The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Please Paul I need a new watch, because the old one is no more in use. My Mrs needs a wrist watch. Also when you are shopping at Port Moresby when coming, please could you buy us about 3 bolts with flowers on. Nothing much to say, so better pen off from here. May God richly bless you.

  And then his scribbled indecipherable signature, an English name rendered in a twitchy Trobriand hand.

  But that bloody battle was not the whole story. I kept remembering my happy days and nights on these islands, and they became emblematic of the Pacific. It was in the Trobriands that I had realized that the Pacific was a universe, not a simple ocean.

  I especially recalled how one day sailing back to an island we were delayed, and night fell. There were stars everywhere, above us, and reflected in the sea along with the sparkle of phosphorescence streaming from the bow wave. When I poked an oar in the ocean and stirred it, the sea glittered with twinkling sea-life. We sped onward. There were no lights on shore. It was as though we were in an old rickety rocket ship.

  It was an image that afterwards often came to me when I was traveling in the Pacific, that this ocean was as vast as outer space, and being on this boat was like shooting from one star to another, the archipelagoes like galaxies, and the islands like isolated stars in an empty immensity of watery darkness, and this sailing was like going slowly from star to star, in vitreous night.

  8

  The Solomons: Down and Dirty in Guadalcanal

  The great canoe route of migration, which was my itinerary, cut through the mountainous islands and coral atolls of Milne Bay and headed east to the Solomons. I wished to follow this old oceanic thoroughfare. The nearest Solomon islands to me were just off the eastern tip of New Guinea – the so-called North Solomons, which were, confusingly, a province of Papua New Guinea. I had the idea of paddling there, and then onward to the vast archipelago – 992 islands and atolls – that is the Republic of the Solomons, named by a fanciful Spaniard, four hundred years ago, after King Solomon.*

  Before I was able to do this, I met Takaku, an islander, who confirmed the rumor that the North Solomons had seceded from New Guinea and that his fellow islanders, under siege, had taken up arms. These guerrilla fighters called themselves “Rambos,” and generally modeled themselves and their hit-and-run killings after the ugly bulgy little palooka they had seen in videos.

  Takaku frightened me. It was not just his great size but his anger, and his threatening T-shirt depicting a Solomon Islander Rambo celebrating his freedom, rather prematurely I felt, dancing wildly with a machine-gun.

  “Dim-dims say I look like Idi Amin,” Takaku said.

  I was another dim-dim who agreed. He had two blazing bloodshot eyes in a rich rubbery face of astonishing blackness. His t eth were sharp, his gums were the color of tar. His belly was vast, and his enormous feet had crushed the life out of his rubber sandals. He was the sort of man teasing Trobrianders (who thought of themselves as white) called Tabwaubwau – ”Blackie.”

  Takaku said he believed that the New Guinean province of North Solomons, its rich copper deposits exploited by foreign interests, ought to be a sovereign state. Having recently declared themselves independent, the local people had killed some foreign-born miners to show they were serious, and driven the rest back to Australia. The armed rebellion was led by one Francis Ona, a nationalist, who was seen by the islanders as a visionary, and by the miners as an opportunist and a rabble-rouser. A nationalist is nearly always a pest.

  “Ona is a great environmentalist,” Takaku told me. “He wants to give the land back to the people. You see, our land was raped by the minority interests in Panguna.”

  Panguna was the capital of the main island, Bougainville.

  “You mean the local people don’t want money from the mining firms?”

  “No. If we show my people gold and silver they will say, ‘What is this? It is just metal. We don’t want it. We want taro and cassava. Why are they digging up our land and sending it overseas?’”

  This was not a time to remind him that most New Guineans, even Trobrianders, needed money occasionally to buy necessities (fish-hooks, rope, cloth, pots) and occasional luxuries. They had put me in my place by telling me so. For one thing they preferred the taste of Japanese canned mackerel to any fresh fish they caught themselves. But the territorial problem was, at the moment, a standoff. The North Solomon secession had become a military Issue.

  “Is it true that the government of New Guinea has blockaded Bougainville?”

  “Yes, but it will have no effect,” Takaku said. “People say to them, ‘You will have no energy or lights.’ But my people say, ‘Can you keep the sun from rising? Can you prevent the rain from falling?’ They give very poetic answers. It is a wonderful poetic language. It is not an Austronesian language.’’

  “Will this new republic have a new name?”

  “Francis Ona wanted to call it ‘The Sacred Land’ but so many languages are spoken there he thought it was better to call it Bougainville.”

  “Does it seem to you to be a sacred land?”

  “Yes. We don’t need radios and cars and money. My people say, ‘We will drive our cars until we run out of petrol and then we will push them into the sea to make homes for fishes. We have canoes, we have food, we will dance and sing.’ ”

  But Takaku had a complaint. He said that he had been trying to rally support for the new republic and had not made any progress.

  “I went to the New Zealand High Commissioner in Moresby and asked, ‘Why don’t you recognize us?’ He said, ‘If we do, we will be the laughing-stock of the world.’ But why don’t they?”

  I said, “Because they don’t need you. If you don’t reopen the copper or gold mines, and if you don’t buy anything from overseas, why would anyone want to recognize you? What’s in it for them?”

  “We want to protect our land,” he said.

  “But the more solitary you are the more vulnerable you will be.’’

  “It doesn’t matter. We will be weak. But we will have our own country. We don’t want foreigners. You see what happened in Fiji – the Indians tried to take over. But they will be kicked out.”

  We talked for a while more, and as I became firmer in my resolve not to go to this rebellious province of New Guinea – I had no wish to risk death among these quarreling islanders – Takaku told me of his Melanesian uniqueness and how proud he was not to be a Polynesian.

  The North Solomons were not happy islands. It did seem to me strange that this little group of islands belonged to New Guinea and not to the Republic of the Solomons, the hundreds of islands just south of it, with whom they shared both language and culture. But that was just another anomaly of history.

  Taking my collapsible boat, I bypassed Panguna, and flew with it to Honiara, the capital of the Solomons, the harbor city at the edge of the island of Guadalcanal. The name was Arabic, from Wadi el Ganar, which was the name of the home town of its first European discoverer, the Spanish explorer Mendaiia.

  A definite sense that the world is elsewhere, I wrote in my notebook in Honiara.

  My first impression was of a place so ramshackle, so poor, so scary, so unexpectedly filthy, that I began to understand the theory behind culture shock – something I had never truly experienced in its paralyzing and malignant form. The idea that this miserable-looking town could be regarded as a capital city seemed laughable.

  And I also wrote, Why would anyone come here?

  It was not only hideous, it was expensive. Nearly all the food in Honiara’s stores was imported – from Australia, New Zealand, Japan and America. It is often possible to gauge the prosperity of a place by looking at the central market. Honiara’s central market was pathetic – a few old women selling little piles of blackened bananas and wilted leaves and some tiny fly-blown fish.

  “If I were a king, the worst punishment I could inflict on my enemies would be to banish them to the Solomons,” Jack London wrote in his Pacific travel book, The Cruise of the Snark. He added
, “On second thoughts, king or no king, I don’t think I’d have the heart to do it.”

  The Solomons and Melanesia in general frightened and inspired London much more than the Klondike had done. The Solomons were synonymous with horror, in his view; the most savage islands in the Pacific.

  You consider that a moment, and then you want to see more.

  I walked farther, past the wrecked and vandalized buildings, and the gangs of teenagers in dirty T-shirts. Honiara had the decrepit and resentful look of Haiti,, or one of the plundered coastal towns of West Africa. There were a few hundred yards of wide paved road before it gave out and became a broken road, full of pot-holes. Even the trees were shabby. The ships tied up at the quayside, or moored in the harbor, were rusty hulks. Most of the shops were owned by Chinese and contained identical merchandise: cloth, soap, shoes, tin pots, lard, matches, and the Ma Ling range of canned goods – luncheon meat, chicken-feet, lychees in syrup, corned beef, goose meat in gravy. A Japanese store advertised its offer of big money for endangered species, and urged islanders to bring in turtle shells, giant clams, and rare birds. Before I had gone fifty yards an islander sidled up to me and showed me a necklace made of about three hundred teeth – they were dolphins’ teeth, pretty little pearly ones, and he urged me to count them, because such necklaces, representing the slaughter of perhaps twenty dolphins, were sold at so much a tooth.

  I walked to the harbor. A little wooden fishing-boat was grandly named PT-109 in homage to the boat that had been torpedoed under John Kennedy near an island not far from here. The wicked-looking spikes and rusty guts of Second World War wreckage – abandoned landing-craft and the hulks of larger vessels – poked up from the water, posing severe hazards. Garbage and raw sewage sloshed against the shore, and what I had first taken to be a beach toy was the gray corpse of a pig, swollen in death and bobbing on the dirty water and seemingly on the point of bursting. Watching that dead pig impassively were three fat Melanesian boys in torn shorts sharing a bag of Cheez Doodles.

  The Solomon Islanders in Honiara were among the scariest-looking people I had ever seen in my life – wild hair, huge feet, ripped and ragged clothes, tattoos on their foreheads, ornamental scars all over their faces, wearing broken sunglasses. They loped along in large groups, or else idled near the stores that played American rap music and looked for all the world like rappers themselves.

  That, as I say, was my first impression of Honiara. Yet as time passed and I shopped for expedition food and asked directions and bought maps and generally hung around, this impression softened. The town had been a village that the war had turned into a capital; it had only existed since the war, less than fifty years. Knowing this, I did not regard the place with less horror, but I came to realize that these wild-looking people were friendly and approachable.

  Gude apinun, mistah, yu stap gut?

  Yes, they spoke Pidgin here.

  Pies bilong yu we? Wanem nem bilong yu? Mi laikim America tumas. Yu savvy Michael jackson himpela singsing?

  As for crime, I decided to talk to someone who might know about it. This was Officer Sara of the Honiara Police. His Christian name was Marcelline – the name had been suggested to his parents by a French priest in Malaita, the Western Province. Malaita was a traditional place, Saro said. Some men still wore bones in their noses. Some villages attacked any outsider who came near. Some villages worshipped sharks – his did, as a matter of fact.

  “But Honiara is a safe place,” he said. “Guadalcanal is quite safe. Just petty crimes – mostly drinking and fighting. Some driving offenses. Maybe one murder in two or three years, caused by drinking. That’s about all.”

  We were drinking beer under the trees at the edge of Honiara’s stinking harbor, looking out upon the channel called The Slot, and Iron Bottom Sound, which got its name from the great number of ships – sixty-odd – that were sunk in the battle of Guadalcanal, a six-month ordeal that ended in an American victory in February 1943. It had been one of the crucial Pacific battles in the Second World War. The Japanese headquarters had been at Tulaghi, across Iron Bottom Sound, at the northern side of the Sealark Channel – The Slot. This battle was perhaps the turning point in the war, at the great cost of 30,000 lives.

  Marcelline Saro had discovered that people elsewhere knew the name Guadalcanal. He had been an amateur boxer and then became a coach on the Solomon Islands Olympic boxing team.

  “I went with them to the Los Angeles Olympics,” he said. “Iliked Disneyland the best. People asked me if I was from Africa. I said no, but when I told them I was from Guadalcanal everyone recognized the word. Because of the war.”

  “Did they know where Guadalcanal is?”

  “No,” he said, but he did not mind that. He had also gone to the Seoul Olympics. “What impressed you in Korea?”

  “I realized how lucky I am to speak English. They don’t speak it at all there.”

  His own children, he had five of them, learned English at school. He and his wife spoke their own language – she was from Malaita – and he also spoke Solomon Pidgin to his kids.

  When he had saved enough money he would take the whole family back to Malaita and have a farm. He disliked cities, he said. He could never have lived in Los Angeles or Seoul. If he had the chance of going to another country he would travel to the countryside and see how the farmers lived.

  “My island is traditional,” he said. “We have no electricity. It is dark at night.”

  And, he implied, the missionaries had lost their grip. At that point I asked him about traditions and he told me about the shark worship.

  “We respect the shark, that is why we worship it,” he said. “And that is why we never eat the shark. We believe it will save us and protect us – the shark has magic –”

  In the same spirit, the ancient Russians of the steppes venerated the fierce brown bear and called it medved – “honey wizard.”

  “Every year,” Saro said, “we have the sacrifice ceremony of the roasted piglet. No woman may come near the altar, ever. The shark-caller summons the shark – he stands at the edge of the sea and calls the fish. When he sees it swimming towards him, he throws the piglet to it. And the shark eats it, and then protects us.”

  Saro saw his friend William Fagi walking along the sea-front and called him over, to share another beer with us. William was a cook in the Happy Cafe in Honiara, and he had just knocked off work. He too was from Malaita – another part of the island, but just as traditional as Saro’s village. Both men used the Pidgin word kastom to describe how traditional the places were. They believed in kastom.

  Fagi said, “In our kastom we worship the eagle. Eagles deliver messages – they are strong. No one may kill or eat the eagle.”

  It was nearing sunset and at that time of day, as so often seemed to happen in this part of the Pacific, the wind dropped and the horizon in the new light of early evening became lumpy and irregular with the pronounced shapes of islands which the haze of day had obscured. Seated comfortably under the trees, we could see the Florida Islands, the two Nggelas, big and small, across the channel and in the northwest the simple hump of a volcano rising from the sea. This was Savo Island.

  “That is an active volcano,” Saro said. “I have never been there but they say that the volcano erupts now and then. There is a scrub duck that lives there and lays eggs in the sand. It is a strange place, but I think the people are friendly.”

  As he spoke I began to calculate how long it would take me to paddle there if I started here, went along the coast, and then struck out across the channel – twenty-odd miles.

  Meanwhile, Fagi must still have been ruminating on his village in Malaita, and the creatures worshiped there, because he said, “A certain snake is also important to us, especially when we travel. It is the baeko – black with white spots. This snake can save you and bring you back alive.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said, because – travehng – I often felt the lingering anxiety that I was doomed.

 
; Traveling would kill me, I felt. I had always had the idea, and still do, that my particular exit would be made via an appointment in Samarra: I would go a great distance and endure enormous discomfort and trouble and expense in order to meet my death. If I chose to sit at home and eat and drink in the bosom of my family it would never happen – I’d live to be a hundred. But of course I would head for the hinterland, and pretty soon there would be some portion of a foreign field that would be forever Medford, Mass. And I imagined that this overseas death would be a silly mistake, like that of the monk and mystic Thomas Merton at last leaving Gethsemane, his monastery in Kentucky, after thirty secure years, and popping up in Singapore in 1970 (while I was there) and accidentally electrocuting himself on the frayed wires of a fan in Bangkok a week later. All that way, all that trouble and fuss, just to yank a faulty light-switch in a crummy hotel.

  I wanted to hear about this snake which might save me that fate.

  “Before we go on a trip,” Fagi said, “we go to the baeko’s hole and put our hand in and touch all the snakes. Then we reach for the fattest one and hold it.”

  “This is a poisonous snake?”

  “Oh, yes, very poisonous. And when we hold it we take a good hold and squeeze it.”

  Later I found out that this baeko snake is the venomous and fanged Loveridgelaps elapoides, one of the deadliest snakes in the Solomons. This might have been the Malaita way of breaking the appointment in Samarra, but I found it unlikely that I would ever get on my knees and stick my hand deep into a black hole and grasp one of these creatures by the waist.

  I asked Saro and Fagi where they thought the Solomon Islanders had originated from. Had they come from Australia?

  Fagi said, “No, not from Australia. We are nothing like the Aborigines. They have rounded noses and wide faces and soft hair. They are more like Indians, from India.”