captain.

  “I knew that he’d visited three times, and that he was an admirable man, very interested in the health and welfare of his crew. This was not typical of the day. Many sea captains were only interested in controlling their men.” I listened politely to a discourse on naval discipline. When he paused for breath, I broke in with a question about the tortoise Cook had given the Tongans.

  “I believe it was from Madagascar, not the Galápagos as many people think,” he said. “Galápagos tortoises are much bigger, and not so long-lived.” As a boy, the king had ridden around the palace grounds on the tortoise’s back, and he recalled that Tu’i Malila sometimes strayed as far as a mile away. “Cook also left some red cloth used for making marine uniforms. It was displayed for many years.” He laughed, his dark eyes becoming suddenly merry and warm. “Did you know Americans called British marines lobsterbacks because of their red uniforms?”

  A servant entered with a silver tray on which sat two crystal glasses of orange juice. Kava was no longer the royal drink of choice. “I go through the gesture and pretend to drink it at ceremonies,” the king said. “I don’t think it’s very clean.” He also avoided alcohol and tobacco and kept to a rigorous exercise schedule, visiting the gym three times a week and walking around the palace grounds. This had helped him shed 150 pounds since his peak.

  “When I was fourteen I pole-vaulted about ten feet,” he said. “No fourteen-year-old has leaped higher yet in Tonga.” It was hard to imagine a man of his size having performed this feat, and harder still to imagine that any Tongan teenager would try to break the monarch’s record.

  The king sipped juice, fingering my book again. “I was born on the Fourth of July, so I’ve always had an interest in America. Europe, too. I just read a biography of Napoleon and am very interested in Bismarck.” This led to a discourse on battle tactics and Bismarck’s sound judgment on and off the battlefield. “I am very interested in history of all kinds,” he concluded.

  All history, that is, except Cook’s. I tried to broach the topic one more time, pointing to drawings of Tonga on the room’s wall, made by an artist aboard an early French expedition. Did the journals and art of European explorers have value to Tongans today?

  “Yes, it is strange in a way. We must look to what the Europeans saw two hundred years ago to teach ourselves about Tonga as it was. We just built a hundred-foot double pirogue. We learned what it was like from European sketches.” He paused. “When William the Conqueror came to England, Normandy was a territory settled by Vikings, and the ships William built were still Scandinavian in style.”

  I gave up on Cook and asked about politics instead. The king had brought the Tongan monarchy into the twenty-first century. Would it still be here in the twenty-second?

  “I think so, yes. Without such
an institution, the islands would fall apart and go their own way. Look at the Philippines, at Fiji. You need a sense of unity.” He went silent for a moment. “Monarchy is a very old view of society, it started off, really, as war leaders. The Vikings, each of their early ships had a leader. It grew from that.”

  As he went on, about Norsemen and ship design, my attention began to drift. But it was hard to take my gaze off the king. He filled most of my field of vision. Studying his face, I noticed that the lower half was much larger than the upper, and that his head seemed too small for his titanic body. He looked a bit like the wrinkled tortoise he’d ridden as a child.

  “In America, the constitution was made for a republic but it is not one really,” he said, following the Norsemen across the Atlantic. “The president appoints his ministers, the same as here. So it is not really so different.” This put him in mind of the new U.S. president, whose father he’d met. He was pleased that a second Bush was in the White House, though his preference was dynastic rather than political. “It is a good family,” he said.

  He felt even closer to the Chinese, who now gave Tonga considerable aid. The king, a fundamentalist Christian and formerly a fierce anticommunist who had kept close ties to Taiwan, seemed an unlikely ally of Beijing. But he felt there was a strong kinship between Tongans and Chinese. “They belong to the Mongoloid race and so do we. All Mongoloid people have blue spots on their spines when they are born.”

  I learned later that this unlikely sounding birthmark did exist. Still, it seemed an odd basis for international alignment. Even stranger was the king’s belief that his tiny Christian nation might have spiritual influence over China’s billion-plus people, and that Tongan missionaries would be allowed to proselytize on the mainland. “Religion comes very late in a society’s development,” he said. “Christianity changed Tonga from top to bottom. Perhaps China will change, too.”

  The king appeared tired. I could see from his two watches that we’d been talking for an hour and a quarter, longer than scheduled. I asked to take his photograph. He assumed a solemn pose and then pointed to the palace lawn. “You should take a picture of my statue, too. It was a gift from the Chinese.” He saw me to the door. “There used to be tall Norfolk pines on the grounds, but they were chopped down so the trees would not fall on my statue.”