The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “You have fish in the net?” I asked.

  The fisherman groaned and heaved and muttered yes.

  I paddled near and hovered, watching. The men seemed to be blundering, one almost swamping his boat, the other tangling himself in his net. At last the man with the net dumped the catch, a mass of sardine-sized fish, into the dinghy. Then they beckoned to me and offered me a bucket of them, the first time in Tonga anyone offered anything to me. When I politely declined the fish, the men lost interest in me.

  More men were fishing under the cliffs of Kapa, catching larger fish on hand-lines. When I said hello they returned my greeting but without moving their heads, without expression, just an impassive “Huh.”

  To keep away from the yachts – I could see half a dozen here and there, bobbing at anchorages – I decided to paddle through a lagoon, which was too shallow for anything bigger than a canoe. The island just to the west of the lagoon was Utungake, where I intended to camp and, near the shore, women – fifty or sixty of them – were standing waist-deep, holding buckets, and gathering – what?

  A woman called me over. Like the rest of the women she was fully dressed and completely wet. She was sitting in water to her armpits with four other women, gutting sea creatures – eels or slugs.

  “Where is your wife?” she said, by way of salutation.

  “Not here,” I said. “Where’s your husband?”

  “I no gat none.” This was Enna, and she was very fat, her hair hanging into the lagoon, her fingers smeared with eel guts the color of butterscotch.

  “Why not get one?”

  “You can hee-hee be hee-hee my husbeen!”

  Another named Melly said, “What is your name?”

  “Paul.”

  “Like dis?” She made a sphere with her fat hands. “Ball?”

  “Not ball,” I said, but she was tittering – they all were – “but Paul. Like Saint Paul.”

  “Thank you, Meestah Ball.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Cutting dese,” Enna said. “Lemas.”

  Now I could see that they were sea-slugs, but limper than any I had seen, the shape and color of bulging condoms. The women were gathering them from the bottom of the lagoon – there were thousands of these creatures in the mud – cutting them open, and extracting a long orange organ, sticky and dripping, which they dumped into the plastic bucket.

  “You like?” Enna asked.

  “We don’t have lemas in America.”

  “You eat.”

  “I no eat,” I said.

  Enna twirled the raw gooey thing around her finger and sucked it like a noodle into her mouth and said, “Yum!”

  Melly did the same. Then Melly picked up a gelatinous eel from the lagoon mud with her knife and held it dripping in my face.

  “You afray of dis?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You eat it den.”

  It was what bratty schoolchildren did to the school wimp, or the new kid. Melly held the long limp creature on the blade of her sharp knife, while I sat in my kayak smiling at her.

  “Put it down, Melly,” I said.

  “You afray,” she said, and jerked the knife at me. I tried not to blink.

  “Why you no eat dis?”

  “Because I’m not hungry,” I said, and thought, Fatso.

  I paddled farther into the lagoon, going faster than any of these people could walk. Most of the villagers on Utungake struck me as being incredibly stupid and slow, and they seemed to take only a cruel interest in other people. Everyone was digging for slugs. No one looked at me. A woman carried a big water jug through the lagoon. Like everyone else she was wearing all her clothes. They always swam in dresses and skirts and blouses, like Victorians. The boys wore shirts and trousers. But everyone was barefoot, in spite of the coral and the sea-urchins.

  I went swimming myself at the head of the lagoon and in the late afternoon got permission from a nearby village to camp on this deserted beach, distributed some silk scarves, and settled down for the night, which was full of lantern light and laughter and barking dogs.

  The next morning I paddled back to civilization.

  “And yet the sea is a horrible place,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1888 to a friend in London. He had been wandering the Pacific in a chartered schooner, Casco, looking for a happy island on which he would spend the last six years of his life. He liked islands. He hated the sea. Sailing the sea was “stupefying to the mind and poisonous to the temper; the sea, the motion, the lack of space, the cruel publicity, the villainous tinned foods, the sailors, the captain, the passengers – but you are amply repaid when you sight an island, and drop anchor in a new world.”

  Those were my sentiments exactly: sailing the sea was a monotony of doldrums interrupted by windy periods of nightmarish terror. No desert was ever deadlier or more tedious than an ocean. Then – after weeks or months of your thinking Life is a reach, and then you jibe – Landfall.

  I had never loved a boat enough to want to spend a year in it, and the fact is that yachties loved their boats – every cupboard and binnacle. Yachties were also finicky, orderly, conservative and yet haters of authority; they were self-sufficient – capable menders and fixers of things; they could be peevish; they frequently shifted the topic of conversation to Doomsday. They had little in common with landlubbers – was it this that had driven them offshore? And had these people always been so orderly or had yachting, with its limited space, forced them to become such fuss-budgets?

  Whatever, I saw them everywhere in Oceania, and they seemed to me truly a breed apart. They were not intrusive. They were great live-and-let-livers. Yachting involved certain complex courtesies. If you didn’t bother them they would not presume on you. They wanted mainly to be left alone – that is why they had weighed anchor in the first place. They spent years and years in their boats. They had sold houses and businesses and cars; they had quit jobs and put their life savings into this venture, the all-consuming occupation of being Flying Dutchmen.

  In the Port of Refuge of Vava’u were thirty-four yachts, all bobbing at moorings, waiting out the hurricane season. Most had been there for three or four months, some for several years. On good days the yachties ventured out and might spend a night at an anchorage, near one of the islands; but mostly they stayed here, going ashore from time to time, for water at the dock, or food at the Neiafu shops, though generally they hated the shops for being expensive. (Yachties never threw money around – partly out of frugality, but mostly out of a desire to be anonymous: spenders were always noticed.) They bought bananas and coconuts at the market, bread at the bakery, and they checked the post office or the Moorings agency for mail from home.

  They did not often call each other by their proper names, but rather referred to the boat.

  “Windrift is a plumber,” a yachtie told me gesturing to the vessel. “Southern Cross is a builder. Sourdough is a doctor, though you’d never know it – he’s a very nice guy. Gungha used to be a lawyer and now he’s a salmon fisherman during the season up in Alaska – there’s money in that. You get all kinds of people, a real cross-section, you know. Of course in the season people fly in and meet their yachts. ‘Take the boat to Tonga – we’ll meet you.’ They cruise a little, then fly home. ‘Take the boat to Fiji – ’”

  We were on the deck at Neiafu, talking about cruising. I had come in with a week’s growth of beard, in my salt-flecked kayak, and a group of yachtsmen had taken an interest. Mine was clearly a seaworthy craft, even if it was only a little more than fifteen feet long. Yachties admired anything functional that was well made and compact, because the best yachts were enemies of superfluity.

  Sundog said, “We try to spend a year in each place.”

  And he added that he and his family – two little girls – had been cruising the Pacific for the past seven years.

  “We had a great time in Tahiti – not Papeete, but Moorea and Tahiti-Iti, the little island just behind Tahiti. That’s another wo
rld. Very sensual. Then you come here and everyone’s going to church.”

  “We’ve been cruising since eighty-six,” Glory said. “This is our second time in Tonga, and I can tell you it’s really gone downhill. This used to be the cleanest harbor in the Pacific.”

  “I studied history and Polynesia navigation,” Dancer said. “When I came here I discovered that no one knew a damn thing about it.”

  Sundog was still talking about Tahiti: “Your Polynesian doesn’t really have a problem with nakedness the way they do here. They’re very welcoming – you see all these smiles.”

  “Now there I have to disagree with you,” Glory said. “We brought needles and fish-hooks to the Marquesas. We always try to leave a place a little bit better than we found it. That’s our way. But they weren’t interested. They couldn’t care less. They didn’t want our needles and fish-hooks.”

  “The thing is” – this was Dancer speaking – “you always judge a place by the last place you were in. We were last in New Zealand. Everyone talks to you in New Zealand. Great people. Great sailors too. It’s blowing a Force Ten and you hear some Kiwi on the radio saying calmly, ‘We’re okay – just out here with the missus’ and the fucken Tasman Sea is like hell on earth.”

  I introduced the topic of Tongans, because I had been wondering whether I had been imagining their xenophobia and bad temper. It is quite easy in travel to project your own mood onto the place you are in; you become isolated and fearful and then find a place malevolent – and it might be Happy Valley!

  “Tongans? They’re surly,” Sundog said. “They’re unhelpful. They’re resentful. They don’t care about you.”

  “They pretend not to see you – don’t even look at you, right?” Dancer said. “But they’re always looking at you sideways. They see everything.”

  “I blame the church,” Glory said. “The Free Wesleyans especially – they’re always collecting money. They get thousands from these people, but what do these people have? They’re tithing like crazy and in hock to the church.”

  “Tongans are unteachable,” Sundog said, beginning to rant. “Hey, they just don’t want to learn. They’re slow, lazy, and a lot of them are real wise-guys.”

  “Your Fijian is pretty affluent,” Dancer said. “But if you have business to do in Fiji you always do it with some downtrodden Indian.”

  “I’m headed for Samoa,” I said.

  Glory said, “Now I wish – I really wish – there was something good I could say about your Samoan. But I can’t.” Glory smiled a gloating smile. “Oh, sure, your Western Samoan has to scratch a little harder, so he might be a worker. But I was in Pago for two years and I thought the people were horrible – they steal, they lie, they’re lazy, they hate you, they’re takers. We give them seventy-five million and what do we get for it?” He smiled again. “They’re violent, too.”

  “People get involved there, though,” Dancer said.

  “See, a lot of your so-called expatriates are not very bright lights,” Glory said. “But they shine more brightly in places like that.”

  “And this,” Gungha said. He had just stepped onto the dock and was tying up his tender.

  “Your Tuomotuan is a delightful person,” Sundog was saying. “They’ll umu a dog or a pig and make you feel very welcome.”

  So it went, our discussion on the dock. They often had such confabs on this neutral ground. But they also visited each other, rowing from yacht to yacht in their little dinghies, paying calls. Sometimes they yelled from rail to rail. But each boat occupied its own specific area of water. There were no close neighbours. When it was windy they battened down.

  “It’s funny,” Mike of Gungha said. “You often find in a place like this the very problems you thought you left behind – pollution, bureaucracy, all that.”

  Glory told me how proud he was of his self-reliance. He had left Honolulu a year or so ago with four thousand dollars’ worth of stores – canned his own meat and fish, made his own chutney.

  “My wife bakes bread once or twice a week. It’s fantastic bread. We give it out,” he said. “The one thing we have is time.”

  Who, in the world they had left, could say that?

  They also read books, and Glory, the most manic, sententious and domineering yachtie in the harbor told me how much he disliked The Mosquito Coast.

  “I hated the guy in it. I couldn’t stand him. You wrote that book? I really didn’t like that book at all.”

  I said, “I’d probably hate your wife’s bread.”

  “My kids think I’m just like the guy in that book,” Verne Kirk of Orion said. “So I think that book’s a masterpiece.”

  And that was the end of that discussion. The yachties were soon in their dinghies, rowing home; all except Verne.

  “I like that book because it’s true,” Verne said. “People do that. They leave the States, just like he did. You see them here all the time.”

  He was the archetypical Pacific wanderer, down to his last whisker and eccentricity. He was nearly always bare-foot, with a bandanna around his head; he smoked heavily – yachties were frequently heavy smokers, I found – and played Rolling Stones music on his boat. He had spent years tacking back and forth in Oceania. He was in his mid to late fifties – funny, friendly, and crotchety. “Life is a two-edged sword,” he often said. His Orion was a battered catamaran that he used for charters, taking people out for a day of snorkeling or a week of cruising. But Orion was also his home. He had sailed it from Samoa. It contained all his possessions, the most valued of which was his library. He was always quoting – Margaret Mead, Captain Cook, William Mariner, various historians, and me. Freud’s Totem and Tabu was a great favorite. He showed me his extensively underlined and annotated copy.

  “Business is pretty bad here, but the place is nice,” Verne said. “It’s true that I have few enemies – palangis, naturally. Machiavelli says you should judge a man by his enemies. That’s all right with me. My enemies are dip-shits.”

  He had spent five years in Samoa and was alone in my experience in putting in a good word for the Samoan people.

  “I liked them,” Verne said. “American-ness is only skin deep. They’re funny and they left me alone. I pretended to be crazy. I guess I am a little crazy. If people think you’re whacko they keep their distance.”

  “People say Samoans are violent,” I said.

  “Oh, sure, they are. But that didn’t bother me,” Verne said. “I had a pretty good job there.”

  “How was the money?”

  “Five bucks an hour – chickenfeed. But I lived on my boat. I didn’t have any expenses.”

  Verne said that “for reasons too complicated to go into now” – he often used the expression when speaking of his exploits, and I liked the “now” most of all – he had been a staff engineer at the Department of Public Works in Pago Pago.

  Verne confirmed that Vava’u was one of the great yachting destinations. People sailed from Hawaii to Pago and then here. Or they came from Fiji or New Zealand. But where to go from here was a difficult decision from the navigational point of view. If they continued west to Vanuatu and Australia they then had to sail north into Micronesia and more northerly still into cold waters in order to pick up the westerlies that would take them back to Hawaii. The alternative was to sail east out of Tonga and go as far east as necessary, beyond the Tuomotus, heading towards Easter Island, in order to pick up the southeast trade winds for the run back to Hawaii.

  It all sounded like hell to me. And for most people in the Port of Refuge leaving Vava’u was the last thing on their nautical minds. Verne had been in the harbor for two years and said he was here more or less for the duration. If you asked what that might be like he would reply by saying that life was a two-edged sword.

  I told Verne that one of my canvas boat bags was coming apart at the seams, as a result of being thrown around by baggage-handlers. It was the size and texture of a mail bag and I had repaired it with layers of duct tape.

 
“I know just the man who can fix that,” Verne said.

  “It has to be done with an industrial sewing-machine,” I said.

  “Andy on the Jakaranda has got an industrial sewing-machine.”

  The Jakaranda was a sleek green schooner at a mooring some distance from the dock. Andy and his companion Sandy had been coming to Tonga since the mid-eighties. Andy said they had become somewhat disenchanted by the Virgin Islands – the selfishness and rapacity of the locals, the numerous yachts. They liked the pace of life in Vava’u, they liked the people, too.

  “Where is your home port?” I asked.

  Andy said, “This is. Jakaranda is our home. We’ve been living in this boat for the past twelve years.”

  It was a beautiful boat, made twenty years before in Holland, lying deep in the water because – Andy said – of the stuff they had accumulated: artifacts from around the world, the sewing-machine, a big tiki from the Marquesas. Even so, there was plenty of room to ramble around in.

  “I just got a Tongan work permit,” Andy said. And he explained that he would be making and mending sails – all kinds of sewing. “In the season this harbor will be full of boats.”

  I showed him my boat bag.

  “I can fix that,” he said.

  He tore out all the stitches and mended it expertly in fifteen minutes. It was a brilliant stitching job, and his willingness and his skill made it an even greater act of kindness.

  We had coffee and chocolate cookies that had been sent to Tonga by Sandy’s mother in Pennsylvania. Sandy was mellow, pleasant, good-tempered and, like many yachties, easygoing because she was on her own boat. That was also a yachtie temperament. You spent years and years in a confined space in all sorts of weather and you either coped and developed a cheery positive outlook, or else you headed home. Andy and Sandy expressed a genuine liking for the Tongans, and echoed other yachties in saying they had no immediate plans.

  “In a way, this is the best place to be,” Sandy said. “I mean, with the war on. If the worst happens, we could just settle down and plant taro.”

  As someone who needed space, I marveled at their capacity for living at such close quarters – and the marriages and friendships that prevailed over those conditions seemed to be as solid as it was possible for a human relationship to be, totally interdependent.