The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  The Polynesians paid lip-service to the French and so the French truly believed they had subverted the islanders. But in fact they only made a greater burden for themselves. By encouraging the islanders to be “colorful” they distanced themselves. The French are at their most obvious, their most bourgeois and sentimental when they are dealing with people they regard as savages, but it seems to be a fact that sentimentality is a trait one always finds in bullies and brutes.

  The honest thing, in dealing with Tahiti, would be to discuss French Polynesia as a depressing political problem, because it has been a French colony for 150 years. Everything else ought to be irrelevant – that is, whether the beaches are pleasant and the food is tasty, and the hotels are comfortable, and what’s the music like? The very fact of politics mattering in the Pacific seems strange – few people in other islands care about politics – yet it is the only place in the Pacific where there is a political situation. It is a characteristic of colonies that unless political life is manipulated or made ineffectual the place won’t work.

  But it is all so boring. I liked Pacific islanders generally for the way they guffawed at politicians – I admired their sense of family, their practicality, their usual indifference to world events. They were out of the mainstream, on the other side of the world – the brighter, happy side. For those with televisions, “Operation Desert Storm” had been to them not much more than a nightly entertainment video. That attitude seemed informed by a healthy combination of wisdom and vulgarity, and a taste for sensationalism – but most of the world’s couch potatoes are much the same.

  There was always a mixture of motives among Polynesians: they made you feel at home and then they stole from you. If you complained, they would say that it was nothing personal – and if you couldn’t afford it, what were you doing here, so far from home, in the first place? Colonial politics was just another complication. Yes, the French built court-houses and schools, but the French colonialists needed such institutions far more than Tahitians did. I just kept wishing that the French were a bit nicer and more generous, and weren’t so keen on nuking everything in sight. They said they had to – for world peace, but that was merde. The French arms industry, third largest in the world, and exporter of nuclear technology, now more than ever depended on extensive nuclear testing.

  I paddled past Bengt Danielsson’s two thatched-roof fares.

  Buffeted by the trade winds – the wind never ceases to blow in Polynesia – I kept within the reef, glorying in the sight of the lovely island of Moorea, its mountains looming dark and spiky – local myths claimed they were the dorsal fins of giant fish, but the island looked to me like a seagoing dragon, crossing the channel known as the Sea of the Moon.

  It was then, squinting into the intense glare of a cloudless oceanic afternoon – the sun slanted into my eyes – that I saw a small raft drifting perilously near the reef. There were some inert specks on it – humans probably – but it was the oddest possible place for a raft to be. If it went on drifting it would be smashed to pieces by surf. It had no mast or sail, nor was anyone paddling it. I had the idea that it had broken free of a ship and that somehow it had floated through a break in the reef. What was beyond question was that it was hardly visible from shore. The only reason I could see the raft was because I was in a seaworthy outrigger canoe and paddling along the margin of the reef.

  You sometimes heard stories of the ordeal of the people on such rafts; how their expensive yacht had been sunk by a killer whale, and how the quarreling castaways had clung to the wreckage for days or weeks, praying for deliverance, until, one sunny morning, the battered thing hove into view on a tropical shore, where holiday-minded families frolicked with beach balls, the raft looking as though it had floated straight out of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and it was immediately, grotesquely clear that the survivors had made it through by using each other with the utmost barbarity – human bones, scraps of flesh and the evidence of cannibalism. “Daddy, what’s wrong with those people?” –one of those rafts.

  That made me paddle faster, and I could see that there were only two figures on board and that I was gaining on the raft. It excited me to think that I might be the first person to witness the arrival of this desperate craft in Tahiti, and I alone would hear their ordeal – what a piece of luck for someone like me, who intended to write about these islands where in the normal way nothing much happened.

  Now I could see that the two figures on the raft were lying flat, as though prostrate from the sun, and there was something melancholy about the solitariness of their situation – within the reef and yet still so far from shore. You could drown, or starve, or die of thirst, or suffocate with heat exhaustion, even in this bewitchingly lovely place.

  I had a water bottle and the remains of my lunch in my boat – enough to revive them, I was sure. They were upwind, so they did not hear the thrashing of my canoe, but I was soon close enough to recognize the strangeness of this simple raft. It was not drifting; it was tethered to a mooring. Apart from the two people, there was nothing else on it, not an object of any kind – no flag, no scraps, no bones, no bucket, nothing-nor any clothes.

  There were two skinny women on the raft and they were naked. As I drew near – I was only thirty feet away – some warning vibration of my maleness must have charged the air: suddenly each woman sat up straight. Or had they heard my paddling? They were young, in their twenties, rather pretty and, from their demeanor, French. They were browner than any Tahitian I had seen – the gleaming darkness of the most lizard-like sunbather. It was the sort of tanning that made you think of leather. Seeing me, they arranged their bodies compactly, as modestly as they could, folded themselves with ingenious economy, their knees drawn up under their chins, and their feet jammed together, and they hugged themselves, like monkeys squatting in the rain.

  To preserve their modesty, I did not go much closer, and yet I was close enough to be able to marvel at their nakedness, at the exoticism of this sight – a pair of nymphs on a bobbing raft in the Tahitian lagoon.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to be jaunty, so as not to alarm them. But it had a hollow sound – and I realized it was just the sort of thing a rapist or voyeur might say to give false reassurance to his victim.

  They narrowed their eyes, their gaze did not meet mine, and their tense posture, with this grim indifference (which I took to be fear and apprehension), was meant to shame me. They wanted me to go away, of course. And now I saw a Tahitian fisherman, trolling from a small motorboat. He looked up and leered at the crouching sunbathers. They shrank from him, too, and wished him away.

  It irritated me that they felt we had no right to go bobbing past them – that, simply because they had taken all their clothes off, they regarded themselves as inviolate, and treated this part of the lagoon (which belonged to everyone) as their private property. For that reason I lingered and then I left, paddling onward towards Papeete. There I was told that this was a fairly common practice – a French thing, women sunbathing nude in order to eliminate bathing-suit silhouettes on their skin. A speed-boat dropped them on the raft and returned two or three hours later to take them back to their hotel.

  It was dangerously silly to lie naked under this blistering Oceanic sun, and there was not a single Polynesian who would dare it. Apart from being bad for the skin, and a cause of premature wrinkling, if not cancer, it was blatant immodesty.

  Once upon a time the Tahitians had reveled in nakedness and seduced European sailors and tempted them from their stern duties on shipboard. (“… for when we were sent away, ‘Huzza for Otaheite!’ was frequently heard among the mutineers,” Captain Bligh wrote bitterly, after seeing his ship the Bounty headed back to Papeete and the local women.) But these days only the tourists went naked, and the bare tits you saw were always those of visiting sunbathers. The Tahitians were all covered up and decent; history’s wheel had taken a complete turn, the fantasies were reversed, and now it was the Christian Tahitians who leered, and the pa
gan French who were naked.

  As soon as the nameless Tahitian girl on Bougainville’s ship dropped her flimsy cloth in full view of the impressionable sailors, Tahiti’s fate was sealed, and the South Sea Island myth was born. Ogling a woman’s private parts is the Frenchman’s version of a glimpse of paradise in any case, but to these horny and fanciful sailors this was even better – the woman was a dusky maiden, just the sort of uncorrupted savage living in her natural state that Rousseau had described only fifteen years earlier.

  Captain Bougainville was ecstatic. He paid Tahitian women his highest compliment: “for agreeable features [they] are not inferior to most European women; and who on the point of beauty of the body might, with much reason, vie with them all.” He wrote that the naked girl on board “appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus showed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having indeed, the celestial form of the goddess.”

  From that moment – and Bougainville encouraged the view – Tahiti was known as the New Cytherea, the abode of Venus. When Venus Aphrodite rose from the sea foam she stepped ashore (according to the poet Hesiod) at Cythera, in Ionia. This naked Tahitian girl was Venus made flesh, a goddess of love and beauty, the physical embodiment of the life force. But there was more. Every detail of Tahiti excited Bougainville, and when he settled down to write about his voyage he described how like the world before the Fall this island seemed, and he used Rousseau’s precise expression “the golden age” for this uncorrupted place: Polynesia was one of “those countries where the golden age is still in use.” Even the creatures associated with the mythology of Venus could be found in Tahiti. The dolphin, the tortoise and the gentlest birds were sacred to Venus – and there the captain had found them in the very spot where this dusky Venus smiled upon him.

  More than that, more rousing than the unashamed nakedness, were the sexual practices – and they were of the most unfamiliar kind. This seemed to be an island of exhibitionists. Officers and sailors invited into the islanders’ houses were given food and afterwards the Tahitians “offered them young girls.” Neighbours crowded into the house, music was played, the floor was spread with leaves and flowers; and the Europeans were encouraged to strip naked and make love to the girls, there and then, under the approving eyes of the islanders. “Here Venus is the goddess of hospitality, her worship does not permit of any mysteries, and every tribute paid to her is a feast for the whole nation.” In short, public copulation, group sex, fruit trees and freedom.

  The islands were bountiful and lovely, and what distinguished them from all other happy islands on earth was their dedication to free and joyous and unsentimental sexuality. Captain Cook was shocked by what he saw in Tahiti, and he wrote, “There is a scale of dissolute sensuality which these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and which no imagination could possibly conceive.” On one occasion in Tahiti, in a presentation that was organized by the islanders for the amusement of the foreigners, Cook and some of his men watched a naked six-foot Tahitian man copulate with a fourteen-year-old girl, and he noted that neither was embarrassed – indeed, the young girl was skilled in the arts of love.

  Bougainville’s extremely well-written Voyage Around the World (1771) made Tahiti a byword for everything beautiful. The book was quickly translated into English, and it delighted and inspired – and stimulated – its readers. Just a few years after the book appeared, James Boswell got a hankering to go to Tahiti, and he mentioned this to Dr Johnson, who told him not to bother, because “one set of Savages is like another.”

  “I do not think the people of Otaheite can be reckoned Savages,” Boswell said.

  “Don’t cant in defense of Savages,” Johnson replied. “They have the art of navigation,” Boswell said.

  “A dog or a cat can swim,” Johnson said.

  Boswell persisted: “They carve very ingeniously.”

  “A cat can scratch, and a child with a nail can scratch,” Johnson said.

  But Boswell was right, and he went on yearning to go to Tahiti, in order to “be satisfied what pure nature can do for man.”

  The Tahitians were anything but primitive. They were among the greatest navigators the world has ever known. They had been brilliant stone-carvers and masons. At Papara they had raised a large eleven-step pyramid, the Mahaiatea Marae, and there were more temples and altars at Paea and on the island of Moorea. The people whom Wallis, Bougainville and Captain Cook met (these captains visited Tahiti within three years of each other) were skilled in the arts of wars, of boat-building, and navigation. And far from depending on the fruit trees of the island for their food, they practiced complex and organized cultivation – growing yams, sweet potatoes, gourds and sugar cane; they raised pigs and chickens, and dogs – they preferred dog meat to pork. Speaking of the first Europeans in Polynesia, Fernand Braude! wrote (in The Structures of Everyday Life), “But were the savages they described really primitive people? Far from it.” Yet to nearly everyone, the sophistication of the Tahitians was the least interesting thing about them.

  Because of its reputation for innocent sex, for pretty people in a pretty place, Tahiti has been one of the most inspirational pieces of geography in the world. Even writers who never saw it praised it – Lord Byron, who wrote a poem about it (“The Island”), and the philosopher Diderot (cribbing from Bougainville) set a novel there. Melville made his reputation by writing about it in Typee and Omoo, and Robert Louis Stevenson vastly preferred it to Samoa. Most of the people who subsequentlly wrote about it described it in much the same terms as Bougainville. Pierre Loti went one better and in the purplest prose imaginable described his marriage to a Tahitian; after reading this book, Paul Gauguin was encouraged to set sail. They were all male writers, of course; it would have been interesting if someone like Edith Wharton or Simone de Beauvoir had gushed in quite this way about Tahiti.

  Even the sexually ambiguous Somerset Maugham regarded Papeete as pleasant – but he had reason to feel lucky for having gone there. He had sailed to Tahiti after Samoa (which he hadn’t liked much) in order to collect material about Gauguin for his novel The Moon and Sixpence. This was in 1917, only thirteen years after Gauguin’s death, and so memories were still fresh. Indeed, one old woman remembered that the obnoxious Frenchman had painted the glass panels of a door in a decrepit village house. Maugham went immediately to the house, where the door was still hinged and swinging, and bought it from the innocent owner for 200 francs (he later sold it for $37,400). Years later, Gauguin’s son Emil, an overweight buffoon, was a colorful local character. Emil hung around the bars of Papeete, and visitors bought him drinks and badgered him for information about his father (whom he had never known), and for ten francs he let you take his picture.

  For literary reasons, Maugham regarded Tahiti as a seductive place (Gauguin certainly didn’t, which was why he abandoned it for the Marquesas). It is questionable whether all Tahitians were ever as sexy as Bougainville described – he was only on the island a matter of days, his ship anchored off Hitiaa – but proof of the power of his book is the fact that Tahiti in particular and Polynesian islands in general are still regarded as Cytherean. Yet, manifestly, they are not. Pleasant and feckless, yes; paradise, no.

  Bougainville’s descriptions stimulated two quite different sorts of people, polar opposites actually – adventurers eager to taste the Cytherean delights of willing women; and missionaries determined to clothe and convert the islanders to Christianity. Over two hundred years later, these people are still contending for the souls of Polynesians. But for every Melville or Gauguin, or Don Kattwinkel on the six-day Polynesian package-tour (“Features include welcome flower leis”), or anyone else searching out a seductress, there are many more zealots with fire in their eyes who have made it their life’s work to convince these people that they are imbued with Original Sin. No adventurer’s book is complete without an attack on missionaries – Melville despised and
ridiculed them for their subversion and hypocrisy; no missionary’s memoir omits to mention the sinfulness and opportunism of beachcombers and remittance men. Each saw the other as a corrupter.

  It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a reputation for being paradise it goes to hell. Tahiti seemed to me dramatically beautiful, but its population lived entirely on the fringes of its steep and inaccessible slopes; and so it seemed small and crowded. It was full of French soldiers and expatriate bureaucrats cashing in on the fact that overseas salaries were double what they were in France and here there was no income tax. The businessmen wore a perpetual scowl of disappointment, because business was so poor. The hotel-owners and tour-operators complained that tourism was off twenty to thirty percent. Even in its great days Tahiti prospered because of French aid rather than from the receipts of tourism, but if it was ever to become independent it needed to make a show of selfsufficiency. By the 1980s it had become noticeably poorer and more careworn. The bureaucrats were overpaid, but the place itself was undercapitalized, and the locals were penetrated by the aimlessness and vague resentment that characterizes most colonial people. Treat people like children and they become infantile and cranky. The clearest evidence of this was the government’s official Put On A Smile! campaign.

  Another campaign – the Tourist Board was unimaginative but desperate to please – was a contest to find “the most hospitable Tahitian” who would qualify for a Mauruuru (Thank You Very Much) Award. Visitors to French Polynesia were encouraged to write letters to the Tahiti Sun Press recommending a person who had impressed them. I found the letters laughable but engaging, as they described a particularly helpful bellhop or swimming-pool attendant or taxi-driver. One day, I read a laudatory letter from some visiting Americans (Mr and Mrs Albert Crisp, from Los Angeles) who had spent a week in Moorea:

  Since our stay at the Hotel Bali Hai in Moorea we have enjoyed meeting and getting to know Helene (“Mimi”) Theroux, a sweet girl who tends bar.