The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  It was up this path in Taipivai that Melville had spent most of his month. Here it was that he had got the title for his book: Typee was just another way of writing Taipi, and “vai” or the variation of it means “water” all over Polynesia.

  The ruins and the tikis in the marae just above the village were only part of the story. There were ruins all over the valley, which was fragrant with wild vanilla, and they were practically invisible until you looked closely into the jungle. Then you could see stone walls, platforms, altar-like structures, carvings and petroglyphs, tangled in the vines, and with trees – very often a banyan, associated with sacredness in the Marquesas – bursting through them.

  And this was true of the Marquesas generally. Entire hillsides, covered in jungle, hid enormous ruins made of black boulders. It was in this respect like Belize or Guatemala – full of huge tumbled structures, strange statues and walls. Where the walls were intact the construction was like Mayan stonework. These jungles had once been full of villages and big houses; the population must have been immense – estimates are that it was more than ten times larger (80,000 is one guess) at the time of their initial contact with the outside world. This first emissary was Captain Ingraham of Boston, Massachusetts, though the islands were first sighted by the ubiquitous Spaniard Mendaiia and named Las Marquesas after his patron, the Marquis of Mendoza.

  What had happened to all those Marquesans? The Pacific historian, Peter Bellwood, has an explanation in his book The Polynesians. “The Marquesans, together with their close cousins the Maoris, were by all accounts the hardiest and most robust of the Polynesians, and life was never pervaded with the indolence associated with an island such as Tahiti. Heavily dependent on the breadfruit – a tree which fruits seasonally and not all year round – they were subjected to famines of devastating proportions, and these naturally increased the incidence of warfare. Many early visitors reported that impoverished and defeated Marquesan families would set off in canoes to find land over the horizon.”

  Now most of the ruins were buried and all of them overgrown; some had been documented, but very few had been excavated. Except for the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, I had never been in a place where the foundations of so many stone structures existed, covered with moss and ferns. All around them were petroglyphs, of birds and fishes, and canoes, and turtles, finely incised in the rock. In the damp shadows of the tall trees, and teeming with mosquitoes, the sites had all the melancholy of lost cities. It was exciting to see them sprawled in the gloom, on those muddy slopes – the immense terraces, the altars, the scowling, castrated tikis. To anyone who believes that all the great ruins of the world have been hackneyed and picked over I would say that the altars and temples of the Marquesas await discovery.

  A woman I met in Taipivai, Victorine Tata, had just bought a pick-up truck. She drove, riding the brake like my grandmother, but never mind; what bothered me most was that she had floated a loan from the bank to finance the vehicle on the instalment plan, and it had cost her $35,000. Would she ever pay off her debt? Victorine just laughed.

  The Aranui sailed to the administrative center of Nuku Hiva, Taiohae, where it would be unloading cargo for a few days, and so I stayed in Taipivai, and asked Victorine, for a fee, to drive me around Taipivai in her new truck. She said she would be delighted. She was a big bulky woman, with a square jaw and heavy legs. She was impassive, but she was honest, and seated in her truck she was so huge and immovable she seemed to give the vehicle enough extra weight to hold it firmly on the precipitous narrow curves of Taipivai’s heights.

  “Melville lived over there,” she said in French, and pointed into Taipivai, about two miles above the estuary, near a large marae on the eastern side of the valley.

  We were now driving up a steep muddy path.

  “My uncle traveled with him for a while. He showed him tikis and taught him about the flowers and the trees.”

  “Do you mean he traveled with the real Melville?”

  “Yes. The American Melville.” She pronounced it Melveel. “My uncle liked him.”

  Her uncle had given Melville many a helping hand.

  “Wasn’t this a long time ago?”

  “Eighteen twenty-something,” Victorine said. “Long ago. My grandfather also knew Melville. He showed him the island – all around.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “My father told me many stories about my relatives and Melville.”

  It was not clear to me whether there was even a grain of truth in what she said, but she was a good sober person, and she believed it, and that was what mattered.

  “The Marquesans were anthropophagists, weren’t they?”

  “What’s that?”

  I had hesitated to use the word “cannibal,” but I steeled myself and rephrased the question.

  “Oh, yes, before – long before. They ate people. But not now.”

  The word “Typee” in the Marquesan dialect signifies a lover of human flesh, Melville had written. True? Victorine said no.

  “Now, I understand they eat dogs here,” I said after a while.

  “No. The Tuomotus – that’s where they eat dogs. We eat goats and cows.”

  The Taipivai hills were empty. In Tonga and the two Samoas, in Fiji and on other islands, I had become used to seeing concentrated populations – crowded towns, and hillsides filled with huts, and every twenty feet of shoreline claimed and occupied. This place was extraordinarily depopulated – there was no one in sight. This was simply a great empty island of dense trees and the deserted magnificence of the black stone ruins.

  We sometimes enjoyed … recreation in the waters of a miniature lake, into which the central stream of the valley expanded, Melville had written. This lovely sheet of water was almost circular in figure, and about three hundred yards across. Its beauty was indescribable.

  That was where the naked Fayaway had mischievously played at being Tommo’s mast, and where Tommo had splashed among the dusky bathing beauties.

  “What about the lake?” I asked.

  “There is no lake,” Victorine said, and another illusion was shattered.

  Although Victorine’s pick-up truck had a radio cassette player, there was no radio station in Nuku Hiva – there was none in the Marquesas – and she had no tapes. But I had replaced the Walkman that had been stolen from me in Tonga, and I still had the Kiri Te Kanawa tape (Kiri – A Portrait) that had soothed me in the Solomons. I popped the cassette into Victorine’s tape deck as we chugged across the Taipi mountains.

  There was a sudden plangent burst of Kiri singing Dove sono from Le Nozze di Figaro. “That is a song from an opera.”

  “Opera, yes. I have heard of opera.”

  The next aria was Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante from Bizet’s Carmen.

  “That’s French,” she said – we were still speaking French. “But do men sing like that, in that sort of voice?”

  She pretended to be a man singing in falsetto.

  “Sometimes they do, but they don’t sing exactly like that.”

  Vissi d’arte was issuing from the loudspeaker of the muddy truck.

  “Do you like that one?”

  “I love it,” Victorine said.

  “I’ll tell you something interesting,” I said. “That singer is a Polynesian – a Maori, from New Zealand.”

  “I am happy to know that.”

  Her face was blissful. I imagined Victorine traversing these roads, from Taipi to Taiohae and back, dropping off eggs, picking up passengers, and on every trip, listening to these arias, and Rejoice greatly and I know that my Redeemer liveth from the Messiah, and the others – perhaps looking forward to listening, and mumbling the words that might become familiar.

  And so after a while I said, “You can have the tape. A present.”

  She was pleased, she started to speak, then thought a moment. Finally, she spoke in English, “Sank you.”

  Victorine dropped me nine miles above Taiohae, because after the confinement of
her little truck, I craved a walk. I hiked across a high ridge and on a switchback road down to the main town of Nuku Hiva, where the Aranui was still discharging cargo. Although it was also the main administrative center of the Marquesas, it was a small settlement, a few grocery stores selling expensive canned food and some imported vegetables. In Taiohae I saw nine-dollar cabbages, from California; and that same day there appeared carrots and onions from the Aranui.

  The ship was headed to a village on the north coast of the island, Hatiheu, and as I could get there myself by road I lingered in Taiohae, enjoying the novelty of walking. I had begun to dislike the sedentary voyage, and all the meaty food. In Taiohae I felt better for missing meals, and although I stayed in a hotel, I occasionally bought a liter of fruit juice (from Australia) and a can of baked beans (from France) and a baguette (from Papeete), and sat under a tree on the seafront and made my own meal.

  All canned goods were luxuries in the Marquesas. The people grew breadfruit and mangoes, and they caught fish. If they had spare money they treated themselves to a can of Spam or one of the crunchy snacks they liked so much.

  “A girl might work as a waitress simply to be able to buy cigarettes,” Rose Corson told me. She ran a small hotel on the western side of Taiohae’s pretty harbor. “At five dollars a pack the cigarettes would take most of her salary.”

  The Marquesans I met were big and ponderous. They were noted for their gloom and their heavy moods, and unlike the Tahitians they were not at all quick to play music and sing. At sundown, fat men in T-shirts gathered at the seafront in Taiohae, near the jingoistic French memorials, and cooled their toes in the breeze and shared Family Size cans of Cheez Balls.

  One plaque said, À la Mémoire des Officiers, Soldats et Marins Français morts aux Marquises 1842–1925, but no mention of the thousands of Marquesans who had died fighting in vain to keep possession of their homeland. Another, ignoring the fact that the islands had been discovered by brave Polynesian navigators who had probably crossed the ocean from Samoa about eighteen hundred years ago, extolled the spurious claim of a “discoverer” – Au nom du Roy de France le 23 Juin 1791 Étienne Marchand découvrier du groupe N.O. de Marquises prit possession de l’lle Nuku Hiva. This also took no account of the fact that Captain Ingraham had claimed it two months before.

  Nuku Hiva was annexed in 1813 for the United States by Captain David Porter. He put up a fort and renamed Taiohae after James Madison, who was president. But Madisonville was no more than an impulsive gesture, and as Congress never ratified the act it had no force. The French would have fought us for it in any case, battling just as fiercely as they did in 1842 when they slaughtered thousands of islanders in order to gain possession. Melville witnessed the shelling. His Marquesan jaunt coincided with the French adventure, and in his book he mocks the French part in the affair: “Four heavy double-banked frigates and three corvettes to frighten a parcel of naked heathen into subjection! Sixty-eight pounders to demolish huts of coconut boughs, and Congreve rockets to set on fire a few canoe sheds.”

  After my two days alone in Taiohae, I made my own way across the island to Hatiheu, where the Aranui was moored in the pretty bay – there was no dock for the ship: the whaleboats brought the cargo through the surf to a crumbling pier.

  Hatiheu was a small exquisite village at the foot of three steep mountains, and in a meadow at the center of the village was a large church, with two steeples and a red tin roof, dedicated to Joan of Arc. Horses cropped grass in the churchyard. And standing under a tree outside Hatiheu’s tiny post office, with dogs barking and the waves breaking on the black sand beach, I made a telephone call to Honolulu.

  Later, I found Señor Pillitz, and we walked into the woods behind the village, through the palm plantations – and the palms were interspersed with kapok trees, laden with bursting pods; kapok had once been cultivated commercially here. But now all this farming was outdated. Beyond the plantation was a ceremonial area, called a tohua, which was about the size of a football field and enclosed stone platforms, and altars and carved statues. Such an area tended to be avoided by the local people, who believed the tohua to be haunted and that it had a mana, or spirit, that was at odds with their Christianity. There was an enduring fear, if not horror, among locals of these ancient sites. Most of all it was a fear of the spirits of the dead that haunted these glades after dark, the malevolent tupapau.

  Deeper in the forest there was another site that was larger but much harder to see, because it had all been tumbled apart – the terraces, the altars, the boulders cut with petroglyphs. It was overgrown with banyans, several of them giant trees. In an earlier time, the Marquesans had placed the skulls of their enemies among the exposed tree roots, and there on a higher slope was a round pit, lined with stone, where captives were held in order to be fattened before they were killed and eaten.

  “Zey wair cooking zem wiz breadfruit,” a Chinese woman told me later. Her name was Marie-Claire Laforet. Her father had dropped his Chinese surname (“The French didn’t want foreign words,” Marie-Claire said) in the great Tahitian name-change of 1964. It was an appropriate choice. His Cantonese name, Lim (Lin in Mandarin), is the character for wood or trees.

  That same day I went with Philippe and Señor Pillitz across a ridge beside Hatiheu to Anaho Bay. Well enclosed, with extensive ruins, a white sand beach and a coral shelf – one of the few reefs in the Marquesas, the only lagoon – it was the loveliest spot I saw in the Marquesas, combining the color and gentleness of a tropical beach with the ruggedness of surrounding mountains. Robert Louis Stevenson had stopped in this very bay in 1888 in the Casco with his wife and his two stepchildren and his elderly mother. It was the sight of Anaho Bay, and his dealing with the tattooed Marquesans, whom Stevenson believed still to be cannibals, that convinced him of the rightness of his decision to spend the rest of his life in the Pacific. Anaho had a profound effect on him – and on his mother, too: for the first time in her life this fastidious Edinburgh matron gave up wearing stockings, “and often shoes as well.” Bewitched by Anaho, the whole family went native. Anaho was – and still is – the apotheosis of the South Seas: distant, secluded, empty, pristine – ravishing, in fact.

  “Are there sharks here?” I asked two spear-fishermen, wading out to the edge of the reef. “Many sharks.”

  “Big ones?”

  “Very big ones.”

  “Do they bother you?”

  “No.”

  They left a machete behind. I knocked some coconuts from a low palm tree and slashed them open. We drank the sweet water and ate the meat. Walking back past the scattering of fishermen’s shacks and through the humid forest we were followed by a small so-called demi, a Chinese-Marquesan boy, about ten years old.

  “I am happy here in Anaho,” he said stumblingly in French. “J would not like to go to France. There are no langouste there and no breadfruit. Here we have food. We have fish. We can build a house anywhere in the woods. I can swim, I can fish from my father’s pirogue. I would not be happy in France.”

  In the early evening we sailed to the island of Tahuata, anchoring off the black sand beach of the village of Vaitahu. In the morning we were taken ashore by whaleboats. Vaitahu was typical of most of the larger Marquesan towns in a number of respects: a Catholic church, a canned-food shop, wonderful ruins at the edge of town, steep green valley walls, flowering trees, and fruit trees – avocados and grapefruit trees in the gardens of little wooden bungalows, hairy black pigs, fretting mongrels, a new church, and an insulting plaque on the seafront speaking of all the Frenchmen who had given their lives battling to take possession of the place.

  The monument in Vaitahu spoke of the French soldiers and sailors who had “died on the field of honour” in the battle for Tahuata in 1842. Melville had ironized about this very place, and how the French had prided themselves on the good order they had brought to the Marquesas, though it had caused human fatalities; and “to be sure, in one of their efforts at reform they had slaughtered about
a hundred and fifty at Whitihoo [Vaitahu].”

  I was overheard jeering at the plaque by the woman known on board as The Countess. She was half French, half German and often strolled along, holding a tape recorder to her lips and nagging into it. She said she was somewhat struck by my sarcasm. It so happened (she went on) that she was a travel writer. Thus the tape recorder.

  “I am writing a story about this trip for the best and most brilliant newspaper in the world” – and she named a German daily paper. “They respect me so much that in seventeen years they have changed only one sentence of mine.”

  “What was the sentence?”

  “It was very reactionary you will think,” the Countess said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “All right then. ’Three hundred years of colonialism have done less harm to the world than thirty years of tourism.’”

  I smiled at her and said, “That’s brilliant.”

  Thereafter whenever she felt the need to unburden herself she sought me out.

  “My husband was a genius,” she said later. “I myself have written many books about clothing.”

  “I hate children,” she told me another day. “I love doggies.”

  I told her I had seen some puppies with wire on their necks being taken out of Vaitahu to be used as shark bait by some Marquesans in a canoe.

  “They should use babies instead,” she said, and laughed like a witch in a pantomime.

  Speaking with some youngsters in Vaitahu, one of them asked me, “What are you? What is your country?”