Nor do the people look alike. In Tonga they are stocky and dark, in Samoa large and fair, in Tahiti somewhat stunted and darker than the Samoans.
There it is! Vast, insignificant Polynesia, ruled badly by many different nations, victimized by all kinds of robbers. It is not rich. Its people seem to have few causes to be happy. It is a backwash in the world’s eddies, yet these trivial islands have imposed on history the most lasting vision of the earthly paradise. Why?
To find the answer one must visit Tahiti, the emotional capital of Polynesia. Surpassing even Bali and Capri in attracting gifted people from all over the world, Tahiti is the symbol of hedonism. It is a small island, with only 600 square miles, and may be likened to a sombrero touching a derby. The only good lands are around the rims of the two hats, the interiors being mountainous and inhospitable. Their is not enough land for everyone, not enough food to supply the population. (Most comes from Australia.) The natives are not noticeably attractive, since early in life they lose their teeth—a heritage from the decayed stumps of English sailors—and many are afflicted with elephantiasis, next to leprosy the most repulsive of diseases. In spite of all this the island is a paradise, and here is why.
Tahiti is beautiful. The mountains are like no others I have seen. Treeless, they are sometimes orange red, sometimes iridescent green. They are shot through with splendid valleys, sheer cliffs and catapulting waterfalls. From one casual spot no one has even named you can see nine superb falls, two of them hesitatingly delicate as they drift down in spray. The black beaches of Tahiti are unparalleled, composed of volcanic ash across which tumbling breakers glisten. At the feet of waterfalls are pools crisp with mountain shrubbery about their edges, cool and inviting to the swimmer. The road round the island is a changing panorama of magnificent scenery, but nothing on Tahiti is so majestic as what faces it across the bay, for there lies the island of Moorea. To describe it is impossible. It is a monument to the prodigal beauty of nature. Eons ago a monstrous volcano exploded and the northern half sank into the sea. The southern semicircle remained aloft, its jagged peaks looming thousands of feet into the air. From Tahiti, Moorea seems to have about forty separate summits: fat thumbs of basalt, spires tipped at impossible angles, brooding domes compelling to the eye. But the peaks which can never be forgotten are the jagged saw-edges that look like the spines of some forgotten dinosaur. They stand together, the peaks of Moorea, forever varied, forever new. I once watched them for thirty days, at dawn, at sunset, in the heat of day, and they showed an infinite variety. They were only nine miles across the bay, but in a storm they would seem to be at the very edge of the horizon. At dawn the orange sunlight made them angry ghosts. At dusk lingering shadows made them quiver in the sky. They reached into the air and pulled down clouds; they dressed in gold and purple. If Tahiti boasted of nothing more than these faery silhouettes across the bay, it would still be one of the most fortunate of islands.
Tahiti encourages the wacky life. In a world grown exhaustingly serious, here you can observe the rich variety of life. In one day—that’s less than sixteen hours—I witnessed the seven following incidents: (1) There was a small riot at the school, more noise than trouble, but a leading businessman who had no doubt often suffered there in his youth jammed on the brakes of his truck, leaped astride the hood and shouted fiercely, “Vengeance! Vengeance! Death to the teachers!” Having provided this vocal support, he got back into the truck and drove off. (2) A woman of forty appeared for dinner at the leading hotel dressed in sneakers, midriff bathing suit and sable overcoat (3) In a crowd of girls I noticed one with an ugly complexion and a strange manner.
Finally I asked about her and was told, “That’s Jules from Moorea. He didn’t want to be a man so everybody agreed that he could be a woman.” (4) At the boxing matches a gigantic bruiser dashed to the middle of the ring and cried, “You have been very patient. All night you have waited for a real champion of box. Well, here I am!” At the bell he roared out, swinging like all the windmills of Holland. Four minutes and twelve seconds later he was colder than a dead squid. When brought to, he jumped up and bellowed, “I’ll be lots better next week.” Explained his manager: “We have to keep him likkered up to keep him brave. This time we overdid it.” (5) A Frenchman with no money arrived in Tahiti and announced that he was the son of a viscount. Everyone knew he wasn’t, but they humored him. “After all, if he wants to be the son of a viscount, why not? The funny thing is that after two years we began to think he was, too.” (6) A wealthy man and woman were flying back to Honolulu. Two Tahitian girls said they’d never been up in an airplane and would like to go along. Three weeks later we received the news: “We enjoyed the trip so much we’re going on to Paris.” (7) The copra crop was bad in Paea and parents hadn’t much money for Christmas, so the chief sent word to all children: “It is very sad. Père Noel just died.”
Tahiti insists upon relaxation. When James Norman Hall, famous co-author of Mutiny on the Bounty, was worried about a novel that wouldn’t come right, he developed stomach ulcers. “Nonsense!” said local doctors. “In Tahiti? It’s impossible.” Nevertheless Hall flew to Honolulu for expert advice. “Ridiculous,” said the specialists. “Upset stomach, that’s all.” Citizens of Tahiti were much relieved because no one can get an ulcer on that island. In Tahiti you see more happy people per hundred than in any other part of the world. Here even the Chinese smile! Here even men are allowed to dress comfortably!
Tahiti has unique sex freedom. A bitter critic of the island has sneered that its charm is explainable solely in terms of the “erotic mist” that hangs over the island. It was, perhaps, prophetic that the first geographical feature named by white men was Point Venus! A foremost allurement has always been the frank affection native girls have for white men. Reported one missionary: “And out of pity to these girls, as we saw they would not return, we took them on board; but they were in a measure disappointed.… Nor did our mischievous goats suffer them to keep their green leaves, but as they turned to avoid them they were attacked on each side alternately, and completely stripped naked.… It was not a little affecting also to see our own men repairing the rigging, attended by a group of the most beautiful females.… No ship’s company, without great restraints from God’s grace should have resisted such temptations; and some would probably have offended, if they had not been overawed by the jealousy of the officers and by the good conduct of their messmates.”
I remember as a boy poring over the accounts of early navigators and coming repeatedly upon that cryptic phrase “so we put into Tahiti to refresh the men.” Or, as one captain added, “with limes and otherwise.” Yet the fact is that women like Tahiti as much as men do. Those who enjoy it most are married couples, and surely the great visitors whose writings have made the island famous were not all in search of a sexual holiday. Yet the old reputation lingers, aided by the diligent efforts of roistering girls who come each year from outlying islands to have a last fling before settling down. The skipper of a visiting ship saw two such wahines climbing the ladder. The oldest asked, “Captain, you like to make love?” He was astounded and said, “You’re very pretty but …” “Not me!” the girl cried. “I asked for my friend. She’s very shy.”
Tahiti is French. Much of the charm is due to the tolerant, democratic French. In Samoa all people are classified according to five rigid degrees of whiteness: all white, 75%, 50%, 25%, all black. The courts decide your classification, and once it is given, your education, ability to own land, type of medical service and social life are rigidly set! In Tahiti a man is a man. If he is white and a drunken bum, people ignore him. If he is pure Tahitian and a jovial spirit, he is an honored guest everywhere. Under British or American rule the great humane spirit of Tahiti would have been stifled. Under the more benevolent French it has magnified year by year.
But above all, Tahiti is Polynesian. Without these remarkable people, the island would be nothing. With them, it is a carnival. They are generous, courageous, and comic. They wake each morning to
a fresh day that has forgiven the previous day’s outrages. In pursuit of money they are irresponsible. In pursuit of happiness, dedicated. They are the perpetual adolescents of the ocean, the playboys of the Pacific.
Beyond these six attributes, Tahiti has another which makes it doubly exotic: the town of Papeete, a rambling tropical center of 13,000. It is one of the world’s great ports of call, comparing with nostalgic and wonderful names like Rangoon, Singapore, Shanghai, Valparaiso and Acapulco. Yet it is grander than any of these, for at Papeete the ships of many seas dock right along the main street. From the stern of a Hong Kong junk to the post office is twenty yards. From the bowlines of a San Pedro yacht to the bank is one city block. Without qualification I can say that the waterfront of Papeete, with Moorea in the background, is unequaled.
The daily pageant is more beautiful than a ballet: The Orohena is back from the Gambiers to discharge a load of copra. Huge half-naked Polynesians stride up and down the gangplanks, wreaths of flowers about their heads. The seasick Hiro is in from Bora Bora with a cargo of turtles that are flopped over on their backs and left kicking in the sunlight. The loveliest schooner in the South Pacific, both by name and sweep of line, L’Oiseau des Iles, is leaving for Makatea’s phosphate mines, its trim white prow cutting the bay’s green water. The Mitiaro, barely afloat, limps in with a cargo of retching Chinese from Moorea, the boat of which it was said, “When they tie it up at the wharf people half a mile inland start to heave.” The Chinese stagger off, catch their bicycles as they are landed and pedal away to market. And everywhere are the small bonita boats, their roofs covered with palm fronds, their holds choked with iridescent tuna caught that morning.
In fact, the port of Papeete is so colorful that yachtsmen who have circled the globe say, “There’s only one thing wrong. It should be located right off the tip of Sandy Hook, because the way it is now, you get there too early in the cruise. After Papeete, everything else is an anticlimax.”
Yet many visitors despise Papeete. They have no words strong enough to describe its shanties, its poor water, crowded alleys, honky tonks, bootleg opium, wildcat gambling and rapacious prices. They say, “You hear about the glamorous beaches, but you can’t find one where the average yokel is allowed to swim.” Such critics leave in a hurry and complain endlessly to friends back home that “everyone who ever wrote about Tahiti from Pierre Loti to Frederick O’Brien is a liar.” As a much-disappointed friend of mine said, “Papeete? What a bust! Tia Juana without tequilla.”
There is much to the comparison, for Papeete does resemble a Mexican border town, not so dirty along the main streets, dirtier in the alleys. To those who insist that all picturesque towns look like Siena or Stratford-on-Avon, Papeete will be disappointing, but to others who love the world in all its variety, the town is fascinating. My own judgment: any town that wakes each morning to see Moorea is rich in beauty.
I like the cluttered streets and the neat parks, the narrow alleys and the wide verandahs, the jumbled stores each with some one unpredictable thing for sale: “En Vente Ici. Dernier Arrivage. Campbell Soup.” I like the noisy poolrooms, the perfume shops, the policemen on rickety bicycles, the Chinese dress shops with sewing machines whirring like mad, the dreadful hotels, the worse ice-cream stands and the happy faces. It has been aptly said of Papeete, “It drives Englishmen, schoolteachers and efficiency experts crazy.” There is something childishly delightful about every aspect of the place. One movie house advertises the Hunchback of Notre Dame as “Super-sensational, Archiformidable, Hyperprodigieux!!!!” Whereupon the competition states baldly of René Clair’s Le Million: “The best motion picture in the world.” At which the first springs a trap: “Le Hunchback avec Gene Autry!!! Pas de Conversation. Beaucoup de Cowboys!!!” In fact, so powerful is the lure of a cowboy picture that the leading popular song in Papeete goes:
I’m a frustrated Tahitian cowboy
A ridin’ the range every night.
The wahines are thick as cactus
But there’s never a dogie in sight.
Oh I want to be just like Gene Autry
With bright shiny saddle and spurs,
But all I can find to round up
Are bee—oo—ti—ful brown skin-ned girls.
To appreciate Papeete you must see it around the clock, for its mood changes with each hour. It’s Christmas Eve, the end of a very hot day, and a cool breeze blows in from Moorea, whose golden peaks are slowly disappearing. There are many public celebrations, but the finest is at the Hospital, where all the children of town seem to have gathered: little French girls in crisp dresses, English boys in knee breeches, Tahitian children with eyes like embers, Chinese youngsters with their black hair pasted down. They all squeal at the spectacular fireworks.
After the fiesta older boys and girls go down to the waterfront, where a carnival, housed in grass shacks, is in progress. You get five rifle shots to knock over a clay target, five baseballs to knock down a pile of tin cans. Kiosks sell pineapples, drinking coconuts and chunks of pie. There’s roulette, ring-tossing games, and a big black box into which you can’t see but out of which you must fish the big prize. The game is called, in big letters, OU EST GUS? At one end of the carnival is the sailors’ dive, Les Révoltés de la Bounty, boasting huge murals in the rarest colors ever mixed which show leading scenes of the tragedy with a gruesome Fletcher Christian leering from the shrubbery of a huge beard, surrounded by kegs clearly labeled RHUM.
Now the crowd converges on Quinn’s, a mixture of dance hall and bar. It has no equal in the Pacific. Around a small floor are ranged postage-stamp tables behind which are booths with wooden benches. By the door, on a raised dais, sits the frenzied American pianist Eddie Lund, the Tahitian wonder boy. Small, underweight, bald-headed, he is a jovial tunesmith who produces one lilting song after another. He has written an island opera, dozens of popular ditties and hymns. He writes only Tahitian words, rare bouncy jobs, and is the second-best-loved American ever to have hit the island. He looks like Eddie Foy, eats huge meals, loves to gamble with Chinamen and starts every conversation with “Hey!”
Tonight he has a big crowd, and here is a chance to see once and for all whether there are any beautiful girls in the South Pacific. So you take a seat near immensely fat Lucy Drollet, who rides to every dance on a trembling bicycle, sporting an expensive evening gown. She never dances herself, but each of the couples stops by to say hello, for she is one of the island’s grand old ladies.
Then suddenly your head begins to snap! That glorious creature, who was she? That willowy thing nearly six feet tall? Before you, dancing with American beachcombers, French officials, sailors and plain tourists are some of the most striking girls you’ve even seen. “Like Madison Avenue on the first warm day in spring, but with fewer clothes on.” Where did they come from?
Most of them are half-castes. The real beauties are apt to be Chinese-Tahitian, the next most attractive French-Tahitian. You don’t see them about the streets of Tahiti very much, but on big nights at Quinn’s they bedazzle the eye.
Then you begin to chuckle. No matter how tired you are, you have to laugh, for there on the floor is a dumpy, dark girl with extraordinary hair that reaches to her waist. With a frangipani behind her right ear (looking for a fellow; left ear, got one, not in the market) a leering look of joy across her flat face, she is in town for a big Christmas Eve. A friend whispers, “Just down from Bora Bora. Look at her stomp.” And somehow she drives away your vision of the slim beauties, for she is the classic Tahitienne that the great navigators met years ago; the happy, shamelessly lewd, delightfully primitive island girl. If you smile at her once too often, she will bang her way to your table, push aside your wife or sweetheart and cry, “You like to dance with me?”
At eleven-thirty the crowd begins to desert Quinn’s and move toward the main square, where a huge gathering presses against the cathedral doors. At this late hour there is no chance of getting into the midnight Mass, but loudspeakers will relay it to the congre
gation outside. Then comes a whisper: “It’s Eddie!” and the frenetic little pianist, dressed soberly, hurries through the crowd and shortly the organ begins to peal forth the exquisite French hymn to Christmas, Cantique de Noel. Christmas, which had arrived in Fiji twenty-two hours ago, now comes to Tahiti at the very end of a long, happy day.
At one in the morning the Mass ends, and dancers hire taxis which whisk them out to the Lido, a dismal barn east of town, where a weary orchestra hammers out old tunes. The dancing is apathetic until a sailor smashes a beer mug on the floor and a riot ensues. When it ends, a livelier mood prevails and someone begins to chant a Tahitian stomp.
There is a breathless moment. Then everyone starts clapping hands. The band springs into hectic action, and from the crowd out dashes a kind of hurricane. It’s the Bora Bora girl! She kicks off her tight shoes and you can feel her big feet saying, “Ah!” A slim, no-hipped boy leaps into the air and lands before her. “Wahine!” cries the crowd, and the Tahitian hula is in progress.
It is difficult to describe this dance without sounding indecent. An army chaplain once said, “If there weren’t so much noise and good fun, that would be a very dirty dance.” It combines the maximum sexual suggestion plus the violence of primitive joy plus the bellylaugh of a riotous Falstaff. It goes to the ultimate roots of life, man-ness and woman-ness without shame or smirk. I know two white women who felt sick after seeing their first Tahitian hula. Said one, “It’s like watching people undress. But worse.” I was with a naval officer who watched with his lower jaw ajar. Finally he broke into an immense grin and cried, “Oh, boy! If they could see this in Richmond!”
And pretty soon those slim beauties who looked so coldly perfect at Quinn’s kick off their shoes and start whooping it up with bank tellers who suddenly resemble long-repressed collies allowed to romp in the park. No one has ever come close to apprehending the spirit of Tahiti who has not seen a group of staid people mysteriously erupt into the frenzied gyration of this sexual pageant.
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