Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  Turning my eyes to the water, I immediately noticed an extraordinary surf break, a long right-breaking wave just below a steep precipice, the breaker curving around the headland. Anywhere else in the world and there’d be a dozen or more surfers on this point break, all pummeling each other as they jostled for position. This wave, I thought, would be worth big bucks on other islands. Some chiefly landlord would claim it, a backpacker’s resort would pop open, and surfers from around the world would flock here for the chance to experience a few barrels. But not here. There wasn’t a soul on the water. There are just six hundred people living on Fatu Hiva, divided between two villages. There are no hotels. The island lacks a runway, so there aren’t any prop planes ferrying visitors from Papeete. It is a difficult place to reach. The only way is by sea.

  As for tourists? That would be us. As I gazed upon the sandals and dark socks combo that European men of a certain age inexplicably favor, and the wide-brimmed sun hats nestled upon stacks of gray hair, and listened to the whir of cameras, I thought it unlikely that any besides myself was jonesing for a chance to shred a few waves. What I’d give, I thought, for a boogie board and a local to point out the jagged rocks that I sensed were lurking below the surface, ready to slice apart a femoral artery. Such was the allure of this wave.

  As the crew unloaded cargo onto a barge, we arranged ourselves into steel-hulled launches and roared toward the island like invading marines. I felt awkward, as I always did when in the company of some kind of group-travel excursion. To see the world, I thought, one should be quiet, stealthy, like James Bond. We were not James Bond. We were Gérard Depardieu and the cast of Murder, She Wrote. Lovely people, but I was feeling a disconnect between the remoteness of the locale and the familiarity of my shipmates. They, the native Fatu Hivans, however, were ready for us. They’d seen this show before, the monthly attack of well-traveled European pensioners, and even from a distance I could already discern the commercial gleam in their eyes. Much as I enjoyed the company of my fellow shipmates, I knew I’d have to leave them if I was to ever garner some kind of authentic Marquesan experience. It’s why I liked traveling solo. The world presents itself unfiltered in all its mess and glory. This, I thought, as I beheld the scene that awaited us, was stagecraft, a well-rehearsed play. See native handicrafts. See native dancing. And so, as we landed, where we were soon gathered around a few local women for the Tapa-Making Demonstration, I figured I’d simply enjoy the scenery and find some way to work up a sweat. The last thing my home needed was another knickknack from the South Pacific, and I wandered away from the group, the guides, and the local ladies turning bark into a coarse paper, and walked on, whereupon I soon found myself in a long tin-roofed shed, bargaining over handicrafts.

  What can I say? The reason I live in a home full of Pacific art is because I’m kind of a sucker for really well-crafted indigenous handiwork. Some people like oil paintings and ceramic cats. I like bark etchings and carved shells and scary masks made out of moss. As soon as I wandered into the shed, I could tell that this was a village that paid some serious attention to the making of art, in particular the tapa, which is crafted from the bark of mulberry, breadfruit, or giant banyan trees, upon which they painted figures and elaborate designs based on the tattoos that Marquesans traditionally inscribed upon their bodies, transforming their physical appearance into living canvases. They displayed their work on long adjoining tables, and as soon as I wandered in, the lone foreigner in their midst, they had but one urgent question for me: “Est-ce qu’il y a des Américains sur le bateau?”

  Really, I thought, does the presence of Americans still bring such a tingle of wanton joy? Like the Japanese, Americans have a reputation for wildly overpaying for things when in foreign places. Lacking a bargaining culture of our own, the rest of the world sees us as walking ATM machines, and whenever a merchant encounters a Yankee accent, they quiver in anticipation. But those days are gone, I thought. I wanted to explain that times had changed. Whereas once the dollar had been king, it was now an enfeebled currency. The world, inexplicably, had become expensive. In the nineties, when I lived in Eastern Europe, I managed just fine on about a hundred dollars a month. Today, that covers perhaps two middling meals in a restaurant in Papeete. Even third-rate hip-hop stars today, when they do those videos displaying their affinity for booty and mullah, now prance about with wads of Euros and Swiss francs. And as for your average middle-class American, I wanted to explain to the handicraft sellers hovering around me, we have this weird retirement scheme where we are more or less obliged to hand over our savings to this place called Wall Street, which is kind of like entrusting your future to a leech, and as you watch it engorge itself with your blood, you simply hope that someday in the future, the leech will give it back. Most of us—especially those under the age of forty-five—don’t have pensions like those Commie Europeans. And because leeches are not to be trusted, I wanted to add, Americans are now tightwads. Shocking, but true. It’s like our whole national character has undergone some kind of seismic change, and you, dear foreign merchant, should be made aware. But instead, I said that regrettably there were no Americans on board. I could do this because I am a chameleon when it comes to nationality, and in this instance, it would do me no favors to be an American. Reputations die hard.

  So I explained that, sadly, this was a boat of French, Germans, Swiss, and a couple of elderly New Zealanders, and I fear that I pretty much ruined their day. Cheapskates all, nationality-wise. I myself, today, would be Dutch, the cheapest, most penny-pinching, scrooge-like traveler on the planet, and so when I saw an extraordinary tapa made of darkened banyan cloth—perhaps five feet long and three feet wide—upon which a moving image of a dancing, tattooed Marquesan warrior had been painted, I felt I was well positioned, bargaining-wise.

  “Twenty-five thousand,” said my interlocutor, a cherubic woman with a friendly, albeit all-business, demeanor, who wore a hibiscus flower in her hair and whose skin glistened with coconut oil.

  Well, that settled it. I didn’t have 25,000 Polynesian francs, roughly the equivalent of 230 US dollars. And this was a cash-only island. I showed her exactly how much money I had in my wallet, because that’s the kind of savvy negotiator that I am, and she quickly decided that all 20,000 francs in my possession would be adequate. But don’t tell anyone, she whispered confidentially, and don’t show your money. This, of course, was no longer a problem since she now had all of it. She assured me that, not to worry, she’d make sure the tapa would make its way back to the boat, and so I left it with her, because that’s the kind of flinty-eyed judge of character that I am. As I departed, I could hear her talking to her compatriots, noting with delight this strange Dutchman, an apparition who shopped like one of those legendary Americans.

  Pleased to have contributed my part to the local economy, and thrilled to have such a beautiful tapa, I walked onward through the sparsely inhabited village—a scattering of modest tin-roofed bungalows arranged around a white-steeple church—and found a dirt path leading deeper into the bush, toward the hills of the high country. It’s a small island—a mere thirty-one square miles—but everywhere I turned my gaze it was like encountering a new land. Near the village, the fruit trees were enormous. Massive banana trees with giant clumps of green fruit; pamplemousse, or grapefruit the size of melons; there were trees bursting with ripe mangoes and, of course, breadfruit that hung from branches like Chinese lanterns. Even the noni, a foul-smelling fruit used throughout the Pacific for medicinal purposes, was gigantic, at least double the egg-size specimens I’d been familiar with. What was this place, I wondered? Jurassic Park? Even the pigs were gargantuan. I half expected to see some colossal pterodactyl circling above the valley, in the shadow of a verdant bowl of 3,500-foot mountains, hungering for a stray mammal ambling in the open on a sun-drenched path, looking for prey that was feeling mildly lost and befuddled.

  But I walked with purpose. I immediately felt a greater affinity for Heyerdahl
. He’d chosen his island well. It would be so easy, I knew, to live off the island’s offerings. This was no grim, drought-stricken atoll. It was a veritable Eden. There were copious sources of food; the sea was aswarm with fish; every mountain beheld a freshwater stream. And while mosquitoes were a burden, the island lacked no-nos, the microscopic bloodsuckers and egg layers that bedevil so much of the Marquesas. If your inclination was to renounce Western civilization, you could do far worse than to set forth for Fatu Hiva. But of course, even in Heyerdahl’s day, the world he sought to escape had already inflicted a heavy toll on Fatu Hiva.

  The first Westerner to spot the island was the Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña, who named the islands after his benefactor, the viceroy Las Marquesas de Mendoza, in 1595. Luckily for the Fatu Hivans he never made it to shore, which was most fortunate, because in the northern Marquesas, he had a habit of shooting locals on sight, while spending his downtime infecting hundreds of women with syphilis, and marking the occasion of his visit to what he thought was the fabled gold-laden kingdom of Solomon with three enormous crosses on the island of Tahuata. It wasn’t until 1825 that the first Westerner set foot on Fatu Hiva, and it would take another fifty years until missionaries succeeded in converting the locals to Catholicism. By then, of course, the decimation of the population had begun in earnest, and the surviving remnants, mostly young adults—the diseases had carried away the small and the old—abandoned their hillside villages to settle into the two remaining coastal hamlets. Today, deep in the forests of Fatu Hiva and the other Marquesan islands, hundreds of ancient villages lie dormant and undisturbed, reclaimed by nature, hovered over by ghosts.

  I was searching for one such remnant of the old Marquesas, a petroglyph that Heyerdahl examined, of which he waxed poetic, conjecturing about its resemblance to similar carvings in South America. I expected a longish trek, but found it after a half-hour amble up a grassy sidetrack surrounded by a canvas of coconut trees. It was up a small hillside, where I was startled by the bleating of a goat. I found a cluster of boulders, and casting my eyes deeper into the forest, the faint outlines of what I thought might be maraes, flat and terraced ceremonial clearings, now overgrown with bush-tumble and trees. Walking around the huge rocks, I found the petroglyph. Some say it is of a bonita, but to my untrained eyes it looked like a whale. It didn’t have a little fishy mouth, but rather the lush-lipped openmouthed cavern of a feeding whale, and if those leviathans were as rare then in these seas as they are now, it is no wonder that some Marquesan of yore had chosen to mark his encounter in stone. As I used my finger to trace its lengthy outline, I heard the rustling of palm fronds and felt the first stirrings of a morning breeze—some strange meteorological change was afoot. I felt a sudden chill in the warm, humidity-sodden air, and because my brain was no longer dull and foggy, and instead prone to wild imaginative leaps, I immediately thought of ghosts and the curse of the tiki, possibly because I watched far too much Gilligan’s Island during my formative years, and I decided to hightail it out of there pronto. I’m telling you, this is a strange, magical island, a place, I thought, much more accommodating of the paranormal than Roswell. You sense things here.

  I retraced my steps, or rather, galloped back to the village just in time to join the trekkers. We had been forewarned about this hike—a seventeen-kilometer tramp to the village of Hanavave, the other hamlet located on what was once known as the fabled Bay of Penises, said to be the most beautiful in the South Pacific—the bay that is. We’d hike up to a summit of about 2,500 feet, followed by a knee-shattering descent to the village. Those with heart conditions, arrhythmia, high blood pressure, wobbly joints, and enormous beer bellies were strongly discouraged to attempt the hike—there would be no defibrillators brought on this journey—and they were soon whisked back to the boat, which would sail onward to Hanavave as soon as it had finished unloading its goods in Omoa. I checked out the remaining hikers. It seemed somehow important to be the first to summit, no matter how modest the peak. No way was I going to lose to some middle-aged periodontist from Dortmund. I’m not sure why this was important to me—it betrayed a lack of serenity—but I felt it crucial to demonstrate, if only to myself, that I was fitter than a group of balding, older, gray-weaved, arthritic retirees with dubious prostates and severe bunion problems. I scanned the assembled passengers, a healthy lot, all things considered, but detected no rival until my eyes met the steely gaze of the hard-bodied Swiss woman I’d encountered in the gym. She had a glint in her eye, and it suddenly occurred to me that she was probably some world-class alpinist for whom a 2,500 vertical climb was but a mere warm-up for a free ascent up the north wall of the Eiger. We had already established that we had no common language. She spoke neither English nor French, and my German—such as it is—found the Swiss dialect incomprehensible. I did, however, note that during meal times with her husband/partner her wineglass remained as empty as mine, which could mean nothing, or that we shared a particular commonality.

  As we headed up a steep bush trail, I fell in step with Mareile, the archeologist on board. I told her about the petroglyph and the remnants of the marae platforms that I’d seen in the bush-tangle.

  “They’re everywhere on these islands. It makes me very sad to see them. Most have never been examined or excavated.”

  “Why not?” I wondered.

  “Many are taboo. And even when we do receive permission, it is often rescinded the moment we find a skull or artifact. And sometimes bad things just happen. On the north coast of Hiva Oa, we’d begun excavations in caves full of petroglyphs and rock art. Unfortunately, while we were working, the chief’s son fell out of the back of a pickup truck and smashed his head. When he died, the whole valley was declared taboo.”

  I reflected on this for a moment. It seemed evident to me that the Marquesans actually cared about their heritage, which may seem obvious—what culture doesn’t—but these islanders had become nearly as extinct as the dodo bird, and what they’d found when the onslaught of disease and contagion had finally run its course, leaving but a bare sliver of survivors, was a new regime of French functionaries and stern missionaries, determined to exterminate the last vestiges of the old ways.

  “Yes,” Mareile agreed. “And remember, it was only the young adults who’d survived, and they’d largely been unschooled in the ways of their ancestors. It was a lost people with no memory of the old ways. They were now taught French, instead of Marquesan. Church was mandatory. And they’d lost their connection to their forbearers.”

  Well, all that seemed depressing as hell. Usually, it takes the allure of television and the Internet to snuff out a culture, but not here. A little pestilence and plague, a few fire-and-brimstone preachers, and a sprinkling of French bureaucrats were enough for the Marquesan culture to be brought to the brink of doom.

  “But these days, the Marquesas are such an optimistic place,” Mareile added brightly.

  Say what?

  “Since the eighties, beginning in Hawaii, there’s been a revival in Polynesian culture. And ever since the nineties, the Marquesans too have begun to search deep into their roots. They may not remember the legends or all the medicinal uses of plants found here, but they have reclaimed the old dances. They now teach Marquesan in the schools. And did you notice the woodcarvings and the tapas?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I even bought a large tapa—against my will—because my house already looks like the home of the Swiss Family Robinson.”

  She laughed at this. “You bought it, I suspect, because it was the most beautiful artwork you’d seen in the Pacific, right?”

  I couldn’t argue with that. The image on the tapa I’d bought—the dancing warrior—managed to be both joyful and melancholic, as if it were the portrait of some aged relative, now infirm and feeble, but for a brief moment, long ago, a camera had captured him with eyes full of vigor and dreams, the inevitable misfortune and disasters yet to befall him, and as he gazed into the lens wi
th a warm, determined face, the shadows of life still seemed so distant, as it always does for the young, for whom hope and fate had yet to diverge.

  “And how much did you pay for it, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Every franc I had. About twenty thousand.”

  “That’s not so bad, you know. A couple of years ago an American paid more than two thousand dollars for a similar tapa.”

  “Ah,” I said. Explains much, that.

  “And have you seen the tattoos?” Mareile continued.

  They were hard to miss. No tramp stamps here; nor the barbed-wire circling deflating biceps; and not a smidgen of inscrutable Chinese calligraphy found anywhere, ankles and shoulders included. This was the real deal, and as far as I could tell, every Marquesan over the age of eighteen was elaborately bedecked in the distinct, swirling designs of the islands, men and women alike. My favorite happened to be the ship’s crane operator, who’d gone for the full-skull mask, a fearsome-looking man who was often bedecked with a flower tucked behind an ear pierced with a thick golden loop. On a smoke break, he’d told me of his desire to one day visit America. “But with this face,” he’d said in French, “I don’t think they’ll let me in.” And then he laughed like he couldn’t care less.

  “But what about kava? Do the Marquesans drink it today?” I inquired of Mareile, suddenly unsure whether this was a question asked with sincere curiosity, or whether this was a remnant of my lizard brain, searching for the local, traditional mind-altering brew. Stevenson, I remembered, wrote about kava, mentioning the narcotic effect the foul-tasting mud-water, which is made from the shredded remains of a particular pepper plant that grows high in the hills of Polynesia and Melanesia, had on a local chief. Kava was an important part of the traditional culture in the Marquesas. Had this too been reclaimed?