by Paul Theroux
“And what did you think of his conclusions?”
“He reached his own conclusions,” the professor said, tactfully. “As for me, I am convinced that the Marquesas were the dispersal point for eastern Polynesia. The migration and settlement were very rapid. The canoes seem to have come from the Admiralty Islands” – in northeast New Guinea – “around one thousand B.C., and they found Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. They stayed in those islands, and by staying they developed Polynesian culture.”
“That’s the point, isn’t it? That they became more Polynesian by living on their islands and not venturing farther,” I said. “But why didn’t they go on navigating and sailing? Is it possible that they lost their nerve, or lost their technology and had to re-invent it?”
“Yes. Possible. They stopped making pottery in 300 to 500 – there was no pottery in Hawaii. We have not found even one shard. They sailed to the Marquesas in about 300, probably from Samoa. From there they dispersed. Heyerdahl said that the South Americans brought the sweet potato to the Pacific, but I disagree. It is much more likely that the Marquesans sailed to South America and brought it back.”
“But the canoes would have been sailing very close to the wind – and is that voyage possible?”
Professor Sinoto was hypothesizing a voyage that went in the opposite direction from that of the Kon-Tiki.
“Many canoes must have set sail. A lucky canoe reached Easter Island and later found its way back,” the professor said. “I was on Easter Island just a few years ago and met a man who told me a story of how he had sailed away in a small canoe with two boys. They brought a big bunch of bananas and twenty gallons of water. He reached the Tuomotus after three weeks or so, and there he stayed for ten years.”
I had heard a similar story on Easter Island, about this same man who had sailed to the Tuomotus.
“Other people might have been put into canoes with some food and deported – the chief ordering them away,” the professor said, describing how the voyagers might have been banished.
“What about migrants being refugees from tribal wars?”
“Yes. After about 1500 there were many tribal wars in the Marquesas, one valley against another, or one island against another. The choice was whether to stay in the valley and fight – or else leave. I excavated many fortifications and found many sling stones. The people were very accurate in throwing the sling stones – they could throw them two hundred feet or more. Missionaries have written how the people always had bumps on their head from the fighting.”
“So they lived in small groups?”
“They isolated themselves,” he said. “I am very interested in fish-hooks. I have found that as the time passed the fish-hooks grew smaller. They were catching smaller and smaller fish. They didn’t want to go out so far – perhaps they were afraid of the sea, or else of their enemies. They stayed nearer to the shore.”
He showed me a set of fish-hooks, diminishing in size.
“The Little Ice Age was another factor that isolated the people,” he said. “And as you say, these cultures always developed after they were isolated. The Little Ice Age was between 1400 and 1500. There was a colder climate and rougher seas, so the people tended to stay on their islands in this period. That produced local culture. All the Marquesan tikis are post-1500, for example.”
“I am planning to go paddling along the Na Pali coast of Kauai,” I said. “Is it true that the Marquesans sailed there and brought their stonework and techniques of building?”
“Hawaii was settled between 500 and 700, by Marquesans,” he said. “You will see in Nualolo Vai – which I excavated, by the way – the people worked with much smaller stones than in the Marquesas, where the stones are very big.”
“Why do you suppose they set sail for Hawaii?” I asked. “I mean apart from the tribal wars and the famines that forced them out to sea?”
“It is a good question, considering the distance,” he said. “But when I was in the Marquesas some years ago I remember seeing migratory birds arrive – first two or three, then fifteen or twenty. And then many, many birds. I am a scientist, but I am also somewhat romantic, and I began to imagine the people saying, ‘Look at those birds! Where do those birds come from? Let’s go!’”
“Have you found any evidence of cannibalism in your digging?”
“I once found fifty skulls on a Marquesan site. In some places people say, ‘Don’t touch the skulls.’ But in the Marquesas the people say, ‘You want these skulls? Take them.’”
This question of cannibalism animated him. He rose from his chair and began to describe other circumstantial evidence.
“I would sometimes be digging and find – mixed together – dog bones, pig bones and human bones, all thrown in the same garbage pit, as though they had just been eaten. Why else mix human bones with pig bones?” he said. “There was human sacrifice everywhere in Polynesia – for big events, to bring rain because of a drought, or for whatever reason.”
“What is the most Polynesian island in the Pacific – the most traditional?”
“Polynesia is gone,” he said. “Western Samoa is probably the most traditional place, and perhaps Tonga. The Solomons and the New Hebrides are also traditional. But even so it is spoiled in those places. Fiji and Tonga still have chiefs.”
This tallied with my amateur observations: the graceful huts of Savaii, the nobles and commoners of Tonga, the egg fields of Savo, the cross-faced tribes and muddy buttocks of the island of Tanna.
“But I remember Atiu,” the professor said, speaking of a small island in the Cook group, not far from Aitutaki, where I had paddled. “I was working there and as recently as 1984 Atiu was totally traditional. Everything was intact. I returned for several years, and then in 1989 the culture was gone. It was finished, just like that. How did it happen so quickly? You know what caused it? The video. I don’t know why the government doesn’t regulate videos. They are terrible. Rape. War. Violence. Drinking. They give bad ideas to young people, and they destroyed the culture in Atiu which had lasted for over a thousand years.”
Then he began to talk about his dig in Huahine, how he had worked on the lovely island for twenty years – the uniqueness of the place, with aquaculture in the lagoon, and farming beyond it, and the chiefs living along the shoreline. He had uncovered thirty-five sites behind the lagoon, one of the richest archeological finds in Polynesia.
“But what do my fellow countrymen do?” Professor Sinoto said. “Some Japanese businessmen want to buy this whole end of Huahine. They want to put up three large hotels and use the lagoon for swimming and water-skiing. They want to put up an airport and have three jumbo jets a week from Tokyo.”
It was wonderful to hear a Japanese person becoming indignant over the acquisition and exploitation of Pacific islands. For once, I could shut my mouth and listen to someone echo my sentiments.
“The Japanese are looking for playgrounds in the Pacific,” the professor said, barely controling his fury. “What kind of benefit will this bring to the locals? They hire a few people to work in the hotels for the lowest wages. The first big hotel on Huahine was the Hotel Bali Hai. Local people became drunk in the bar. Because of their drinking they needed money. They began to steal money from the bungalows. When I heard that the Japanese were planning to buy this area I hoped they would be turned down. Their application was temporarily denied. After that, I saw someone in the government and said, ‘We must preserve this area,’ and he helped arrange it. So it might not happen in Huahine, but it has happened in many other places.”
He let this sink in. We sat among the artifacts, in front of a great chart with arrows showing the ancient migration routes in Oceania.
Professor Sinoto said, “Everyone is looking for playgrounds in the Pacific.”
24
Kauai: Following the Dolphins on the Na Pali Coast
There are distinct seasons for everything in the Pacific, though this is not always so obvious to the tourist on dry land. Look at all the people
lounging on the beach in Hawaii, remarking on the balmy weather, the wonderful hotels, the funky music, the ya-yas at the local clubs, the great food. They haven’t the faintest idea what month it is, because paradise hasn’t got a calendar, or seasons. Aloha, they say to each other, and after a while they learn to say Mahalo (thank you).
They bandy these two words all over the place, and some people laugh at them for it, but why? It is rare – almost unheard of – to find anyone who speaks Hawaiian in complete sentences. This is tragic, because when the Hawaiians lost their language – when it was debased and bowdlerized by missionary literalism – they lost their identity. The movement for reviving the old language, which is melodious and highly metaphorical, is (like the movement for sovereignty) still struggling. What you hear in normal speech is jargon, conversational color, a matter of vocabulary, of knowing twenty or thirty words and scattering them in your English sentences.
The more Hawaiian words you know the more easily you can pull rank. It is exactly what missionaries do in simple societies to ingratiate themselves. In Hawaii this manner of speaking comprises a local idiolect, or lingo, in which every hole is referred to as a puka, and all talk as namu, and every toilet as a lua, and all children as keikis, and so forth. Directions are full of Hawaiian jargon – seaward is makai, towards the mountains is mauka, and west is ewa. Like Hawaiian Pidgin, with which it shares many words, it is often used jokingly. Of course, there are words which only native-born Hawaiians know, but they keep them to themselves: why give everything away?
This lingo has a certain charm, though no one forms sentences. No one ever says “Hello, how are you?” in the language, and when I asked some old-timers, who would have called themselves kamaainas, they couldn’t tell me that the simple greeting was Aloha kakou. Pehea’oe. Hawaiian is used simply to gain credibility. In Africa it has an exact counterpart in so-called kitchen Swahili.
Travel writers in Hawaii interlard their prose with this island jargon to give it verisimilitude. Travel writers in Hawaii write about the room service at the hotels, and the efficiency of the valet parking, and whether the hollandaise on the eggs benedict has curdled. Brunch is quite an important subject for the travel writer. So is golf. So is tennis. They are mainly junketers, people on press trips; and they often travel with their spouses – one scribbles, the other snaps pictures – making travel writing one of the last Mom and Pop businesses in America. I thought of such people when I was in my camp site at Vava’u, or paddling in the Trobriands, or squatting on the beach in the Solomons, or sheltering from the driving rain in a ratty cave on the west coast of Rapa Nui.
“I’m a travel writer, too,” one named Ted said to me on Kauai. “I’m here covering some hotels. I’m covering some restaurants, too. Pacific Café? It’s Pacific Rim cuisine. We’re at the Waiohai here. My wife Binky is with me – we always travel together. She’s an astrologer. Have you stayed in the bungalows at Mauna Lani? We had three nights there. I’m covering it for a paper back home. We mainly do upscale hotels. Last time I was here I was covering the block party at Waikiki. It was kind of fun.”
I asked Binky to tell my fortune.
“I couldn’t read your stars unless I had lots of astral information,” Binky said. “I do a little writing myself. I like the hotels. But it’s funny about Hawaiian hotels. Some of them serve only American wine. And I can only drink French wine. I love Cristal. They made us feel very welcome at the Four Seasons in Maui. They gave me a gold pendant and Ted got a fabulous shirt from the logo shop. They hydrated our faces with Évian atomizers as we lounged by the pool. My real favorite place is St Bart’s. Ever been there? I love French food.”
I was proud of being a travel writer in Oceania. I stopped seeing it as a horrid preoccupation that I practiced only with my left hand. But when I got to Hawaii I changed my mind. I was not sure what I did for a living or who I was, but I was absolutely sure I was not a travel writer.
As a matter of fact, travel writers seldom wrote about the seas that lap Hawaii. The Pacific was something they squinted at over the rim of the pineapple daiquiri. They gushed about the waves breaking on the reef, but apart from that, water sports are not a frequent subject for travel writers. The proof of this was their love of surf. And yet boat-owners are never so sentimental about surf, which is like a vision of death and destruction.
Boating in Hawaii’s waters can be rather uncongenial. Just offshore, prevailing conditions are unpredictable much of the time, and fierce (and of course prettiest) in winter months – frothy seas, stiff winds, and strong currents. The sailor with a problem looks onshore and sees a rocky coast or a reef, heavy surf, or one of the great horrors for anyone in a small boat – surfers having a wonderful time.
“It’s not too great when you see surfers,” Rick Haviland told me in Kauai. He was a master of understatement. “That’s kind of a bad jellyfish,” he said one day of a Portuguese man-of-war, and “kind of neat” always meant breathtaking. Rick was in the kayak and bike business, rentals and sales, and as a former surfer he confided to me that the presence of surfers always means high waves and the worst conditions for the rest of us. It was Rick who gave me a crash course on Kauai’s sea conditions, and it was Rick whom I successfully bullied into accompanying me on an off-season jaunt down the coast which has the most beautiful cliffs in the Pacific.
If you try to paddle a kayak in the wrong season off the glorious and almost inaccessible Na Pali coast of Kauai you can get into deep trouble – no one does much paddling between October and April, though some of the tour boats run throughout the winter. I was apprehensive, because it was November and I was looking for a window of good weather to make the trip paddling my own little boat. I had a special reason for wanting a closer look at Kauai, because I had traveled in the Marquesas in French Polynesia. There is a great cultural connection between those two places.
Of course there are connections and relationships all over the Pacific – words spoken in Tahiti are also spoken in New Zealand and Samoa, food items and cooking methods are shared in island groups thousands of miles apart, and so are dances and deities. It seems at times – and it is often argued – that this enormous body of water is a single oceanic family of like-minded people with a common culture.
But, as Professor Sinoto had said, one of the closest connections that exists is between the Marquesas and the Hawaiian Islands. In fact, the Hawaiians are the descendants of the Marquesans who sailed to Hawaii and settled there sometime around A.D. 700. But it is generally reckoned that the last place in the Pacific to be settled was here, on the almost inaccessible Na Pali coast. They could not have chosen a more appropriate place. Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas and Kauai in Hawaii might be neighbor islands: they look similar, with volcanic mountains shaped like witches’ hats and vegetation as dense and dark green as spinach, the same deep valleys, the same furrows of cold lava flows. Their ancient ruins – patterns of boulders, rock platforms and walls and petroglyphs – are almost identical, and they are just as dangerous to anyone who travels offshore in their peculiarly tricky waters.
“I guess we should kind of angle out here,” Rick murmured, looking up at the surf as we set off in our kayaks from Haena Beach Park near where the Na Pali begins. To the right were surfers frolicking in the ten-foot breaking waves of “Tunnels,” a well-known surfers’ spot; to the left was a reef and more waves nearer shore – another version of sudden death.
I followed him; I liked his mellow mood, the way he relaxed and rode the waves. The happiest campers are imperturbable. So what if the wind was blowing fifteen knots or more? At least it was at our back, helping us along in a big following sea. The outlook was good, but so what if the weather turned foul? We had camping equipment, we had food and water, we had survival gear, we even had a quart of margaritas.
We paddled on, past the first of the cliffs – Na Pali means “The Cliffs” – a corner of the coast, which was the place where Hawaii’s best-known deity, Pele (goddess of the volcanos), fell in love wi
th a mortal, the chief Lohiau. It is a hidden and in many respects a spiritual coast, full of mana; a place of temples and burial grounds – a holy coast. This coast and much of Kauai is a byword for the exotic. It is the source of many Hawaiian legends, ancient and modern, as well as some of our own sweetest myths: just above us, the Makana Ridge was the location of Bali Hai, in the movie South Pacific; a bit further on, Honopu Valley was seen by millions as the home of King Kong; across the mountains the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark was shot; and further along the coast Elvis Presley fooled with Ann Margret in Blue Hawaii. Talk about legends!
An eight-foot swell with a strong push to it (“Kind of a surge – feel it?”) was dragging us sideways towards the first of the deep Na Pali valleys. This one was Hanakapiai, with a small but lovely beach which is swept away each year by the powerful winter seas and then is piled up again in the spring and summer. The footpath passes here and then continues on to about a third of the length of this coast, the eleven-mile Kalalau Trail. It is only for the strongest hikers, but is well known among outdoor people as one of the most scenic in the world.
The rocky cliff-face a bit farther along was being battered by waves, and these reflected waves smashing against oncoming ones created a choppy sea and a phenomenon called clapotis – vertical standing waves – which were making me seasick. I had never felt pukesome in a kayak before but, bobbing like cork in this chaotic chop, I felt distinctly nauseous.
Coincidentally it was lunchtime, but paddling out a mile in the wind and streaming sea I was able to settle my stomach. Rick and I divided up our lunch and, eating it – a sandwich, an apple, a bottle of water – we drifted apart, and there we stayed, for an hour or two.
There is a mystical element in paddling a kayak which might be described as the trance induced by the rhythm of paddling, lifting and stroking continuously and gliding along. The paddler concentrates, and falls silent, and without fanfare but with a relentless steadiness goes forward, rising and falling in the waves. It is an effort, of course, but because of this trance the effort is almost unnoticeable. I suppose hikers and joggers must enter that same state of mind, because it becomes a very peaceful and healthful way of breathing, and here it was intensified by the beauty of Na Pali with long narrow fluted valleys, and cliff rims rising to 4,000 feet.