The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  I was intrigued by these lagoons specifically because my great-grandfather had not ventured here. The region was considered too dangerous for the Southern Cross in 1892. My great-grandfather formed his opinion of New Georgia on his visit to Santa Isabel, a half-day’s sail to the east, which he described as a “hunting ground” for raiders from New Georgia. “They are, perhaps, the worst of all cannibals, and great is the dread in which they are held by all who live in these waters, whilst the effect of their raids has been that, of the hundred miles of Ysabel, eighty are practically uninhabited. The people have either been wiped out and eaten, or else they have migrated to safer quarters.” The Isabelan survivors, who lived in a constant state of dread, sought refuge in tree houses or in hilltop fortresses.

  By 1892 the New Georgian “savage” had taken on a mythic aspect in the eighteenth-century European imagination, thanks to the shocking tales seafarers related on their return from the lagoons. These days, postcolonial theorists can’t agree if many early accounts of head-hunting and cannibalism in the South Pacific were based on fact or European imagination. Revisionist historian William Arens proposed in The Man-Eating Myth that the cannibals who always seemed to inhabit the edges of the Western world were largely the product of intellectual conjuring. He argued that explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists constructed their cannibals using secondhand stories and the glue of their own primordial fantasies. The cannibal was a projection of European psychoses rather than an accurate representation of history. Princeton anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere later deconstructed so-called eyewitness accounts of great cannibal feasts in Fiji to prove that those stories were fictions written to satiate a public hungry for a taste of tropical savagery.

  The revisionists aren’t suggesting that head-hunting and cannibalism never happened, but rather that cannibal tales reveal more about their believers than they do about the people they describe. Europeans wanted to believe in headhunters as much as they wanted to believe in their own heroes. Both provided psychological fodder for empire-building.

  The colonial historian Austin Coates used head-hunting lore as justification for British intervention in the Solomons: islanders needed to be ruled to prevent them from killing each other off. But a perusal of early reports reveals that it was the arrival of Europeans that precipitated the worst violence.

  For all the supposedly unchecked carnage, some historians suggest that the New Georgians may have established a steady state of feuding, trading, and head-taking before white men arrived. Yes, the New Georgians were sure that human heads contained concentrated mana, and that the raising of a canoe house, the launching of a war canoe, the honoring of ancestors, all required skull offerings. But raids were annual affairs, carefully planned, steeped in ritual, magic, and communal work. Expeditions took weeks of planning and travel, and involved barely a few hours of fighting, the grand finale of a yearly cycle of preparation, feasting, carving, gardening, and trading.

  It was a shocking, yet quite sustainable, way of life until white traders began arming their allies with axes and guns. Although European governments had agreed to ban the sale of firearms to islanders in the 1890s, apparently only Germany, which controlled Santa Isabel, enforced the ban. The gun-toting tribes of New Georgia were rendered superhuman compared to their unarmed prey on Santa Isabel, whose tree forts were not much protection against lead shot. That was one factor. The other was European tinkering with the supply and demand of skulls. The Royal Navy punished unruly lagoon dwellers by smashing skull collections that had taken centuries to accumulate. This caused a crisis of mana. In response, the Roviana chief, Ingava, put together the greatest war machine the region had ever seen—hundreds of warriors, hundreds of breech-loading Snider rifles, and at least two European whaleboats—then spent much of the next decade replenishing his stock of skulls.

  Amazingly, the lagoon population only really began its downfall after the Royal Navy had put a stop to all the raiding. The pioneering anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers noted a spectacular drop in birth rates among communities on the Vella Lavella and Eddystone islands in the first two decades of the twentieth century. People had stopped getting married and having children. Rivers concluded that this reproductive lethargy was, in fact, triggered by the ban on head-hunting, which was essential to the fabric of religious and community existence. Without head-hunting, islanders simply lost their zest for life. They grew bored and listless. Communities were dying from tedium vitae. The only hope, he felt, was for Melanesians to embrace Christianity with the same passion and vigor as they had their old beliefs. Rivers, who did much of his traveling aboard the Southern Cross, would likely have suggested the Church of England as a cure, but it was far too late for the Anglicans to set up shop in New Georgia; Methodists and Seventh-day Adventists had gained a foothold in 1902, and their charismatic worship turned out to be just the heartfelt substitute for cannibalism that Rivers had prescribed.

  A century later, it was clear that New Georgia had got its groove back. There was no shortage of children in the village of Seghe, the Tomoko’s first landfall. We pulled up to a coral rock jetty, and all hell broke loose. Passengers tumbled over the rails and scrambled away from the ship as though it were on fire. It might as well have been. The head had been overflowing like a fountain all night, transforming the ship’s passageways into a frothy slough of gastrointestinal horrors.

  I bought a coconut in the market that had sprung up at the foot of the jetty, and sat under a tree, sipping the sweet milk, and I let the Tomoko pull away without me. The market disappeared, too, carried away on the backs of women with shining skin and frizzy hair bleached surreally blond by the sun. Seghe fell silent. I picked up my pack and wandered through the palms.

  There was a line of plywood shacks strung between the sea and a vast lawn, which steamed in the morning sunlight. That lawn, it turned out, was all that remained of the airfield the Americans had built during the war. There was a red shack beside the field. I went inside and found the air agent yelling into a radio phone. The only point of interest in Seghe, he told me, lay in the lagoon at the end of the runway, where there was an American fighter plane from the war. It shone in the depths like a great silver fish.

  “You could fly back to Honiara,” he said. “The plane will be in this afternoon.”

  “Skulls. Maybe I could look for skulls,” I said.

  “There’s a girl you could have. Over at the village rest house,” he said.

  “Or crocodiles. I could look for crocodiles,” I said.

  He shrugged and pointed through the chicken wire of his window to where a few men were lying under a tree. “That boy will help you. He has a kanu. Hey! John Palmer!”

  John Palmer was the tallest Melanesian I had ever laid eyes on, topping out at about six-foot-six if you included his hair: his head was shaved except for an island of braided dreadlocks on the crown. He had bound the strands together so their splayed ends resembled the fronds of a palm tree. He wore army fatigue shorts. He had the wide eyes of a child, but to be accurate, he was not a boy. He was at least twenty-five.

  The air agent told John he should quit whatever mischief he was up to and take me away to look for skulls and crocodiles. I could come back to Seghe and catch the plane out in a week.

  John suggested I come stay with him on his island. If I had strong legs, he could also show me the Nonotongere.

  “Nonotongere?” I asked.

  The air agent interrupted. “Crocodiles, fine. Skulls, fine,” he barked, then poked me in the chest with his finger. “But don’t you lead John Palmer astray. Don’t you put his Christian soul at risk. Leave that stone alone.” I left it for the moment.

  I was suspicious of John Palmer. I wasn’t sure why he was so willing to help me. “You want money?” I asked.

  “Yu savve pem petrol long kanu blong mi,” he said hopefully. Gas money.

  “And…”

  “And nothing.”

  John left to hunt for fuel, and I waited with the bo
ys by the airstrip. In the afternoon a Twin Otter buzzed in, released a trio of Asian men in gum boots and polyester business suits, then took off again.

  “Loggers spoiling everything,” said one unhappy onlooker who introduced himself as Benjamin. There was a time, he said, when he thought he could make a living from ecotourism—in fact plenty of people in the lagoon had the same idea after the World Wide Fund for Nature told them how special the place was back in the nineties. The United Nations had been on the verge of declaring Marovo a World Heritage Site. People constructed bungalows with stoves and raised beds for tourists. Benjamin had opened his own lodge over on Vangunu. But then the tension came, and the government withered, and the tourists disappeared, and the Malaysian Chinese showed up with their suitcases of money.

  One by one, the lagoon’s chiefs had been selling their forests in return for cash and tin roofing and outboard motors, and the red scars had crept up the hillsides, and the guts of the forest seeped into the lagoon like blood, and the coral choked and turned white in the silty half-light, and fishnets began to come up empty.

  Sometimes people didn’t want their chiefs to sell off the forests. They burned logging trucks and stole chain saws. Back in the nineties, islanders had tried to work with groups like Greenpeace to start village-based “ecoforestry” ventures, but the foreign loggers had guns, guards, and friends in high places. At least one eco-activist got his neck broken. Onetime prime minister Bartholomew Ulufa’alu tried to clamp down on corruption and unsustainable forestry in the nineties, but all that ended when the Malaita Eagle Force arrived on his doorstep with machine guns. Now things were back to normal. “The loggers’ work is even easier now that the government is broke,” said Benjamin. “They bribe the government agents and the chiefs, then cut as fast as they can.”

  New Georgia’s wealth, its mana, was being sucked away and delivered raw to mills in Malaysia and Japan. Meanwhile, Benjamin’s eco-lodge was empty, so he had started a canteen beside the airstrip, where he sold crackers and warm beer to the loggers.

  A woman from the village came to warn me about John Palmer. She said he was the sort of boy I should avoid. He was a rubbish boy. He ran with the rebels from across the water in Bougainville. And worse. “What kind of worse?” I asked. “Just worse,” she said, staring at the dirt, then stomped off without another word.

  John returned after dark with the last two jugs of gas in Seghe. We jumped in his kanu (another flimsy fiberglass runabout) and headed west to Nono Lagoon. The stars were out, but their light was nothing compared to the halo of phosphorescent sparks that flowed around the bow. Our wake glowed behind us like the tail of a comet. There were other lights, too: yellow nebulae, waving and pulsing under the surface of the lagoon.

  “Divers,” said John. “Collecting bêche-de-mer.”

  Sometimes John would ease the throttle and shine his light into the clear water, and then it was as though the belly of the lagoon had been split open and its entrails had floated up in great bubbles, stopping just short of the surface. Coral. Thousands and thousands of pounds of pale green and purple coral. Within the folds I could see the bêche-de-mer, the mottled sea slugs that had excited Chinese palates and lured traders to these waters for two centuries. Some were as big as footballs.

  Islands drifted past like shadows on shadows. Then a violent constellation of incandescent orange emerged from behind a curtain of palms. It was a ship, anchored in the middle of the lagoon. It must have been fifty times bigger than the Tomoko. Floodlights shone down from two steel cranes. The lights illuminated a stack of raw logs on the deck below. The cranes jerked and twisted frantically, like great metallic birds arranging a nest of sticks.

  We rounded a point, and the curtain of islands closed again. We steered toward a single spark of light, which grew into the warm glow of an oil lamp sitting on the porch rail of a cottage. We tied up to a heap of rocks and were greeted by six shirtless young men. They all wore dreadlocks, and they all smoked long cigarettes rolled from magazine paper. John introduced them as his brothas, which didn’t tell me much because that might mean “brother” or “cousin” or “uncle,” or some more distant relative. These brothas were Sam, Laury, Oswold, Allen-Chide, Namokene, and Ray. The island was called Mbatumbosi, but John preferred to call it Bad Boss, because that name made it seem tougher. It did feel a bit like a gang hideout at first. The brothers smoked and wrestled and lay about in hammocks. There were no women, no sisters, no scolding parents.

  “We are alone,” said Allen, as he brought our dinner—a pot of plain rice—to a boil on a gas stove on the porch.

  “We are free,” said Ray.

  “We are raiders,” said John.

  “Raiders,” I said encouragingly, “like your ancestors?”

  “No, mon. Raiders blong luv. Olsem Casanova!”

  John explained the modern art of raiding. The brothers would take their kanu over to the hamlets that dotted the edges of their lagoon, and they would whisper beneath the young women’s windows: “Come out, come out and play.” And the girls did crawl out their windows and disappear with the brothers into the shadows. The Methodist village of Nazareth made for poor hunting, but the girls on Mbarejo, which was Seventh-day Adventist, were always eager.

  “So you are creepers,” I said, recalling the men who had harassed Sabina back on Vanua Lava.

  “Yes!” said Allen.

  “No!” said John. “The girlies, they come to us. They tell their daddies that they are going fishing on the reef. Then they paddle straight to Bad Boss.”

  Ray said that it was the marble trick that attracted the girls more than anything. The boys had learned the trick from Japanese fishermen. John had one marble. Ray had two. What you did, explained John, was smash a glass mug and file down a small piece of the handle until it was perfectly round and smooth. Next you took an old toothbrush and filed the end of it to a sharp point. Then you got your brother to pull out a pinch of skin on the shaft of your penis, so you could poke a hole through the skin with the sharp end of the toothbrush. You used the toothbrush to push the marble into the hole. In with the marble, out with the toothbrush, a splash of Dettol disinfectant, and voilà, you had transformed your penis into a sexual novelty. John unzipped his fly and, squirming with pride, exposed just enough of his penis to prove they weren’t lying. There was indeed a roundish lump just under the skin.

  “Lookim,” Ray said as John pushed the lump with his finger, “hem roll all-abaot!”

  Then we all bowed our heads, and Ray said grace beneath John’s framed portrait of Princess Diana.

  The brothers may have been raiders. They may have been vagabonds. They may have been naughty. But they were not living alone on Bad Boss by choice. John’s parents lived in Honiara and so had he, before the tension.

  The problem, he said, was the color of his skin. John was tall and lanky, like his great-grandfather, one of the lagoon’s first white traders. But John’s skin wasn’t white or black or even a Guadalcanal shade of peat brown. So the Guadalcanal militants wouldn’t believe John shared their blood. They chased him and beat him. Then, when the Malaita Eagles took their revenge in Honiara, John got a second round of beatings. That’s why he was hiding out on Bad Boss. Not because his father had caught him hanging out with Bougainvillean exiles. Not because he was in hot water for hiring a car and helping his friends in the Bougainville Revolutionary Army round up a trunkful of machine guns. No, said John, he was a refugee. It had been three years since he had sat in a car or tasted chocolate.

  We passed days languidly on the lagoon. We paddled through the estuary of the Choe River looking for crocodiles, but there were none to see. We took John’s boat out through a gap in the barrier islands to spear minnows for lunch. We climbed among the limestone cliffs on the barrier islands. The rock was an amalgam of petrified coral and giant clamshell, and impossible to walk on with bare feet. We found the first skull under a cracked slab. It was surrounded by fractured bones, doughnut-sized rings of carved rock and
bits of shattered clamshell jewelry. I picked up the skull. It was warm. A spider skittered along its jaw. Startled, I let the skull slip from my hands. It struck the ground and lost a tooth.

  “No problem,” John said. “This is not one of my grandfathers. This is someone my grandfathers killed, probably some weak fala from Roviana.”

  Back on Bad Boss, John led me to three skulls tucked into a shady ravine behind his house. He picked up one and lovingly rubbed the mildew from its forehead. Its eye sockets were cracked and imploring. This, said John, was one of his great-grandmother’s people. Those folks were tough, but apparently not tough enough. They had migrated west to Bad Boss to escape the marauding tribes of Roviana Lagoon. Then they were chased away again.

  “So you come from a long line of refugees,” I teased John over dinner.

  He assured me that his ancestors had killed many people. They had raided villages from Roviana all the way to Isabel. And besides, the Tagitaki were no ordinary enemies. They were giants who wielded clubs so heavy it took six ordinary men to lift them. That’s why the ancestors fled. The Tagitaki had once lived on the mountain ridge across the lagoon from Mbarejo. That ridge was tabu now, said John.

  “Because of the ghosts of the Tagitaki?”

  “Ha! Of course not.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because of the Nonotongere.”

  I had heard that name before.

  Once upon a time, long before men hunted for heads, said John, a giant serpent had prowled the lagoons. The snake was thicker than a sow and as long as the airstrip at Seghe. One day, the snake fought with a giant lizard. It didn’t go well for the snake. The lizard ripped it to pieces. Parts of the snake’s body now littered the foothills of New Georgia, but its head lay on the crest of the ridge where the giant headhunters once lived. That was the Nonotongere. It had retained all the giant snake’s mana. If you disturbed the snake head, shouted at it, or even so much as blew on it, the devil inside it would answer you with a meteorological hissy fit. It would bring wind, rain, and thunder.