The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  Even when Europeans acknowledged the role they played in spreading disease, they put the catastrophe down to a lack of stamina among Melanesians. As Durrad put it, “There is a fatalism in their outlook which reacts upon their physical organism.” When they fell sick, Melanesians tended to give up and wait to die rather than fight their illness. It was the same with sorcery: anyone who so much as believed he was the victim of black magic died within hours or days. If only they were made of stronger stuff! The third bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, responded to all this by suggesting that all that could be done for this “dying race” was to try to ensure its members went to their graves as Christians.

  I didn’t have my history books with me on Gaua. But I wanted to let the chief know I was ashamed and sorry for my ancestor’s ignorance, sorry for the slow dirge of pneumonia, dysentery, and influenza that had decimated the island. He just laughed.

  “You just don’t understand,” he said. “We have been saved. Esuva Din saved us.”

  Once the coast had been purged of evil, hundreds of families arrived from nearby islands to till new life into Santa Maria’s ancient gardens. That was during the 1970s and ’80s. Now the population had rebounded to almost forty-two hundred people.

  Still, the Gaua coast felt eerily empty, like so many of those places—the highlands of Peru, the Thai plains of Ayuttaya, the Turkish Aegean—whose time has passed and where foreigners pay to see the rubble of once great cities. Only there weren’t any tourists here. Nor were there ghosts or vui.

  Who would the ancient souls of Gaua have haunted? Most of their own descendants were dead, and the rubble of their ancient city was suffocating under a thickening blanket of vines. I walked the ruins and the empty forests, bought the last can of tuna from a village canteen, sat out a rainstorm, and then lay down in the tall grass and waited for the mail plane. A crowd of giggling children gathered around me. Since nobody on the island could remember the stories of Qat, I told them one I had learned from Codrington.

  Before there was a lake in the caldera, Qat played games there with his companion Marawa the Spider. Once Qat spent six days carving bits of wood into the shapes of men and women. He danced for those dolls, and they stirred. He beat his drum, and they moved some more. He kept on dancing and drumming until he had coaxed them all to life. Qat was pleased, because he had made the first humans. He had made life. Marawa tried to imitate Qat, but the spider was so startled when he saw his own dolls stir that he buried them in the dirt. After six days Marawa scraped the earth away to find his dolls rotten and stinking. He was horrified. Marawa had made death.

  10

  The Parishioners’ Paradise

  Warning: It is not wise to be dismissive of religion, particularly Christianity, if you are a nonbeliever.

  Islanders are likely to dislike you strongly if you are hostile to Christianity.

  —Lonely Planet: Solomon Islands

  When I was young, I learned that paradise was an island. There were mountains on it, and they were shaped like sand castles melted by the rain. There were pink marshmallow clouds around those peaks, but not over the beaches or the kaleidoscope of reefs that sheltered the lagoons from the surf. You approached paradise by plane and drifted between those peaks and circled over its estuaries, and you saw the palm shadows cast over sand. When you landed, you were greeted by a white-suited Mephistopheles who said, “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” and you knew that paradise would be whatever you willed it to be.

  Vanua Lava was twenty minutes by Twin Otter north from Gaua. The volcanoes, the beaches, the shining estuary, I did glide above them all, and I was carried into the lushness of a vivid green airfield, and then I was welcomed not into an exotic fantasy but into the arms of the church. The secretary to the bishop of Banks and Torres was a large, backslapping fellow, and like almost all Anglican clergy in the islands, Melanesian. He was waiting at the airstrip with the only truck in the village of Sola.

  I jumped in the back and was deposited shortly at a seaside rest house owned by an Anglican priest. We prayed before lunch, then again before dinner, and then again at breakfast.

  “I want to go to Mota,” I told the priest’s wife.

  “Tomorrow is Sunday,” she told me. “You’ll go to church.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course I will,” knowing there was no way out of that one.

  Vanua Lava’s tiny neighbor, Mota, was the epicenter of the explosion of Anglicanism that reverberated across Melanesia in the nineteenth century. The church now defined life on both islands. When I asked people in Sola to tell me a kastom story, something from the past, they did not tell me about Qat. Instead, and without fail, they related the tale of their favorite hero, a lad who had been born in Darkness Time. His name was Sarawia, and his curiosity would lead him on an adventure stranger than anything he could imagine, an adventure that would forever link the names of Vanua Lava and Mota in the new Christian mythology. When he was an old man, Sarawia wrote down his story so it would not be forgotten. The bishop’s secretary gave me a copy. It went like this:

  In the days when people still relied on ancestors and spirits for help, Sarawia lived in the forest above the wide bay that now cradled Sola. He was paddling his dugout canoe in the sheltered waters one evening when he saw what looked like a floating village on the horizon. As if by magic, the village drifted into the bay and ceased moving, despite the strong tide. There were creatures with shocking white faces on board. Everyone who saw them was certain they had come from the rim of the sky, because they were clothed in the colors of the setting sun.

  Sarawia paddled out for a closer inspection. Two of the creatures were dressed in black robes. They beckoned him to come closer, but he stayed in his canoe, remembering his father’s warning that the spirits would kill and eat him if he was not careful. But Sarawia was even more curious than fearful, and he wanted the fishhooks and biscuits that they held out to him. One man called so gently that Sarawia could not resist taking his hand and climbing on board. He saw the leather-shod feet of his hosts and was horrified: “I said to myself that these men were made partly of clamshell, and my bones quaked.” But Bishop George Selwyn and his young protégé, John Coleridge Patteson, did not hurt Sarawia. They sat him down and asked the names of people and things on Vanua Lava, and when Sarawia told them, Selwyn scratched symbols into what Sarawia later discovered was called a book.

  The Southern Cross returned to Nawono the following year. Sarawia was still unsure if his hosts were men or spirits, and he was unsure about the dangers that lay ahead, but like Ulysses, Sinbad, and Skywalker, his mind was set on fortune and adventure. “I wanted to go myself to the real source of things, and get for myself an ax and a knife, and fishhooks and calico, and plenty of other such things. I thought they were just there to be picked up, and I wanted to get plenty for myself,” he recalled.

  Sarawia got on board and sailed away. Selwyn took him far beyond the edge of the world, and after more than a hundred nights, Selwyn brought him home again to Vanua Lava and presented him with a very large ax, and his family was immensely proud. After the Southern Cross sailed away, Sarawia joined in a few battles against other villages.

  The next year, Sarawia and twenty other boys traveled with Selwyn to his school near Auckland, where he was taught by both Codrington and Patteson. One day Patteson asked Sarawia which spirit had made the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the world, and its people. Sarawia answered that of course it was Qat. No, said Patteson. It was God alone who had made everything. Sarawia did not think much of the bishop’s idea: “I said to myself that this was just another spirit whom the white people think about, whereas we think about Qat.”

  After Patteson was consecrated bishop of Melanesia, Sarawia sailed with him to Espiritu Santo, Gaua, Ambae, and Ambrym. He sat in the rowboat and watched fearfully each time Patteson swam to shore to sit among bands of strangers armed with bows, arrows, spears, and clubs. The strangers wouldn’t shoot, not until Patteson had finished handing
out his presents and was swimming back to his boat. Sarawia was not on board the day Patteson was chased from the beach by a bloodthirsty crowd at Santa Cruz. But he knew the two half-caste boys who were pierced with bone-tipped arrows as they rowed Patteson to safety. One of them, Fisher Young, was buried near the beach at Port Patteson.

  Patteson taught Sarawia to read the Bible. Sarawia was duly impressed. The stories were like nothing he had ever imagined, and if they were true, Patteson’s God was certainly more awesome than Qat or any other vui. Patteson baptized him and gave him the Christian name George, after Bishop Selwyn.

  After four years of training, Sarawia concluded that his kin and his race were prisoners of Satan. He returned to Vanua Lava to deliver the unsettling news. He told his people that Qat was not a true spirit but a lying spirit, that there was only one God, and it was Patteson’s god. “He alone created all things, in heaven and on earth, and it is he who looks after them, loves them, pities them, people and animals, birds and fish and plants, and every kind of thing in the world, he alone looks after them because he loves them.”

  Sarawia was ordained Melanesia’s first native deacon in 1868 and, with Patteson, set up a model Christian village on Mota, transforming the tiny island into an Anglican stronghold. Motese men were sent to evangelize throughout the archipelago. Sarawia stood fast even after Patteson’s murder at Nukapu three years later. He was a living legend by the time Henry Montgomery landed to conduct a mass confirmation service on Mota twenty years on. My great-grandfather declared that “Dear George” had shepherded the entire island to its Christian destiny. Men were no longer afraid to walk from village to village for fear of attack by humans or spirits, as they had once been. My great-grandfather waxed poetic about the new age Christianity had brought to Mota: the hymns, the merry children’s dances, the prayer gatherings (twice daily!), and the congregations whose members were more gracious and humble than in any English country parish. “No spot in the whole extent of the Mission has so settled a Christian life,” he enthused. The bishop had indeed found his Fantasy Island.

  Before my own journey, several South Pacific scholars had advised me that if I wanted to get anything done in Melanesia, if I wanted doors opened, if I wanted to achieve any kind of intimacy with the place, I would have to strike up a friendship with the church. The church had trucks, boats, influence, and many friends. I suppose that’s why I joined the people for Sunday Eucharist in Sola.

  The service was conducted in a tin-roofed shelter by the gentle but long-winded local rector. We sprawled on grass mats while Father Saul rambled on for close to three hours, giving an extended remix of Jesus’ walk on water. The rector stroked his woolly chin, ruminating on the Word, offering the incantations that would be repeated before thousands of altars across the former empire during the course of the day. I prayed along with the people—“For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever”—and before I knew it I was dutifully accepting the blood and body of Christ from the rector’s hand. I glanced up to see a look of intense concern on his little face. He knew I was not a believer.

  After the service I escaped before the rector could interrogate me. I headed down the beach, away from the village, restless, irritable. Clouds boiled around the peaks. Boys marched past me in their Sunday whites, Bibles in hand. There was no escape from Henry Montgomery’s settled Christian life. Take the hill above the village, which had the twisting shape of a snake. Back in Darkness Time, that hill had been inhabited by the spirit of an evil serpent. Not anymore. The Anglicans had claimed it, exorcised the spirit, and built a residence for their bishop on its crest. The snake’s head had been pierced with a tall white cross and the mystery banished forever.

  The bishop’s secretary spotted me at the edge of the village.

  “Yu go wea?” he shouted from his truck.

  “Away,” I barked.

  He insisted that the cook from the rest house guide me. She was a good Christian girl, he assured me. Great. I followed the wide sweep of the bay, chasing the coconuts that rolled in with the breaking waves, the girl steps behind. I had a sickening feeling she would want to talk about the rector’s service. I tried to ignore her. I gazed out beyond the surf, beyond the whitecaps that danced in the riptide on the shallow bay to where Mota floated like a Chinese straw hat on the horizon.

  I was beginning to resent my great-grandfather. It was the sort of resentment shared by many Western travelers when we discover that missionaries got to paradise and transformed it long before we packed our bags. It is similar to the anxiety we feel when we discover a McDonald’s among the palms. Melanesia was supposed to be exotic and primitive, not familiar. It was supposed to be otherly.

  I couldn’t help feeling this way, even though I knew that the very idea of the tropical paradise was an invention. I carried a copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism with me as a reminder of the dangers of romantic thinking. Said argued that the Orient never existed in the real world. It was a fantasy, a collection of exotic places filled with quaint but inferior races, constructed in order to justify England’s colonial aspirations in the East. His theory could well apply to the Melanesian Mission: Henry Montgomery made no secret of his fatherly affection for his hotheaded and childlike “little Melanesians.” So many dark-skinned people in need of improvement. We modern travelers claim to be different. We insist we don’t want to change paradise. But we are frequently bothered by the version of it we encounter.

  The American writer Paul Theroux, for example, expressed constant disappointment in his South Pacific travelogue The Happy Isles of Oceania. Theroux was irritated to find churches on every populated island and maddened by the ringing bells that reminded him that Sundays were more sacred in the Pacific than at home in New England. He fled to increasingly remoter shores, but the only islands uninfected by Western influence were, in fact, uninhabited.

  I knew how Theroux felt. I had read my Treasure Island. I had studied the accounts of swashbucklers like Peter Dillon, the Irishman who claimed to have repelled a cannibal army from a mountaintop in Fiji while the torsos and limbs of his companions were cooking in the valley below. I had seen Mel Gibson bewitched by an Oceanic love spell in The Bounty. I had gaped at Bronislaw Malinowski’s snapshots of Trobriand Island primitives, unaware that missionaries had arrived in the Trobriands decades before him. Despite everything that my great-grandfather had written about his mission’s triumphs, I suppose I still wanted it to be more authentic, more savage, more like the South Pacific other travelers had invented. But the romantic primitivist is bound for disappointment in Oceania. The spear-shaking headhunters, the Man Fridays, the Bali Hai girls—if they ever existed—were long gone even before Robert Louis Stevenson and company began to package them for northern audiences. Now, not even a photo opportunity at Port Vila’s Cannibal House can fill that void. No island has escaped the whorl of cultural convergence that began nearly two centuries ago.

  But this does not mean that history ended with the baptism of Melanesia. I had realized on Tanna that the strangest bits of culture were those that had been infected by Christianity. Otherness lay not in some romantic stereotype but in the hybridization of myths, magic, and spirit, in the eight-legged, DayGlo love child produced by the union of church and kastom.

  I shuddered at the thought of sitting through more prayers, and yet I knew the church was my conduit to the mutating soul of the Banks Islands. On Mota, where the well of faith had overflowed to spread across the archipelago, there was yet an unexplained chink in the mortar that held the church to its island foundations.

  What my great-grandfather did not write, and what islanders won’t admit about Vanua Lava’s first native priest, was this: George Sarawia’s great evangelizing influence came not from his office as a priest but from his stature in a secret society whose members’ use of black magic and poison once led to a near-apocalypse on Mota.

  The first missionaries didn’t condemn the strange suqe and tamate societies to which the men al
l seemed to belong on Vanua Lava and Mota. On the surface, the suqe appeared to be nothing more than a social club. Each village had a men’s clubhouse lined with cooking ovens, all arranged according to rank. Men gained status by sacrificing pigs, giving feasts, and paying long strands of shell money to high-ranking members. At first the Anglicans saw nothing overtly sacrilegious about the arrangement.

  Tamate was harder to accept. It was a network of secret societies whose members met deep in the forest to communicate with tamate—the ghosts of dead men. The meeting place, or salagoro, was tabu, and strictly off-limits to women and uninitiated men. The missionaries stationed on Mota heard terrible noises coming from the salagoro at night. Sometimes “ghosts” clad in leaf overcoats and masks would emerge to rampage through nearby villages, beating anyone they could catch. Sometimes tamate members would march out of the forest in the full light of day, wearing bark hats bristling with red and white quills, and they would dance. This beguiled and softened the Anglicans, who had a weakness for pageantry that extended beyond the bells and incense of their High Church liturgies (some taught converts Gilbert and Sullivan show tunes in their spare time). Codrington was delighted by the tamate’s finery, the outrageous frilled masks, the dancers who posed with their leaf fronds much like the paintings he had seen of Christ the Martyr holding his palm.