Of twelve men squeezed into the boat, only Mathys and another sailor survived, both jabbering, sun-blind and half insane when the brig pulled them from the sea. Days later, tended and fed, they were asked what happened to their skipper, Captain Toby Newton.
“Stringy, he was,” Mathys said. “When they all began to expire, he was the first we et.”
By the time they reached Lahaina on the island of Maui, whaling capital of the Pacific, word had spread that the brig was carrying two sailors who had eaten their captain. Still weak in body and mind, Mathys peered out at a harbor that rocked with tall-masted whalers, schooners, and clippers from round the world, and large crowds milling ashore, waiting to view the young cannibals. Terrified of imprisonment or being hanged, he neglected to see the incredible beauty of the island, white sickle beaches, tremulous palms, volcanic mountains like jagged emeralds.
Detained aboard the brig by police and representatives of King Kamehameha III, who refused to let haole cannibals lose among his people, Mathys grew desperate. One night he and his friend overpowered the watchman, jumped ship, and swam ashore. Within hours they had worked their way into the mountainous jungle interior of the island, hiding in daylight, running for their lives at night. Then Mathys’s friend crushed his leg in a fall down a ravine; the leg grew septic and he died.
Now he was alone in a world so foreign, so fantastic, he didn’t know the names of things, which plants and fish were edible, which ones would kill him. Islands he had always dreamed of, towering pavilions in the sea, were now a jungle prison where he was cursed to end his days alone. That loneliness was compounded by what Mathys feared was creeping insanity. At night he heard drums beating, saw lights, ghostly vapors dancing on graves.
He didn’t have the aptitude to live like a beast, and after months of crushing solitude one day he crept to the ocean, wanting only to die. With no thought, he threw himself from a cliff down to crashing waves. For a long time he thought he had died, that he was paying for his sins in hell, a nightmare world of blood, incessant pain, near-blindness.
Years later he would describe how he first saw Kelonikoa:
“She came to me from the sea. God had finally forgiven me.”
For, in that last year while Mathys had been slaughtering, whoring, eating human flesh, a young, headstrong Tahitian beauty was also consigning herself to a life of shame, exiling herself forever from her native lands. Daughter of a Tahitian high chief and a lady-in-waiting at the court of the reigning king of the islands of Tahiti, this girl—Kelonikoa Pi‘imoku Kanoa—had been betrothed, sight unseen, to a first cousin of the reigning Hawaiian king, Kamehameha III. After weeks at sea, arriving in Honolulu, she had peered from her carriage with her attendants, caught sight of the man she would marry and fainted. He was small and bowlegged, with a wrinkled face like a monkey.
She sent word to Tahiti, begging to return, threatening to kill herself rather than marry this monkey-man. She bided her time, refusing his visits, until word came back from her father, demanding she marry Kamehameha’s cousin, or be cast out forever from her people. Should she return to Tahiti, her father would eat both her eyes, she would be sacrificed alive, her bones thrown to wild dogs. One night while her attendants slept, Kelonikoa fled Honolulu on an inter-island steamer heading across the channel to Maui. The captain took an oath of silence when she placed in his hand a huge, precious black pearl.
In those days, Lahaina was a town of three thousand people, living mostly in grass houses, unprepared for thousands of whalers descending on them in increasing numbers, men bestial from months at sea, craving drink and women, men who believed there was “No God west of the Horn.” Arriving at Lahaina’s harbor, Kelonikoa stared horrified at crowds of sailors fighting, knifing, dragging laughing women into the bush. Fearing they would take her for a whore, afraid missionaries would report her to the king—for often their sympathies went to the highest bidder—she fled, working her way along the coast, until the town was far behind.
She was a woman of the sea, and in the sea was solace. She cast off shoes, petticoats and stays, tore the sleeves from her dress, tore off half the skirt so she could swim freely. Her skin darkened from sun, her hair grew coarse and tangled, she lost the language of humans, hearing only wildlife, the sea’s rhythms. She ate raw fish, slept in rock caves, and months passed as she gained her bearings. Her clothes disintegrated into little more than tattered rags, so that diving in and out of waves, limbs draped with seaweed, she resembled a creature half human, half fish.
One morning she played in the shallows, gathering ‘opihi for breakfast. The tide slowly brought her in, close enough to see on shore what resembled a yellow dog. The thing had long, filthy hair past its shoulders, a leathery brown body pollened with pale fur. It moved in a half crawl but, seeing her, tried to stand on two feet like a human. Waves washed her closer, and Kelonikoa saw its face was awful, one-eyed, bloodied, and bloated. She turned, swimming away, but it made a sound like a human. When she looked back it whimpered, held out its paws, and seemed to faint.
For weeks, she tended him, never speaking, touching him only to put food to his lips, or spread antiseptic root juices across the suppurating eye socket. In his delirium it came back to him: headlong plunge into the sea, the coral spear piercing. When the undertow wrenched him sharply back, there had been a swift, sucking POP! the coral snatching his eyeball. Slowly, slowly, pain receded, he felt nothing there, not even when she poured seawater into the healing socket. He learned to adjust to limited peripheral vision by keeping the good eye, the right eye, always roving.
Out of modesty, she covered his lap with a diaper of moss, made a skirt and vest for herself of ti leaves. And, as his eye began to heal, she fashioned an eye patch from the skin of mynah bird cured and softened with oil of kukui. Once he recovered, she didn’t go near him, would not touch him again. They moved side by side during the day, slept at a distance at night.
One morning, Kelonikoa saw him struggle with his knotted hair, his filthy beard, failing to strike down a bird with his makeshift slingshot. Approaching slowly, she made motions for him to lower his head into a stream, then washed his hair with coconut and eucalyptus juice until it rinsed to gold. With a seashell honed to a sharp blade, she trimmed his hair and shaved his beard off. Before her stood a man with features so pleasing, she backed away.
But in that caring gesture Mathys slowly came to life. He had feared the girl was a figment of his madness, that in the delirium of pain he had conjured her, for sometimes she was there, and sometimes not. Yet, now, the smell of her hands lingered on him. Her soft laughter echoed. Slowly, they began to talk in grunts and sign language that evolved into Tahitian-English Pidgin. Drawing maps in sand, using twigs and stones, he learned she was Polynesian, but from islands far south, called Tahiti, from which ancient Hawaiians had ventured looking for new lands. And she learned he was a Yankee, his home near an island called Manhattan. She learned he had been a common farmer. And Mathys understood she came from royalty. Now they were equals, trying to survive.
Her incredible, golden beauty called forth the beauty around him, and nature quietly stepped forward. Jungles that had choked him now opened into misty rain forests abloom with torch ginger, orchid, heli-conia, towering waterfalls. The vegetation he was afraid to eat turned out to be luscious guava, mango, passion fruit. Kelonikoa fashioned a strong bow and arrow, taught him to stalk partridge, pheasant, goat, how to face a charging boar, gauging the force of the boar’s leap to gain extra penetrating power for the arrow. She taught him Polynesian net-casting, how to pry limpets from tidal rocks, how to bake kālua pig in earth with heated stones. She taught him to pound taro tubers into poi, and how to store meat in ti leaves.
In the evenings, sun slipping through the fingers of their right hands, moon rising in their left, as cooling trades funneled through the channel between Maui and Moloka‘i, Mathys began to talk about his life at sea. How, seeing a whale for the first time, something in him went down on its knees. O
nce, rowing close to a creature’s head just before the harpoon struck, he stared into its eye.
“As if God had turned and looked at me.”
He talked about the humpback’s songs that constantly, mysteriously changed. And the size of the blue whale, largest in the world. And the rich, thick milk of the sperm whales, thick as cheese, the crying of their calves when mothers were slaughtered.
“I have seen their hearts,” he said, “large as boulders. And I have seen their brains. What do they think with those massive brains? What do their songs mean?”
They had sometimes followed his ship for days, deeply inquisitive, watching the crew. He explained how they were the first animals on earth, it said so in the Bible, and he would spend his life mourning the ones he had slaughtered. Even now, some days he sat alone by the sea, remembering the songs of the humpback, wondering at the mind of the sperm.
Hearing sorrow in his voice, a kind of poetry, Kelonikoa felt a stirring. Though foreign traders had visited her islands, he was the first white man she had ever spoken to. She had been taught they were evil, that their bodies carried “sailor’s pox,” always fatal to natives, that they were spreading it island to island as a way of conquering the Pacific. No one had told her white men felt sadness, or longing, that they had grave souls like Polynesians.
Wanting to give Mathys something in return, Kelonikoa took him down to the sea, teaching him to hold his breath and deep-dive. She gave him the gift of deep canyons of pastel-colored coral, the courting dance of sea snakes in silver blizzards of sprats. She showed him the intelligence of the octopus, how when stroked with affection, they danced a graceful, eight-legged dance. She showed him the eerie and beautiful night world of plankton pulsing and glowing, trailing gossamer tails like ghostly anglers. They swam with schools of dolphin, hitched rides on the backs of manta rays with wingspans of twenty feet. One night they watched two giant phosphorescent squid, tentacles eighty or ninety feet long, battling in moonlight to the death.
And still, they slept apart, Mathys never dreaming of touching her, for she seemed a thing beyond his reach. One day when he woke, she would be gone. Then one night they heard drums like giant heartbeats, which Mathys had thought were part of his madness from too much solitude. Kelonikoa led him through the jungle, and from a distance they watched lights flash like fireballs, vaporish forms swerving and weaving over gravelike mounds of earth.
“Heiau” she whispered. “Ancient temple grounds where human sacrifices made. Dey come back searching for dere souls.”
That night Mathys divulged the unspeakable part of his past, for he had thought the drums and ghosts of his solitary year in the jungle were God’s way of keeping him half mad, his penance for having devoured human flesh.
“You see, everyone else in the boat had expired. We were starving, sun-blind, dying of thirst.”
Bodies blistered and cracked, they had watched sharks circle and circle. Desperate, they had thrown a corpse overboard, keeping the beasts at bay. Seeing the blood during their feeding frenzy, Mathys had sliced into his skipper’s body, put his mouth to the cut, and mindlessly sucked.
“Captain was tough and stringy, body dehydrated, only a bit of blood. We threw out his arms and legs, worked our way down to the organs. That’s what saved our lives.”
He could still see the man’s liver in his hand as he washed it with seawater, still see it shining and quivering, as he brought it to his mouth.
He hung his head. “That’s what I was. A cannibal.”
Rocking back and forth, Kelonikoa laughed at his great “sin,” explaining how her grandparents had eaten the flesh of their enemies during tribal wars, that cannibalism was a noble part of Polynesian heritage. After that, Mathys grew calm, more confident. There was nothing left to hide. But she turned strangely sad, for she had no secrets, no tragedies to tell him in return.
“But you do,” he cried. “Tell me again of your flight from the monkey-man!”
He loved the story, made her tell it over and over. And in each telling, he saw her strength, a woman who would follow her decisions. Each telling also reminded him they were fugitives, Kelonikoa fleeing her father, and Mathys the police, possibly the American government. Occasionally, coming upon hunters, they turned and ran. But no one seeing this one-eyed wild man connected him to a young sailor from New England. And the ragged wahine they saw was never associated with a Tahitian gentlewoman who had refused the hand of royalty and supposedly flung herself into the sea. Spotted swimming by fishermen, they changed their sleeping and cooking places, moved deeper into the jungle.
One day, Kelonikoa came running to where Mathys was curing the pelt of a goat. Prying ‘opihi from tidal rocks, she had heard the voices of net-casting natives. Hiding behind rocks, she had listened to their talk, Hawaiian so similar to her Tahitian. Now, she knelt before him, speaking rapidly in Pidgin, words tumbling over themselves.
“Poppy War! Chinee come Honolulu . . . monkey-man pau!”
He calmed her down and, slowing her chatter, understood that a terrible Opium War had begun, and that possibly their life of hiding was over. During the days of whaling, he had heard from seamen how in the early 1800s, watching their country become a nation of addicts, the Chinese Imperial government had forbade further importation of opium. By the mid-1830s British and American ships monopolized the illegal opium trade. With the fastest clippers in the world, Americans transported opium from Turkey, and the British from India, both navies converging at the mouth of the Pearl River near Canton. There, it was transferred to the holds of storage ships owned by corrupt mandarins, who paid for it with vast amounts of silver.
According to what Kelonikoa had heard, and what Mathys could piece together, in the past few weeks, trying to enforce laws against opium trade, the Imperial Chinese government had seized and destroyed all opium ships near Canton. In retaliation, the British attacked the Imperial Navy. It was a struggle that would go on for several years, affecting politics throughout the world. Even now, spies from the Imperial Chinese government were radiating across the Pacific, assassinating rich opium profiteers. One of those profiteers had been King Kamehameha Ill’s cousin, the monkey-man, found with a jade chopstick run straight through his head, protruding through both ears.
Now Mathys sat with his head in his hands, trying to make sense of it. He imagined the harbor of Lahaina. In the chaos, who would recognize him as the youth who ate his captain? That night Kelonikoa woke to find Mathys sitting beside her, watching her in moonlight.
“I am at your command,” he said carefully. “What is it you wish to do?”
She sat up, folded her arms and thought. In her father’s eyes, she would always be damned. Here in this rain forest, for the first time, she was her own woman, free of tribal codes, the dominance of men.
“I stay here,” she said. “Where I can be what I can be.”
For the first time in all their months together, he touched her, took her hand. “If you so choose, then I will stay with you, for I love you, Kelonikoa, with all my heart. If you could ever learn to love a common man, I will find someone to marry us. I will wait for you. Forever.”
She had loved him for a long time. But now she brooded, weighing things. “You have de ‘sailor’s pox’?”
“No,” he said. “I swear it.” Remembering the whores of Valparaiso, it seemed a miracle that God had spared him syphilis.
“I be no sailor’s wife,” she said.
He gripped her hand, told her there were two things he would never be again. A sailor. Or a farmer. He talked about the enterprising Dutch in New York State who had become importers and tradesmen, and land they slowly acquired for their descendants.
“That’s what I want to do. These islands are a new frontier, the world is coming here. I have heard it. I want to settle in Honolulu, become a merchant, begin a family.” Then he shook his head, nearly defeated by his ambitions.
“I have nothing to begin with, only a slingshot, this bow and arrow, the goatsk
ins on my back. It would mean years of struggle. But I would love you dearly, I would provide for you, give you dignity, so you would never have to beg. And I would depend on your advice, Kelonikoa, for now I’m among a different people, and bound to make mistakes.”
She studied him a long time, then opened a pouch worn on twine round her waist since the first day he saw her. She even swam with it, and he had assumed the little knocking sounds inside were simple Tahitian talismans. Now she poured into her palm half a dozen perfectly round black spheres, winking and shimmering in moonlight. Mathys leaned close and gasped. What looked like fat, black cherries, perfect in contour and color, were legendary, priceless South Seas pearls from the rare black-lipped oyster. Kings went to war for them, white men conspired and murdered for them.
“My dowry,” she whispered. “What monkey-man were waitin’ for.” She dropped a pearl in Mathys’s hand so he could feel its weight. “We begin our life wit dese. I still daughter of Tahitian high chief, no like livin’ poor.”
He backed away. “I can’t accept this. I’m a man of honor!”
Hips swaying, she walked nonchalantly to the beach, flung a black pearl into the sea. “I fly dem back where dey been born. Not’ing to me. You go away now, wit’ your false pride. Go!”
A week later, they entered the chaos of Lahaina. Riots, shootings, nightly curfews. In the streets the talk was of the Opium War between China and Britain. A ship had been blown up in the harbor, and as Mathys suspected, others were quickly reprovisioning and weighing anchor. He and Kelonikoa stood in shadows, listening. As a missionary family snored, he entered their house, took a dress, a man’s suit, left a goatskin in return. The next day, he entered a shop, trading more goatskins for shoes, proper underwear. He sold his bow and arrow for cash, and they made their way to a makeshift Congregationalist church, asking to be married.
Shark Dialogues Page 5