The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  In his book he wrote, The testing at Mururoa still continues. Nothing in French history suggests that it will stop until countries more powerful even than France put a stop to it. I can only look forward to the day when they will want to.

  We talked into the night. The nights were starry on Aitutaki. It was an ideal island; it had one of the largest and most beautiful lagoons I had seen in Oceania. Its people were friendly and gentle, its food was plentiful; it had no telephones, no cars, no dogs.

  More than once, after a peroration or an anecdote, Lange leaned over and said, “Are you sure you’re not writing about this island?”

  Towards the end of that week, I bumped into Lange on the beach again, and he said, “The Queen’s Representative is leaving the day after tomorrow. There’s a sort of do for him in town. Want to come along as my guest? Might be fun, even if you’re not writing about this place.”

  “What is a Queen’s Representative?”

  “In this case an anachronism named Sir Tangaroa Tangaroa.”

  I spent the next day spear-fishing, using my mask and snorkel, and dragging my boat behind me. My idea was that I would make my way along the reef, and when I got sick of fishing I could paddle the remaining distance to the only motu I had not visited, Maina (“Little Girl”). There was the hulk of a ship near it that had been wrecked on the reef in the 1930s with a cargo of Model-T Fords.

  Beyond the twists of plump black sea-slugs and tiny darting fish were the lovely parrot fish. I swam between the bulging lumps of coral, pursuing fish. After you have seen the Lovely colors of live fish, and how gray they look when they’re dead on a slab, how can you eat them? a vegetarian had once said to me. Soon I lost all interest in spearing fish and just snorkeled, and then – remembering there were sharks around this reef – I got back into my boat, and put on my Walkman and paddled.

  On this lovely morning in the lagoon of Aitutaki I was listening to Carmina Burana. It was one of those days – I passed many in Oceania – when I forgot all my cares, all my failures, all my anxieties about writing. I was exactly where I wanted to be, doing what I liked most. I was far enough offshore so that the island looked distant and mysterious and palmy, and I moved easily through the greeny-blue lagoon, and I could hear the surf pounding on the reef between the movements of music.

  The wind strengthened and I paddled on and saw more wrecked ships. They were strange monuments to the danger of this reef, and seemed fearsome and skeletal. They had a look of frozen violence – so large and rusted black. The oddest aspect of that was that there was no sense of anything happening on shore. It seemed so absurd that a captain should even steer his ship to Aitutaki, much less risk his whole enterprise on this reef. The island seemed to slumber dreaming its green dreams in its green shade. There was no industry, no traffic, no smoke even. It was the simplest quietest society I had seen. I seldom saw anyone cooking or gardening, or doing anything energetic except fishing. The island was almost motionless in the still hot mornings, and only at night after the drumming and dancing started did it come alive. The people were alert and could be talkative. It did not surprise me that life proceeded at the slowest possible pace, but rather that it proceeded at all.

  Something about Cook Islanders (there were only 20,000 of them altogether) made them seem special. Even with all the patronage from New Zealand, and their passionate interest in videos, the people remained themselves. They were not greedy. They were not lazy. They were hospitable, generous and friendly. They were not violent, and they often tried to be funny, with little success.

  One day early in my visit I had speared a parrot fish. I showed it to a man on shore, when I was beaching my boat.

  “What do you think of this?”

  “It is a fish,” he said, deadpan.

  “A good fat fish?”

  “A normal fish,” he said.

  “But it’s a good one, don’t you think? A big one. Good to eat.”

  “A normal parrot fish,” he said, refusing to smile. “A normal parrot fish.”

  Meanwhile I was still paddling to Maina. I had asked David Lange about the distinctiveness of the Cooks, and his explanation was that they had retained their character because they were still owned by the islanders. Not one acre had been sold to a foreigner. The land was sometimes leased, but it had not left their hands. This was also the basis of an anxiety – that the Japanese would come and somehow wrest the land away from them, trick them somehow. They hated and feared the Japanese, and I saw no Japanese tourists in the Cooks. “We don’t want them!” a man in Aitutaki told me. “We will send them away!”

  The wind was roaring in my headphones, blowing waves across my deck and slewing me sideways. I paddled on, feeling happy in this vast green lagoon, among turtles and glimmering coral, and at last reached Maina. Isolated and empty and hardly ever visited, in a distant corner of the lagoon, it was one of the most beautiful islands I walked upon in Oceania.

  * *

  On the way to the feast for the Queen’s Representative, David Lange showed me some new trucks parked in the Ministry of Works depot.

  “They can’t use them. They’ve been here for months. But they’re using that dangerous old banger” – he indicated a jalopy, dumping logs – “you’ll never guess why.”

  “Someone put a curse on them?”

  “Close. They haven’t been dedicated. They need a proper ceremony. It might be months before they manage that.”

  It was a God-fearing archipelago. Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists, Catholics, and the local outfit, Cook Island Christian Church, the CICC. The plaque to the martyr John Williams (eaten by Big Nambas in Erromanga in Vanuatu) should have been a tip-off, but there were churches everywhere, and crosses, mottoes, Bible quotes, grave-markers and monuments. The history of the Cook Islands was the history of missionaries – that, and a small trade in fish and coconuts. But mostly it was people’s souls that were sought after, and some of the earliest photographs of Cook Islanders showed the men in long pants and women in Mother Hubbards, the modest all-embracing muumuu. The Mormons didn’t drink, the Jehovah’s Witnesses didn’t smoke or vote, the Seventh-day Adventists didn’t dance, the CI CC didn’t fish on the sabbath.

  Still, life went on in its passive Polynesian way and somehow people managed still to dance, to drink, to smoke and sing and fish and make love. There was a local woman who had a reputation for simply appearing on the beach, offering herself, welcoming any and all fishermen, who made love to her. As for the dancers, they cleared their consciences by saying a prayer before every dance – then they drummed and twitched their bums and shook their tits; and afterwards they said another prayer.

  There were prayers in the garden of the small tin-roofed bungalow that was the residence of the Administrative Officer of Aitutaki. Just a simple hut with a pretty garden. About thirty men and women joined in the prayer, and they all wore colorful shirts and dresses – there was no clothes snobbery at all in the Cook Islands. You wore a T-shirt and shorts, a bathing-suit, a lava-lava, and that was it. No socks, no shoes, no ties, no dress code at all.

  Another day in Fatland – fat men, fat women. The fattest was the Queen’s Representative, an older man – perhaps seventy – in a very tight Hawaiian shirt, a button missing where his belly bulged. This was Sir Tangaroa Tangaroa, QR. In spite of his titles he was a simple soul. But I had heard this word tangaroa before, in connection with Polynesian cosmology.

  “What does ‘tangaroa’ mean?” I asked the mayor.

  The mayor was the brother of the prime minister. It’s all nepotism here, Lange had told me.

  “His name is the name of god.”

  “God in Heaven?”

  “No. One of our old gods.”

  “Which one?”

  The mayor’s own name was Henry and he looked a bit flummoxed.

  “God of the sea? I think god of the sea.”

  This man Henry was very vague altogether. There was a big marae in the south of the island. I
asked him where it was. He said, “Somewhere in the jungle. You will never find it.”

  Aitutaki was less than two kilometers wide at its widest point, and it was less than six kilometers long. Somewhere in the jungle had no meaning when dealing with a place this small, unless one was an islander and considered this island an entire world.

  “Can’t you tell me how to get there?”

  “No. It is not easy. Someone will have to take you.”

  That was another thing about islanders: they were almost incapable of giving clear directions, because they had never needed to encapsulate directions by giving the location of a particular place. An island was a place where everyone knew where everything was, and if you didn’t you had no business there.

  I said, “But this is not a very big island.”

  “The marae is in the jungle.”

  “Even so, there’s not much jungle. Do you ever go there?”

  “I am so busy.”

  But this were merely an expression: no one was busy in Aitutaki.

  I then approached the Queen’s Representative. “Have you spoken to Her Majesty?”

  “Yes. For hours,” he said, and blinked at me. “For many hours.”

  His English was very limited – in fact this was the whole of our conversation, for he soon lapsed happily into Maori – but he insisted that he had had long talks with Queen Elizabeth.

  Lange had heard me quizzing the man. He said, “If you get the Queen alone she’s very good – very funny. Loves New Zealand.”

  He said that he had spent some time with her alone when he’d been awarded the title CH, Companion of Honour, which was more coveted than a knighthood.

  After the prayer in the garden the food was uncovered – and men and women stood near it, fanning away the flies, while we filled our plates with octopus in coconut milk, taro, sweet potato, pig meat, marinated raw fish (with skin and bones), banana fritters, fruit salad.

  Lemonade was served, and then there was dancing – young men and women in grass skirts. The drummers sweated and smiled and people wandered into the garden from the dirt road to watch, gathering at the hedge or sitting on the grass. Children who had been playing on the grass since before the party began – they had no connection with the party – went on playing. It was all amiable. There were no ructions here.

  The Queen’s Representative smoothed his shirt-front – it was now splashed with food – and accepted his gifts, a woven mat and a piece of nicely stitched cloth. He spoke briefly but in a formal chiefly way, in his own language, Maori. He was from the little island of Penrhyn, an almost inaccessible atoll in the far north of the Cook group. He had spent six years making the rounds from island to island. Now he was on his final round, collecting gifts. A new QR would soon be sworn in – someone’s relative.

  Leaving the party, Lange turned to me and asked again, “Are you sure you’re not writing about Aitutaki?” And he smiled, but instead of waiting for an answer he began to describe for me his recent experiences in Baghdad.

  When I left Aitutaki it was Lange who saw me to the plane and we agreed to meet again. I went to Rarotonga, a pretty island entirely ringed by bungalows and small hotels. You couldn’t paddle without paddling in someone’s front yard. But there I had a sense of the murmurs of island life.

  A New Zealand couple from Aitutaki recognized me on the road in Rarotonga and told me about the woman who wandered the beach and was such a rapacious fornicator with the Aitutaki fishermen.

  When I tried to verify this story with an Australian he told me that the gossiping New Zealand couple had been heard quarreling loudly and abusively in their bungalow.

  “He’s the world’s authority on giant clams,” someone said of the Australian.

  “You could get killed for fooling with fishermen,” someone else said.

  The gossips were gossiped about, and everyone had a story.

  “Never guess who’s in Aitutaki,” another Australian said to me in a bar in Avarua, Rarotonga. “David Lange. Someone saw him get on the plane. He split up with his wife. He’s out of office. He’s fucked-up and far from home.”

  I said, “I have the feeling he’s going to be fine.”

  21

  Easter Island: Beyond the Surf Zone of Rapa Nui

  It was too dark to see anything, even at seven in the morning when I arrived on Easter Island, but there were the insinuating smells of muddy roads and damp dog fur, wet grass, briney air, and the sounds of barking and cockcrows, the crash of surf, and people speaking in Spanish and Polynesian. The Customs Inspector had been drinking. Someone muttered “Borachito” – tipsy.

  On winter days on Easter Island the sun rises at eight in the morning and by five-thirty in the afternoon the light has grown so crepuscular there is not enough to read by – not that anyone reads much on this lost island of damaged souls. Long before sundown, the horses are tethered (there are few vehicles); the motor-boats are moored (there are no canoes, and haven’t been for a hundred years); and anyone with money for a bottle of pisco – hooch – is quietly becoming borachito.

  The island goes cold and dark, and except for dogs barking and the sound of the wind in the low bushes, there is silence. There are not many trees, there is only one town – small one, Hanga-Roa – and as for the moai, the stone statues, no one goes near them after dark. They are associated with akuaku – spirits and are the repository of the island’s secrets. Many, many secrets, you have to conclude, because there are hundreds of stone heads on the island – upright and staring, lying down and eyeless, shattered and broken, some with russet topknots, others noseless or brained – more than 800 altogether. They are also known as aringa ora, “living faces.”

  The rest of the island is yellowing meadows with thick wind-flattened grass, and low hills, and the weedy slopes of volcanoes, but never mind that, or the fleeting thought that its landscape looks in some places like the coast of Wales and in others like Patagonia. It is totally itself, the strangest island I saw in the whole of Oceania – a place penetrated by gloom and anarchy. And a spooky place, too. Te Pita o Te Henua, “The Navel of the World,” the early inhabitants called their island, and more recently Rapa Nui. Easter Island is smaller than Martha’s Vineyard, and probably has fewer stony faces.

  I passed through the airport building, which was just a wooden room with signs in Spanish, and went through Chilean customs (Easter Island, Isla de Pascua, is part of a province of Chile).

  An attractive woman, obviously Polynesian, approached me.

  She said, “May I offer you my residence?”

  It takes an hour to fly from Rarotonga to Tahiti, and five and half from Tahiti to Easter Island. But connections in Oceania are seldom neat. I had two days to kill in Rarotonga, and three days in Papeete before I could head to this little island, the easternmost outpost of Polynesia.

  My traveling time must be compared with that of the original migrants to Easter Island. They might have sailed from Rapa – now called Rapa-Iti – in the Austral Islands, 2,500 miles away. Or it might have been from Mangareva in the Gambier group. In any case, the journey in double-hulled canoes took them 120 days. This was sometime in the seventh century (though some archeologists have dated it earlier). On the other side of the world the Prophet Mohammed was fleeing to Medina (in the year 622), the start of the Moslem Era. The Dark Ages had taken hold of Europe. The glorious T’ang Dynasty had begun in China. In the Pacific, people were on the move, for this was the most active period of Polynesian expansion, which one Pacific historian has called “the greatest feat of maritime colonization in human history.”

  Before I left Tahiti I had called on the airline representative. He was Chilean. We conversed in Spanish. He spoke no other tongue.

  “The plane is half full, maybe more,” he said.

  “All those people going to Easter Island!”

  “No. Only four passengers are getting off there. The rest are going to Santiago.”

  “Will the weather be cold on Easter Island?�
�

  “Sometimes. Especially at night.” He flapped his hand, equivocating. “You have a sweater? That’s good.”

  “What about rain?”

  “It can rain at any time. And wind. You will have some wind. But not too much.” He smiled at the ceiling and he blinked for effect as he chanted, “Sun. Cloud. Sun. Cloud.”

  He was trying to encourage me.

  “Now the hotels are interesting,” he said. “I know you don’t have one. You never have one before you go. But at the airport, the island people will look at you and offer their houses to you. You will see them and talk to them. That way you can find the most economical one.”

  He then searched for my reservation.

  “Your name is not on the passenger list,” he said. “But come tomorrow. If you don’t have a ticket we will sell you one. There is space. There are always seats to Easter Island.”

  That was my preparation for the journey – that and a vast tome entitled The Ethnology of Easter Island, by Alfred Metraux, and the writings of other archeologists, and much colorful and misleading information by the enthusiastic Thor Heyerdahl, who is regarded by many Pacific historians and archeologists as of minimal consequence to serious archeology. Scientifically, his books have as little value as those of Erich von Danniken, who theorized that the Easter Island moai were carved by people from outer space.

  I found a place to stay, a guest-house, and agreed on a price – sixty-five dollars a day, which included three meals a day. I planned to camp, too – no one seemed bothered, as they had on other islands, by the threat of my pitching a tent.

  Stretching my legs after arriving, I walked to the Easter Island Museum. It was one mute room on a hillside at the edge of town. There are some carvings, and some dusty skulls with drawings scratched on the craniums, and artifacts, but no dates have been assigned to anything in the room. There are old photographs of melancholy islanders and hearty missionaries. There are ill-assorted implements – axes, clubs, knives. One exhibit shows how the moai had carefully fitted eyes, most of them goggling – the sclera of the eye made of white coral, the iris of red scoria and the pupil a dish of obsidian, which gave the statues a great staring gaze.