History bookshelf:
Next book on the shelf is The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific
by Paul Theroux. So crazy Paul Thoreux starts in Australia, and then is flown to the Solomon Islands. He then takes out his trusty canoe, and begins to paddle from island to island … just like the ancients did. Sometimes, because he is a modern man, the distance is too far – and he takes a boat or a tiny plane to the next island. But he goes through them all – Solomon, Trobriands, Vanuatu, the Cook Islands, Tahiti … He even finds a deserted island and camps there for a couple of days. Just to see what it is like. As with all of Thoreux’s books … he’s voraciously curious about things … but he also doesn’t seem to meet than many people he likes. He’s brutal at times. He couldn’t stand the Samoans, for example. A lot of his writing in this vein reminds me of Mark Twain’s travelogues. The freedom with which Mark Twain made fun of people, or passed judgment. He doesn’t care.
A lot of this stuff is endlessly fascinating to me – it’s history I am not familiar with, except for the fact that I know it happened. People got in huge boats, a gazillion years ago, and paddled THOUSANDS of miles to inhabit other islands. How, why, what the feck … it boggles the mind. But the intricacies of that history – and all the different peoples … is not something I’ve ever studied. So I was very interested in it.
Theroux ends his journey with a jaunt to Easter Island. Far-out, isolated. He takes a plane to get there – he cannot paddle his canoe the distance, obviously – but the fact that he cannot makes him understand the truly astonishing level of accomplishment of those who did.
I’ll post an excerpt from the Easter Island section.
From The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux.
It takes an hour to fly from Rarotonga to Tahiti, and five and a half from Tahiti to Easter Island. But connections in Oceania are seldom neat. I had two days to kill in Rarotonga, and three days in Papeete before I could head to this little island, the easternmost outpost of Polynesia.
My traveling time must be compared with that of the original migrants to Easter Island. They might have sailed from Rapa — now called Rapa Iti — in the Austral Islands, 2,500 mils away. Or it might have been from Mangareva in the Gambier Group. In any case, the journey in double-hulled canoes took them 120 days. This was sometime in the seventh century (though some archaeologists have dated it earlier). On the other side of the world the Prophet Mohammed was fleeing to Medina (in the year 622), the start of the Moslem Era. The Dark Ages had taken hold of Europe. The glorious Tang Dynasty had begun in China. In the Pacific, people were on the move, for this was the most active period of Polynesian expansion, which one Pacific historian has called ‘the greatest feat of maritime colonization in human history.”
Before I left Tahiti I had called on the airline representative. He was Chilean. We conversed in Spanish. He spoke no other tongue.
“The plane is half full, maybe more,” he said.
“All those people are going to Easter Island!”
“No. Only four passengers are getting off there. The rest are going to Santiago.”
“Will the weather be cold on Easter Island?”
“Sometimes. Especially at night.” He flapped his hand, equivocating. “You have a sweater? That’s good.”
“What about rain?”
“It can rain at any time. And wind. You will have some wind. But not too much.” He smiled at the ceiling and he blinked for effect as he chanted, “Sun. Cloud. Sun. Cloud.”
He was trying to encourage me.
“Now the hotels are interesting,” he said. “I know you don’t have one. You never have one before you go. But at the airport, the island people will look at you and offer their houses to you. You will see them and talk to them. That way you can find the most economical one.”
He then searched for my reservation.
“Your name is not on the passenger list,” he said. “But come tomorrow. If you don’t have a ticket we will sell you one. There is space. There are always seats to Easter Island.”
That was my preparation for the journey – that and a vast tome entitled The Ethnology of Easter Island, by Alfred Metraux, and the writings of other archaeologists, and much colorful and misleading information by the enthusiastic Thor Heyerdahl, who is regarded by many Pacific historians and archaeologists as of minimal consequence to serious archaeology. Scientifically, his books have as little value as those of Erich von Daniken, who theorized that the Easter Island moai were carved by people from outer space.
I found a place to stay, a guest house, and agreed on a price — $65 a day, which included three meals a day. I planned to camp, too — no one seemed bothered, as they had on other islands, by the threat of my pitching a tent.
Stretching my legs after arriving, I walked to the Easter Island Museum. It was one mute room on a hillside at the edge of town. There are some carvings, and some dusty skulls with drawings scratched on the craniums, and artifacts, but no dates have been assigned to anything in the room. There are old photographs of melancholy islanders and hearty missionaries. There are ill-assorted implements — axes, clubs, knives. One exhibit shows how the moai had carefully fitted eyes, most of them goggling — the sclera of the eye made of white coral, the iris of red scoria, and the pupil a disc of obsidian, which gave the statues a great staring gaze.
Many of the moai had been ritually blinded by the islanders themselves. The archaeologist JoAnne Van Tilburg mentions how “specific, probably ritual damage was done to only certain parts of the figures, in particular the heads, eyes, and occasionally the right arms.”
That first day, I ran into an island woman who was secretary of the Rapa Nui Corporation for the Preservation of Culture, known locally as Mata Nui o Hotu Matua o Kahu Kahu o Hera (“The Ancestral Group of Hotu Matua of the Obscure Land”). She confirmed various stories that I had read about the island.
Hotu Matua was the leader of the first migration to Easter Island. Descended from ancestral gods, this first king had mana, great spritual power, and is credited with the founding of this civilization. Much of the early history is conjecture — there are so-called wooden rongo-rongo tablets, with strange figurative script incised on them, but no one has ever been able to decipher them. In spite of this, most of the stories regarding Hotu Matua agree on the salient points. That he sailed from an island (Marae-renga, perhaps Rapa) in the west commanding two ninety-foot canoes. That he brought with him “hundreds and hundreds” of people. That some of these people were nobles (ariki) and others skilled men and women (maori) — warriors, planters, carvers — and still others commoners. That the captain of the second canoe was a noble named Tuu-ko-ihu. That on board these canoes they had “the fowl, the cat, the turtle, the dog, the banana plant, the paper mulberry, the hibiscus, the ti, the sandalwood, the gourd, the yam,” and five more varieties of banana plant. (Later generations gave Hotu Matua credit for introducing animals which early explorers introduced, such as pigs and chickens.)
After sailing for two months in the open sea, the voyagers came upon the island and they sailed completely around it, looking for a place to land. After their tropical home, this windy treeless island must have seemed a forbidding place: then, as now, black cliffs being beaten by surf. They found the island’s only bay, its only sandy beach. They went ashore there and named the bay Anakena, their word for the month of August. It was an island of seabirds and grass. There were no mammals. The craters of the volcanoes were filled with totora reeds.
Another happy incident, which occurs in all versions of this first-arrival story, is that shortly after Hotu Matua’s canoe reached the shore of the island, one of Hotu Matua’s wives, named Vakai, gave birth to a baby boy, Tuu-ma-heke, who became the island’s second king. The cutting of the infant’s navel cord caused the place to be called Pito-o-te-henua, “Navel of the Land”.
The woman who was telling me these stories said that she was a teacher of the Rapa Nui language. But was there such a language? She claimed there was, but linguists said that the original tongue had been lost, and that the language spoken on Easter Island now was the Tahitian the Christian missionaries had brought — because that was the language of their Bible and hymn book. Because this Tahitian had many similarities to the old Rapa Nui it had displaced it. Easter Islanders were identified as Polynesians when they boarded Cook’s ship in 1774. As soon as they spoke, Cook recognized that their language was similar to Tahitian.
Looking for a place to launch my boat, I walked down the main road of the town, a dirt track called in the local language Navel of the World Street, past grubby little bungalows — they had the shape and dimensions of sheds: flat roofs, single walls — to Hanga Roa harbor.
It was not like any harbor I had ever seen, and it explained why if you totalled the time all the early explorers spent ashore on Easter Island, it would amount to very little. Few of the nineteenth-century explorers, Metraux says, “stayed on the island for more than a few minutes.” Some of the explorers, having made the 2,500-mile run from Tahiti (and it was nearly as far from South America) were unable to go ashore — too windy, too dangerous, too surfy. In 1808, for example, Captain Amasa Delano of Duxbury, Massachusetts (and of Melville’s story “Benito Cereno”), arrived at the island and sailed around it, but could not set foot on the island, because of the heavy surf off Hanga Roa.
Some ships did land, to the sorrow of the islanders. In 1804, the men on an American ship, the Nancy, kidnapped twelve men and ten women from the island after a fight — the intention was to use these captives as slave laborers at a seal colony on Mas Afuera, a rock halfway to Chile. When the islanders were allowed on deck after three days at sea, they jumped off the ship and began swimming in the direction of their island, and all drowned. Whaling ships plying the southern oceans often abducted Easter Island girls, for their sexual pleasure.
“In 1822 the skipper of an American whaling ship paused at Easter Island long enough to kidnap a group of girls who were thrown overboard the following day and obliged to swim back to the island,” Metraux writes. “One of the officers, simply for amusement, shot a native with his gun.”
After more raids of this sort the islanders became hostile to any foreigners. But the foreigners persisted, either fighting them or employing more devious means to subvert the islanders, using gifts as bait, as in this raid in 1868: “The raiders threw to the ground gifts which they thought most likely to attract the inhabitants and … when the islanders were on their knees scrambling for the gifts, they tied their hands behind their backs and carried them off to the whaling ship.” The king, Kaimakoi, was kidnapped with his son and most of the island’s maori (experts). These and later captives were sent to work, digging on guano islands, where they all died.
The history of Easter Island in the nineteenth century is a long sad story of foreign raiding parties (mainly American and Spanish), of slavery and plunder, leading to famine, venereal disease, smallpox outbreaks, and ultimately the ruin of the culture — the place was at last demoralized and depopulated. In 1900 there were only 214 people living on Easter Island, eighty-four of them children. A hundred years of foreign ships had turned Easter Island into a barren rock.
The island had flourished by being cut off, and then it became a victim of its remoteness. Since the earliest times, it had never been easy to land on it, but it was so far from any other port, and in such a rough patch of ocean, that every ship approaching it took advantage of it in some way — looking for water or food, for women, for slaves.
How was it possible for even a small ship to land here? In fact it had never been managed. No more than a scooped-out area, with boulders lining the shore and surf pounding beside the breakwater, the harbor was a horror, and it was difficult even to imagine a ship easily lying at anchor offshore, with a whaleboat plying back and forth with supplies. Problem one was mooring a ship in the wild ocean off Hanga Roa; problem two was getting the whaleboat through the surf to shore and, since there was nowhere to land, steadying it long enough to unload it.
I saw that I could paddle through the surf zone. But it was usually easier to get out than to paddle in. The danger here was that the surf was breaking on large rocks at the harbor entrance. Even if I surfed in I might be broken to smithereens on the rocks.
The most ominous sight for a potential kayaker was that of Rapa Nui boys surfing into the harbor on big breaking waves. This surfing, locally known as ngaru, had been a sport here since the earliest times, and was the only game that had survived all these years. They had abandoned the ancient games of spinning tops, flying kites, and going to the top of volcanoes and sliding down “tracks on which they had urinated to make the path more slipper.” But surfing had been sueful in the early innocent days of foreign ships anchoring off Hanga Roa in a heavy sea. Surprising th eseamen, the islanders swam out to the ship, using “swimming supports” — a plank or a rush mat. Some of the islanders were observeds surfing back to shore afterwards, riding the waves using the planks as surfboards.
In the Rapa Nui language there was a complete set of surfing terminology, which described the board, the surfer’s waiting for the wave, allowing the wave to crest, and settling on the wave; what in current surfing jargon woudl be the banana or the pig board (or sausage board), the pickup and takeoff, the cutback on the hump, hotdogging, hanging ten, and walking the plank. In the old days there had been surfing contests and some men, real Rapa Nui beachies, had gone far from shore to surf a long distance on the large ocean swells.
But the sight of surfers convinced me that this was not a good area to paddle from — and it was the harbor!
This reminds me of something I read about the difference between a tourist and a traveler. Travel can involve work, hardship, uncertainty, and the very real possibility of danger. This is why being a traveler can be more satisfying and meaningful than being a tourist. If “travail” is the origin of the word travel, then travel truly is work.
I love Paul Theroux books, this one especially. I am addicted to travel books and have really enjoyed some of your recent suggestions. Another one of my favorite travel author’s is Redmond O’Hanlon. Also Robyn Davidson’s two books are both wonderful. There is a little known book called A Boat in Our Baggage that is really fun to read. It’s about a couple who kayak around the world.
I am envious of your organized library! I have about 10 bookcases scattered all over the house, and I can never find the book I am looking for!
Michele – I love a good travelogue book as well – and will certainly look up the authors you mention. Thanks!
oh, and the book organization is a CONSTANT struggle. hahahaha I have to so keep on top of the book situation, especially in my small apartment … otherwise they will totally take over!!
It’s really cool to hear that someone else read and really enjoyed this book of Theroux’s – I love it as well.