The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  I felt strangely unfaithful and wicked for most of the walk, but young and reckless as well, almost like a teenager. My brain was fizzing with excitement. Sorry, Don.

  I picked up the pace on my way back. I was hurrying along the shore to grab up the bone to take home. I reached the spot I’d marked with the driftwood branch but the marker was gone. The tide was still fairly low but obviously a contrary set of waves had swept over the patch of sand, scooped it clean of debris, left it smooth and bare as a tabletop, swamped it so recently that air bubbles were still popping on its surface.

  That’s not unusual, of course. Waves and tides and winds seem irregular forces of nature, erratic in their evenness, but there’s always a proper reason for their existence, like Cyclone Sharon being caused by rapidly warming seas.

  I understand all that. I’m an old North Coast girl. I see this every day. More than anyone, I understand the way Dr Pacific does things. So I waded into the sea, into that shallow green dip between the shore break and the shore itself, and the bone was lying on the seabed, rolling back and forth in the tide. Quite easy to find, being so pale.

  In the late afternoon the descendants of the cannibals’ victim lined up warily side-by-side outside the church in the island’s village square. Flowers and balloons decorated the square and three old women stood and moaned to music on the back of a truck. The balloons tossed and twisted in gusts from the ocean and palms lashed back and forth. Facing each of the descendants, staring deeply into their eyes, stood a descendant of someone who’d eaten their ancestor.

  Now a helicopter rose above the headland and clattered over the square, showering the crowd with sand and setting the village dogs cringing and barking, before disappearing into the hinterland. A loudspeaker crackled, the music and keening stopped and a deep male voice made an announcement in Pijin that the visitors didn’t understand. In the silence that followed they became aware of the surf breaking against the outer reef, the wind rattling the palms and the low sunrays filtering across the square.

  To identify their unique status, the victim’s successors and their partners had been given special island clothes to wear: outsized red and green flowered shirts and dresses, all of the same material, made by the village women, obviously to local measurements for they hung loosely on the visitors and flapped in the breeze. The cannibals’ male heirs, meanwhile, wore only woven palm loincloths and their heads and their bodies were painted to resemble skeletons.

  Drumming started up suddenly in the background and the skeleton-men began panting in unison and stamping their feet to the beat. The skull-mouth of the cannibal descendant in front of Damian Horne was red from chewing betel nut and the man loomed so close that Damian felt the pungent heat of his breath on his face.

  Averting his head from the man’s heavy exhalations, Damian attempted a calming smile and sympathetic wink at Lisa, his flustered wife, who was simultaneously trying to subdue her billowing dress while avoiding the panting breath of an even larger skeleton-man.

  Damian’s wink was intended to remind Lisa of their honoured status here on this remote atoll in the central Pacific where the cultures of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia lapped over the coral reefs and flowed into each other. It was meant to convey things like Relax, Leez. I know this seems crazy, but let’s appreciate the uniqueness of our bizarre situation, a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We’re their guests. Just go with it.

  Flecks of red juice flew from the chin of Damian’s islander attendant. Over the drumming, the old women started keening again. Damian’s wink hadn’t calmed Lisa. An indoor-looking woman, his wife appeared too frail and urban against this tropical-island decor. From the moment the Reef Explorer had sailed away and left them there, she’d turned pale. Her whole aspect clashed and he hoped she wasn’t about to faint.

  *

  In Sydney, Damian worked in IT and Lisa edited Bibelot, a smart interior-design magazine. Their journey to the island of Okina, where Damian’s great-great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Isaac Horne, an English Methodist missionary, had been killed and eaten in 1867, had begun eighteen months before with a flurry of emails from a distant cousin, Dr Jennifer Horne-Smith in Leeds. These were followed by a string of back-and-forth correspondence with other Isaac Horne descendants, including Bradley Horne in San Francisco, Kevin Horne in Auckland, Catherine Underhill in Melbourne and Julie Truscott in Adelaide.

  ‘The islanders of Okina want to hold a special 150th-anniversary ceremony to make amends to the Horne descendants,’ declared Dr Horne-Smith’s initial message. ‘I’ve been asked for the family’s reaction. A sensitive matter, as you can imagine. What do you think? I must say I strongly support it myself.’

  Her academic interest in traditional Pacific Island carvings, weapons and domestic implements had led to Jennifer, an associate professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leeds, meeting George Bogenvanu, Okina’s representative in the Pacific Islands Forum, when he accompanied a collection of Okinan artefacts to the Pacifica Exhibition at the British Museum eighteen months before.

  Over drinks at the exhibition’s opening party, an animated Jennifer soon let George Bogenvanu know that her cultural appreciation of the island of Okina extended beyond battle clubs, kava bowls and penis gourds. After two wines it was somehow thrilling to approach him and announce, a little hectically, ‘Your ancestor ate my ancestor.’

  She’d thought he might frown or grin uncomfortably but George Bogenvanu, a suave man in his mid-fifties, with the height and bulk of a former international rugby front-rower for Fiji, replied, ‘Yes, you’re right. I want to talk to you about it.’

  Over dinner and more drinks afterwards they discussed Okina in some depth. And especially their rarest of ancestral links: the manner and immediate aftermath of Isaac Horne’s death.

  As she solemnly told George Bogenvanu, ‘The events of that day on Okina are the reason I do what I do.’

  ‘I understand,’ he said, his manner as grave as hers, and presently she found herself studying his mouth, considering the square white teeth, how similar each big tooth was to the one next to it, and the vigorous movement of his jaws as he bit into his beef Wellington. A muscle twitched below his ear as he chewed. When he downed his shiraz, his neck swelled as he swallowed.

  ‘How long are you in England?’ she asked. Another week, as it turned out. She imagined his teeth biting into her living flesh. ‘Let me show you around,’ she said.

  The correspondence that ensued from Jennifer to the various Horne cousins had stressed the sacred nature of the practice of cannibalism.

  ‘What a pity there isn’t another word for it,’ she wrote. ‘One with less emotional freight. Yes, we could say “anthropophagy”, and cannibals could be termed “anthropophagites” or even “anthropophaginians”. But these unwieldy terms (such “mouthfuls”, more flippant people might joke!) don’t stand a chance against the word in common usage, that much-relished name for people who ate people: Cannibals!’

  As her emails emphasised, ‘Contrary to cannibals in popular fiction and the occasional modern man-eating psychopath, Pacific Island cannibals didn’t think Missionaries are delicious. Let’s have this one for dinner. It was part of their traditional culture, to absorb the power of an enemy.’

  Clearly, she went on, their ancestor Isaac, who’d voyaged around the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century establishing Methodism outposts and training local converts, was eaten because as a Christian churchman he represented to the Okinans the threat of European civilisation.

  Damian and Lisa had met Jennifer only once before, at a family wedding in north London, and remembered her as a wiry extrovert with reckless scarlet hair and a sort of ethnic-Victorian dress style, a mixture of tinkling bracelets and fingerless net gloves. Today, on the island of Okina, dwarfed by another huge islander and, like Lisa, swimming inside a capacious muu-muu, her self-assurance looked only slightly dented. The way she was gazing gaily about her, and humming to the be
at of all the drumming and panting, gave the impression she was perfectly in tune with the proceedings.

  Her sandalled feet and ankle bracelets now joined the ritual stamping, and as her fixed smile and jangling jewellery declared This is all part of the Big Picture, Damian recalled her emailed responses to the descendants’ curiosity and their understandably ignorant questions.

  ‘In any society or culture, in whatever period of history, everything we humans do rests on the assumptions we share with our family, friends, neighbours and workmates,’ she’d replied.

  ‘Everything social is open to question, including solidly held beliefs and ideas about karma, the self in society, and nature and culture. Only by relating uncritically to the different versions of the world can we be fully human.’

  ‘I’m not clear on this,’ Lisa had wondered. ‘Is she lecturing us that cannibalism is okay in some circumstances? That if we’re against killing people and eating them we aren’t fully human?’

  ‘Grandpa Isaac might beg to differ,’ Damian had said. ‘Frankly, I thought this was one case when we weren’t the bad guys.’

  In her emails Jennifer had gone on to mention the valuable work her department did to enlighten the First World on the human condition – cannibals and all. ‘Through our interest in “exotic” places, social and cultural anthropology considers people, all of us, as social beings.’

  She went on, more specifically, ‘Reconciliation is very important to the Okinan ethos. But “making amends” isn’t the whole point. “Saying sorry” is part of it, but reconciliation ceremonies require something from each side.’

  George Bogenvanu had stressed this to her in London. ‘There has to be an element of exchange,’ he’d said several times.

  Exchange? ‘So they entertain us in a big way, say sorry for eating him, and then want something from us in return? Some sort of swap?’ Damian said. ‘Maybe we should remind them that our team is already one member down.’

  Not worth getting upset about, though. Isaac’s fate was macabre and tragic, but it had made for an extraordinary family legend, not to mention unbeatable dinner-party conversation. Black humour in spades. Of course cannibal jokes were bad form these days. Cannibals were the stuff of old cartoons and comic strips. Chubby cannibals wearing chefs’ hats and bones in their noses. Pith-helmeted explorers simmering in big cooking pots.

  Everyone drew a polite veil over bloodthirsty bygone practices. Keep shtum about headhunters. Don’t mention Michael Rockefeller’s mysterious disappearance. But it was the Okinans themselves who’d brought up their old fierce habit and suggested the reconciliation ceremony. Maybe he and Lisa could combine the event with a Pacific Islands vacation.

  He’d looked up everything Okinan online. Interesting stuff: like the inbreeding and recessive gene that meant twenty per cent of the population was completely colourblind and only saw things dimly in black and white. And the island custom of burying their dead very deep because of the orange land crabs.

  ‘I’m also thinking style ideas for Bibelot,’ he told Lisa. ‘Atoll-inspired designs. I’m seeing summery basics incorporating jungle ridges of black volcanic rock entwined with snowy coral sands and swathed in emerald rainforest.’

  She rolled her eyes. He liked to tease her with this gibberish. A worn-out joke after twelve years.

  ‘I’m seeing whimsical sea-change prints of happy islanders chowing down on clergymen’s thighs.’

  ‘Don’t mock.’ But as nothing more was heard from Jennifer, the reconciliation suggestion gradually slipped away, only recalled when an article on cannibalism leapt out at Damian from The Guardian several months later.

  Not an everyday news topic. How many calories would you get from consuming a human body? So pondered Dr Malcolm Woolhouse, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney. About 118,000 calories, he’d estimated.

  With the cooperation of the science and medicine faculties and the university’s Institute of Nutrition and Dianetics (and five average-sized adult male cadavers), his ‘morbid curiosity’, as Dr Woolhouse put it, had led him to publish, in the archaeological journal Remains, a calorie-counting guide for cannibals.

  In the guide, reprinted in The Guardian, Dr Woolhouse, whose speciality was the behaviour of ancient humans, said these hominids might have practised cannibalism for many cultural motives. Or was it for nutritional reasons?

  ‘So how nutritious are we?’ he wondered.

  To test whether early humans ate people for survival, Dr Woolhouse had investigated whether compared to other mammals they hunted, such as deer, bears and mammoths, human meat offered a nourishing meal.

  While admitting his five-man sample was small (and provided no insights into the nutritional value of women or children), he insisted his paper’s methods and calculations were valid.

  ‘Taking into account lean tissue, fat and carbohydrates, we calculated the calorific value of the human body in the same way as in determining the energy value of beef, lamb or pork.’

  In order of nutritional value, they had found male thighs and buttocks gave a beefy 15,500 calories, while the upper arms provided around 5450. The calves supplied about 6490 calories and the liver, 2570. The forearms and lungs each provided 1660. The kidneys together totalled 380 calories. The heart, barely a full single meal, came in at about 500.

  Altogether, the meat on one adult male body would provide a tribe of, say, twelve people with only enough calories to survive for one day, ‘about the same as a small seal or shark’. Whereas a Paleolithic bison would have offered them 600,000 calories, enough for ten days of food. And if they killed a mammoth, its 3.5 million calories would give them enough sustenance for two months.

  ‘For our food value,’ he concluded, ‘we really aren’t worth eating.’

  The Reverend Isaac had been a less than nutritious fellow, Damian imagined. The two portraits of him in existence showed an austere-looking gent with wild eyebrows and mutton-chop whiskers. In defiance of the tropics, his several layers of English suiting (Isaac would have taken a lot of unwrapping before cooking) covered what looked like an angular, God-fearing body.

  A grisly and gristly thought. More than ever, Damian found it difficult to take any of this seriously. But of course he was still curious. The 150th anniversary of Isaac Horne’s death did mark the perfect time for a ceremony, and it would be the temperate season in Okina.

  He foresaw gentle trade winds and azure seas and drinks under the palms. A holiday with an interesting edge. A Robinson Crusoe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin sort of vacation.

  *

  Over the loudspeaker a voice gave an order in Pijin and the drumming and stamping stopped. Shadows were lengthening across the square and in the echoing silence each cannibal descendant now knelt before his assigned visitor, grasped his or her hands, groaned plaintively, roared into the sky, and burst into tears.

  After several minutes of the islanders’ wailing, while the embarrassed and anxious Horne descendants, some moved to tears themselves, patted the Okinans’ heaving shoulders and attempted to soothe their distress, the loudspeaker barked another instruction. The islanders leapt to their feet, shook their heads to clear them, and recommenced the rhythmic puffing and stamping.

  Now the loudspeaker blared again and the skeleton-men all sprinted aggressively towards the beach, growling theatrically and shouting war cries, and grabbing up clubs and battleaxes on their way.

  All agape, the Hornes watched their wild progress across the sand. And there was more to see in the ocean. From around the headland waded another islander. Snappy waves and spindrift buffeted his makeshift nineteenth-century clothing. This fellow had a white painted face and stuck-on whiskers and as he splashed ashore he held aloft a big cardboard book emblazoned BIBLE.

  Dashing into the shallows, a dozen armed and howling skeleton-men encircled him. Then, before the missionary’s stunned great-great-great-grandchildren, amid much splashing and bloodcurdling yells, there followed a vigorous reenactment of the sl
aughter of the Reverend Isaac Horne.

  *

  As the skeleton-men carried the make-believe slaughtered Methodist ashore – soaked, cross and decidedly roughed up – the village chief, Tomasi Tetuani, the voice on the loudspeaker, appeared in the church doorway.

  The crowd in the square parted before him. In traditional chieftain’s grass skirt, head bowed and wiping away tears, the old man shuffled along the line of Hornes, handing each one a sperm whale’s tooth, and kissing him or her on both cheeks. To each person he repeated, ‘Isaac Horne died in this place because of us and we need to confess our past activities. I am the great-great-grandson of the chief who ordered his killing. It’s time for repentance and to clear our consciences.’

  Tendrils of smoke began drifting into the square at this point and the village dogs slunk towards the smell and sizzle of roasting meat. The Horne descendants frowned, a few chuckled uncertainly and nudged each other, and Lisa said, ‘I hope they’re not acting out the next part.’

  ‘Relax, madam,’ said the old chief. ‘This is the twenty-first century.’ He gestured towards the small stone church. ‘We’re Christians. Not Methodists like the Reverend Isaac, but Presbyterians, so near enough. In olden times many people were killed and eaten but we in this generation don’t like it at all.’

  And then a Land Rover pulled up in the square. Barefoot and fleshily bare-chested, though perfectly composed in his VIP grass skirt, George Bogenvanu emerged, embraced the chief, snatched up a microphone, and without further ado or introduction addressed the throng.

  ‘What happened on this small island on that momentous day in 1867 was a clash of civilisations,’ he declared, his rich voice filling the square. ‘The old island gods and the battle club still ruled. Those who killed and consumed the Reverend Horne were not bad or vicious people. Our ancestors were simply honourable warriors who believed they were defending their home against threats to its established ways.’