The Shark God

by Charles Montgomery

  When I returned to the port the next morning, the voice of the Temotu’s captain was echoing off the warehouse walls. “If you don’t come on time, wantoks, how can we leave on time? I’m serious now! We’re going home! Brothers and sisters, we’re going home!”

  I climbed aboard. The ship’s pastor read a prayer, finishing it with an imploring, “Lord God, olgeta laef blong mifala stap insaed long hand blong yu.”

  God, our lives are in your hands. The tone of the prayer didn’t do much to inspire confidence in the ship itself.

  The lines were loosened and tossed aboard. The engine rumbled. I went to check on my berth. I had fought with the ship’s agent until he had agreed to assign me a first-class berth. This, I now discovered, gave me the right to occupy a painted rectangle of floor, roughly the size of my inflatable air mattress, in a cabin with sixty other people. I had left a blanket on my square to mark it. Now the blanket was buried under a heap of bagged rice, Chinese noodles, grass mats, and plastic buckets.

  I squeezed between two families: on one side, a mountainous Polynesian matriarch whose children crawled over her breasts like ants on their queen, and on the other, a prematurely seasick woman with a gaggle of teens who took turns wiping the drool from her chin.

  Brother Clement appeared, and I remembered his vow of poverty. I invited him to my painted square for a picnic of crackers and peanut butter. He fell asleep on my inflatable mattress and stayed there for a day. I curled up on the linoleum with the Polynesians.

  I realize I have complained about my ocean passages, and I would like to tell you that this one was different, that I sat with my legs dangling over the bow, experiencing the mariner’s camaraderie and the exhilaration of the sea. But that’s not how it was at all. My passages were getting exponentially miserable.

  We were welcomed by the bruised folds of an approaching storm shortly after leaving the shelter of the strait that separates Guadalcanal and Malaita. As usual, the head overflowed. As usual, the wind picked up. As usual, the waves grew beneath us, lost their form, and became a mishmash of monstrous lumps, like giants writhing under a blanket.

  The Eastern Trader turned back at Santa Ana, last of the islets that trailed from the eastern tip of Makira. For the first time on my journey, there were no islands left on the horizon. The optimism of our departure evaporated. The cargo mountains collapsed, and the babies began to howl. The cabin was transformed into an infernal day care of screaming tots, glassy eyes, swollen breasts, and bile.

  Occasionally the Temotu corkscrewed, sending cargo and babies and vomit buckets tumbling across the cabin and unleashing a chorus of “O, Jisas Krais! O, Jisas Krais!” The cries sounded like accusations, as though God were letting us down horribly. “Tasiu!” people shouted after one nasty lurch, as though Brother Clement could calm the tempest. But he snored through the night and into the morning, oblivious, on my mattress.

  We crashed through another afternoon and evening. I could not sleep. Near midnight, I climbed to the top deck to watch the ship’s dogsbody wrestle bucket after bucket of trash over the rails. “We must not carry this mess with us to paradise,” he shouted, “so we must feed the sea, my friend. Ha ha! The sea will consume it!”

  I watched the garbage disappear into the night. The storm had exhausted itself. A light appeared on the horizon just off the bow, a faint crimson glow. It grew and became not a fire but a damp reflection of fire, like a red spotlight projected up onto the belly of the clouds. My heart raced at the sight. The light could only be Tinakula, the volcano around which the Santa Cruz Islands were scattered like the remnants of an ancient eruption. Tinakula! The volcano had inhabited my dreams for years.

  Tinakula has guided explorers and missionaries to their deaths for nearly half a millennium. Like poor Alvaro de Mendaña, who discovered, named, and sweated to death in the poorly named Graciosa Bay in 1595. Or the mysterious comte de la Pérouse, the French navigator who had ably explored much of the North and South Pacific, but who was never seen again by Europeans after he left Australia’s Botany Bay in 1788. Nearly forty years later, relics from la Pérouse’s two ships were discovered on Vanikoro, a day’s sail southeast of Tinakula. Islanders reported that their ancestors had slaughtered most of la Pérouse’s crew and retired their skulls to a local spirit house.

  Then came the missionary martyrs. First to die were Nobbs and Young, Patteson’s beloved protégés. But a decade later, the British commodore James Goodenough, protector of the Melanesian Mission, sailed past Tinakula and waded ashore at Carlisle Bay on Santa Cruz. He walked from one village to another, leading to much confusion among the warring natives as to whose side he was on. The locals attacked, and Goodenough recognized his diplomatic blunder. He ordered his men not to bomb or burn the village, then he died from his wounds.

  “To step ashore at Santa Cruz! To sleep among people so famed for outrages committed in moments of excitement! The very thought was inspiring,” gushed my great-grandfather after landing on the island in 1892. I felt the same way as the glow of Tinakula drifted toward the stern of the Temotu. We were turning, following the great shadow that had grown from the sea to starboard. This was Nendo, Mendaña’s Santa Cruz. The calm water that soon steadied the ship was Graciosa Bay, where the Spaniard’s adventures ended. We steered toward a constellation of quivering flashlights. A hundred people waited for us on a rubbly pier.

  Nobody wanted to unload cargo in the rain, so we stayed in Graciosa Bay for two nights. I slept at the village rest house. So did the captain and crew of the Temotu, because there was a gas stove at the rest house, and a woman who was a cousin of a crew member and could therefore be ordered to cook.

  I ate with the ship’s crew. We found warm beer. The crew drank to get drunk. I drank to stop the world from swaying. It felt like we were still at sea.

  “You go to Nukapu? I’m half-Nukapu!” said a thin man with an enormous, stretched mouth. He might have been the ship’s engineer. “And I can tell you I am a proud man. It was my people, my blood, who killed Bishop Patteson.”

  “Then perhaps you should be ashamed.”

  “Aha! Wrong. You know, the bishop predicted that he would die on one of our islands. And he said he would die for us. My people helped him achieve his destiny. We made him a martyr.”

  “Stronger in death…,” I said.

  “Yes, much stronger in death!”

  “Just like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I said.

  “Yes! Just like…hao?”

  I told the crew the great tale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi master from Star Wars. I liked the film because it was unambiguous. Kenobi was the wise man of the story and the keeper of sacred knowledge, like Patteson. I told the crew how Kenobi had confronted Darth Vader, the personification of darkness, in a duel. Kenobi did not win by slaying his opponent. No. He warned the Dark Lord: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” and then he raised his light-saber above his head and allowed Vader to cut him in half. But there was no blood. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s body simply disappeared. The martyr’s spirit lived on to inspire and guide the forces of goodness. There was also the part about the Force, which I explained was something like mana.

  “Oh, yes, our story is like that exactly,” said the engineer. “Patteson is more powerful now than ever. You know what we call the spot where he was killed? We call it ‘the Clinic.’ Because if you are sick, you just go to the bishop’s cross and pray, and you will be healed. Ah! And when cyclone Namu hit in 1986, the only place that wasn’t drowned on Nukapu was the Clinic. Everyone gathered there and was protected from the waves.”

  The residents of Nukapu are now so proud of their place in history they stage a feast on each September 20, the anniversary of the bishop’s murder. The next party would take place in four days. If I could reach the Reefs and find a canoe, I could get to Nukapu in time for the martyr’s anniversary, suggested the engineer.

  “And what do you know of Mr. Forrest,” I asked. I knew his answer would be
nothing, and it was.

  I cannot let this story continue without Actaeon E. C. Forrest, the fly in this mythological ointment. It was Forrest who revealed that Patteson’s murder may not have been a message to Queen Victoria to stop the blackbirding. It was Forrest who reported that the murder was nothing more than an overreaction to an episcopal faux pas. And according to The Light of Melanesia, it was Forrest, not Patteson, who saved Nukapu. But his story and his name have now been crumpled up and tossed into the dustbin of mission history.

  I must tell you the tale of a misfit whose life did not match the missionary template. Actaeon Forrest was a man of faith and a lay missionary who came to the Santa Cruz Group sixteen years after Patteson’s death. My great-grandfather was in awe of him. He described how Forrest had heroically survived ambushes and assassination attempts. How Forrest had repeatedly dashed out between two parties of warring natives, determined to halt the whistling arrows and make peace. How Forrest had braved the seas by canoe to initiate the pacification of the Reef Islands, despite having once been capsized and stalked by a giant horned sea monster. How Forrest had survived by pluck and wit, built a school on Santa Cruz, and finally begun to win over the hotheaded natives. “This gallant man,” wrote Henry, “single-handed, is fighting our battles here in perils among waters, in perils among arrows, in perils among fever, and in loneliness.” It was Forrest alone who had begun the Christian conquest of Santa Cruz.

  A photo in The Light of Melanesia shows Forrest standing with a group of Cruzian men. The men are naked except for what look like woven handbags hanging in front of their genitals and, of course, their spectacular shell jewelry: wide hoops through their ears, moonlike discs strung from their necks. The men are stern and muscular. Forrest is bookish and shy among them in his white, three-quarter-length trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He looks like a schoolboy hoping desperately to be chosen for the cricket team.

  Forrest’s name was not wiped from The Light of Melanesia simply because my great-grandfather published it before his downfall. The rest of Forrest’s story has survived only in bits and pieces. I found scraps of it at Lambeth Palace, in the private correspondence of colonial administrators and church leaders. In 1896 the third bishop of Melanesia alerted the archbishop of Canterbury that Forrest and another teacher had fallen into very great sin. “They were both found guilty of indecency with the native boys,” wrote the bishop, who elsewhere lamented that Forrest had shown a damning lack of remorse: “He says that [the natives] do not think much of his offence; if so, his work during the 9 years he has been here has been worth nothing.” Charles Woodford, the resident commissioner of the Solomon Islands, wrote that tales of Forrest’s “sodomy” were a matter of common report among steamship crews.

  Forrest was dismissed from the mission, but he refused to leave Santa Cruz and began a trading business. The missionary conqueror of Santa Cruz soon became the mission’s greatest foe. Woodford wrote in 1899 that Forrest, who had more influence among the natives of Santa Cruz than any other living white man, had bragged about reducing the number of mission schools in Santa Cruz from six to one.

  The bishop of Melanesia was concerned about a scandal. He wanted Forrest out of his diocese. But Forrest had become so popular among the islanders it took Woodford five years to convince anyone to testify against him. Finally, Woodford had a couple of men from Ulawa sign depositions accusing Forrest of cajoling them into bed some years previously. Woodford edited the depositions, then he declared Forrest “dangerous to peace and good order” and signed a warrant for his arrest.

  Forrest was arrested by a passing sea captain, but he escaped from custody immediately upon arrival in Sydney. Using his cutter, Kia, he established a trading base in the Torres Islands, south of Santa Cruz—just beyond Woodford’s jurisdiction. Forrest settled down and adopted a young man, whom the natives referred to, apparently without judgment, as his “wife.” He lived in relative peace for nearly a decade. But this was the Victorian era. Once the albatross of unspeakable sexuality had been slung around Forrest’s neck, he was doomed. It did not help that he warned the natives on his island not to be lured aboard labor-recruiting vessels. When the recruiters complained to the government about this, they never failed to point out that Forrest’s wife was clearly no woman.

  Forrest had one friend left in the mission, the Reverend W. J. Durrad, who also lived in the Torres Group. When one of Durrad’s servants complained that Forrest had sought his cooperation in an “act of indecency,” Durrad informed Forrest that he intended to report the matter. It was now certain that if Forrest did not take drastic action, he would spend years behind bars. He wrote an apology for having troubled the New Hebrides resident commissioner. He left instructions for his debts to be paid through the sale of his boat. He left gifts for his crew. He left his land and personal effects to his “adopted son,” Barnabas Ditwia of Loh. And then he drank poison. The investigations into Forrest’s character and his involvement with the Melanesian Mission were suspended, and he began to sink into the murk of history.

  There was no place for Forrest in the Nukapu myth because evangelical myth offers no room for nuance or sex. In order for the Nukapu story to sanctify the mission and give Melanesian Christians their martyr archetype, it needed to remain immaculate, asexual, and incomplete.

  Sex: according to one English historian, it was very much a driving force behind empire-building, particularly in the repressive Victorian era. In the book Empire and Sexuality, which I carried to Santa Cruz in my knapsack, Ronald Hyam argued that imperial expansion was as much a matter of copulation and concubinage as it was Christianity and commerce. He pointed out that while Victorians exported their prudish sexual mores around the world (banning polygamy in Melanesia, for example), those who carried the torch of empire were frequently refugees from psychosexual tyranny at home.

  Melanesia was fraught with temptation, which the missionaries were not always able to resist. So it was that Charles Brooke was dismissed for some unnamed sexual impropriety just three years after he watched Patteson’s paddle toward death. Arthur Brittain and C. D. G. Browne were sacked for their lack of self-control in the 1890s. And adolescent sex was “rampant” at the mission school on Norfolk Island: thirteen Melanesian recruits were suspended for sexual misbehavior in 1899 alone.

  Forrest had first defended himself by saying the islanders were not offended by his conduct. That was probably true. Early anthropologists reported accounts of homosexual behavior all across Melanesia, notably on Malaita, and on Malekula in the New Hebrides, though the church soon rendered it tabu.

  I can’t help being drawn to Forrest, whom I have decided to remember through the fog of history not as a sinner but as an irrepressible gay adventurer. Perhaps I am drawn to him for the tenacity with which he survived after being abandoned by his colleagues and peers—everyone who shared his skin color. More likely it is because in all my months among the islands, through all those long nights, amid the sad whoosh of wind and waves, among men who would stand close, grasp my hand in their own strong hands for hours, and gaze into my eyes without reservation or intent, I knew how Forrest must have felt. That loneliness. That longing. I could understand how Forrest, who had tried to reach for the infinite, was yet pulled by the desire for something closer, something like, but yet unlike, himself. It was the wrong desire for his times. It was even more wrong now that Melanesia had been transformed into a twentieth-century holdout of Victorian sexual mores. But still it was there, and I felt it acutely. The loneliness that wanted more than a firm handshake. The longing that did not seem to fit into any Christian myth and which was monstrous in the eyes of Melanesians. So the ghost of Forrest traveled with me in Santa Cruz, as present as Patteson and Codrington and my great-grandfather. But I was careful to keep my own romantic longings secret, and I did not press Forrest’s case among the crew of the Temotu.

  We pulled out of Graciosa Bay at dawn. Everything had changed. The ship was nearly empty. The cargo was gone. So was
Brother Clement, and so were all the vomiters. We followed the coast of Nendo, then turned north at a bearing nearly parallel to the swell, which had found its shape again.

  I was standing by the rail on the ship’s bow when John, the ship’s dogsbody and garbage-dumper, gripped my arm, pointed north, and squealed. “Look, Charlie!” he panted. “It’s paradise, Charlie! Don’t you see it?”

  There was nothing to see but a frothy white line on the horizon. It looked like the first hint you get of the Rocky Mountains when driving west across the prairies: a ragged fringe of glaring peaks and cumulonimbus clouds. I peered and peered and saw only that mirage of snow. But by afternoon a faint, dashed line had begun to appear amid the glare. It thickened into tufts of palm. The snow became surf. A wall of foam, a thousand white bouquets of spray, exploded along a reef that stretched as far west as I could see.

  John began to leap up and down like a child. A dozen other men climbed to the bow, and they, too, were all leaping and jigging on the shifting deck. They were Reef Islanders, and they were coming home.

  The Reefs were as much shoal as they were island. It was as though a vast jigsaw puzzle of coral had been shaken, and a few pieces had shifted and slid atop the rest. Some, with their palms and breadfruit and papaya trees, resembled flower baskets perched on black stone pedestals. The rest were like giant clumps of moss. None was higher than the mist that billowed from the breaking surf.

  The sun fell. The palms were seared gold. The lagoon and the sky melted into shades of scarlet. John pulled a lever, and the anchor rattled into the sea. Canoes came from every direction, like iron filings toward a magnet. I caught one to Pigeon Island, last of the old copra trading posts. The traders kept a room for travelers decorated with matching sheets and drapes. Avocado, 1969. They had a generator, which fueled Mozart’s Twenty-ninth Symphony in A.