Pilgrim in the Palace of Words

by Glenn Dixon

  The Endeavour sailed into this very same bay, and the sailors must have seen immediately that they had entered paradise. The stories of bare-breasted women paddling out in canoes to meet the gob-smacked sailors are all true.

  But while his men were enjoying themselves, Cook and one of his navigators, a certain William Bligh, were working on charts. The Royal Astronomical Society had partly funded Cook’s trip, sending him here specifically to observe the transit of Venus. A transit occurs when a planet moves in front of the sun. It appears as a small black dot moving from right to left across the solar plane, and with the right instruments it can be timed and measured quite accurately. So, as a true child of the Enlightenment, Cook measured the angle of the sun at the first sign of the transit, while at precisely the same time on the other side of the world, in Greenwich, England, a royal astronomer measured a second set of angles. All this then produced an exact triangulation whereby the exact distance between the Earth and the sun was, for the first time, revealed.

  I’m a little lost on the exact mathematics here, but somehow this measurement was used to determine longitude on Earth (the lines running north to south) with considerable accuracy. Navigators had long been able to determine latitude (the lines running east and west), but until Cook’s measurements there was no real accurate method to determine longitude. So this was a major breakthrough. The mapping and measurement of the entire planet’s surface could now be completed.

  Venus, actually, pops up all the time in the study of the world’s cultures. It’s called, alternatively, “the morning star” or “the evening star.” Even in English we’ve hung on to those terms because they make sense. That’s how we see them in the night sky, and it takes some fairly complex math to show that the two stars are actually just one, a planet, in fact, seen in different places in the sky at different times of the year.

  So the word star (te fetia in Tahitian) is a pretty complicated little ball of meaning. Stars mark time as well as place and were surely the signposts by which ancient Tahitians navigated their way across the ocean. Like trees, they’re real things in the real world, but humans manage to infuse them with meanings far beyond their simple existence.

  Let me tell you now that I made a very foolish decision on this trip. I bought myself what’s called an Island Pass. That means that one ticket allowed me to stop at any five islands I liked, any islands at all in the broad Pacific.

  There are a number of reputable companies that offer this kind of a pass, but I opted for the cheapest one. Big mistake. I ended up buying a ticket on what might be the worst airline in the world.

  I first had problems with this airline way back in California. When I arrived in Los Angeles, ready to fly to Tahiti, I wandered 181 around the airport for some time searching for the airline’s ticket desk. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then, finally, I shuffled over and asked a security guard where it might be. He spoke into his walkie-talkie, looked concerned, then said, “I’m sorry, sir. That airline’s no longer allowed to fly in U.S. airspace. The FAA has banned it.”

  That should have been my first clue.

  Well, all right, what happens in this sort of circumstance is that, under international law, I’m able to get on another carrier to take me to the first place my airline is allowed to fly into. And they have to pay for it. So I spent a few hours kicking around the L.A. terminal and eventually got onto an Air New Zealand flight that took me to Tahiti. Not bad, I thought. I felt as if I’d been bumped up onto a better airline, anyway.

  So now I’d had a few weeks in Tahiti, and it was time to try out this little airline again. I hefted my bags and headed for the airport with my trusty little Island Pass in hand.

  The flight left Tahiti at around two in the morning. This was the usual time for arrivals and departures in the South Pacific. The planes come in from Los Angeles or Vancouver, West Coast cities, and jump across the wide Pacific, making stops at all the major islands along the way. These planes eventually head for Taipei or Singapore, and in this case, Auckland, New Zealand. With my Island Pass, though, I was bouncing over to the next group of islands — the Cooks — a thousand kilometres farther west.

  I got on the plane, and we took off without any problems. The flight was only a couple of hours, and I must have nodded off because the next thing I recall was the runway at Rarotonga coming up fast beneath us. Rarotonga is the biggest of the Cook Islands. It’s where the international airport is.

  Our jetliner had its landing gear down already, but something wasn’t right. Out of the small window I could see the ground rising to meet us, but we were coming into it too hard. The pilot must have realized that because all of a sudden he threw the plane into full throttle. We were thrown against our seats, sucked back with the G-force of the plane’s emergency acceleration.

  We zoomed back into the sky, and for a few moments no one reacted. Everyone glanced at one another politely as strangers in strange situations usually do. What the hell was that all about? I wondered.

  After a few minutes, the pilot spoke to us over the intercom. His voice sounded professional and reassuring. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “we’re experiencing some tailwinds so, uh, we’re just going to go up and come in on the runway from the other way.”

  That sounded reasonable. What I and the other hundred passengers in the plane didn’t know was that the next time would bring us all as close to sudden death as we’d probably ever get.

  Now, admittedly, the runway at Rarotonga is short, ending with a pebbled beach and thundering surf. And the typhoon winds were real enough. Still, a bigger carrier would have allowed for that. It would have known. It would have at least told us we should probably fasten our seat belts.

  We were above the clouds again. The plane banked widely through the early-morning sky, and we felt ourselves descend. I dared to peer out the window and saw the black runway rise beneath us again. Fifty metres, forty metres … and then thump. The plane’s engines throttled into full acceleration. Now this wasn’t the swell of power in a plane taking off. This was a sudden, mighty blast so that we were thrown back into our seats and a few loose bags and purses were swept down the aisle. At this point there were no longer any polite smiles. This time there was raw fear.

  Rarotonga disappeared beneath us as we rose to cruising altitude once more. It was a good hour before the pilot spoke over the intercom this time. “Uh … ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. We have, uh, had some problems and we’ve decided to turn around and head back, uh, for Tahiti.”

  There were groans around the cabin and nervous, excited chatter. What the hell was going on? It was another two hours back to Tahiti. Why were we going all that way? What was wrong?

  When we finally landed in Tahiti, we hurried down the steps that had been wheeled up to the plane. Out on the tarmac an uncomfortable-looking airline official came out to meet us. He tried to speak, but the crowd was too noisy. A lot of people were quite angry.

  Eventually, his message was passed along by those in the front of the mob who managed to hear him. Again, by law, the airline had to put us up for the night in Tahiti — at the carrier’s expense. Or, as the official tried to explain, there was another possibility for those who wished to take advantage of it. This plane was needed in Auckland. That was the way things worked. These were glorified bus routes so that if a plane didn’t arrive at its final destination, then the next flight after that wasn’t going to happen, either. So the airline had decided to send our plane directly on to Auckland. Anyone who wanted to ride along was welcome, and the airline would then try to arrange a flight from there back to the Cook Islands.

  Well, I’d already been in Tahiti for a few weeks, not that it was a bad place to spend a few extra days, but I’d never been to New Zealand, and here I was being offered a free trip. I put up my hand. “I’ll go,” I said. Surely, I figured, the plane wouldn’t have a problem a third time.

  The end of this particular story is that I spent only five or six hours in Auc
kland. The airline did indeed arrange for a much smaller plane to take us the six hours back to the Cook Islands. The weather had settled down by then, and after some twenty or so hours of back and forth over the whole Pacific, I eventually made it to Rarotonga.

  The next morning, still a bit of a zombie from lack of sleep, I was walking along the beach, surveying the new place, when a guy sitting on a beach towel began to wave at me. “Hey!” he called. “Hey, you! Yes … you!”

  I pointed at myself, and he nodded, waving at me to come over. “Listen,” he said when I got a bit closer, “you were on that plane yesterday, right?” He didn’t have to explain which plane he meant. I didn’t recognize him, though obviously he’d been on the plane, as well.

  “Look at this,” he said, holding up the Cook Island Times. On the front page in bold type was: NEAR DISASTER AT AIRPORT. There was also a large photograph of our plane angling over the airport terminal. One of the wings, clearly, had just missed the edge of the roof by mere metres. Fire trucks and a couple of ambulances had been assembled on the runway, as well.

  Shit! I thought.

  The next morning I woke up to the singing of angels. It took me a minute to realize I was still alive and lying safe and cozy in a bed in Rarotonga. Drifting in through the window was the sound of several hundred voices raised in song. I got up and glanced out the window. A little church stood just up from the beach. It was Sunday morning, and the service had begun.

  Now I’m not a religious man, but I was drawn to the church like a cartoon character floating on the waft of an alluring scent. Most of the townspeople had gathered there, and from infant to elderly they were singing in five-part harmonies, a rich swell of chords accompanied faintly by the breaking surf two hundred metres away.

  I stood for a while on the doorstop, and when a few villagers turned to see who was arriving late, they smiled and waved me in. They were singing a hymn in Maori that had been translated a hundred years ago, and I closed my eyes and let the sound fill the air around me. The Cook Island Maori are closely related to the New Zealand Maori. In fact, the Cook Islands are a protectorate of New Zealand to this day. The Cook Islanders have been on their islands for more than a thousand years.

  In July 1823, Reverend John Williams of the London Missionary Society stormed onto the beaches here. He claimed to have discovered the Cook Islands, though there’s ample evidence that a number of ships had already been here. Captain William Bligh anchored briefly in 1789. His ship was named the Bounty, and his arrival here was only a few weeks before the famous mutiny.

  All over the South Pacific the countries of Europe were grabbing territory, but Reverend Williams was interested in territory of a different kind. He was concerned about human souls. Lucky for him, the Maori already happened to have an ancient religion that spoke of a central power, an ultimate god who ruled over a litany of lesser deities. Williams simply started smashing the tiki, the statues of the lesser gods. He spoke forcefully of the singular importance of the ultimate god, and over time the Maori began to listen to him.

  Now here’s something I’d seen before, this mapping of new symbols onto older ones. It was the “Blue Jesus” idea again. Sometimes, if the situation and the symbols are right, you can graft a new symbol, a new way of thinking, onto an older one. Symbols, after all, are constructions. We use them, like tools, to do the things we need them to do.

  Williams’s new religion stuck, and most Cook Islanders today are largely Protestant, though at least a few of the old ways remain. In the central villages of Rarotonga, for example, it’s still quite common to see burial vaults in the front yards of many of the houses. These concrete structures are usually the graves of female relatives. It’s thought to be disrespectful to throw dirt on females, so they can’t have regular Christian burials. So dearly departed females aren’t tucked away in cemeteries. They’re put in the front yard, with the family car parked beside them, surrounded by spare tires and lawn ornaments.

  After Reverend Williams converted the Cook Islanders, he continued preaching westward and met a strange fate in the New Hebrides (what’s now called Vanuatu). The people there are Melanesian and didn’t quite identify with the new set of symbols the missionary was handing out. Moreover, they were cannibals. They bludgeoned Williams to death on the beach as he arrived and carried his corpse off to the cooking pot. It’s even said that his flesh had a faintly bitter taste, a hint perhaps of Protestant sanctity.

  Melanesia was my next destination. I was scheduled to leave in two days, and already I was scared. The back of the now dog-eared Island Pass instructed me to phone and confirm my flight forty-eight hours ahead of time. When I phoned, I was greeted with another catastrophe.

  “Your plane is leaving tonight, sir.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to have two more days here.”

  “No, sir. It leaves at ten, sir. Tonight.”

  “Shit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  Springing into action, I packed my things and hurried my goodbyes. It was already eight o’clock, and the sun had long since set. I raced to the airport, but it didn’t matter in the end since the flight was predictably delayed. We ended up taking off around midnight.

  I was now headed for Fiji, and the flight was meant to be about six hours. But this was, as I’ve said, quite possibly the worst airline in the world, so when the plane began to descend at 2:00 a.m. — four hours early — there were quizzical glances but not much panic. We’d all become quite familiar with this carrier’s questionable operations.

  We touched down, and as the plane rolled to a stop on the tarmac, a few of the passengers began to ask out loud, “Where are we?”

  “Samoa,” someone said. “Western Samoa.”

  “Samoa … Jesus. Where’s that?”

  We all sat in the darkened plane for an indeterminable time. No stairs were rolled up to the fuselage, no bags were unloaded. Time is a relative thing on Western Samoa, so it took about an hour for us to get off the plane. Once more a harried airline employee arrived in a taxi to meet us on the tarmac.

  “Why aren’t we going to Fiji?” we pressed him. “Where are we? Where are we supposed to stay?”

  Word filtered through that we would be stuck in Western Samoa for a couple of days, though no real reason was given. Some sort of international law kicked into effect again, and it became the airline’s responsibility to accommodate us. (This airline wasn’t only one of the most dangerous in the world but a financial disaster, as well.) A couple of buses arrived, and as luck would have it, they took us to the Aggie Grey, a rather legendary four-star resort in the main town of Apia.

  I’d been living out of a backpack and a tent for almost a month, so I almost cried with joy to see a warm shower, a clean bed, and a room set in a beautifully manicured garden. At last I had found a real paradise.

  If you look at a map of the world, you’ll see something interesting about Samoa. The International Date Line runs right through it, or should, because actually the date line makes a special zigzag around Samoa. This deviation was made so that half of the island wouldn’t be in Monday while the other half was in Tuesday.

  In fact, it’s still true that if you swim out far enough from the beach, you’ll find yourself swimming on a different day than the day you left on dry land. For this reason a number of my fellow passengers started to call Samoa “the island at the end of the world,” and our hotel became “the hotel at the end of the world.”

  Besides that, I really only knew two other things about Samoa. One was that the two main island groups were Western Samoa (to the north, in reality, and not to the west) and below it American Samoa, whose name I imagine had something to do with the U.S. presence there during the Second World War. Second, these were the islands where the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead did her groundbreaking work in the late 1920s. Her book was entitled Coming of Age in Samoa, a classic in the field, and it included her well-known descriptions of Fa’a
Samoa, or Samoan customs.

  She wrote of a place where there was sexual freedom before marriage. The teenagers, boys and girls, were encouraged to enjoy as many partners as possible, and as a result, there was almost no incidence of rape or any real violence against women. Her book, quite frankly, shocked the world. The “inept lover is a laughingstock,” she wrote. There is absolutely “no frigidity,” and no one resorts to pornography of any kind. Masturbation “is a universal habit.” Homosexual activity is “very prevalent” and is regarded as “simply play.” In general, Mead concluded that on Samoa the passage from childhood to adulthood wasn’t burdened with anything close to the kind of emotional distress and confusion found in Western culture.

  Unfortunately, she got almost everything wrong. It’s a dangerous thing to dabble in cultural matters. That’s why Dr. Hirabayashi scared me so badly. Cultures are incredibly complex things, and it’s pretty easy to mess things up.

  Mead didn’t exactly falsify her findings, but somehow her projections of what she wanted to see came out in her writing. Or it could have been that the villagers were telling her what they thought she wanted to hear.

  Fa’a Samoa, as the island culture is known, might have sexual mores that are different from our own, but Mead wasn’t even close when she tried to describe them. She was after some kind of sexual utopia that really didn’t exist, at least not in the islands of Samoa.

  I spent a couple of more days on Western Samoa and saw the most traditional culture I’d seen yet in the South Pacific. Many of the homes are thatched huts called fales. They’re a simple construction with walls made of what look like bamboo blinds. They can be rolled up in the heat of the day and rolled down again at night when either privacy is needed or the breezes blowing off the ocean are cool.