The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Even the most user-friendly travel guide becomes Francophobic when the question of testing is raised. “French radioactivity will remain in the Tuomotus for thousands of years,” David Stanley writes in The South Pacific Handbook, with justified indignation; “the unknown future consequences of this program are the most frightening part of it. Each successive blast continues the genocide committed by the Republic of France against the people of the Pacific.”

  Elsewhere on the Tuomotu archipelago, the many shoals and poor anchorages have given it the reputation of being one of the most notorious ship-swallowers in the Pacific.

  Under a cheddar-coloured moon that rose through black shreds of cloud and glimmered in shattered light on a rippling tropic sea, the crew began emptying clattering barrels overboard – waste paper and plastic bottles and crushed tins and vegetable peelings – but it hardly disturbed the sea, because the radiant rubbish was bobbing in the moonglow in this remote and peaceful place, and the junk and detritus had a lively phosphorescence all its own.

  I woke to shouts and the sound of cranes the third day. I could see the whaleboat through my porthole, ferrying cargo to the tiny village on the harbor at the croissant-shaped atoll of Takapotou. It was too deep to anchor, and there was no harbor here, and so we were pitching just offshore as the whaleboats came and went. In the whole voyage only once was the ship moored alongside a quay, with a gangway from the deck to dry land. In every other instance we were brought ashore in the whaleboats, which necessitated a delicate (and at times wet) transfer. It should have been hell for the elderly passengers, but it wasn’t: the powerful Marquesan crew members lifted the feebler ones bodily into the whaleboats and at the edge of the pounding surf hoisted them again like kids and carried them to shore – little twittering women and men in big tattooed Marquesan arms.

  These same crewmen also hauled the cargo – thirteen hours repeatedly going from the ship to the quay and back again, that same quarter-mile – the twenty-foot whaleboats always piled high. The cargo covered all aspects of human activity – loaves of bread, sanitary napkins and toilet rolls by the crate, mineral water, breakfast cereal, a large peagreen three-piece suite, and in a place that teemed with live fish, crates of canned fish. Two whaleboat-loads contained cardboard boxes of Tyson’s frozen chicken pieces (from Arkansas). The rest was predictable – building materials, lumber, bricks, pipes, cement; and rice, sugar, flour, gasoline, and bottled gas. (Many of these staple items were heavily subsidized by the French government. The rice, for example, cost twelve dollars for ten kilos, which was not much more than thirty-six cents a pound.) There was crate after clanking crate of soft drinks, Budweiser beer, bottles of Hinano, Arnott’s “Cabin” Biscuits in ten-pound tins, and cartons of snacks, including immense quantities of Planter’s Cheez Balls.

  A cloying odor of decayed copra hung over the quay at Takapotou, where it was stacked in bulging sacks, quietly humming, like a mountain of last week’s dessert. Copra has the look of brown rinds and is in fact chunks of dried coconut meat that is later processed into coconut oil. The French heavily subsidize the copra crop (paying $650 a ton), making it profitable for the grower. But the islanders shrug, the harvest is in decline and the shortfall is made up by copra imported from Fiji (where growers are paid $100 ton).

  Forget copra, the locals say – the great business today in Takapotou is black pearls. The seed pearls are slipped between the valves of the giant black-lipped oyster which is happiest in the lagoons around Takapotou and, if the transplant is successful, in about three years a pearl-fisher could become very wealthy.

  The Japanese have thrust themselves into the black pearl industry and now – to no one’s surprise – almost totally dominate it, from seeding the oysters to stringing the pearls and selling them. Even so, fortunes have been made by Tuomotuans on some atolls that are little more than desert islands – a coral beach, a few palm trees and cringing dogs.

  I had hardly been in Takapotou an hour when a woman named Cécile sidled up to me and asked me in French whether I wanted to buy some black pearls. She said they were from Takaroa, a neighboring atoll where the best colored pearls are found.

  “This is my son,” Cécile said.

  But he didn’t hear anything: he was listening to a rock music cassette on earphones, and it was presumably turned loud – I could hear it – to overwhelm the sound of the pounding sea. And the dogs – we were being followed by nine barking dogs.

  Cécile was in no hurry, nor was she interested in bargaining – haggling is not a habit in Polynesia. She slid open a matchbox and showed me the four pearls – a tear drop, a polyp, and two round ones – and she mentioned the price. That same amount would have bought three loud Tahitian shirts or two meals in Papeete.

  “Done,” I said, and handed over the money. As we walked back to the quay, where the atoll’s whole population (“Four hundred – plus children,” Cécile said) had gathered, we were still followed by the dogs – about fifteen of them now.

  “About those dogs,” I began. We were speaking French.

  “So many of them,” Cécile said, not looking.

  I wanted to be delicate. “In the Marquesas the people eat dogs.”

  “We eat them too!” She seemed to be boasting, as a way of setting me straight.

  Now I began to see something canine in Cécile’s features, her teeth more dog-like than is usual, her nose looked damp, her jowls a bit loose, her eyes rather soulful.

  “What does dogmeat taste like?” “Like steak.”

  Most dog-eaters stew it, the meat is so tough, but the French had made steak and chips so popular in their colony this had obviously influenced the manner of serving up woof-woof.

  “Entrecôte of dog, dog steak, and what about dog stew?”

  She shrugged and said, “Sure.”

  “Do you eat sea turtles?” I had noticed the shells of this endangered species were hung up to decorate many of the box-like houses on Takapotou.

  “We love turtles,” Cécile said. “We make them into soup.”

  It turned out that food was not a problem on an atoll like this, where fish and coconuts were plentiful. There were pigs in the place too. They could have managed without dogs, but as Cécile said, they ate them because they tasted good. The rest of the time they subsisted on fish and rice and coconuts. When the Aranui called they had carrots and onions. No one on Takapotou had a garden – the soil was too poor; it was hardly soil at all, but rather crumbled coral, and all that grew were palms and feathery Australian pines.

  I met an American named Tim at the landing-stage. He had the look of a surfer. He was from California and was making his way from atoll to atoll, any way he could. He had been here for several months. He liked Takapotou more than any other atoll, so far. I asked him why.

  “The sharks are smaller, and there are fewer of them, for one thing,” he said. “And the people are really friendly. As soon as you arrive they sit you down and give you food, even if it’s the only food they have – even if their children haven’t eaten.”

  “I was thinking that it doesn’t look as though there is much food here,” I said.

  “There’s more than you might think,” Tim said. “These houses look poor, but in each one there’s a TV, a video machine, a gas stove and a freezer. They freeze the fish they catch and sell it to the boats that stop by. The Aranui will pick up a lot.”

  “Is that how they get their income?”

  “That’s it, mainly. Apart from the child allowance, they don’t get handouts from the French. The copra price is subsidized. Otherwise they provide for their own needs.”

  “I noticed that quite a few cases of whisky were unloaded.”

  “Drinking is a problem here,” he said. “And it really has an effect on them. They get very violent – their whole personality undergoes a change. There were four serious fights last Saturday night.”

  The cargo, including booze, was still being carried past us by men who were so heavily laden they sank up to th
eir ankles in crushed coral.

  Tim said, “They say that if you hand someone a bottle of Jack Daniels you can get anything done – anything.”

  “What if you had a whole case of the stuff?”

  “You’d probably get a handful of black pearls.”

  Such a strange, recent-looking piece of land, a few feet above sea-level in the middle of the ocean, so flat, so thinly wooded – no grass, few people. If it were not for the pearls it might have been forgotten long ago and left to itself. Seeing the entire population gathered there at the landing in the failing light I thought of people clinging to coral, frail people holding on to the frailest and most crumbly living rock. The whole place was like a small fragile organism.

  It was dark when the last of the copra was brought aboard and by then I was sitting with some of the Marquesan passengers: Thérèse, a medical worker; Charles, a powerfully-built former soldier in the French army (he had seen action in Chad and had the scars of bullet wounds to prove it: “The Africans are real savages”) – none the less, he had tiny white tiare blossoms in his shoulder-length hair; and Jean, who claimed that he was descended from the last king of the Marquesas and was just returning from Tahiti where he had been combing through the birth records and genealogies to establish his royal connection.

  They had not known each other before the voyage, but had fallen in together and they agreed on most things – hated Tahitian politics, were against French nuclear testing (“Everyone is against it. It poisons all of nature, the sea, the fish, and it causes sickness,” Thérèse said), and they wanted the Marquesas to be independent of the rest of Polynesia.

  “We want a free Marquesas,” Charles said, and then confusingly added, “It doesn’t matter whether the French are there or not. We just don’t want Tahiti politics.”

  He also repeated what many Marquesans said: his islands were a family, a large Catholic family. The rest of French Polynesia was rather despised for having abandoned the faith and gone over to the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  Just before I went below I saw Patrick, one of the fellows from Melbourne, looking over the rail.

  “Did you see that movie Cocoon, where all those people got into the boat and then the boat was beamed up to another planet?” He was smiling. “When I saw these people hobbling on board the first day I thought to myself,

  ’Oh God, hold on, we’re off to outer space!’”

  In a way it was true: the Marquesas were a world apart. It was a thirty-six-hour run from Takapotou to the first of these high islands.

  In that time I got acquainted with more of the other passengers. Señor Pillitz had once trained as a waiter at the Ritz in London, but one night he spilled an entire tureen of onion soup down a woman’s back (“She was wearing a lovely green dress”) and that convinced him that he should take up photography. The Germans kept to themselves and hogged the best seats, the most food, and with an instinct for invasion went up and down the ship, claiming the prime areas for themselves. Carmelo and Amelia from Venezuela had been around the world several times. India was their favorite country, “for cultural reasons.” Ross and Patrick, on their first foray out of Melbourne, found everything just fabulous. Horace, a neurosurgeon from Sarasota, held me spellbound when he described the process of removing a brain tumor, which was his business. After a person’s head was opened (the cut was made behind the ear, at the base of the skull) the tumor was taken out with unbelievable slowness, “like removing sand, one grain at a time, and at the end of the operation, when you are very tired, there’s a chance you might slip and cut vital nerves.” Philippe, who was also a doctor, was doing his National Service at Papeete Hospital, and had a Tahitian grandmother. Pascale, a young and pretty Frenchwoman, who was usually topless except at mealtimes, worked as a nurse at the Papeete hospital and had helped deliver Cheyenne Branda’s little boy. “This Branda is a strange woman – she will not let anyone touch her. You think it is possible to have a baby and not be touched?” A woman from Chicago who called herself Senga (she hated the name Agnes and so spelled it backwards) said she was seventy years old and had come on this trip, “because I want to do everything before I die.” There was a sunburned Frenchman we called Pinky who, when he got drunk, which was every evening at eight in the bar on C deck, praised the racist French politician, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Pinky’s nemesis was Madame Wittkop, whom we called The Countess; she often said, “I’m outrageous,” but so far she had seemed unprepossessing. That was most of them.

  Four and a half days after leaving Papeete, we reached the first of the Marquesas, the little island of Ua-Pou.

  Several passengers on board said that Ua-Pou did not look anything like a South Seas island. Melville had anticipated that reaction. “Those who for the first time visit the South Seas, generally are surprised at the appearance of the islands when beheld from the sea. From the vague accounts we sometimes have of their beauty, many people are apt to picture to themselves enameled and softly swelling plains, shaded over with delicious groves, and watered by purling brooks,” he wrote in Typee.

  “The reality is very different,” he went on, and he was speaking of Nuku Hiva but it might have been Ua-Pou he was depicting: “Bold rockbound coasts, with the surf beating high against the lofty cliffs, and broken here and there into deep inlets, which open to the view thickly wooded valleys, separated by the spurs of mountains clothed with tufted grass, and sweeping down to the sea from an elevated and furrowed interior.”

  The rock, most of all, and the way it was arrayed in pinnacles – that was the most unexpected feature. It was high and where it was wooded it was dark green. Some of the mountains were shaped like witches’ hats and others like steeples and domes – everything eroded and slender and perpendicular, and the cliffs of black rock plunging straight into the sea and foaming surf. Where are the sandy beaches? Where are the translucent lagoons? There are not many in the Marquesas, and they are hard to find. It is almost impossible to overstate the ruggedness of the islands – the almost unclimbable steepness of their heights or their empty valleys. And at the head of every valley was a great gushing waterfall, some of them hundreds of feet high.

  We went ashore at Hakehau – a tiny town on a snug harbor – and Señor Pillitz and I, egged on by a Frenchman desperate for customers, went for a two-hour ride to the stony beach at Hohoi, where we saw a brown horse. “And two crazy cats,” Señor Pillitz said, snapping a picture. Several minutes later the Frenchman said we must leave. The road was muddy. The Land-Rover got bogged down. I wrenched my spine helping to push the thing. Back in Hakehau he charged each of us twenty dollars and tried to sell us for another twenty dollars framed photographs he had taken of the volcanoes. We were just in time for the dancing – fifteen young men doing “The Pig Dance” – snuffling and oinking and nimbly hurrying on all fours. They finished with a great shout and then we feasted on langouste, and octopus, breadfruit, bananas, and raw tuna marinated in lime juice and coconut milk, the raw fish (ia ota) that the French call poisson cru.

  Strolling back to the ship I found myself walking among flowering bushes which exuded a delicious fragrance, a noa-noa, and then I came upon a big family behind a hibiscus hedge hacking a dead cow apart with axes and machetes. They were skinning and butchering it at the same time, while seven dogs fought over the scraps. Just before we set sail I saw these same people running up the gangway, with bulky sacks of the butchered cow slung over their shoulders. They were off to another island with enough meat to last them a month.

  In the afternoon, the Aranui sailed to the other side of the island, to another village on a bay, Hakehetau, where whaleboats brought bottled gas and provisions ashore. The sky was full of birds – brown noddies, white terns, grayish-yellow finches, and – two or three at a time – the slowly soaring frigate birds. On the high slopes of Ua-Pou there were flocks of wild goats, which had nibbled the mountainsides bare.

  Then, in a puddly golden sea, that was calm and mild in the same golden sunset, with the s
cent of flowers carrying from shore, we sailed to Nuku Hiva, and at night we anchored off Taipivai, where there was a bay – but no mooring, no quay, no landing-stage, nothing but a stinking sandbar at the river mouth.

  We went ashore the next day to the village of Taipivai, the whaleboats sputtering up the deep river valley. This was in the southeast of Nuku Hiva. At the sacred site nearby, the passenger I thought of as Gandhi displayed for the first time his uniquely obnoxious habit. At every ancient platform, and at all the stone tikis, he turned his back on the rest of us and yanked his swimsuit down and, sighing with pleasure, relieved himself against the noble ruins. I noticed this first at Taipivai, and thereafter, for reasons that are still obscure to me, Gandhi desecrated every marae in every tabu-grove we visited in the Marquesas.

  “That man is so disgusting,” I would say.

  “Isn’t he fabulous?”

  Perhaps he was no worse in his way than the missionaries who had castrated these very statues. There is not a dick that has not been hacked off, nor a statue that has not been tipped over, in the name of God Almighty. “But what matters all this?” Melville remarks sarcastically. “Behold the glorious result! The abominations of Paganism have given way to the pure rites of the Christian worship – the ignorant savage has been supplanted by the refined European!” Some of the people struck back, and even statues were said to be rebellious. All tikis are “live” and they can be vindictive, the Marquesans say. Anger these fat black demons that look like the gods of constipation and you will be cursed with bad luck or death.