by David Yeadon
I drifted through the satiny, sun-dappled shallows, among the butterfly fish and golden shoals of anthias, watching the darkgreen tentacles of the sea worm emerge from their white warty tubes and sway ballerinalike in slow graceful dances. I could sense the warmth of the sun on my back and the soft lapping of the water on my outstretched arms. That old familiar feeling of weightlessness eased in—a lovely limbo of effortless movement through a landscape of infinite beauties where fish come up to kiss you and golden wings of lace coral wave at you like old friends and you wonder why you can’t just float on like this forever, buoyed by a benevolent ocean, lost in mushy-minded reveries, where all the plans and perils and petty concerns of life on land dissolve away and you allow your fantasies free rein to play, hour after hour, day after day….
I hadn’t seen the shark.
It must have been trailing me, keeping its distance, mimicking my lazy meanderings. I was moving over a field of cabbage coral, great blue-green sprays of leaflike clusters, when I noticed that my own dappled shadow appeared to be followed by a second shadow, almost of the same length. I thought it must be some trick of the light—some form of double reflection—and then slowly realized that the movement of the shadow behind was not identical to mine. Similar, but not quite the same.
With a quick flap of my flippers I turned…and there it was. A whitetip, almost five feet in length, but similar in almost every detail to far larger—and deadlier—specimens. There was the dullgray smoothness of its streamlined head, the ridge of its nose, the dark pectoral fins like honed knifeblades, the scimitar-shaped mouth slightly open and generously endowed with layer upon layer of razored teeth…and its eyes. God—how I hate the eyes of a shark, any shark, even those of the little puny dogfishlike sharklets. The eyes are always the same. Wide open, metallic, cold, angry, cruel—utterly merciless. Nothing like the cute little button eyes of the tomato clown fish or the bright gold jewel eyes of the anthias or the conical domes of the puffer.
Previously I had been warm, buoying about in the sunny shallows. Now I suddenly felt cold—death cold—as I looked right into the eyes of a killer. Only whitetips weren’t killers…or so I’d been told. But maybe this one hadn’t heard about its benevolent reputation. Or maybe this was the day when it was contemplating a new direction in life, a little human flesh maybe, to enliven an all too regular diet of puny defenseless fish. A nice fat mouthful of thigh, possibly, or a juicy arm.
If only the thing would blink once in a while…a smile would be too much to ask, and anyway, that crescent slit of a mouth seemed to possess a perpetual smile of gustatory anticipation…but a little blink of those deathly, malevolent eyes would be very nice, a little reassuring gesture, an indication that this was something more than just an endlessly avaricious eating machine.
But it didn’t.
So—what to do?
No way was I going to turn my back on it or try to swim around the creature. Maybe a hand gesture? I slowly allowed my arms to drift together until my hands were touching. Then I clapped them together, hoping a sudden movement would persuade it to wander on in search of less aggressive prey. But it did nothing except wriggle its dorsal fin and keep staring right at me.
There were branches of staghorn coral a few feet below me. Maybe I could use one of those as a spear and give him a quick jab on the nose. After all, the tips were supposed to contain some unpleasant poison…but that might make him mad at me and then…well, I’d be a quick lunch and that would be that.
In the end it was a standoff. I kept staring and it kept staring back and then I think it just became bored. With a quick flick of its tail fin it vanished. Off over the edge of the shallow reef and down into the purple depths of a canyon to my left.
I decided not to wait around to see if it had second thoughts and swam back to the boat as quickly as I could, expecting at any second to feel those incisor teeth and that ghastly maw of a mouth closing on one of my flapping legs.
“Oh, no, the whitetips are fine, man,” the boatman assured me. “Never had no problems.”
“Well, that’s what I assumed,” I bluffed. “Never really thought it would do anything.” Fear was easing away; my confidence was returning.
“No, not ’round here,” he replied with a big reassuring grin.
“Right.”
“’Course, if you’d been up in the Solomons…”
“Off Papua New Guinea?”
“Yeah tha’s right, man.”
“Why would that be different?”
“Man, tha’s very different up there. They eatin’ people all the time. Blacktips, whitetips, they all doin’ it. They really like people meat ’round those islands. They got used to it a’suppose. Before all them missionaries, the people’d leave out the bodies of them that died on the reefs for the sharks. Faster’n cremation, man. Few seconds and they’d be gone. So y’see, they got this taste for people meat. No one likes the water up there.”
“But that’s never happened around Fiji?”
“No, man—oh, no—we got different ways of doin’ things here.”
“Like burying the dead—not feeding them to the sharks?”
“No, man—no! Like eatin’ ’em instead!” His laughter made our small boat rock as if hit by a hurricane, and all the way into shore he kept repeating his punch line.
“Like eatin’ ’em instead!”
I was soon to learn much more about the ancient tribal customs of this seemingly benevolent little island.
I made another island friend—a young black-haired man named Mitieli. He just happened to be around when I emerged from the hotel one morning and we started talking. I liked his eyes and his conversations and he seemed to enjoy the role as newfound friend—and tutor.
We were strolling on a narrow stretch of beach just beyond the school at Somosomo when he pointed to a pile of driftwood lying in the roots of wind-bent palms at the high edge of the sand.
“Pieces of the Ra Marama,” he said in a soft voice. “Could be….”
“What’s a Ra Marama?” The locals kept doing this to me, dropping references to Taveuni history as if anyone who had taken the trouble to come to the island would at least know something about its intriguing (and gruesome) background and traditions.
“Ah—you don’t know about the Ra Marama?”
I’d read enough about the early adventures of Hannah and John Hunt, farmer-missionaries from Lincolnshire, England, to realize that whatever story Mitieli was about to tell me would be both colorful and violent.
The Hunts apparently arrived here in the 1840s to preach their Methodist doctrines to an extraordinarily savage population. The king of the reef, Tui Thakau, had loaned them a tribal bure but made it clear that their presence was merely tolerated, not welcome.
“Cruelty is law in this place,” John Hunt wrote in one of his journals. Hardly had they landed when they were confronted with “giants with spears in their hands and great heads of hair, two or three feet in diameter, their bodies naked except for a loincloth of masi and behind them were the tall thatched steeples of their heathen temples and the jagged peaks and rainclouds of Taveuni.” He noted in understated English prose, “The first sight of a Feejee man is rather appalling.”
The initiation of this young, God-fearing couple into the vicious rites of the “Feejee” men occurred suddenly, within a week of their arrival. One of the king’s sons was drowned one morning in a boating accident and immediately the king ordered the execution of sixteen attractive widows so that his son might be attended by enticing female companions in the spirit world. According to tribal custom their deaths were to be by strangling.
The poor Hunts protested and begged the king to reconsider, but the gentler ways of Christians had not yet begun to permeate tribal mores. The king dismissed their pleas with a wave of the two royal spears and ordered the Hunts to witness the horrifying spectacle. John recorded the gory details:
We were obliged to be in the midst of it and truly their cries and wailings
were awful…. They took a long piece of Native cloth and tied two knots about the middle and putting one knot on the throat and the other on the back of the neck some pulled at one end and some at another until they were strangled. Soon after they were murdered they were brought to be buried about twenty yards from our house. They were folded up in mats and were carefully covered over with stones; the cloth which formed the rope for strangling them was hung over them.
The poor Hunts were in for more gruesome rites the following day—the celebration of circumcision for the young men of the tribe.
When the ceremony was performed with knives made from split bamboo, the cloth on which some of the blood had been sprinkled was brought into the king’s yard and put on a stick, and the persons who had been circumcised danced round it. Their dancing consisted in walking and jumping and singing and shouting and yelling, etc., a most heathenish affair to be sure and continued several nights…. In connection with this ceremony many females and some men had one of their joints of their fingers cut off.
One can only admire the Hunts for their perseverance in the face of so much cruelty. They witnessed more ritual slaughters, the great festivities and feasts (the mekes), the pounding of the great lali drums made of tree trunks as the bodies of enemies were cooked and devoured with glee. They were also aware of the ancient tradition of implanting the bodies of captives upright and alive as foundation supports for the main posts of bures and tribal buildings to ensure mana (spiritual harmony) for each construction. Nevertheless, they continued to preach, teach, and collect a few converts while sacrifices and rituals continued unabated. They tried at one point to hide from the horrors of the tribe’s cannibalistic rites when captured enemies were slaughtered, roasted, and eaten with great relish by the tribe. John, ever loyal to his journals, described one such event when the Hunts had closed all the doors of their bure, which was located only a few yards from the king’s own house, to block out the appalling activities in the royal compound:
The king came in during the time the bodies were cooking and enquired why we had closed all the doors of the house. We told him the true reason which was because we hated the smell of the bodies which were cooking at which he was not pleased. As soon as Mrs. H. saw the king she began to cry. We spoke strongly to the king on the conduct he was pursuing, etc., at which he became angry and among other things said if we did not cease to reprove him he would kill us. I think he was particularly displeased because Mrs. Hunt wept.
Missionaries like the Hunts were often ill-informed prior to their arrival about the meticulous ritual-bound lives of the Fiji Islanders. What to them were despicably gruesome excesses, to the islanders—particularly the fierce Taveunians—were essential elements of a delicately balanced relationship between the gods and the tribe. Any omission, any abbreviation of ancient ceremonies, even a careless error in the long recitations of chants and war epics and accolades to the bravery of fallen enemies, could disturb this balance and make the chief and all his followers liable to divine punishment and retribution. Critical battles, it was thought, could be lost because of a single forgotten line in a thousand line monologue; villages, even whole kingdoms could be destroyed by such thoughtlessness. The gods were intolerant of the foibles of man. They expected perfection from their chiefs, warriors, and worshipers. The far more benign teachings of the missionaries with their “loving, forgiving God” seemed curiously unmasculine to many Fijian chiefs. They preferred the rigid rituals which they claimed would guarantee success and joy in life, in battle, and in the hereafter.
So—having learned at length some of the details of nineteenth-century tribal life on Taveuni, I prepared myself for Mitieli’s doubtless stomach-churning story of the Ra Marama.
“This was a splendid boat,” he began, “a great double canoe over a hundred feet long and twenty feet wide which took the boat makers over seven years to carve. They built a large platform and a place for the King—Ratu Thakobau—to sit when it was on the ocean. It was really a beautiful boat and all the rituals were done according to tradition. There were some human sacrifices and men were clubbed and killed with big wooden sticks when the boat was launched.”
“Why were they clubbed?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It was tradition. A kind of blessing on the boat, I suppose. Anyway, after the boat was on the ocean something went wrong. They were lowering the big sail and it snapped, killing one of the men on the boat and hurting some others. The king became very worried and said this was a sign of anger from the gods because not enough men had been sacrificed. So they found twenty more men and sacrificed them quickly.”
“And then everything was okay?”
“I don’t know. The boat seemed to have a kind of curse on it. It wasn’t used very much. People were afraid of it. And when Thakobau died it was returned to Somosomo—here—where it was built, and the people decided that as a sign of respect for the king, it would never sail again. So they put it high up on the beach and left it to rot.”
“And you think these are pieces from the Ra Marama?”
Mitieli smiled. “I don’t know. I was just joking, really, so that I could tell you this story!”
“Ah, yes. Joking.”
“Well, I tell good stories. Don’t you think?”
“Indeed you do, Mitieli.”
“So where’s my tabua?”
Oh, God, here we go again. Mitieli’s segues into island traditions and legends were never subtle.
“Okay. What’s a tabua? Tell me all about tabuas.”
“Well,” he said with a grin. “I’m glad you asked…and it’s not tabua. You say it tam-boo-a.”
This was turning into a real Abbott and Costello routine.
“Tabuas are very valuable in Fiji. They are the teeth of sperm whales and are given as tokens of thanks and respect. Sometimes as polite bribes—y’know, if you want someone to do something for you. You give him a large tabua and if he accepts it, then he usually will do what you ask.”
“So you think I should bribe you with one of these tabuas?”
“Well—is there anything you need me to do?”
“No—not really. Just keep telling me your stories.”
“Okay, then. So—this would be a thank-you tabua for all my wonderful stories. A nice big tooth—about eight inches wide would be fine—just like we used to get from the whaling boats that came to the islands over a hundred and fifty years ago. You’ll have to scrape and clean it, sand it with coral sand, then rub it with coconut oil and polish it till it shines with the leaves of the masi ni tabua tree.”
“Okay—sounds easy enough.”
“I haven’t finished yet. Then, when it’s all nice and shiny and polished, you’ll have to smoke it over a fire or stain it with tumeric until it turns a lovely deep orange. Then you plait some magimagi rope using pandanus leaves and tie this around both ends of my lovely tooth so that I can carry it around.”
“And that’s it?”
“No—that isn’t it. Then you have to wrap it up in a piece of tapa cloth and put in a special kato basket with a polished tinai ni tabua stone—one about the same size—so that they lie together.”
“Why a stone?”
“I don’t know. When there were not so many whale teeth they used to use polished stones or even tabuas made from trochus shells. But I don’t know why they put both of them into the kato basket.”
“And that’s it?”
“No. Then you have to present it to me as a gift. You have to kneel down on a special straw mat—a masi—and tell me that this gift is sa ka tudei—a thing that will not change—something that will last forever. And then I accept your gift, give a nice speech, and tell you more stories.”
“How about a bottle of rum instead?”
“Okay. Now?”
“No, not now, later. After more of your stories.”
“A big bottle, right? Not one of those little things for your back pocket?”
“Okay—a big bottle.”
“Good—well that’s all settled. Now, how about a climb up to Lake Tagimaucia?”
“To see the flowers?”
“To see…everything!”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Right.”
Wrong. Definitely a wrong decision. On the map it looked like an easy enough hike. Take the track behind the Mormon church (the islanders are very tolerant of divergent Christian sects) in Somosomo and then a brisk walk up the mountain to the lake and back down for a lunch of Indian samoasas or Fijian poached fish in coconut sauce. A pleasant morning walk. Nothing more.
But maps are often nothing more than deceitful, mean little shards of useless printed paper. At least this one certainly was. For a start it had rained overnight and, although the day was bright and blue, the almost invisible path remained a quagmire of mud holes and hidden ankle-snapping rocks. And then the map indicated a walk of no more than a mile or so into the center of the island. It felt more like a hundred. And it didn’t show that we had to climb three thousand feet from the beach.
Mitieli didn’t complain, however, so I kept my peace and followed him as the route became steeper and steeper, winding between enormous forest trees festooned with vines that snagged my arms, backpack, and legs. In places the path seemed to take on the characteristics of a stream bed, with cascades of water bouncing off the roots and rocks with silvery abandon.
“It gets a little tough now,” said Mitieli cheerfully, hardly panting.
I was wheezing like a retired warhorse. The air was thick and hot. There were no breezes in the dense layers of rain forest and little light permeated the dark canopy. My lungs screamed uselessly for cool dry air.