Gauguin might be flattered to know that there is a drive-in cinema bearing his name, but I think not. As the tourists have advanced on Tahiti, together with the French H-Bomb squads, and international airlines, so a little of the romance has seeped away. And yet, of all the words and places in the world, Tahiti always meant romance – to a point. Rupert Brooke went to the island and prosaically fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, Herman Melville was in jail there for mutiny, Zane Grey holds the big-fish record, Somerset Maugham walked off with Gauguin’s painted doors, and Robert Louis Stevenson would rather have lived in Tahiti than Samoa, but the postal service was better to Samoa so, a businesslike Scot, he went there to live (and die) instead.
In the initial days of World War I the German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, prowling the Pacific, shelled Papeete, causing much damage to the simple town and blowing up part of the wall of the yacht club, resulting in an aperture that was for years sportingly retained as a door. Even that’s gone now and the yacht club has moved to new premises. Some worthwhile things have fortunately been preserved, the tomb of King Pomare V being one.
Pomare V was the final Tahitian king. At the end of 1880 he was enthusiastically pensioned off by the French colonists and devoted the remaining few years of his life to drinking – crowning his mausoleum (on the touchline of a soccer pitch) is a huge, unmistakable Benedictine bottle. Purists or historians will say it represents a burial urn, but if you have ever seen a Benedictine bottle, that’s a Benedictine bottle.
In the rural areas, even today, times alter only reluctantly. The policemen still occupy their spare time delivering mail or turning a blind eye to the weekly cock-fighting jamborees that survive under the subterfuge of chicken fighting. Le Truck – half-lorry, half-bus – one of the world’s more exciting public transport systems, still carries the population, its chattels and animals, to anywhere the people wish to travel, bumping along rough roads, through floods and flowers, nowadays to the sound of raucous rock-’n’-roll.
After Louis Antoine de Bougainville, one of the early Europeans in the South Pacific, had returned to France with his stories of Tahiti in the eighteenth century, the naturalist Commerson wrote:
Tahiti is perhaps the only country in the world where men live without vices, without prejudices, without necessities, without disputes. Born under a most beautiful sky, nourished on the fruits of an earth which is fertile without tillage, ruled by patriarchs rather than kings, they know no other god but Love.
Life was never quite as good as that again.
For a change James Cook was not the first to arrive in Tahiti – he was third. He anchored in the Endeavour in April 1769, carrying instruments and astronomers to observe the Transit of Venus, the planet passing across the sun (something they never properly achieved – at the earth’s best vantage point – due to the shortcomings of their instruments). But Samuel Wallis, with the young Furneaux, and Bougainville had been there before him, seeking, as were all explorers in those days, the unknown continent at the foot of the world – Terra Australis Incognita. It was reasoned that there had to be something down there to counterbalance the great land mass at the top of the earth. Wallis was one of that rare breed, an easily satisfied explorer, and having discovered Tahiti and prised his sailors loose from the women there, he returned shamefacedly home. Furneaux, however, was to voyage again and leave his name forever on the islands to the south of that legendary land of Australia they had been seeking.
Point Venus, where Cook made his landfall, is a flat, disappointing sort of place, with a municipal-looking lighthouse – a memorial in the form of Venus (the star not the goddess) and a column surmounted by a ball representing the earth. There are notices saying ‘Keep Off The Grass’ which Cook would have ignored but not Wallis. Another marker commemorates those two men and also Bougainville. Other names, more recently chalked or scratched on the memorial, include Lavinia, Lou Lou and Kasonova. A nice touch.
The first thing Cook did on arrival was to get the name of the island wrong. He reported it as Otaheite not appreciating that the native informing him was saying ‘O Taheite’ or ‘It is Taheite’. Then, however, he performed one of his everyday miracles, the strengths that compensated for his occasional lack of imagination, and with the botanist Sir Joseph Banks and eight sailors he set out to row and walk around the uncharted island.
It took only a week for Cook on his tour to circumnavigate the ninety-five miles. He produced an astonishing map which, even today, has only been changed in detail, for there is still only one basic route around the fringe of the island with a few brief indentations into the hills. The interior, like that of Kauai in Hawaii, remains isolated and unknown. In the 1950s it took a year and a half to clear a track through the vegetation around Mount Orohena (7,353 feet) so that a climbing party could get to the summit, the first to reach there since remembered time. On the top the climbers found a lonely human skull.
Today if you make the same trek as Cook you follow a road that varies between a new autoroute to a winding way curling around headlands and staggering across rivers on temporary bridges. The coastal route was likened to the shape of a dumb-bell by Cook, and also a lady’s hand looking-glass by someone with more romance. Today it might be described as a table-tennis bat. Much, but not all, of the coast is protected by a beautiful coral reef.
At one point, however, where mountain streams divulge into the sea, the water temperature is minimally colder and the sensitive coral cannot survive. A rent shows in the reef and the ocean takes advantage of the gap running to the land with fierce glee as if to make up for its taming elsewhere. The weather and the landscape vary together. Hot sunshine becomes, in the course of turning a corner, hard, grey rain. Clouds gather like mountains along a coastline that is mild and smooth, changing to fierce rocks and battered out-islands.
In their camps along the Tahitian coast are France’s marines, occupied in guarding their country’s H-Bomb tests among the blameless atolls of the South Pacific. Native Tahitians, when summoned for National Service, can serve their time on the island or in France. Predictably there is an overwhelming enthusiasm for France.
The tradition of overseas service is long. In the Mitchell Library in Sydney I read a letter from Mary Hassall of Paramatta, Australia, written to her brother Thomas at 411 Oxford Street, London, on 8 September 1818, describing the arrival there of ‘John Henry Martin, a religious Tahitian’ who had lost his right arm fighting (for the British) at Waterloo. He was going home with a pension of twenty pounds a year.
Papeete has a magnificently deep and protected harbour. I remember, years ago, sitting over a drink on the jetty and watching a full-blown ocean liner curve into the entrance, come to the quay and stop as nonchalantly as a motor car being parked alongside a kerb. She then took ten days to sail out again, seawater having somehow seeped into her oil tanks. An extraordinary airlift of oil from California, carried in a fleet of hurriedly hired aircraft from Britain, had to be mounted before she could leave. It must have been an expensive cruise for somebody.
The harbour, severely damaged in the gross German bombardment of 1914 – and how strange that the Great War should have one of its first conflagrations so far from the main belligerents – was rebuilt in a tropical, haphazard fashion, in keeping with its past. Photographs taken in Paul Gauguin’s day and on display at the museum dedicated to the artist, reveal the nineteenth-century Papeete waterfront crammed with commerce, masts sprouting everywhere, barrels on the wharves. Today it is less romantic, more businesslike, with people leaving their offices for lunch; banks and buffets, tourist agencies, airlines and the insurance companies declaring their divers risques, a phrase in itself, perhaps, sounding to have dangerous maritime connections.
In these days the Chinese run most of the businesses. They were brought in as sweated labour to grow cotton during the American Civil War, the reasoning being that the crop in the Southern States would fail or be destroyed or uncollected. The supposition proved wrong and the venture founde
red, but the Chinese, as is their custom, triumphed. When a Tahitian wife goes shopping today she says simply, ‘I am going to the Chinaman.’
Tahiti has another connection with the war between the States. In the village of Papara the church has a tombstone carrying the inscription, ‘Dorence Atwater, at the age of 16 entered the Union Army as a volunteer with Kilpatrick’s Cavalry in the war of 1861–65. He was captured by Confederate Scouts disguised as Union soldiers in July 1863, while carrying despatches and taken to Bell Isle prison.’
Atwater’s journey from the dreaded Bell Isle to Tahiti was diffuse and included a year in the death camp at Andersonville. It was twelve years later, in Tahiti, that he married a native princess called Moetia, and lived there for all his remaining life.
I spent an evening on the waterfront of Papeete, where the canoes are still pulled up clear of the water. The ferry, a metallic, square vessel, was leaving for the outer islands. In the warm darkness it backed out into the harbour, its lights reflecting romantically. For looks it hardly replaces the old schooner (or the Bermuda flying-boat, full of matronly grace, that used to ply between the South Pacific harbours) but it looked well enough on the limp water, people silhouetted on the deck, others waving from the shore.
I ate at one of the little mobile stalls on the quay, the brochettes, where people have a cheap dinner much as they did in the open-air carparks in Singapore – a stool against the counter and a plate of spiced fish. The market people were settling for the night, arranging themselves and their children on the pavements of the port. Before midnight they are all in place, on rugs, boxes, benches, or spread-eagled on the market stalls themselves, lying out of doors so that they will be there at dawn to claim their pitch. When it rains they pull sheets of plastic over themselves and their families and go back to sleep. It is strange to think that Tahitians used to dream of going to ‘Tahiti’ when they died.
It is a long time now since ‘Paradise’. Gauguin, in 1891, and the other dreamers went to Tahiti to find it. The painter arrived just at the end of the age of innocence, although there was some still left. In his story, Noa Noa, he wrote of how he found his wife, Tehura, who was thirteen years of age.
The lonely, weary artist had travelled on despondent horseback through the island villages. At one place a woman asked him where he was going.
‘To find a wife,’ he replied.
‘This is a village of pretty women. Do you want one?’
‘Yes.’
‘If she pleases you, I will give her to you. She is my daughter.’
The lithe young girl was brought to him. ‘Do you want to live in my hut?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
The mother said, ‘She will come if you will make her happy. In eight days she will return here. If she is not happy she will leave you.’
They lived together for two years, an idyllic, island love story of the fiery man and the little native girl. Their bamboo hut at Mataiea has gone without trace, as has Gauguin’s later home at Punaauia, which is now the site of a secondhand car-yard. Somerset Maugham went away from Mataiea with the three painted glass doors from Gauguin’s hut. He wrote The Moon and Sixpence about the stormy genius who fell in love with an island, and a girl, only to end his life in pathetic poverty. The Tahitians always believed that Maugham would return the doors to them one day, or at least leave them to the island in his will. But they were sold in a Sotheby’s auction to an American banker. The Gauguin Museum in Tahiti has to console itself with a lump of granite from the artist’s native Brittany (the most tenuous exhibit, I think I have ever seen in a museum) plus his sewing machine and sad little harmonium from his last home. He did not even die in Tahiti, but at Atu Ona in the remote Marquesas Islands. He was predictably alone and penniless. In the museum there is a copy of his death certificate and a photograph of his grave surrounded by posed and patently disinterested island ladies.
There is a strange story told that in 1914 the poet Rupert Brooke, forsaking England and honey still for tea, arrived at the village of Mataiea, with the intention of searching out ‘lost Gauguins’. His quest was hardly begun because he fell in love with his landlady’s lovely daughter, Mamua, whom he remembered in his poem ‘Tiara Tahiti’. The three Gauguin painted doors were a stone’s throw away from the village where he was living but he was so bemused by Mamua that he never found them. Maugham did not arrive until two years later, by which time Brooke was dead and buried on another island – Skyros in the Aegean. Mamua died just after Maugham’s visit in 1916 – of influenza.
There are, fortunately, happier stories. Along the beach from the Gauguin Museum lived – in a house once owned by another writer, Robert Keable – an optimistic Englishman called Roger Cowen, who in 1958 set sail from Ramsgate to see the world. ‘There were five of us,’ he remembered. ‘And we managed to get right down here in the Pacific before we were wrecked on a small island about 300 miles south of Tahiti. I’d like to say it was a hair-raising adventure, but it wasn’t. We weren’t even on the boat at the time! We were ashore getting to know the natives.’ Eventually a trading schooner picked them up and brought them to Tahiti, where Roger had been since. ‘At first I became a vegetable grower and then I had a rabbit farm with 800 rabbits,’ he laughed. ‘Now I’ve got a restaurant, a Chinese wife and two kids. It all seems a long way from Ramsgate.’
Robert Louis Stevenson was already famous and wealthy when he arrived with his entire family in Tahiti in 1888, searching for a climate that he hoped might ease his tuberculosis. He loved the island and its brown people and walked around the village of Tautira in striped pyjamas. The family lived royally in the chief’s house where, contrary to his voluptuous surroundings, Stevenson worked hard on his grim Scottish novel The Master of Ballantrae. His publishers, however, suggested that Samoa rather than Tahiti might be a better place for their prize author since the mail ships from Australia to England called there regularly. So Stevenson went to Samoa. They called him Tusitala, ‘The Teller of Tales’, and he is buried there, like Rupert Brooke, beneath the epitaph he composed for himself. Today the church at Tautira, in Tahiti, has a lasting gift from the writer’s mother – a silver communion service that is still used each Sunday.
The coastal road from Papeete climbs One Tree Hill, which before the siting of the lighthouse at Point Venus was the seamark that guided mariners to the safe anchorage, among them the Bounty mutineers in 1789. At sea they had cast off the autocratic Captain Bligh, who had loaded breadfruit on his ship at Matavai Bay, Tahiti, and returned hurriedly to the arms of the local ladies whose charms had so ensnared them during their six months’ stay. Later, some had second thoughts and, under Fletcher Christian, sailed to the secret island of Pitcairn, taking with them a dozen Tahitian women. It was eighteen years before the crew of a Nantucket whaler called at Pitcairn. By that time only one man was left, John Adams, who lived with a large and varied harem. Had had, however, chosen religion and lived a proper Christian life.
The authors of Mutiny on the Bounty, James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff, both lived in Tahiti – Hall at Matavai Bay (where the Bounty had anchored). Two famous films have been made of the saga. When the Charles Laughton version was being produced it was found that the twentieth-century Tahitian girls, used as extras, were frequently lacking teeth (an endemic omission – and extraordinary considering their reputation for great beauty). Each had to be fitted with a false set and, in some cases, wigs were necessary as well.
On the road around the forehead of the island is the sad tomb of the last King Pomare, with its warning bottle, and not far away the site of the folly of one of his forebears, King Pomare II, who listened too long to the missionaries and tried to build a temple longer than Westminster Abbey in London or St Peter’s in Rome.
Local timber, however, had few advantages over the masonry of Europe and because of its limitations, and those of the Tahitian builders, the temple’s length of 712 feet was sobered my a maximum width of 54 feet and a height of 18 feet; not a struc
ture to take the viewer’s breath away.
There were also acoustic shortcomings. When a full congregation of 6,000 was present, no one at the back or even in the middle could hear a word of what was going on at the front. So three pulpits were installed along the nave, and three different sermons were preached.
Everywhere in the South Pacific, the missionaries had much to answer for. Tahiti’s road was partially built by natives as a punishment for failing to attend matins or evensong. Certainly some missionaries, and some missionary societies, became rich on the proceeds of the evangelism, but others merely tried to do their best. Their decendants are still to be seen today, young Americans aboard bicycles, each wearing a proper collar and tie even in the steaming heat – Mormons on a missionary crash course of six weeks.
I watched them cycling by from the roadside where, as it happened, I had paused at an appropriate spot. There was a river in which shouting Tahitian children were swimming naked. Gracefully a man cast a net into the current further upstream and beyond that the green mountains lay against the fetid grey sky. I had stopped to look at a grave in the umkempt grass of a field beside the river. It was the burial place of a missionary’s wife. The tablet said simply, ‘Mariah, wife of J. W. Clark. Died 11.5.1863 aged twenty-three years.’ There was a design of a little flower cut into the stone. Who knows what story lies there?
Nearby was a neat red-roofed house with a Tahitian cutting his front lawn as phlegmatically as a suburban husband anywhere. The shouts of the children echoed from the thick river, the fisherman hauled in his net, and I thought there was thunder growling in the hills but it was only a youth on a motorcycle. Tahiti was as near, and as far from, Heaven as ever.
TAHITI situated latitude 17°30’S and longitude 149° W; area 386 sq. m (1,000 sq. km); population approx. 115,000; France
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My World of Islands Page 27