5. A Savage on Hiva Oa
 Atom at anchor in Hana Iapa Bay. |
 Children of the Marquesas. |
 Map of Hiva Oa Island. |
I have escaped everything that is
artificial, conventional, customary.
I am entering into truth; into nature…it is true; I am a savage.
- Paul Gauguin on Hiva Oa
At dawn on the 30th day out from the Galapagos and 45 days out from Panama, I watched as the slender black thread of land my eyes had ached for began to solidify in the increasing light. My mind was focused on Hiva Oa Island for so long I might have conjured up the island from a cloud on the horizon.
Atom had sat out the night drifting with jib backed and mainsail reefed, riding the waters as comfortably as a gull with folded wings. Cloud or island ahead? Only one way to settle the matter: I adjusted sails and course for the cloud-shaped island, disconnecting the spinnaker pole from the clew of the jib to sheet the sail tighter as the wind came on the beam.
At the east end of the island I sailed recklessly close under high cliffs that threw back the trade wind-driven swells in thunderous fountains of spray. Unlike many of the sandy-shored, translucent lagoon-filled isles of Polynesia, the Marquesas Islands lack a protective encircling offshore coral reef, and their weather-beaten shorelines take the full force of the Pacific rollers. Farther along the coast, lush and dark wooded valleys led up furrowed valleys to jagged bare peaks pointing skyward like volcanic gothic spires. Looking for better protection from easterly wind and swell, I passed the first four slight indents in the coast that were optimistically referred to as Bays on the chart. To a sailor, a bay implies some degree of protection, not merely these little zigzags in the coast filled with breaking waves.
Twelve miles down the coast I entered the better sheltered bay of Hana Iapa. The shore was comprised of a few visible grass-roofed huts along a steeply sloping valley cloaked in green floppy-topped coconut palms standing shoulder to shoulder. On the far side of the bay a silvery ribbon waterfall fluttered down a vertical cliff into the sea. Entering the bay I passed a small islet whose weathered contour looked peculiarly like a stone carving of two profiled heads back to back. A river of air descended the valley and carried on to ripple the bay with the unmistakable flowered-scent of a green tropical island. A single gray cloud drifted across the bay releasing just enough water droplets to form a translucent rainbow that touched the water and completed a sailor’s vision of paradise.
Tucked into the eastern corner of the bay, mostly beyond the reach of the sea swell rolling into the deep outer portion of the bay, were three other yachts anchored a hundred yards off a small cement quay. I dropped sails, hoisted my yellow quarantine flag, and motored into an open spot not far from where the other boats were huddled together. The bottom was a mixture of sandy patches, sharp rocks and coral. Though only 15-20 feet deep, the bottom was just vaguely visible due to the run-off of sediments from the stream entering the head of the bay. I dropped my main anchor, a 25 lb plow-type with 25 feet of chain attached and another 100 feet of nylon rode shackled to the chain, onto a sandy spot surrounded by dark shapes of coral.
The problem here was how to let out enough scope to get the anchor to hold while not permitting the nylon rode to chafe itself in two on the rocks as the boat swung to the wind shifts. Most cruising boats out among the Pacific Islands use an all-chain rode, which partly solves the problem. They still often get their chains wrapped around the coral heads, requiring them to dive and clear them at some point. Using my plastic dinghy I set out my remaining two anchors, 13 lb lightweight Danforths best used in sand or mud bottoms, in a triangle pattern. Each line was fastened to the bow so the nylon rodes could remain taut and not wrap themselves around the coral where they would chafe through in a matter of hours.
A woman from a 40-something-foot Canadian-flagged boat, named Lorelei, waved at me and I rowed the dinghy over to meet them. Gwen Cornfield and husband Mike had sailed from British Columbia and for the past several years cruised among the islands of the South Pacific. The third member of their crew was Linda, who was about my age and had flown out to join them in Tahiti for a few months vacation before flying back to Canada. They invited me aboard and were surprised to find out this was my first stop after 45 days alone at sea. “We thought you had just sailed around the island from the main port of Atuona and forgotten to take down your Q flag. Was it tough being alone all that time?” Mike asked.
“Well…umm, you’re the first people…I mean… this is the first time I’ve spoken to anyone in a month. It is great… umm… to talk to someone.” I wanted to talk, but couldn’t make a coherent sentence. I’m sure I sounded like a moron at first, but soon regained my speech and told them about my trip.
They confirmed what I’d heard in Panama, that all yachts arriving in the Marquesas are required to check in at one of the official ports of entry, the nearest of which was some 30 miles around the other side of the island at a crowded, open roadstead of an anchorage at the main town of Atuona. There was also the not so little matter of an $850 cash bond sailors were required to post to cover an airline ticket home in case a shipwrecked or love-struck sailor was unable or unwilling to sail away when his 90 day visa expired. Not having $850 laying around, I adopted the simple ruse of avoiding the gendarme as long as possible while keeping the required Q flag up to comply with the only portion of the law I could afford.
After Gwen and Linda fed us a huge dinner, Mike got on the short-wave amateur radio and placed a radio link call back to my mother in Michigan, letting her know I’d arrived safely.
The crew of Lorelei planned to walk to a village a few miles along the north coast the following day to buy fruit and vegetables from the local farmers. After assuring me it was safe to roam this part of the island without running into any officials of the immigration type – the only road they could approach on had been washed out in a rainstorm a few days ago – I eagerly accepted an invitation to join them. As I was leaving to row back to Atom I hesitatingly asked the lovely Linda if she’d like to “come visit my boat.”
“Alright,” she said and slipped into my dinghy. Back on Atom the young solo sailor’s hormones were raging, but I was so concerned not to act like a desperate dimwit that I bungled my imagined chance by sitting on my hands and talking at her nonstop for two hours. Now that I learned how to talk again for some reason I found it impossible to stop. She was kind enough to let me rattle on without letting on that I was making a bloody fool of myself. Sometime after midnight she gratefully accepted my suggestion to take her back to Lorelei. I returned alone to Atom where I found a nagging shipmate called loneliness had crept aboard in the girl's absence.
Early next morning, well before the sun rose to strike the uppermost coconut fronds in the central valley, the crew of Lorelei and I came ashore in their dinghy, landing on a beach of birds' egg-size stones rattling in chorus with the incoming swell. Along shore was a row of open-sided huts filled with coconuts cut open to dry under the sun. A river whose eroded banks showed it ran deep and wide on rainy days was now a shallow creek that flowed slowly down the valley under the branches of yellow-flowered hibiscus trees. The creek hesitated in a deep pool just before it seeped across a sandbar to mix with the saltwater of the bay. My boyhood dreams of the land of Herman Melville’s fictional South Sea adventure romance book Typee was finally being realized and I was not disappointed by the reality I found.
We had no sooner pulled the dinghy ashore and started moving along the trail around the bay when a shirtless teenaged Marquesan boy heading the opposite way to work in his family's coconut grove, greeted us and decided on the spot to guide us to our intended destination at the village of Pau Mau. Our guide, whose Christian name was Eric, led us up along the ruins of a road that had once been well laid out with hand-cut stones. Along the way Eric pointed to and sang out the vowel-laden names of each craggy outcrop or indent in the coast from Hanapaoa Bay to Mount Ootua. For every spectacular basalt pinnacle that hove into view above the luxuriant green slopes, another fluid Marquesan name rolled from Eric’s lips.
On this day I learned that on Hiva Oa all paths that are not leading sharply downward are leading equally sharply upwards. For a couple miles we followed the remains of the stone-lined road and passed moss-covered rock platforms in the shape of building foundations. These had once been the marae temples where Marquesan religious ceremonies, including human sacrifice, took place.
Rounding a corner in the trail we were alerted by the thumping sound of unshod hooves as wild horses broke from their cover to race over a sloping grass hillock flecked with fluffy white pods of flowering cotton tumbling along in the sea breeze. The cotton was introduced here a century earlier in hopes of giving islanders a second cash crop to supplement copra. The Marquesans, who wisely distrusted adding another labor-intensive industry to their full enough days, now let the cotton grow wild and abandoned to the wind.
The next narrow valley we descended held a single house of a family emigrated from France two years previously. The young parents and two children, including a baby, lived in this remote homestead two hours walk from the nearest road. Their house was constructed in the native fashion using bamboo frames, palm-thatch walls, and grass roof. They seemed pleased to have visitors and showed us around their home, all self-made down to the last stick of furniture and wooden bowls. As self-sufficient as they could possibly be, they lived with little contact from society aside from the once or twice a month trek to town to get the few supplies that couldn’t be made with their own hands, fished out of the sea, or grown in their garden. They could have built near a village or road, but instead they chose for neighbors the bougainvillea, croton, hibiscus, lofty mango and breadfruit trees, and vegetable gardens bordered with citrus and papaya trees, and an extended family of chickens and wild pigs.
I wondered, but didn’t ask, how they managed to buy this well-located piece of land. Most land here is jointly held by members of large families and they do not easily come to agreement to sell at any price. Though visitors are shyly welcomed, the Marquesans are not keen to have so many foreign settlers that they become a minority in their own land.
This tropical version of Thoreau homesteading at Walden Pond has its rewards, though they are hard-earned. The family were thin as birds compared to the fat most of us carry around. The children had numerous little sores from scratching at insect bites. To live here is to be harassed by flies and ants by day and under siege from mosquitoes from twilight to dawn. Possibly worst of all is the lovely sandy beach here that beckons to you, but which like many of the beaches on the island, is virtually off-limits to people due to the nearly invisible stinging insects called nonos that inhabit the sand. You don’t feel their bite until a few hours later when itching red welts appear all over your exposed skin. A legend has it these pests were released on the islands by a God intent on punishing the people for breaking one of his taboos. It also works well to keep tourist developers away. The relentless battle against pests of the insect type when homesteading makes the inconveniences associated with my own sea-steading seem trivial.
In the next bay, just far enough back from the beach to avoid those blasted nonos, was a village of five houses built simply from the sawn wood and pleated fronds of the palm tree. We met several men working at producing copra from ripe coconuts. Fallen nuts were gathered into piles next to a sharpened iron spike driven into the ground, onto which a man thrust the nut down to twist off the husk. Other men pried the oily white flesh from the inner shell and laid the pieces on slit bamboo racks to dry in the sun. Depending on the weather, after several days of drying, the copra is bagged and stored until the arrival of the government subsidized cargo vessel - still locally called the “copra schooner” - from Tahiti. Much of the copra is refined and shipped overseas as cooking oil. Copra work is physically hard, though it has the advantage of allowing each man to work when he wants for as long as he wants and be paid accordingly. The trees are there waiting, each one producing some 40 nuts annually – 80 trees in a grove yielding a ton of copra each year.
While the men worked and joked with us, a boy scrambled effortlessly up a tall palm and twisted a few immature drinking nuts on their vines until they dropped to the ground where Eric deftly sliced off the tops and handed them around. Our hosts watched approvingly as we slurped up the cool, slightly sweet water. In addition to the sightseeing, we looked to find farmers here to sell us some vegetables. However, there was nothing to buy, just a gratefully accepted gift of a few oranges and some bananas and all the husked coconuts we wanted to carry.
Across the bay on the exposed shore was a blowhole at the base of the cliffs where the pulse of the sea ejected a fountain of spray with a deep bass “boom” of a distant canon shot. On our side of the bay, men paddling two canoes dropped into the water a long net in a semi-circle and then brought lines tethered to the ends of the net to another group of men and women standing in the surf. Two groups of men and women exchanged instructions and encouragement as they pulled the net up the stony shore where shouting children picked out its few small fish and dropped them into baskets. To suit the occasion the fish might be marinated and eaten raw as ika tee, or baked in banana leaves in an earth oven.
At this point the crew of Lorelei turned back and Eric and I went on to the village of Pua Mau which we reached after a detour inland to regain the cross-island road. In Pua Mau, in a place overgrown with brush, Eric pointed out the ancient 10-foot-high lichen-covered stone idols, called tikis. My common language with Eric was French, he being far better at it than myself since he had learned it from childhood in the island’s French colonial school. I asked what he knew about the origins of these stone creatures. Eric made an indifferent shoulder shrug and said, "Je ne sais pas,” which in this case means either I don’t know, or maybe I can’t or won’t say. That the current generations of islanders will admit to knowing nothing and caring less about this ever-present and not so long ago industry only makes it all the more intriguing.
Some archeologists theorize that the people of Easter Island originally emigrated from the Marquesas and that these weathering stone monuments on Hiva Oa were created by those same people who went on to the similar and greater works done on Easter Island’s famous long-eared moai statues. As on Easter Island, forgotten generations of Marquesans quarried smaller but still substantial chunks of lava rock weighing over a ton and shifted them miles across the tortuous terrain to their chosen resting places. Then they carved them into mysterious forms and stood them upright using earthworks and levers and coconut fiber ropes.
Today’s Marquesans may have been part of a second migration that arrived here several hundred years after the builders of the stone roads, temples and tikis. Another theory has the stone carvers arriving later and enslaving the local population to do the work for them. Either way, at some point a conflict took place in which the stone artisans, whose culture included sun worship (no, not your typical tourist’s version) and human sacrifice, were themselves carved up and eaten. The victors, who were either slaves or invaders from other islands, knocked down the tikis and temples. The present population is mostly made up of the descendents of these cannibal tribes that survived the battles with the stone artisans. In Pua Mau, three fallen tikis, probably symbols of deified ancestors or other gods, have regained their feet. If not exactly in their full past glory, they stand as mute symbols of the Marquesan peoples long struggle to survive invasions from warring tribes and colonial masters.
The natives used to call these islands Te Fenua Enata, The land of Men. The six inhabited islands of the group lay in two clusters of three each, spreading across 250 miles of ocean. The depopulation and cultural devastation of these islands began when Mendoza – the Spanish discoverer sent by the Marquesa de Mendoca of Peru – got into a scuffle and slaughtered several hundred of the natives.
Until Captain James Cook’s rediscovery of the islands in 1770, the Marquesans had gone about their cultivating of food crops and occasional raids of neighboring islands to pick up guests for their human feasts, with little outside interference. Despite their savage state, Cook noted the Marquesans were “without exception the finest race of people in this Sea.” Cook traded nails, cloth, and hatchets for hogs, fruits and vegetables to nourish his ailing crew. One of Cook’s officers recorded that the heavily tattooed men were “exquisitely proportion’d” and the women were “very beautiful” with long hair “worn down their backs in a most becoming and graceful manner.”
Within 50 years of Cook’s visit, the population he estimated at over 100,000 people was reduced by four fifths. The guns of European raiders claimed far less than the insidious European diseases and the consequent famines. Others were carried off as slaves to work till death on the dry guano islands along the South American coast. The ensuing social turmoil resulted in more devastating intertribal wars and the end to their seafaring expeditions.
When the French took control of the islands in 1842, they nearly succeeded in exterminating the remaining population. By 1936 the one-time Land of Men contained only 1,300 people, a population reduction of some 98%. In recent years, through better governance, or at least less bad governance, the main islands have slowly, partially repopulated.
The French missionaries did succeed in wiping out nearly every trace of the islander’s original culture, with a special emphasis on eradicating the wildly erotic fertility dances described by the South seas whaler turned writer, Herman Melville. In his fictionalized book Typee, based on his very real visit to the Marquesas in the 1840’s, Melville states: "The term 'savage' is, I conceive, often misapplied, and indeed when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilization, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan islanders sent to the United States as missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans dispatched to the islands in a similar capacity."
I’d been told that the road to Atuona was open again and thought I’d better turn myself in to customs and immigration before they decided to come looking for me. A long coastal navigation around the island would be sure to be dogged by periods of calms behind the mountains. Atom’s ailing engine might get us through the calm bits if it felt like working, but it would not help once I turned the corner along the south coast, and came face to face with a brutal beat against wind and current for several miles. Instead of making that risky passage around the island to anchor in a marginal kind of harbor, I decided to report my arrival by walking across the island carrying my passport and boat’s registration and clearance papers from my last port.
As I walked up and away from Hana Iapa, a fresh wind sweept down the valley, rustling the coconut fronds and breadfruit tree leaves overhead. I was barely out of the village when the rain began. Within minutes the dirt road became a steep mass of mud and earth-stained rivulets. Grabbing a banana leaf as a disposable umbrella, I sloshed my way up the island’s backbone of black lava, basalt, and red tufa. In most places, this island’s rock foundation was so overgrown with vegetation that from a distance the crenellated land looked to have a gentle rolling form. Up close, its bony structure showed deeply scored cliffs, the naked scars of recent landslips, and bare peaks so sharp the lush tropical growth fell away in a losing battle against gravity and the erosive forces of wind and rain. Away from all signs of human existence, under a veil of cloud and rain, the dark forest streams with water and exudes something foreboding.
The higher elevations resembled a temperate zone forest where the ragged pandanus trees gave way to troops of close ordered ironwood trees guarding a ridge. In the pre-Catholic era, the ironwood or toa trees were carved into skull-crushing war clubs. At the crest of the ridge the rain lifted, clouds blew away, and I looked out over the windward coast beyond the vegetation-choked valley and several miles across a white-flecked blue sea to another brown and green volcanic upheaval – the sister island of Tahu Ata.
In half the time it took to climb the other side of the mountain, I had run and occasionally slid by the seat of my pants down this equally muddy side. In Atuona the harbor was crowded with a supply ship sitting as Mother Goose to a flock of some dozen yachts rolling uneasily and pecking at their short-scoped anchors. Down the road, shimmering red bouquets of Poinciana and yellow-flowered hibiscus trees bordered the main street and its brick homes, general goods store, bank, and the gendarmarie.
There are a couple of different (but not necessarily recommended) ways for an English-speaking sailor to transact his business with a truculent French official. You can adopt the Englishman’s habit of insisting the Frenchman speak or at least understand English. The idea being to wear our Frenchman down so that he submits to the indignity of speaking English, which he usually knows more or less, but is loathe to use, as if each incident were a replay of Waterloo. That approach may not work so well if your papers are not entirely in order. In my case, I decided to play the humble fool with a smattering of incomprehensible French pulled from a phrase book. In other words, being the hopeless groveling idiot was my tactic.
The gendarme looked fresh off the plane from France, only a few years older than myself, and no doubt still in shock over his good fortune at landing this coveted Polynesian post. My knock at the door of his residence caught him in the middle of a late lunch or early dinner or perhaps an extended lunch/dinner. When he saw me on his stoop covered in mud and carrying a backpack, he stepped outside and led me back down to the lawn to speak with me. He seemed truly amazed and a little irritated to find out I had walked across the island to check in. Once we established my boat was not in the harbor, he proceeded to tell me I would have to move the boat here and go to the bank next door to post an $850 cash bond. The bond is supposed to guarantee repatriation of shipwrecked or lovesick sailors who do not have the means, or inclination, to leave this tropical wonderland.
Back and forth we went, with the gendarme insisting I move my boat and pay the bond, and myself pleading ignorance and penury and a broken engine thrown in to settle the point. Being a reasonable man (and what could he do about it anyway?) the gendarme finally agreed I could remain two weeks to make repairs and then must sail directly to Tahiti to arrange bond payment there. The terms of our truce were agreeable to me mainly because they could be safely ignored. In later years, sailing through Asia and Africa, I learned avoidance is the best tactic with some officials. The gypsies of the land and the sea know the rule: never ask permission; never be denied.
The Marquesas, like all of French Polynesia, are ferociously expensive. They are not a welcoming sort of place for today's low-budget traveler. A single bottle of Tahiti’s Hinano brand beer at the grocery store I noticed cost six dollars. I made one necessary indulgence and bought a baguette and some cheese for the most part of ten dollars converted at the counter into francs by the Chinese shopkeeper. In fact, my entire budget for an expected two months of cruising among the French Isles could easily have been blown here in two days.
At the cemetery above the bay I sat down to enjoy my baguette and cheese at the overgrown grave of French post-Impressionist painter and sculptor Paul Gauguin, who spent the last two years of his life on Hiva Oa. Long before arriving in Polynesia I had been captivated by copies of his stunning painted imagery of Polynesian life and I determined to make my pilgrimage to his final home and perhaps catch a glimpse of Gauguin’s Polynesia.
When Gauguin left his wife and young children in Paris to go to Tahiti in 1891, he told a friend, “I’m leaving to live in peace, to be rid of the influence of civilization. I only desire to create very simple art. In order to achieve this I must immerse myself in virgin nature, to see no one but savages, to share their life and have as my sole occupation to render, the way a child would, the images formed in my brain, using exclusively the means offered by primitive art, which are the only true and valid ones.”
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Gauguin fantasized about the approaching day “when I’ll flee to the woods on an island in Oceania: there to live on ecstasy… there on Tahiti with a new family by my side far from the European scramble for money. In the silence of the beautiful tropical nights I will be able to listen to the soft murmur and music of the movements of my heart, in harmony with the mysterious beings around me. Free at last - without financial worries. Able to love, sing, and to die.”
Gauguin moved into a Tahitian-style hut a good distance outside the capital of Papeete and took for his new wife a teenage vahine, named Tea’Amana (Giver of Strength). His numerous paintings of her became the embodiment of his South Seas fantasy. Of her Gauguin wrote: “She seemed to love me, but did not tell me so. I loved her and told her so, which made her laugh. She knew it very well. Naked, she seemed clothed in an orange-yellow garment of purity – a beautiful golden flower… which I worshipped as an artist and a man.”
Two years later Gauguin returned to France with dozens of dream-like Polynesian-idealized paintings and carvings, but his inspired, unconventional genius went largely unrecognized at the time. He returned to Tahiti where he continued painting and writing anti-government editorials in local publications. Gauguin had listened to the islander’s stories of wrongs done to them: a girl trying to report a rape who was then raped by the magistrate who dismissed the case; gendarmes arresting girls for indecency after searching out their bathing places; natives wrongly accused of all sorts of crimes merely because their culture was not the French ideal; and Gauguin himself threatened with expulsion from the islands when he tried to intervene.
Tahiti had become too civilized and corrupted for his tastes so he moved to the remote Marquesas. He built a home and art studio here in the center of Atuona village that he called the House of Pleasure, and carved on its wooden frames his favorite maxims, "Soyez mysterieuses" (Be mysterious) was one, and "Soyez, amoureuses vous serez heureuses" (Be in love, you will be happy).
Having been rejected by Tea’Amana after his return to Tahiti, he took here a new 14-year-old vahine he had lured away from the local Catholic mission school. This monstrous behavior and his continued public protests against the colonial government and church made him a quick enemy of the local priests and police. The European colony shunned him as an evil heretic and salacious traitor. The islanders, on the other hand, loved Gauguin, seeing him as the only European who never tried to exploit them or treat them as inferiors, but the villagers were soon forbidden by the priests and gendarmes to visit the home of the white painter. Only Tioka, the island’s old witch doctor, refused to be scared away. Since Gauguin had interceded and gotten Tioka’s prison sentence reduced after his conviction for cannibalism, the fiercely independent old rogue spread the word among all the islanders that here was one good white man who would help them.
Between increasingly serious bouts of illness, Gauguin completed several more paintings that he sent back to his art dealer in Paris. A degree of recognition and money began to trickle back to him. His running feud with church and state was exacerbated by his published newsletters railing against the intimidation, ill-treatment, and denial of elementary justice done to the natives. For his trouble, Gauguin was convicted of libel against the government and sentenced to a large fine and three months in prison. Before the sentence could be carried out, he died alone in his house from heart failure complicated by his various ailments. As the hated priests removed the body of their adversary for burial, it was reported the old Tioka cried “Gauguin is dead: we are lost!” and then sang the Marquesan death chant.
The islanders missed seeing their odd friend, barefoot with colored pareo around his waist and astonishing silver-tassled green beret pulled over one eye, traipsing off to some lonely part of the valley to capture the tropical scenes on canvas and cultivate the savage within. Speaking of his legacy to art and not necessarily about his behavior, Gauguin said he wanted to provide future generations of artists with “the right to dare anything.”
By the time I rose from Gauguin’s grave it was too late in the day to return to Hana Iapa. Not that I actually rose from his grave in a metaphorical sense. If there were similarities between Gauguin and myself, they were mainly limited to a mutual distrust of the minions of bureaucracy and perhaps a desire to cultivate the savage within. Oh, and maybe an unreasonable need to find the uncorrupted world of Polynesia where one never existed.
On the edge of the village I pitched my one-man tent alongside a shallow stream next to a fruit orchard. Entering my thin fabric tent, which was held open by two little fiberglass rod hoops, was more like slithering into a loose-fitting garment lain on the ground. Soon after sunset a rain began that continued throughout the night. I became aware I was too close to the river when it rose and wetted my feet inside the tent. A chill night air flowed down the mountain to add to my discomfort as I slogged around in the rain and darkness, relocating the tent to higher ground.
At dawn I drove the chill from my bones by marching briskly back up the mountain towards Hana Iapa. Along the way I passed an abandoned four-wheel-drive jeep stuck up to its axles in mud in the middle of the road. Where the road crossed a high ridge I detoured onto a trail that took me up the ridge to what could have been one of the island’s highest peaks, but it was engulfed in a rain-filled cloud that blocked what surely was a stunning view. A series of sharply dropping trails, much harder on the knees than an uphill slog, brought me back to Hana Iapa.
During my absence my friends on Lorelei had moved on to another island and two other yachts had arrived in the anchorage. I was relieved to see Atom appeared as I had left her. However, once I got on deck and checked the anchor rodes, I saw one of the lines was loose. When I pulled it in there was no anchor on the end, just a chafed frazzle where the coral had cut it in two. Diving with fins, mask and snorkel, I located the missing anchor and freed up the other two rodes, which had also worked enough slack in their lines that they too were nearly chafed through on the sharp rocks. The rest of the afternoon I spent splicing the three-strand nylon lines and resetting the anchors with fender floats attached to attempt to lift the slack from the lines above the reach of the rocks. This was not the last time a lack of all-chain rode nearly caused the loss of my boat.
During my stay here I became friends with a family who had a simple home of bamboo, plywood and thatch located above the stream on the sole road passing through the village. The father, Tehoko, almost daily paddled his canoe out to visit Atom with his children and bring me food from their garden. In return, I gave him fishing tackle and an armful of those T-shirts I’d bought by the bundle at the flea market in Miami. They were now worth something as barter goods way out here in the Pacific isles far from a clothing store.
Besides the gardens around their house, many Marquesans have a second garden on land they use, or ignore, according to their need. Tehoko invited me to join him on a horseback trip to his inland garden. My backside was relieved when we finally dismounted the uncomfortable wooden saddles. Sensing what would please me most, Tehoko’s first task was to clear the vines away from a rounded Volkswagon-sized boulder revealing ancient carved symbols, the meaning of which was now lost, at least to words. At the garden Tehoko brought down a whole banana tree with a single swipe of his machete. Then he cut off a stalk of the rare and delicious red bananas.
I smiled then as I always do whenever I see a banana tree cut down, remembering the first time I saw a man do this on Tobago Island in the Caribbean. This destruction of a whole tree for a single bunch of bananas seems a terrible waste to the uninitiated Westerner, but each tree produces it’s bunch of bananas only once. From the base of the cut trunk, another tree will grow and bear fruit again within a year. I still laugh as I remember what an idiot I looked like when I ran forward and grabbed the man’s arm to stop him from cutting the whole tree down to get me the bananas I’d asked for. He had a good laugh as he explained the necessity of it. I’m sure he’s laughing still, when he gets together with friends to recount stories of the dumbest white men they ever met.
As we moved into a partly flooded streambed, Tehoko showed me how to select and cut the potato-like tuber of the taro plant, which is a basic staple of the Polynesian diet. The purplish-white flesh of the taro is more dense and chewy than a potato – probably more nutritious as well – and became a favorite ingredient in my boiled vegetable stews whenever I could get them.
Another incredible food found in the gardens of Hiva Oa is the pomplemoose, a grapefruit-like fruit the size of a basketball and sweet as Mandarin orange. There are few pleasures like burying your face into a ripe pomplemoose, mango, papaya, or pineapple from a tropical garden. I’m not talking about the horrid Hawaiian pineapple grown on chemical feed, sprayed with insecticides, picked green, injected with chemicals to retard spoiling, and then refrigerated for thirty days while being shipped to your antiseptic supermarket. For anything like the real flavor of a pineapple, you must snatch it from the dark volcanic soil at the peak of ripeness and eat it unrefrigerated.
We tied our sacks of fruit and vegetables on the horses and led them back to Tehoko’s home where I was given a bagful of taro and other well-keeping foods to take on the next leg of my passage west. Much of the so-called farming here is little more than plucking the food from the ground or trees. At least I saw no planting, just an endless cycle of harvests. And this is part of the reason for the apparent indolence and carelessness that Westerners see in the native Polynesian – he needn’t worry himself with our misplaced notions of “make hay while the sun shines.” Winter never comes to Polynesia.
Nearly daily I went to visit Tehoko’s home where I spent happy days with his family. Tehoko’s wife and eldest daughter Celestine, prepared meals for us containing the South Seas staples of roasted cassava, poached breadfruit, and taro root baked in an earth oven and slathered with coconut cream, with side dishes of those fantastic little red bananas and papayas sprinkled with lime juice. Tehoko said, “It’s a shame you just missed the July”, as Marquesans call Bastille Day which is celebrated throughout French Polynesia as their National Day. “We had a great feast with music and dancing.”
Celestine was a lively teen-aged girl, a slender beguiling beauty with dancing black eyes. Laughing at my flawed pronunciation, but encouraged by my efforts, she helped me compile a short phrase book of the Marquesan language, which as she spoke it, sounded more like music than words. With my rough French, we strained to understand each other, and I pretended to when I could not. I thought of extending my stay here, despite the gendarmes order to leave.
Taking me into her garden, Celestine led me past bunches of white morning glories in full bloom. We passed under giant leafy breadfruit trees, slender trunks of the green mop-topped papaya trees and over to the climbing vanilla orchids wrapped in a leafy embrace around the trunks of young kapok trees. In vanilla’s native Mexico, pollen-questing bees help fecundate the orchid. On Hiva Oa there is no bee enterprising enough to do the work and the flowers must be pollinated by hand. Showing me one of the delicate yellow-green blossoms, Celestine held the bloom in one hand and with the other transferred pollen between stamen and pistol with a sharpened twig. On another plant she lifted a dangling bunch of seed pods beginning to ripen. When fully ripe, she picks them and lays them out in the sun to dry. In America a faint resemblance to vanilla flavor is extracted by steeping the pods in alcohol. In the islands the women cut the dried pods into small bits and put them in desserts imparting on them the true full vanilla flavor.
I followed Celestine through the garden and a short way into the forest to a waterfall so gentle and well-concealed by hanging vegetation that I did not even see it until we were standing knee-deep in the pool at its base. We sat on a smooth-topped stone with our feet dangling in the pool and the cool misty air swirled around us. She handed me some ripe yellow guavas she had picked along the path and we ate them whole – skins, pink flesh, and tiny hard seeds all together.
Like most Marquesan vahine, Celestine wore only the pareo, a colorful printed or tie-dyed piece of light cloth wrapped sarong-like around the body once and tied behind the neck. Her long silken black hair framed an Asian face trimmed with the smiling eyes and lips of Polynesia. I felt the savage Gauguin whispering in my ear: “Ah, here is the essence and ecstasy of Oceania”.
“Would you like to see the ancient burial site?” Celestine asked in French. At this point I’d follow her into an erupting volcano without hesitation. We walked a short way farther into a place of dark silence where the aerial roots of banyan trees pushed up through the flat-topped stones of what had once been a pyramid-shaped temple. At the center of the ruins I looked down into a space between the rocks and spotted a human skull staring back at me through empty eye sockets. Looking farther, I saw complete skeletons entwined in the web of tree roots. Not so long ago, the tattooed witch doctors like Gauguin’s friend Tioka, led islanders to place their dead on this sacred temple behind the backs of the missionaries who insisted they bury them underground. Having your remains buried underground was considered a horrible fate to the Marquesans, though many have accepted it now. We spoke in hushed tones and as we left I had the vague feeling that if we lingered too long the ancients could reach out and pull us back into their world.
My allotted two weeks in Hiva Oa had passed. The next day I untangled my anchor rodes yet again. As I lashed the dinghy on deck under the boom and prepared to hoist sail, Tehoko and Celestine came out by canoe to wish me “Bonne chance” and heave aboard another basket of fruit. Moments later a light breeze wafting down the valley pushed me slowly out to sea. I said farewell to The Land of Men and Women with a long deep blast from my conch shell horn.
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