Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

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  Along the horseshoe of the bay a cluster of new buildings, some attempting an imitation of traditional Marquesan architecture – the mairie, Travaux Publiques, Banque de l’Indosuez. Yachts stood in the bay. There was nothing I wanted to see or do in this place with its wonderful scenery and its beautiful name like a sigh in a perfumed night – Tai-o-hae. It sounded like the name which Melville gave to the ‘beauteous nymph Fayaway’ with the ‘strange blue eyes’. She was the only Typee who seemed truly to understand the distressful feelings of the two young American deserters when they found themselves the captives of a well-organized race of cannibal warriors.

  Now it was the valley of the Typees I wished to visit. Not in the hope of finding my own Fayaway – I was well aware that the Typees were no more, victims of those all-too-familiar European invasions, alcohol and disease. Yet the valley Melville saw would be there; and even some vestiges of a civilization – for example, the immense stone platforms called pae-paes on which the Typees built houses and temples.

  The French teacher on the Taporo had said I might go there on foot, on horseback or by jeep. I consulted Captain Alphonse, who in turn suggested a visit to Jim Hostetler’s sister-in-law, a Marquesan who lived here. She was married to a prominent merchant, a Chinese Tahitian called Chin. ‘Chin will know. Chin knows everything here,’ Eric Maamaatua, the mate, confirmed and we went to Chin’s for dinner together.

  Chin and Michelle lived in a modern bungalow in a fine Marquesan garden. Michelle greeted us all with a kiss on the cheek and her husband was all smiles. It was impossible not to feel warmly towards such a friendly couple, who produced a meal of raw sailfish in a dark wine sauce, langoustes grilled on charcoal and French red wine.

  ‘If Du Petit Thouars hadn’t got here first,’ I said after a while, ‘we might be drinking warm English beer instead of wine.’

  ‘Yes’ Chin said. ‘If he hadn’t come, the Tahitians might all be speaking English.’

  Michelle said, ‘The Tahitians were doomed to be someone’s plaything.’

  ‘Capitaine Cook, peut-être,’ Captain Alphonse suggested.

  ‘Well,’ said Michelle, ‘he wasn’t a religious man. There would have been more dancing hereabouts. Cook quite enjoyed all that.’

  Chin said, ‘Nowadays, young Tahitians don’t dance spontaneously – okay, at weddings, on national days, yes. But normally they prefer video TV or cassette music. Or sleep.’ As it happened, the Chin children were watching Space Invaders on the television set, transfixed. Later the news came on. There was nothing about the Falklands War, but a bomb had exploded in Paris, killing and wounding numerous passers-by. Shocked eye witnesses – a mechanic, a young butcher’s assistant – gabbled to interviewers above the noise of ambulances and police sirens. ‘I saw this car lifted bodily….’ It seemed very good indeed to be in the Marquesas Islands. Give me a Typee warrior-cannibal any day, I thought, in preference to a twentieth-century idealist who believes that murder will bring the millennium.

  Chin said, ‘Go to the valley by jeep. The ship sails soon. It may rain and the track can get very bad. Be on the safe side. I know a good driver called Peine.’

  And so next morning I set out with Peine to the valley of Typee. But I was not alone with him. ‘Capitaine Cook’, the chef of the Taporo, was with us, too – on business, he said. He was carrying a bunch of political tracts in a large manila envelope on behalf of the Parti Socialiste du Tahiti. There was an election coming on.

  ‘I hope we won’t all be arrested,’ I said.

  We wriggled up the side of that great amphitheatre in low gear. Terns and pure white birds which the driver said were parrots accompanied us until the dirt track climbed past a dense region of willows and reeds – the one, I supposed, that had given Melville and Toby such a devilish struggle as they pushed upwards out of sight of their ship. Wonderful vistas of cliff and sea met us at every turn. The air cooled and purified itself; far below, the Taporo and the yachts were toys to play with in the bath.

  At the top of the ridge we dipped away down towards a valley which Melville wrote as Happar and which is now spelled Hapaa. The Happar people, he said, were good, while in the valley beyond them dwelt ‘the dreaded Typees’. In Hapaa there was no sign of habitation now – there were no people, good or bad – and this may have accounted for Capitaine Cook’s unusual excitement when we spotted human figures at the side of the track ahead. There were two of them – dark-skinned men who leaned on their pickaxes and watched our approach with expressions of wariness.

  ‘Ah-ha! Heel’ cried Capitaine Cook triumphantly as we came up to them with undiminished speed, and he swiftly thrust a copy of the manifesto at each in turn. ‘Whee!’ The driver seized a third copy and tossed it at random into the air. We bumped on, and looking back I saw the roadmen staring after us, awkwardly clutching their pamphlets. Only their two short-legged horses showed much interest; they gave up cropping the verge to snort suspiciously at the paper that fluttered on the ground.

  We rose over another ridge and descended into a valley much greener than the first, with a bridge over a stream. Here we stopped. ‘Taipivai,’ announced Capitaine Cook, and got out of the jeep.

  We had pulled up by a small bungalow on a track that crossed ours at right-angles and disappeared in one direction up the valley through thick avenues of trees. In the other direction it ran parallel to the stream towards the bay which, I knew from Melville’s book and my map, was hidden behind the screen of vegetation. A fat, middle-aged man in shorts waddled out of the bungalow, recognized Peine and shook his hand. When Capitaine Cook eagerly gave him a pamphlet he folded it carefully and put it into his pocket. I was a writer, Capitaine Cook told him. The fat man seemed mildly interested to meet someone like me, a writer from outside. Speaking Marquesan, he gave me through Peine a few useful facts. There were now about one hundred and fifty inhabitants of Typee, he said. Half the coconuts here belonged to them, half to a company in Papeete. He was not quite sure what Typee (or Taipivai) meant, but he thought it meant ‘where the river meets the sea’. He pointed out that his wooden bungalow stood on a platform of lava boulders like a chief’s house in Samoa. There were several like it along the track.

  Even in the shade of the breadfruit trees that screened the house the air was hot and oppressive. The midges were particularly militant. Melville had tried to protect himself from them by wrapping his body in a large roll of tapa. I could only curse and slap at them with one of Capitaine Cook’s manifestos.

  The valley was peaceful, though it could hardly help but seem melancholy. The magnificent, happy-go-lucky Typees whom Melville described in such glowing detail, and whom James Cook said were ‘by far the most splendid islanders in the South Seas’, had coughed and shivered their way to oblivion eight or nine decades ago. Melville saw the race of Typees during its finest hour. He had closely observed its chiefs, Marheyo, Mow-Mow, the war leader Mehevi; he had befriended the hideous but devoted servant Kory-Kory, who wept in the waters of Typee Bay when he saw Melville escaping to freedom; and he had won the heart of the ‘nymph’ Fayaway. The valley was full now of birdsong and the sound of the stream rushing to the sea: and it was dead.

  I asked Peine to drive us to the stream’s mouth at Typee Bay. Here Melville had fled down a more primitive track, seizing his last chance of escape to the world of white men in an English whaling boat that had put by chance into the bay. We heard the same roar of surf and saw the same ‘flash of billows through the trees’ as he had done in a bay that was more like a deep cove with a beach of unexpected black sand – with only a boathook to fend off warriors armed with tomahawks, Melville would have had little time to notice the unusual colour of the sand, even though the ‘beauteous sylph’ Fayaway lay on it, sobbing to see him go. There, like a dog’s head, was the stubby point of land at the bay’s entrance from which Mow-Mow and his companions had dived in vain to intercept the whaling boat. Palm groves clustered on one side of the bay, and from a high ridge opposite a he
avy, sweet smell floated down to us: the noa-noa of Typee.

  ‘Hee! We go!’ Capitaine Cook was impatient to distribute more pamphlets, so we drove back up the valley past a red-roofed church and a small store displaying shelves full of tinned pilchards, butter, jam and baby powder, where a sleepy boy sold us lemonade. The fat man was still outside his bungalow. Two hundred years ago, he said, this valley was full of temples and priests. I should see the pae-paes; some of the larger ones were burial grounds. All, I knew, were of extreme antiquity; the former inhabitants of the island had believed them to be the haunt of spirits.

  I went on up the valley with Peine, leaving Capitaine Cook to distribute manifestos to other houses dotted about the valley. We had the only motor vehicle in Typee, and now and again we were obliged to edge past men leading small horses laden with bananas – the track was hardly wide enough to permit more than two such loads side by side. Beyond the houses we stopped at a tumbledown shed, and a woman sorting bananas outside it hailed Peine. When he had explained about my wish to see the pae-paes, she called to a girl who came yawning out of the shed and signalled to me in a bad-tempered way to follow her.

  The girl was called Marie. She was the woman’s daughter and she led me up a steep, slippery path through the palm trees at a rate that seemed deliberately designed to punish me for disturbing her. It was hard going. A faint breeze soon petered out, and low rain clouds pressing down on the treetops added humidity to the considerable heat. Sweating and tormented by midges, I followed close behind Marie, trying to avoid humiliation by suppressing my increasing need to puff and wheeze like an old locomotive. As we climbed higher and higher up this infernal path, I had to fight off a desperate desire to stop and gasp for breath. We stumped on through the trees, my eyes hypnotized by Marie’s muscular rump as it moved evenly and relentlessly under her pareo, evidently one the curés had missed. I tripped and fell over creepers, but she never looked back. I stumbled through piles of burnt human heads that were really coconuts rotted black by moisture. My towelling shirt clung to me as if I had taken a shower in it.

  At last Marie stopped, and I saw with some satisfaction that even she was sweating. Sweating, but not smiling; scowling, in fact. She jerked a finger at a great jumble of high grass and creepers: ‘Pae-pae,’ she grumbled. Oblong shapes of stone as high as two-storey houses loomed half visible in the anarchy of grass and creepers. Here and there, black volcanic blocks thrust up menacingly like altars of Baal. Lurking dimly in the grass, three dark stone figures stood motionless, gazing back at us, like men surprised by enemies.

  When I rejoined Marie’s mother by the tumbledown shed, she told me there were eleven pae-paes up there – had I seen them all? She was quite angry with her lazy daughter for not having bothered to take me to them. So was I, having come all this way. But after all I had seen a pae-pae or two, and the three watching stone figures – and I felt I had sweated enough. Peine loaded a great branch of bananas into the pickup, Marie’s mother kissed us both on the cheek and we drove down the valley. I tried to imagine what it had been like in the great days. The scenery Melville described was still there – the leafy canopies of enormous breadfruit trees and stately palms, for instance; and the romantic stream on whose banks he had watched chattering groups of naked beauties polishing coconut shells with small stones to make them into light, elegant drinking vessels like tortoiseshell goblets.

  What then was missing? Life was missing. Gone were the taboo groves, once the scenes of the prolonged feasts and pagan rituals of these superstitious and cannibalistic Typees. You would need a flotilla of bulldozers, perhaps dynamite now, to uncover from the forest floor the man-made terraces, the amphitheatres, the idolatrous altars built of enormous blocks of black and polished stone, twelve or fifteen feet high, that once crouched, heavy with priestly mystique, in the cathedral-like gloom of the trees. Gone were those chattering beauties by the stream; gone every last descendant of gentle Kory-Kory and Fayaway; gone the chiefs and the warriors, their arts and their crafts. The magnificent Typees are gone – out of this valley, out of the world. For ever.

  We collected Capitaine Cook and what was left of his socialist pamphlets from the fat man’s bungalow, and Peine drove the pickup across the little bridge and up the Hapaa ridge once more. The low clouds threatened rain, but none fell. The road workers and their horses had disappeared. In the green wilderness of the Happaas we stopped and picked wild guavas, and then started down the winding path to Tai-o-hae and the horseshoe bay of Nuku Hiva. From the top of the amphitheatre of mountain and glen that had encircled Melville and Toby as they fled from the Acushnet, I could see the Taporo and bustling figures on her deck getting her ready to sail. But my mind loitered in the valley behind us where less than a hundred years ago the last of the Typees, miserable and disease-ridden, waited patiently for the end by their ancestral burial grounds. They had abandoned their pae-paes, believing them to have been made taboo by the spirits of their dying race, and already the great stone oblongs and altars had become, Stevenson thought, outposts of the kingdom of the grave.

  Twenty-eight

  The Taporo took me back to Papeete, its decks transformed as if for some Pacific Harvest Festival by stacked branches of bananas and the pungent presence of numerous goats and pigs. Captain Alphonse wore the baseball cap I had given him, and for some reason all the cockroaches had disappeared. Several young men had joined the ship as passengers at Atuona and one of them, named Hyacinthe, told me they were off to do their compulsory military service in the French navy. With any luck, he said, they would be sent to Toulon for training. They were handsome young men with pale toffee-coloured skins. I wondered how much pure Marquesan blood they had in them. How could a race so strongly muscled, so swift and graceful, have vanished in a mere flash of time? That it happened in a flash is beyond doubt. Melville’s account of his adventures in Typee is a partly romanticized version of his actual experiences during a month-long captivity, but his depiction of Typee life was essentially accurate:

  There seemed to be no griefs, troubles, or vexations, in all Typee…. No foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour … no duns, no assault and battery attorneys … no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charity of the world; no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs; or to sum all up in one word – no money! All was mirth, fun, and high good humour. Perpetual hilarity reigned through the whole extent of the vale.

  Yet only forty-six years later, Robert Louis Stevenson arrived in his yacht Casco to find the Typees and Hapaas – and all the other Marquesan islanders for that matter – on the point of extinction. Stevenson witnessed the deaths of some of the last survivors, and he records that these doomed few were terribly aware of the horror that had befallen them. From Tai-o-hae he wrote: ‘The Marquesan beholds with dismay the approaching extinction of his race. The thought of death sits down with him to meat, and rises with him from his bed; he lives and breathes under a shadow of mortality awful to support.’

  Less than twenty years after Stevenson, Jack London sailed his yacht, the Snark, to Nuka Hiva – and found it virtually unpeopled. How was it that the Marquesans were decimated while the Samoans, say, survived the same afflictions – grog, blackbirders, firearms, smallpox, syphilis? Both Stevenson and Gauguin shared an answer to this question – as independent witnesses, neither man knowing the other.

  ‘The Polynesian,’ Stevenson wrote in In the South Seas, ‘falls easily into despondency: the fear of novel visitations, the decay or proscription of ancient pleasures, easily incline him to be sad; and sadness detaches him from life.’ This talk of ‘the proscription of ancient pleasures’ led him to the subject of missionaries. Stevenson was not congenitally opposed to all missionaries; he was, however, bitter against self-righteous persons who meddled with other people’s lives for meddling’s sake.

  We are here face to face with one of the difficulties of the missionary. In the Polynesian islands he
easily obtains pre-eminent authority; he can proscribe, he can command; and the temptation is ever towards too much…. It is easy to blame the missionary. But it is his business to make changes. It is surely his business, for example, to prevent wars. On the other hand, it were, perhaps, easy for a missionary to proceed more gently, and to regard every change as an affair of weight. I take the average missionary; I am sure I do him no more than justice when I suppose that he would hesitate to bombard a village, even in order to convert an archipelago. Experience shows (at least in the Polynesian islands) that change of habit is bloodier than a bombardment…. Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives…. There may seem, a priori, no comparison between the change from sour toddy (or kava) to bad gin, and that from the island kilt to a pair of European trousers. Yet I am far from persuaded that the one is any more hurtful than the other; and the unaccustomed race will sometimes die of pin-pricks.

  How lucky Tolu’s forebears had been. The missionaries, Catholic or Protestant, who converted them had not tampered much with fa’a Samoa. There the pinpricks had not gone deep enough to be fatal. And so fa’a Samoa lives, while Typee is little more than the title of a book.

  Again, it was the Marquesans’ extreme misfortune to have been taken over that July of 1842 by Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars in the name of France. A valiant warrior doubtless, said Melville, ‘but a prudent one, too, was this Rear-Admiral Du Petit Thouars … 4 heavy, double-banked frigates and 3 corvettes to frighten a parcel of naked heathen into subjection! Sixty eight-pounders to demolish huts of coconut boughs, and the Congreve rockets to set on fire a few canoe sheds!’ If one believes Stevenson and Melville and the evidence of the empty valley, French colonial officials, gendarmes and priests invaded these remote and innocent isles like so many grim nannies taking over a nursery full of cheerful children. ‘Stop that!’ they commanded the natives. ‘Stop that or we shall give you a good hiding!’ And in doing so they broke the natives’ hearts.