Return to Paradise

  Yet in spite of costs, Tahiti is worth every cent you spend. In one week I met eighteen couples who had “stopped by for a month or two.” The average length of time they had lingered on was eleven years! Said Bill Stone, “I knew what I liked when I saw it.”

  The other islands of Polynesia are equally difficult to visit, equally rewarding. If I could vacation on only one Pacific island I would choose Rarotonga. It’s as beautiful as Tahiti, much quieter, much stuffier and the food is even worse. But the climate is better and the natives are less deteriorated. But to get there you need special permission from the New Zealand Government.

  For Tonga you cable the prime minister. If you have enough money, a return ticket, and a place to stay, you may get in for two weeks. Says the Government frankly, “We have no room for more people.” For Western Samoa you can get a transit visa fairly easily, but if you want to stay any length of time you need personal permission from New Zealand. American Samoa was very difficult when I applied. Only high Navy brass could grant permission: “If you can prove financial responsibility, tetanus shots and a legitimate purpose we can let you land for a short stay up to October 1. After that, impossible.” All Pacific governments are afraid of a postwar, atom-scared flock of beachcombers. “Keep Out” signs are posted everywhere.

  Yet these islands are enchanting to visit. On Tonga many years ago a devout English missionary heard the majestic native voices and devised a unique Arabic numeral system of musical notation. He reasoned, “With such talent why should they sing bang-bang hymns?” Now, in Tonga, you can hear a massed choir of five hundred sing The Messiah with local soloists. You refuse to believe that such sounds are possible from the human throat. I heard a choir of fifty do Brahms, and the effect was like the ocean hammering into the unequaled caverns on the south shore of the island. Here the sea is impounded in vast cups, and it spouts fifty feet into the air through blowholes. There is not one spout here, but a five-mile line of them, marching in the moonlight like some weirdly beautiful army off to a ghostly war.

  Western Samoa is composed of two large islands and Upolu contains probably the finest remaining Polynesians. Its men and women walk like gods with unmatched dignity. Never will you see in London or Paris old men so handsome as these Samoans. They are politically alert, intellectually able. And their island is a masterpiece of quiet charm. For example, the road from Faleolo airport to the capital at Apia is a dreamy path of sun-speckled beauty.

  On either side small villages crowd down upon the asphalt. Flowers of all description festoon the way. Each house is a work of art, a lozenge-shaped platform from which rise golden pillars of palm wood. Upon them is rested a thatched roof, perfectly proportioned, intricately designed with patterned sennit. There are no walls, simply bamboo slats which can be dropped as needed. Nor are there interior partitions, other bamboo slats being shifted about as needed. Stones about the houses are whitewashed. Grass is kept so immaculate that it forms an endless park. Sometimes to the north the ocean is visible, while to the south rise the big hills of Upolu.

  No island, not even Bora Bora, had a more profound effect upon American troops. Along the main road are several shady pools where Samoans have always bathed. It was rather difficult to get Marine trucks past those pools when fifteen or twenty native girls were soaping down, their sarongs stretched out upon the bank. It was equally tough to get aviators back to camp when all along the road, in houses with no walls or partitions, the same girls went to bed by lamplight.

  And yet for all its sensuous charm—Samoa is very hot, very wet, at times tropically oppressive—this island causes any thoughtful American much heart searching. Here is why. The Germans held Samoa for less than a generation, yet in that time they did more to improve the island—they provided better health services, finer roads, better economic systems—than America provided her Samoa in forty years! Judging solely by material criteria plus the ability to keep order, the colonizing nations of the Pacific rate in this order: 1 Germany; 2 the Dutch; 3 Great Britain; 4 Japan; 5 United States; 6 New Zealand; 7 France; 8 Australia; 9 Chile.

  But when you have made that ranking, you immediately think about the goals of human life. What is a good government? Perhaps the best is that which provides the greatest happiness for the greatest number, assuming certain fundamentals like a just police force, a money system and fair trials. By such standards the worst governing power ever to have hit the Pacific was Germany. Wherever she went there is cleanliness—and hatred. There is order—and undying lust for revenge. So forgetting the good roads and considering only the happiness of people, the order among nations becomes: 1 France; 2 United States; 3 The Dutch; 4 New Zealand; 5 Great Britain; 6 Japan; 7 Australia; 8 Chile; 9 Germany.

  Furthermore, if you consider also Hawaii and the Philippines—and if you forget Puerto Rico—America’s accomplishments are enviable. We have been decent and humane, one of the good colonizing agents. In Samoa we have been less than adequate—for example, Samoans are not citizens—but even so our fair play has impressed the natives. Recently they announced that although they hoped Western Samoa would gain her independence from New Zealand, they preferred to string along with the Americans. “We have been well treated,” they said.

  In any discussion of Polynesia the question always comes up: “Is it really a good place in which to escape the pressure of modern life?” Let’s look at some cases!

  Are you a businessman fed up with labor troubles? In the Cooks you’ll be plunged right into the middle of a jurisdictional wrangle between two labor unions, one of which is probably Communist.

  Are you worried about Communism? In Tahiti you’ll find that a clever French Communist flew out to dominate the last election. Everyone is worried lest their new deputy, a native for the first time in history, vote the party line when he gets to Paris.

  Do you dream of playing pirate and hunting buried treasure? You can if you conform to the requirements of the local ordinance, “Treasure Hunters, Governance of,” Section C-2° of which reads: “If the treasure is found on private property, 50% to the discoverer, 25% to the owner of the land, 25% to the territorial government.”

  Are you tired of screwball politics? In Tahiti the most powerful party is organizing an election campaign on three promises: “For each family—more land. Free legal service. Two hundred feet of sewer pipe.”

  Do you want release from the cost of living? You can get by in almost any part of Polynesia for only 50% more than you pay in Illinois. In Tahiti, of course, the cost is twice as much.

  Are you seeking a refuge from the atomic bomb? Here at last is a legitimate reason. Polynesia presents, because of its isolated geographical location, one of the least likely targets on earth. “But,” says a cynic, “I’ll bet they thought the same about Guadalcanal in 1937.”

  There is only one good way to decide whether or not you really want to knock about Polynesia. Would you travel five thousand miles for a chance at a trip like this?

  At dawn you climb aboard the schooner Orohena lying at the dock in Papeete. The cook shows you to your bunk and you find to your amazement that you will share postage-stamp accommodations with four men and women you’ve never seen before, and who don’t know one another! You will sleep with your face five feet from the man above you, and the steward explains that women usually agree to undress first, while the men wait on deck. You’ll live that way for thirty days.

  The Orohena casts loose and stands out in the channel for Moorea, heading northeast toward the atolls. Each morning you will waken to find some new coral island off the bow, some enchanging lagoon, “and,” adds the supercargo, “some godforsaken place where flies are as thick as regrets in hell.”

  At Rangiroa you pick up a hundred natives with pigs, guitars, breadfruit and babies. They sleep on deck, right outside your bunk, and some of them sing all night. They are going south to build a Catholic church.

  At Hikuera, made famous by Jack London’s description of the terrible hurricane that devastated the island, you
watch copra being loaded and for the first time smell the sickening odor that will haunt you for the next three weeks. At Tatakoto the copra bugs come aboard, and from then on you scratch your hair continuously.

  The food is good, clean Navy fare prepared French fashion. You’ve grown to like your bunkmates and the cook assures a lady passenger, “After you’ve slept with a man for thirty days you know the best and the worst.”

  Now the lazy days begin. You drift from island to island, sometimes going ashore to barter for pearls, sometimes swimming in the lagoon. Then you drop far south toward Pitcairn and put in at tragic Mangareva, a superb and broken lagoon which used to house many thousands of natives but which now holds a few hundred. Here you see the massive church whose Christian doctrine could not save the lives destroyed by unchristian practices.

  Then for several days the sunlit beauty is shattered. You see the yachts Denise and Hotu cracked up on the ever-dangerous reefs which year by year destroy unwary ships. At Vahitahi tragedy strikes your own schooner. The reef is engulfed by a stormy surf. The longboats try to reach it, but the sea lifts one high into the air. A seaman falls out and the boat crashes down on him. You see him perish in the sea he always feared yet blindly followed.

  Now the captain picks up a hundred and fifty deck passengers, bound for the consecration of the new Mormon temple in Tahiti. They sleep everywhere, in the holds, on deck, in life boats. Two huge fellows lie on the railing itself, their legs wrapped about spars. Water gives out and you get one quart a day for everything: drinking, washing, laundry. Food runs low and you watch the cook open one tin of bully beef after another. The man in the bunk opposite you is completely fed up and begins to leave his underwear on your bed. It is steaming hot whenever the schooner lies to for more copra.

  So one night you sleep on deck, and the vast sky looms above you in shattering majesty. You get to meet some of the deck passengers—they pay 80¢ a day—and you begin to learn their songs. In the darkness they point out misty islands and narrate old tragedies. You find that you are surrounded by people you like, the calmest, kindest, most generous you have ever known.

  Regretfully one day you see the jagged peaks of Moorea. “Ah!” the island wahines cry from the prow. “Voilà! Papeete!” Slowly the Orohena warps her way to the dock. Three women rush up with leis of frangipani. You step ashore and your knees won’t work and you even kiss on both cheeks the man who left his socks on your pillow. You’ve had a schooner holiday for $165, and then comes the test!

  As you lurch along the streets of Papeete you see a blackboard sign in a Chinaman’s shop: “Vendredi. Le Navire Monotui pour les Iles Marquises.” And if you’re the kind of person whose heart skips a beat and you cry, “The Marquesas! That’s for me!” then you’ll like Polynesia.

  Let me try to compress the wonder of this perverse, hilarious world into one incident. When missionaries came to the Cooks they arrived so intent upon saving souls that they forgot to turn the calendar back a day. For a generation they drove ship captains crazy. On Sunday in the Cooks no one ashore would work. The next day would be Sunday aboard ship and the crew took off. Sometimes when a holiday followed Sunday the situation became chaotic.

  Everyone tried to make the islanders hold their calendar back a day. “Have two Saturdays in a row,” the Government begged, but they said that would be foolish. They liked their calendar the way it was. Then somebody had a solution so perfect for Polynesians that it was accepted at once. They had two Christmases in a row! As the first one ended, everyone launched right into a second Christmas Eve, and for two days the islands were a festive madhouse. After that the Cook calendar was back in line. Asked the islanders, “Why didn’t they think of that in the first place?”

  Povenaaa’s Daughter

  He saw these massive forms, this somber beauty, the mysteriousness of this race.

  North of Tahiti the Hiro began to roll, and before long all passengers were seasick. That is, they were all sick except a remarkable Polynesian woman of fifty who sat on one of the forward hatches munching something she had pulled from a paper bag.

  She was ridiculously fat. Her jowls seemed to run down onto her shoulders and her body, from neck to knee, was one unbroken ball of suet, covered by a blue-and-red Mother Hubbard which swayed solemnly about her ankles with each motion of the wallowing ship.

  The bag from which she selected her dainties was quite greasy, and two men, long hovering at the vomit point, were thrust over when they saw what this large woman was eating. For Maggi—that was her only name—was eating fish heads. She would lift one from the bag, inspect it, then crack it with her teeth. There would follow a sucking sound, a smacking of lips and then more cracking, as if a dog were worrying a marrow bone. When she had quite drawn out all the goodness from the fish head she would toss the skeleton in an arc over the rail and into the sea. Then she would loudly suck each of her eight fingers before probing once more among her inexhaustible supply of delicacies.

  At the ship’s rail hung a limp Chinaman, so sick he thought he must die. Four times, just as he hoped he was becoming accustomed to the wicked roll of the Hiro, a fish head would go whirling past his face and he would collapse with retching. As the fifth head passed an inch from his nose he stormed in outraged protest, “For the love of God, fat woman! Stop eating those fish heads!”

  The woman in the Mother Hubbard put down her paper bag, wiped the grease off her huge cheeks, and looked at the miserable Chinaman. Placing her hands at spots where her hips had once been she taunted, “You’ve thrown over more than half of yourself. Jump after it!” Then, with ponderous grace, she rose and lurched over to the rail, where she swatted the sick man on the back. “Throw it up, Kim Sing!” she cried. She drew a greasy fish head from her sack and rubbed it under the Chinaman’s nose, holding him by the waist as he heaved in agony. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” she asked like a mother.

  Affectionately she dragged the near-dead Oriental to her hatch. After consuming two more heads she tossed the bag into the ocean and wiped her hands on the ample hem of her dress. Then, belching twice, she adjusted her huge bulk to the ridges on which she sat and asked, “Did you accomplish anything in Papeete?”

  For a moment the sick man was unable to reply, but somehow the vast amplitude of the woman encouraged him and he said, “I made a contract for all my vanilla.”

  “Good!” she said with a crisp finality that meant she was saying nothing about her own mission to the capital.

  But toward morning the Chinaman saw her smiling to herself in considerable satisfaction and he asked, “What did you find in Papeete that makes you smile, Maggi?”

  She was not to be tricked. She laughed to herself for a moment, then rose and hurried to the rail. She peered into the stormy night and caught, along the horizon to the east, the first faint glow of dawn. It was a mere thread of pale light, yet as it played upon the tempestuous waters she could see, past the prow of the ship, waves breaking upon a reef. She studied the scene for some moments until she was satisfied that it was indeed her reef. Then she returned to the hatch and cried in a loud voice, “We’ll soon be there!”

  This caused a great commotion among the restless steerage passengers and they crowded the rail to catch the first sight of Raiatea, the ancient island from which all of Polynesia had been settled in the old days. In the dark mistiness of dawn they saw the island mysteriously appear out of the ocean, the spray high upon the reefs, the rain clouds low upon the historic hills.

  Then suddenly, like the shifting mood of a wind that scurries across the surface of the sea, the passengers stopped mumbling to themselves, and Maggi, forgetting the Chinaman, elbowed her way forward to the prow of the ship, where she stood in the morning rain. She stood with her head cocked as if she were listening for a sound. But she was not, for on one of the off-shore breezes came the most puissant of all island smells: the sweet, rich, perfumed, heavy, unforgettable odor of vanilla, ripening after harvest. The alluring sweetness filled the ocean. It was l
ike the fragrance of many flowers, the richness of fine food, the sweetness of tropic sunshine. It was the smell of dawn. It rolled in blankets from the shores of Raiatea, the symbol of wealth, the reward of labor. Fat Maggi breathed heavily and thought, “I would give everything I smelled in Papeete for this. They speak of Paris! Pouf!”

  As the Hiro warped its way to the creaking wharf, Maggi waited impatiently at the gangplank and even before it was secured started to let herself down onto the dock. A group of cheering young men helped her, yanking her red-and-blue dress awry, but as soon as she felt the earth under her feet, she shook herself loose and plopped onto her head a pandanus hat, which she secured with one hand while running as fast as her bulk would permit through the copra sheds and down the main streets of Raiatea.

  As she hurried along many villagers called to her, seeking news of Tahiti. But on this day Maggi had no gossip to spare. She hurried on and at last half-galloped through the open doors of the island’s only hotel.

  “Povenaaa!” she bellowed. “Oh, Povenaaa!”

  The hotel into which she had thus burst—Le Croix du Sud—was such a place as would have captured the imagination of Joseph Conrad had he voyaged to Raiatea. It was a two-story affair with an interior balcony off which opened several dismal rooms. The ground level was crammed with small, square tables, each attended by four chairs. An open kitchen, with many battered pots and pans, led to the rear and a dirty bar edged one side. A Japanese octagonal clock had run down some years before and now showed three-twenty, while a fly-specked portrait of Clemenceau surveyed the bar. And in one corner, bare-footed and with torn shirt, huddled a thin, unshaved Polynesian man, sleeping off his drunk. This was her neighbor, Povenaaa.

  Maggi’s cries having had no effect upon the sleeper, she let fly with a solid kick and shouted, “Povenaaa! What a morning to sleep!”