Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  These were cannibal isles.

  Cook spent six months circumnavigating and mapping the North and South islands. Banks named the waterway between them Cook Strait. In January 1770, Cook, Banks, and Tupia went ashore, and passed the body of a woman floating in the water. The Maoris disposed of their dead kin by weighing them down at sea, so that was obviously a corpse that had slipped free from its ballast. On the beach, the landing party met a group of natives. In his journal, Banks recorded:

  The family was employed when we came ashore in dressing their provisions. Near were provision baskets. Looking carelessly upon one of these we by accident observed two bones, pretty clean picked, which as appeared upon examination were undoubtedly human bones. Tho’ we had from the first of our arrival on the coast constantly heard the Indians acknowledge the custom of eating their enemies we had never before had proof of it, but this amounted almost to demonstration: the bones were clearly human, upon them were evident marks of their having been dressed on the fire, the meat was not entirely picked off from them and on the grisly ends which were gnawed were evident marks of teeth, and these were accidentally found in a provision basket. On asking the people what bones are these? they answered, The bones of a man.—And have you eat the flesh?—Yes.—Have you none of it left?—No.—Why did you not eat the woman who we saw today in the water?—She was our relation.—And who then is it that you do eat?—Those who are killed in war.—And who was the man whose bones these are?—Five days ago a boat of our enemies came into this bay and of them we killed seven, of whom the owner of these bones was one.

  Cook picked up the tale in his own journal:

  One of the cannibals thereupon bit and gnawed the human arm which Banks had picked up, drawing it through his mouth and showing by signs that the flesh to him was a dainty bit. Tupia carried on the conversation: “Where are the heads?” he asked. “Do you eat them, too?” “Of the heads,” answered an old man, “we eat only the brains.” Later he brought on board Endeavour four of the heads of the seven victims. The hair and flesh were entire, but we perceived that the brains had been extracted. The flesh was soft, but had by some method been preserved from putrefaction, for it had no disagreeable smell.

  Cook’s voyage home was grueling. The Endeavour left New Zealand on April 1, 1770. A few weeks later, he discovered the east coast of what is now Australia. On the night of June 11, the ship ran aground when its hull was pierced by coral on the Great Barrier Reef, and it foundered in shark-infested waters twenty miles from shore. While some men pumped around the clock, others carried the anchors a distance away by rowboat, then, having secured them, used capstan and windlass to kedge the ship off the reef into deeper water. By a miracle, the coral spike broke off and helped plug the hole.

  Having been careened on shore and with the gash in her bottom repaired, the Endeavour struggled west to Batavia—now Jakarta—in the Dutch East Indies. What works in Europe doesn’t necessarily work in the tropics, and because the Dutch had built the city to mirror Amsterdam, the stagnant canals of that outpost on Java seethed with fatal diseases. Cook, who in over two years had not lost a single man to sickness, watched thirty-five members of his crew die because of that stop. Finally, on July 12, 1771, a month short of three years after sailing out, the Endeavour anchored in the Thames estuary and Cook was home.

  New Zealand and Australia were added to the Crown.

  Zinc was deep into Cook’s second voyage—the most monumental ever undertaken by man—by the time his fellow passengers stirred and breakfast was served. Having passed north of Tahiti on its long flight west, the tiny plane on the screen in front that charted their own voyage was closing on Rarotonga in the Cooks, beyond which was Auckland, New Zealand, where Flight 53 would terminate.

  Choosing the omelette over French toast, Zinc read on.

  Never again would Cook sail with just one ship. That close shave with being marooned in Australia settled that. The Resolution and the Adventure, both Whitby colliers, left Plymouth on July 13, 1772, with Cook having carte blanche to explore wherever he desired. Reaching the tip of South Africa, the ships pressed on, crossing the Antarctic Circle to head farther south than anyone had sailed before. In that world of toppling icebergs, pack ice, penguins, and whales, the vessels lost contact with each other in dense fog.

  Four months later, they rendezvoused in New Zealand. Sailing on to Tahiti—where Cook and fifteen veterans from the Endeavour received a tumultuous welcome and took on Odiddy and Omai as interpreters—the ships swept around the South Pacific toward the Friendly Islands, which are now Tonga. Along the way, they passed through what would later be called the Cook Islands, which Cook named the Hervey Islands in honor of a British lord of the Admiralty, but didn’t take the time to stop and explore.

  By late October, they were nearing the east coast of New Zealand when a full-scale storm blew the Adventure back out to sea. Cook managed to battle his way to Cook Strait and sail the Resolution into Queen Charlotte Sound, the rendezvous point for both boats if they got separated. It was there that Cook witnessed cannibals eating.

  On November 21, some of the local Maoris with whom Cook had made peace embarked on a plundering raid to the east for the purpose of looting new booty so they could barter with the Resolution’s crew. After their victorious return, Pickersgill, an officer, and some of his shipmates crossed to a part of the shoreline where wailing women were cutting their foreheads with rocks as haehae, a sign of grief. Nearby, a band of warriors was slicing apart the remains of a youthful enemy they had killed in the raid. One of the Maoris, to tease the Europeans, skewered the lungs of the dead man on the end of his spear and raised them to Pickersgill’s lips. The officer refused the human meat but bartered for the severed head of the cut-up corpse to take back to the ship as a souvenir.

  Cook was ashore, checking the progress of a vegetable patch. On his return, he witnessed a cannibal feast on the deck of the Resolution, then recorded the grisly event in his journal:

  Calm light airs from the north all day on the 23rd November hindered us from putting out to sea as intended. In the afternoon, some of the officers went on shore to amuse themselves among the natives, where they saw the head and bowels of a youth, who had been lately killed, lying on the beach, and the heart stuck on a forked stick which was fixed on the head of one of the largest canoes. One of the gentlemen bought the head and brought it on board, where a piece of the flesh was broiled and eaten by one of the natives, before all the officers and most of the men. I was on shore at this time, but soon after returning on board was informed of the above circumstances, and found the quarterdeck crowded with the natives, and the mangled head, or rather part of it (for the under-jaw and lips were wanting), lying on the taffrail. The skull had been broken on the left side, just above the temples, and the remains of the face had all the appearance of a youth under twenty.

  The sight of the head, and the relation of the above circumstances, struck me with horror and filled my mind with indignation against these cannibals. Curiosity, however, got the better of my indignation, especially when I considered that it would avail but little, and being desirous of becoming an eyewitness of a fact which many doubted, I ordered a piece of the flesh to be broiled, and brought to the quarterdeck, where one of the cannibals ate it with surprising avidity. This had such an effect on some of our people as to make them sick. Odiddy, the native who had embarked with us some time before, was so affected with the sight as to become perfectly motionless and seemed as if metamorphosed into a statue of horror.

  Cook could wait no longer for the Adventure. A voyage into the polar wastes had to be done in high summer, so on November 25, the Resolution left Queen Charlotte Sound. A few days later, the Adventure arrived, and the crew set about repairing the ship in the safety of that cove. On December 16, Furneaux, its captain, sent two officers and eight men ashore to fetch vegetables and greens from the garden patch. When they did not return, a search party set out the following day. What it discovered was that the sai
lors who went for veggies had ended up as human meat. All ten had been killed and consumed by the same Maoris whom Cook had watched eat the severed head on board the Resolution.

  Nothing remained but bones.

  By now, Zinc’s flight was descending toward Rarotonga. The seat-belt sign was on. The screen up front showed an overview map to orient passengers.

  South of the equator and just east of the International Date Line, the Cook Islands sit midway between American Samoa and Tahiti. With Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, and Australia farther to the west, the Cooks are directly south of Hawaii, at about the same distance below the equator as Hawaii is above it. The total landmass of the fifteen islands is equal to that of Rhode Island, the smallest U.S. state, but they are scattered over some two million square kilometers of sea, an expanse equivalent to the size of Western Europe. The population is less than nineteen thousand. Some of the islands remain uninhabited.

  The final words Zinc read as he marked his place in Captain Cook, just before the wheels touched down on the runway of Rarotonga and the engines of the jet roared to brake it to a crawl, were printed in a footnote on the page with Cook’s comment on cannibals having eaten some of his men. It informed the reader that New Zealand was one of the last island groups in the South Pacific to be settled by Polynesian migrants, and that the ancestors of the Maoris Cook encountered in New Zealand had canoed from Rarotonga in the Cook Islands.

  Closing the book, Zinc glanced out the window.

  All he could see of the island was blackness masked by darkness.

  Born too late for pure adventure, he thought.

  Actually, Zinc was wrong.

  For the cannibals were waiting.

  BUSH BEER

  Rarotonga, Cook Islands

  April 18 (That morning)

  The first sense engaged by this tropical isle as Zinc stepped out of the plane was his sense of smell. A fragrance of flowering humidity intoxicated him while he descended the staircase on wheels that had been rolled up to the plane. What a welcome relief it was to escape from the sinus-cracking dry air in the fuselage. The Tarmac under his feet glistened from overnight rain as the inspector crossed the apron from the 767 to the Polynesian airport.

  The airport was a bare-bones shell of simplicity. The strumming of a ukulele and a singing voice that was a cross between Elvis Presley and Don Ho greeted Zinc at the door. The festive atmosphere belied the fact that it was just after five in the morning and dawn had yet to break, but you had to give the islanders credit for laying out the welcome mat. The immigration agent was a friendly woman in a colorful pareu—a wraparound dress of the South Pacific—whose main focus was to ensure that Zinc had his ticket home. When you guard the gates of paradise, there is no such thing as a one-way trip.

  Having cleared customs—he just strolled over, picked up his bag, and walked away—the Canadian changed some money for New Zealand dollars at the Westpac bank, then was directed outside to the minibus going to his resort.

  Cook Islanders drive on the left-hand side of the road. Hoping to get a feel for the island along the route, Zinc sat in the front seat over the wheel well beside the driver. The Ara Metua—also called the Great Road of Toi, though today no one knows who Toi was—was built around the coast of Rarotonga in the eleventh century. The modern road runs parallel to it along the beach, so a bus that leaves from the airport has one of two routes to follow. The sign in the windshield will tell you if it is heading “Clockwise” or “Counterclockwise.” From the bumpiness of the ride he took through the sticky predawn night, Zinc would have sworn the bus had wandered onto the Ara Metua by mistake.

  The airport—a single runway along the north coast—was about a mile west of Avarua, the capital of the Cooks and the island’s principal town. The clockwise journey bounced Zinc along the main street of what would turn into a lazy little South Seas port and trading center in the heat of the day but was now abandoned. Past the Punanga Nui open-air market with its fruit and vegetable stalls; past the rinky-dink national police headquarters that made the Mountie grin (for it seemed barely big enough to house enough officers to patrol the island on bikes); past the central traffic circle with its Seven-in-One Coconut Tree, a ring of palms that legend says grew out of one nut with seven sprouts; past the harborfront wreck of the SS Maitai, the old Union Steam Ship vessel that used to trade between here and Tahiti before it went down with a cargo of Model T Fords in 1916, but which is of far greater historical importance for bequeathing its name to the rum cocktail; past the inland Papeiha Stone, upon which the first missionary stood in 1823 to preach the initial gospel to the cannibals; and past the lordly CICC church, a lovely whitewashed mission made of coral that the London Missionary Society erected in 1853 on the site of the most sacred marae—or religious meeting ground—in Rarotonga, just to make certain the islanders understood who was taking over and replacing their gods.

  So tired was the Mountie from his sleepless flight that the bus ride that circled southeast from the edge of town through rural countryside to Muri Beach slipped by his peripheral vision in a surrealistic blur. Zinc was vaguely aware that mountains rose inland to his right, and that waves broke on the reef to his left. At Matavera, about halfway to his destination, the fine old Christian church was lit up white in the blackness, but the graves that should populate its graveyard were scattered far and wide. Converts they might be, but Cook Islanders still clung to their old cannibal ways in that they dug the graves of their ancestors next to their houses, instead of discarding them in some common dumping ground. And just this side of Muri Beach, the site of Zinc’s resort, another weird dichotomy lurked in the dark.

  He caught sight of the Ngatangiia district’s large white church looming on the inland flank of the shoreline road. Off the coast and to the south, four smaller islands—or motus—lined the reef. North of the northernmost of those motus, between it and a headland on the Rarotongan coast, a deep passage through the reef led into Avana Harbor. A popular mooring spot for visiting yachts and small fishing boats, the harbor marked the starting point for one of the great epic voyages of the South Pacific. It was here, in about AD 1350, that a fleet of canoes from throughout what are now the Cook Islands embarked on the Great Migration, which resulted in the settling of New Zealand by those Maoris whose cannibalism so shocked Captain Cook.

  “Kia Orana”—“Hello”—read the wooden sign over the open entrance to the Muri Lagoon Resort. Lining the lot out front was a string of motorbikes, the transport of choice for the island’s few good roads. A walkway ran between two ponds fed by fountains to guide the bleary-eyed guest to the reception desk inside the thatch-roofed villa. With several high stools to sit on, the desk belonged more in a bar than it did in a classy hotel. As the solitary night clerk checked him in, Zinc looked around. A basket of umbrellas waited by the door for those who ventured out into the sudden squalls that could blow in at any time in the South Seas. Time itself was tracked by a line of clocks on one wall: Rarotonga, Auckland, Sydney, London, Frankfurt, and Los Angeles. Such labels spoke volumes about who frequented the Cooks.

  “Mosquitoes bad?” Zinc asked.

  “No,” replied the clerk.

  “Then why the mosquito coils?”

  “Precaution, sir. There’s dengue fever on the island, and that you don’t want to get.”

  “Oh,” said Zinc. “So play it safe at night?”

  “No, sir. Play it safe in the morning with a spray of DEET. That’s when the bug bites.”

  “Symptoms?”

  “Headache, fever, severe joint and muscle pain, and rash. Some of those bitten require a blood transfusion.”

  “Is that all?”

  A pause.

  “Death if you’re unlucky.”

  Zinc made a mental note to buy some DEET.

  The unit assigned to the Mountie was one of the lagoon villas, so he followed the night porter-cum-security guard past the book-exchange shelf (where beach reading was swapped) and the one communal TV, out into lush gar
dens ripe with night scents, to wend their way through the dark foliage toward the lulling sound of surf breaking on the reef.

  “Just one TV?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How do you prevent fights over what to watch?”

  “We get only one channel in the Cooks, and it broadcasts just some of the time.”

  His villa was hot and stuffy from lack of air-conditioning. To conserve electricity, which on some of the outer islands works in fits and starts, the AC operates only when activated by the tag of your room key. Ergo, if you’re not in the room, no cool air. The porter showed Zinc the ins and outs of his accommodation, then wished him a good night’s sleep—or what was left of it. It seemed strange to the Canadian not to tip the man. Tipping was discouraged in the Cooks.

  The siren call of the South Seas lured Zinc out through the sliding glass door while his villa cooled down. The patio that bordered the beach was arched by coconut palms, and strung between two of the trunks was an inviting hammock. Swinging his exhausted body into the meshed net, he gazed up through the swaying black fronds at the pinpricked dome full of stars. The warm wind off the reef had a velvet touch as it rocked him in this Snugli slung around Mother Nature’s neck. Waves lapped the sandy shore of the lagoon, while out there where starlight glinted on the crests of breakers, the sea rolled over the coral barricade with a constant low rumble. A whiff of coconut oil from the palms and their scattered nuts took the raw edge off the salty scent of brine. Like those feathered fans used by Las Vegas showgirls to reveal and cover themselves in striptease revues, the fronds above opened and closed to clatter with every gust of breeze.

  Zinc remembered how as a lad he used to stretch out on the grass of the Saskatchewan farm and stare up in wonder at the summer stars that shone down on the golden flatlands. The longer he gazed, the more insignificant he felt, and that made him ask those age-old questions that perplex all of us: Where did I come from? What am I doing here? Where am I going? There was a night, he could recall, when he peered too hard into the vastness of the cosmos and almost lost his grip on the here and now. The earth had begun to spin as if he were dizzy drunk, and Zinc felt as if his mind were being sucked into another dimension.