The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  I remarked on this to Sandy, who said, “This is the way I want to live.”

  “Going from one strange hotel room to another can be traumatic,” Andy said. “But in this boat we can go anywhere and still have our own bed, our own food.” He thought a moment. “Our own toilet.”

  But it also meant years on the water, years making crossings, long periods in terrible harbors, always sleeping in a narrow berth, often banging your head, a whole life in which the world was elsewhere. To live such a life you needed a companion, who was handy and healthy and optimistic and who didn’t get seasick, and who was willing to renounce his or her country; and then you went where the wind took you.

  You had to live in a certain way in these island harbors. Yachties could not live too intensely among the local people or they would be destroyed. It was the reason for their watchfulness. It was why they only spoke to me after I had been in the area for more than a week. They bobbed offshore, making the odd foray into town. Who in marine history, or in the history of oceanic exploration, ever lived like this? Either they went ashore and conquered, claimed the island, and left; or they stayed ashore, anthropologizing, botanizing, evangelizing, being a complete nuisance to the locals, whom they wished to subvert.

  The yachties at their moorings had the equivalent of a gypsy camp at the edge of town, slightly exotic, occasionally insinuating themselves into the life of the place.

  “The tourists do as they like – they wear bikinis – but they leave in a few days,” one of the yachties told me. “We have to keep to the rules, because we’re staying.”

  They had to acknowledge the fact that they existed there for months or years because of the hospitality of the Tongans. They did not abuse that hospitality. They didn’t litter, they wore modest clothes when they were in town, they endured the Tongan sabbath. The yachties’ generally compassionate attitude made me look harder at my own opinion of the Tongans.

  I told Verne this – that I felt a bit guilty for distrusting them, and that I had found very little hospitality here. Or was I being too harsh on these people?

  “People here – they may not be friendly but they leave you alone,” Verne said. “It’s a two-edged sword.”

  We were sitting on the dock at the Port of Refuge, among the perfect little islands of Vava’u, each of which was a perfectly rounded piece of land, many of them just like drops of batter on a hot griddle, the ones that cook quickly – simple little places with no people – that was the thrill, the innocence of it, and anyone with a little boat like mine could play Robinson Crusoe here. Each one was just what you imagined a tropical island to be – palms, woods, surf on the bright beach, limpid green lagoons. I was so glad I had come, and felt that I had discovered an island that few others knew, and had found a way of going there and living on it. That was the realization of the South Seas dream – and I had seen how the dream had been deficient. It was not the mosquitoes or the rain. But really I had wished that there had been someone else with me in that pint-sized paradise – a woman.

  Meanwhile, Verne was talking about Doomsday, because a moment ago I had asked.

  “The Doomsday thing is very common among yacht people,” Verne said. “You hear it all the time. ‘The world’s going to hell,’ ‘This used to be a great country,’ ‘This place is awful,’ ‘The end is nigh.’ So they buy a boat and ship out. They come here and talk about it.”

  He was quiet a moment, and then glanced up and looked across the lovely harbor to the green wall of Pangaimotu.

  “This is a fabulous place to sit around, talking about the end of the world.”

  16

  In the Backwaters of Western Samoa

  Apia, the squalid harbor town of Western Samoa (but it was also squalid a hundred years ago in the heyday of its most famous resident, Robert Louis Stevenson), seemed to me mournfully rundown, with broken roads and faded and peeling paint on its ill-assorted wooden buildings, and Samoans rather gloatingly rude and light-fingered, quoting the Bible as they picked your pocket. There were hardly any beaches here, too. But no matter how misbegotten and wayward an island in Oceania happened to be, it always had stars in its sky.

  On the nights without rain I sprayed myself with insect repellent, and went out to the shore to look at the stars.

  Even in Africa I had never seen such a profusion of stars as I saw on these clear nights on Pacific isles – not only big beaming planets and small single pinpricks (plenty of fat blinking stars and masses of little peepers), but also glittering clouds of them – the whole dome of the sky crowded with thick shapes formed from stars, overlaid with more shapes, a brilliant density, like a storm of light over a black depthless sea, made brighter still by twisting auroras composed of tiny star grains – points of light so fine and numerous they seemed like luminous vapor, the entire sky hung with veils of light like dazzling smoke. Even on a moonless night you could read or write by these stars, and they made night in Oceania as vast and dramatic as day.

  That was how people had migrated here to Samoa, from Vava’u in Tonga, culturally its nearest neighbor: the old Polynesian voyagers had made complex charts of these stars – star maps – and traveled great distances with them in their canoes, star-gazing and navigating. This was accomplished a thousands years before the Europeans – Portuguese in this case – ventured out and discovered the Azores 900 miles into the Atlantic. The Polynesians would have guffawed at such timidity, though these days they are a seasick-prone people.

  With daybreak the starry enchantment vanished from Apia, and once more it looked rusted and neglected. And it was much starker on Sundays, a day observed as fanatically in Samoa as in Tonga, for on Sundays the town was deserted. Elsewhere on Upolu, Samoans with big brown chins and fleshy noses, carrying Bibles, and dressed all in white – white dresses, white shirts – headed for church. In Samoa, as in other Polynesian places, I found myself muttering against missionaries and generally rooting for heathens. Pacific Christians were neither pacific nor Christian, nor were they particularly virtuous as a result of all their Bible-thumping. Religion only made them more sententious and hypocritical, and it seemed the aim of most Samoan preachers to devise new ways for emptying people’s pockets.

  I had arrived on a Sunday – day of obstacles. It was impossible to rent a car or do much else on a Samoan Sunday – the sabbath had to be kept holy. Somehow, taxis circumvented this restriction, even if buses could not.

  I took a taxi and I looked around the island for a place to launch my boat. I was eager to paddle to a smaller island or even a village. I could not blame Apia for being awful. Apia was miserably typical. Except for bright little Port Vila in Vanuatu, no city or town in the whole of Oceania was pleasant. Islanders were not urbanized at all – they became antsy and deracinated in anything larger than a village and, without the means to be self-sufficient, they generally made a mess of their towns. They were habituated to their own fruit trees and to crapping on the beach and flinging their garbage into the shallow lagoon. Disorderly towns were not so surprising. Apart from Meganesia, where immigrant islanders were considered a nuisance and a social problem, no island in Oceania was industrialized and, except for tourist hotels, few buildings on Pacific islands were higher than three storeys.

  Pacific islanders of the traditional sort, as Samoans were, seemed to function best in families, and in order to thrive they needed a hut or a bungalow with a little vegetable patch by the sea. Samoan towns were worse than most, and included Carson, a suburb of Los Angeles, where there were more Samoans than in the whole of the Samoan islands and obnoxious posses (there were also branches in New Zealand) of the violent street gang, SOS – the Sons of Samoa. In America, the Samoans’ large physical size served them well in football (nearly every professional football team in the NFL had its Samoan tackles), and some had succeeded as sumo wrestlers or musicians – the Boo-Ya Tribe, a quintet of shaven-headed fatties, had made a fortune in Los Angeles imitating black rappers. Samoans were whispered about in the Pacific for be
ing big and bull-like and, though placid by nature, were said to be capable of extreme violence.

  Samoan stories are retailed throughout the Pacific – the Samoan who casually snapped someone’s arm in two, the Samoan who ripped off a man’s ear, the Samoans who sat in front of a house and then mooned the occupants when they were told to push off, the Samoan who bit off an assailant’s fingers, the Samoan who went haywire in the disco, crushing a hairdresser’s skull (“Because she touched my plastic toy,” the Samoan explained in his defense, in court). In the “Samoans Too Big to Fit” category, there are endless tales of airlines having to unbolt seats or remove armrests in order to accommodate Samoans; too big for telephone booths, too big to fit through doorways, too big for bar stools, for bicycles, for toilet seats. A truthful friend of mine traveling on Hawaiian Airways out of Pago Pago witnessed the mounting terror of flight attendants when a Samoan man, urgently wishing to relieve himself, could not fit through the lavatory door. The employees’ desperate remedy was to hold up blankets to create a wall of privacy for the Samoan, who stood just outside the lavatory and pissed in a great slashing arc through the door and into the hopper.

  The sympathetic Robert Louis Stevenson liked the Samoans for being unpretentious family people, and he managed them by cozying up to the chiefs and patronizing his hired help. The islanders liked being taken seriously by this raffish and yet respectable palangi, who said “Some of the whites are degraded beyond description,” but it is clear that Stevenson kept his distance.

  “He says that the Tahitians are by far finer men than the Samoans,” the bumptious New Englander Henry Adams wrote, after he had visited Stevenson in Apia in 1891; “and that he does not regard the Samoans as an especially fine race, or the islands here as specially beautiful.”

  Yet Stevenson had done more than put Samoa on the map. He was the magician that some writers are – people who, by using a specific location as a settling, lend it enchantment.

  A place that is finely described in a novel by such a person is given a power of bewitchment that it never really loses, no matter how much its reality changes. Not only Samoa, but other islands and, in a sense, the whole of the South Pacific, is a clear example of this sort of transformation because it has been used so effectively as a setting by writers as various as Melville, Stevenson, Somerset Maugham, Rupert Brooke, Mark Twain, Jack London, Pierre Loti, Michener, and even Gauguin in his only book, Noa-Noa. Fiction has the capacity to make even an ordinary place seem special. The simple mention of the name of a place can make that place become singular, never mind what it looks like.

  I sometimes felt as though I was part of that process of improvement or transformation, too – in spite of my natural skepticism – because I felt such relief, such happiness, paddling my boat through a lagoon under sunny skies. And I suspected that when I came to write about having come to the Pacific in such distress, needing the consolation of blue lagoons, my subsequent relief would perhaps transform a buggy drowsing island into a happy isle.

  But Robert Louis Stevenson had the whole world to choose from. He had traipsed through Europe and Britain, he had bummed across America, he had sailed throughout the Pacific, from California to Australia and back. The King of Hawaii, Kalakaua, personally urged him to settle on Oahu. Instead, Stevenson chartered a schooner and sailed to scores of islands, seeking the perfect place, which he had depicted long before, as a young man, in a verse he had written in Edinburgh:

  I should like to rise and go

  Where the golden apples grow;

  Where below another sky

  Parrot islands anchored lie.

  No golden apples in Samoa, and no parrots. There were quarreling islanders and drunken palangis. The Stevenson family arrived in the rainy season, when Apia is at its most dismal – hot, clammy, humid, muddy, with gray skies. Yet Stevenson homed in on it, knowing that he had few years left to live (in the event, only four). So what was the attraction of Samoa?

  In a word, the postal service. Other islands were prettier – the high islands in the Marquesas overwhelmed Stevenson with their rugged beauty, and the atoll of Fakarava in the Tuomotus was bliss – the Stevenson family rented a cottage on the lagoon. But on those islands it could be many months between mail-boats. In Samoa the mail came regularly, at least once a month, via New Zealand, or else from ships in the Sydney to San Francisco run. Stevenson was a zestful letter-writer and, as a novelist who depended on serializing his books in magazines, he needed a reliable postal service in order to make a living. That settled it, because the mail was his lifeline.

  Afterwards, when he became acquainted with the island, he found ways of fitting in and even becoming predominant. The Samoan social structure of clan chiefs and drones and hangers-on and peasants and pot-wallopers was familiar enough to an upper-middle-class Scotsman. Partly through insinuation and partly through recruitment, Stevenson became important in Samoan society. This allowed him to live like a Scottish laird among obsequious chieftains – and that suited him best of all. He was not a snob, though he had the Scottish love of stern affectation and obscure formality, and especially the Highland proclivity for fancy-dress at ceremonials: all the household staff at his house Vailima wore a Royal Stuart tartan lava-lava – the nearest thing in Oceania to a kilt.

  The power and the dignity of lairdship Stevenson found very handy. He made the most of his four years in Samoa – the late 1880s and early 1890s were years of disruption on the islands (Britain and Germany vying with America for control of the archipelago), and Stevenson – who was partisan, on the Samoan side – recorded it all in his A Footnote to History. The Samoans were masters of manipulation – they had made a fine art of obligating outsiders as part of the family and then taking them for all they were worth, while at the same time making these suckers feel important. Blending Samoan traits with those of the Scottish Highlands, Stevenson returned the favor and bamboozled them into believing they were part of his big tangled family – his elderly widowed mother had joined them, his wife’s two children by her first marriage, his stepdaughter’s drunken husband – it was all fa’a Samoa. He was Laird of the Manor as well as their historian and tusitala, “writer of stories.” Stevenson in Samoa is a tremendous success story, a masterful example of forward planning – and everyone profited by his perfect choice of island: his family, his readers, the Samoans, and Stevenson himself. As Byron had done in Greece, he had found a great place to die.

  I stopped by Vailima, Stevenson’s house, but was sent on my way by an officious sentry who told me it was occupied by a paramount chief and not open to the public.

  “You can visit his grave,” the man said.

  “Gravestones depress me,” I said. They were for pilgrims and hagiographers.

  I wanted an inkling of his spirit. It was the house he had built, and where he had lived, that I wanted to see – there were always vibrations of past tenants in houses. Why should I want to climb all morning up Mount Vaea to see the little plot which contained his moldering bones?

  After a tour of the north coast, the taxi-driver dropped me back on Beach Road, the empty main street of Apia, and demanded extra money.

  “Because I waited for you.”

  He meant he had waited while I had walked fifty feet to a possible launching place on the coast.

  I said, “Don’t be silly,” and gave him only the taxi fare.

  “You not paying me,” he said, muttering darkly. “I going to the police station.”

  “What are you going to do at the police station?”

  “Tell them. I waited.”

  “How long did you wait?”

  “A long time,” he said, and looked away. Finally he said, “Fifteen minutes.”

  “What is your name?” I asked.

  “Simi.”

  “Is fifteen minutes a long time in Apia, Simi? I would have thought it was a very short time.”

  Simi said nothing.

  “How much more money do you want?”

  “Two tal
a.”

  I handed it over.

  The next day, I drove to the ferry landing on the northwest corner of the island, Mulifanua Wharf, but there was no ferry to Savaii that morning and no one knew when it might leave. I went farther west and at a little bay was set upon by five fierce guard dogs – German shepherds, the sort that, spitted and grilled, would be considered the high point of a Tongan feast. A German in an expedition hat appeared and called them off.

  His name was Stefan. The company he worked for had been granted a lease on this neck of land by the owner, the head of state for life, Malietoa Tanumafili II, who lived in Stevenson’s grand house, Vailima. Stefan was supervising the building of ten traditional huts, called fales.

  “I saw this beach from the road yesterday,” I said, “when everyone was at church. They pray a lot here, eh?”

  “If you steal a lot, you pray a lot,” Stefan said.

  He confirmed my impression that there were very few beaches on Upolu. There were more on Savaii, he said. I told him that it was my intention to paddle there, across the Apolima Strait.

  “That’s very dangerous,” he said.

  It seemed to me that people on Pacific islands were inclined to say a thing was dangerous when they knew very little about it, but I intended to ask a local fisherman just the same.

  Stefan showed me around the thatched-roof huts at the edge of the lagoon. He said the huts were not finished but that I could stay, for a fee. The sky was gray and the lagoon was dark and muddy, but it was a pleasant enough place to stay – quiet, remote from Apia – and a good spot to launch from.

  I moved in and assembled my boat, and that became my base for a time.

  My first paddling objective was an island, Manono, across a three-mile channel. There were 1,500 people on Manono, but no dogs, no roads, no vehicles, no electricity. I thought of it as a hundred years offshore.