To Run Across the Sea (18 page)

Bora Bora’s speciality is feeding sharks—an experience described at the hotel as
impressionant
, which indeed it is. The Tahitian boatman chooses a likely spot and you lower yourselves into the water. A lifeline is fixed to the canoe, but this carries little conviction. ‘Nothing can happen to you,’ the boatman, swimming ahead, calls back, adding jokily, ‘I have a special deal with the sharks.’ He floats a bucket full of kitchen scraps for distribution, and after grabbing a handful, scatters them in the water. Instantly we are enclosed in a swirling envelope of fish of all degrees of beauty and freakishness. Eventually a shark shoulders its way through the screen of lesser fish to take what is on offer, which it does in a hesitant and somewhat listless fashion. On this occasion we saw six in all, the smallest perhaps 5 foot and the largest 7 foot in length. The boatman said that he had heard that an incautious feeder had once lost a hand, but that had been somewhere else, and long ago.

In contrast with the endless variety and vivacity of the life of the lagoon, the fauna of Tahiti is unremarkable. There are no snakes or frogs, few birds and butterflies, and the quadrupeds are represented by edible, vegetarian rats and by an occasional wild pig. I was shown what its owner claimed was the unique survivor of the native vegetarian (also edible) dog, an insignificant tailless and almost hairless beast. This was normally fed on coconut, but there must have been a break somewhere in the ancestral chain, as I later surprised it licking furtively at a piece of fat.

Of the six islands, Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Maupiti are inevitably less changed by our times than Tahiti itself. Populations are small, and on the whole committed to a happy-go-lucky subsistence economy. These lesser islands—Bora Bora apart—receive relatively few visitors. They are largely to be explored by bicycle or on foot and have retained a substantial element of the old Polynesian charm. Huahine and Raiatea—the sacred islands of the old civilisation—are littered with the vestiges of those ancestral shrines known as
marae
and there is something about these monoliths and packed rows of standing stones—despite the lagoon water rippling over the coral near by—that endows them with a strangely Hebridean feeling.

Nevertheless, Tahiti itself, away from its single main road, must be scenically as charming as ever, and a few hundred yards up into any of the valleys radiating from the central peak, the explorer plunges into forests of almost Amazonian opacity and grandeur. The accepted beauty spot is still Matavai beach, where Captain Cook came ashore in 1769, and nothing has been done to despoil it. William Hodges, artist to Cook’s second expedition, painted it in 1773, and this year it remained with its cassuarina trees, its stream, and its tracery of cliffs lifting into the mists, just as he saw it. Only a Tahitian Venus with lightly tattooed buttocks drying herself after a dip was absent. Here, Cook’s crew, besieged by the garlanded island girls, learned of the existence of free (and instant) love, tore the locally valuable nails from the planks of the
Endeavour
, to offer in token of their gratitude, and caused the ladies much amusement by insisting that the natural conclusion to these encounters should be conducted behind the screen of nearby bushes.

This, too, was the landing place in 1797 of the missionaries sent by the London Missionary Society, who, as entranced as Cook had been by their reception, and the setting, asked for the bay to be given to them. The request was immediately granted by the local chief, who had no concept of private property, and was later disconcerted to learn that he and his people were debarred for ever from trespass on the area. The evangelists were a strange assortment, picked by the Society on the score of their probable usefulness to an uninstructed people and they included a harness-maker, a bricklayer, a farrier, a weaver and a butcher and his wife. None of these had ever left England before, and few their native villages. It was four years before any of them learned enough of the language to preach a sermon to a puzzled though sympathetic audience. The Tahitians built their houses, fed them, and provided them with servants and labourers galore, but after seven years not a convert had been made. The device which eventually established their unswerving rule is described in a letter home, written by one of the brethren, J. M. Orsmond: ‘All the missionaries were at that time salting pork and distilling spirits … Pomare [the local chief] had a large share. He was drunk when I arrived and I never saw him sober.’ Orsmond describes the compact by which Pomare, reduced to alcoholism, would be backed in a war against the other island chiefs on the understanding that his victory would be followed by enforced conversion. Since Pomare was supplied with firearms to be used against his opponents’ clubs, victory was certain. ‘The whole nation,’ Orsmond wrote, ‘was converted in a day.’ Then followed a reign of terror. Persistent unbelievers were put to death, and a penal code was drawn up by the missionaries, and enforced by missionary police in the uniforms of Bow Street Runners. It was declared illegal to adorn oneself with flowers, to sing (other than hymns), to tattoo the body, to surf or to dance. Minor offenders were put in the stocks, but major infringements (dancing included) were punished by hard labour on the roads. Within a decade the process by which the native culture of Tahiti had been extinguished was exported to every corner of the South Pacific, reducing the islanders to the level of the working-class of Victorian England.

J. M. Orsmond crops up again on Moorea where he is remembered with anguish until this day. After their mass conversion it was hoped that the Tahitians might be induced to accept the benefits of civilisation by being set to work on sugar plantations, and to create these a Mr Ayles, formerly a slave overseer in Jamaica was brought over, along with the necessary mill equipment. The enterprise failed, and Mr Orsmond, believing that ‘a too bountiful nature on Moorea diminishes men’s natural desire to work’, ordered all breadfruit trees to be cut down. By this time, the population of Tahiti had been reduced by syphilis, tuberculosis, smallpox and influenza from the 200,000 estimated by Cook to 18,000. After 30 years of missionary rule, only 6,000 remained. At this point the French arrived to take over. Given the circumstances it was the best possible solution. The brethren were driven from their kingdom, and thereafter the gradual recovery both of numbers and joie de vivre was under way.

Back to the Tahiti of our days—dating according to Wiedler from the epoch-making events of the early sixties. These included the coming of television, the siting of an international airport at Papeete and, above all, the decision by the French to begin nuclear testing on the atoll of Mururoa, 700 miles to the south-east of Tahiti. In 1962, Wiedler said, a Tahitian had been fined for speeding on a bicycle down the main street of Papeete. By 1963 when the Pacific Experimental Centre (CEP) responsible for the tests had taken over much of the city’s centre, the reckless cyclist belonged to another century. An army of technicians arrived from France, and the islands were drained of able-bodied males required for the workforce. Many of these came from villages where they still lit lamps at night to drive the ghosts away, and only such things as sugar, rice and basic articles of clothing were bought with money. From this relaxed environment the young islander faced one in which, paid the unthinkable wage of four US dollars an hour, he was introduced to credit facilities, urged to buy whatever he fancied, and expected to drink beer. Up till then he had been accustomed to spend the odd hour, whenever the mood took him, fishing or perhaps cleaning up a manioc patch. Now he clocked in at 6 a.m., learned to jump to it when given an order, and put in a strenuous eight-hour working day. The population of Tahiti had more than doubled, almost overnight, to 123,000, and new arrivals had to be shoved into whatever living space could be found for them. Now, living standards are the highest in the South Pacific, and so are the prices. A packet of cigarettes costs the equivalent of £3. Coconuts, washed up by the thousand along the Tahitian beaches, fetch more in the market of Papeete than they do in London. Love—still as free as ever on the islands—is highly priced and dangerous in the capital.

The changes brought about by sudden wealth and its many obligations are more fundamental than generally realised.
Le Monde
noted the Tahitian tradition by which males aged between 16 and 25 years are expected to spend their time in pursuit of pleasures—usually love affairs. This period at an end, most of them settle down to marriage and raise up to ten children in exemplary fashion. The undisturbed island society is a crime-free one, in which people still make up excuses to give things away. Standards of public health are nowhere higher, with a negligible infant death-rate. Currently, 50 per cent of the population of Tahiti as a whole is under 20, and by 1990 the average age of this juvenile half is expected to fall to 16.

There have been 88 nuclear tests to date, but when, as is bound to happen, they come to an end, what is to happen? A slackening in demand for labour has already caused severe unemployment, leaving too many young workers unable to pay for addictions fostered by the consumer society. In October 1987, an attempt by the dock-workers’ union to compel employers to take on more hands failed when the military were called in to unload the ships. This set off riots in which 100 leading shops and business premises in the heart of Papeete went up in flames, and 1,000 gendarmes and foreign legionnaires were flown in to restore peace. It is perhaps characteristic of Tahiti that no casualties were sustained in this upheaval.

I had another meeting with Wiedler and his favourite nephew, who had been in Papeete at the time of the riots. ‘It was better than the movies,’ Ricky said, but doubt showed through the pretence of relish. His wife had been urging him to look for work in the capital, but now she had changed her mind and they were returning, fairly contentedly, to their atoll. She was to have her picture-window. Ricky was confident that in the end she, too, would have enough of the view, and then he would get a local artist to paint a picture over it of the Boulevard Pomare, Papeete, with the plane trees from France, and the cars parked all along the front.

W
HEN, SHORTLY AFTER THE
war, I lived for a time on the then untouched Costa Brava, I was sometimes approached by a fisherman wanting a lift into Barcelona. The fishermen only went there out of dire necessity, usually in fear and trembling, to buy fishing tackle unavailable elsewhere, and the car-sickness from which they always suffered was accentuated by nerves. The fishing-tackle shop was down a side street leading off the Ramblas, and I usually dropped my passenger on the corner. Barcelona was Sodom to the austere and clean-living fishermen, and I knew that my friend would be carrying his money sewn into the lining of his jacket, and that his hand would be on the weasel paw charm in his pocket. This, on the frontiers of the zone known as the Barrio Chino, was a brazen place. The grandmothers of the fierce-eyed girls who still lurk in the dark doorways of the area would be all round us with their significant gestures, mouthing invitations laced with contempt. ‘If you’ve a moment to spare,’ one of my passengers said, ‘would you feel like walking down to the shop with me?’ We went down the street together and he stocked up with his archaic and inefficient hooks. After that I had business of my own to attend to. He agreed to wait for me in the car and I showed him how the door-locks worked. ‘As a foreigner,’ he said, ‘you’d have no way of knowing, but half these people are sick. It’s something you pick up in the air. Among other things it makes you piss blood.’

‘Let’s go and have a drink,’ I suggested.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to do that. You never know what they put in it. There was a man from the village who was down here last year and they slipped something into his
hierbas
. When he woke up even the gold fillings in his teeth had gone.’

This man has vanished from the earth, and not only he, but all his kind, his village, and the dramatic landscape in which it was set. The little patch of sea he so miserably explored with his antiquated gear is empty of fish, although, reduced to a tourist amenity, it contributes handsomely in other ways to the revenues of those who have developed the coast. Barcelona itself, nevertheless, remains in its central parts remarkably undisturbed. All the landmarks of the old town remain. Gaudí’s fantastic cathedral is as far from completion as it was forty years ago. The innumerable nightspots of old are still in business. The chickens still turn nightly on the spits in the wall outside the Caracoles restaurant (last year the management announced that 1,850,000 had been readied for consumption in this way in the 100-year history of the business). A hundred thousand citizens each day still complete most of the mile’s walk in each direction up and down the Ramblas between the Plaza de Cataluña and the port, moved to do this in the interests of social interchange, for the benefit of their health, and, above all, out of custom.

The Ramblas remains the heart and soul of the city; once a watercourse, now a tree-shaded promenade, copied in all the towns of the Hispanic world, local geography permitting. It provides traditional distractions all along its length. Flower-sellers and dealers in pets with their animals and birds occupy the higher reaches at the entrance from the plaza. There is no more touching sight than that of tiny pinafored children from the local infants’ school, clinging at exact intervals to the long rope by which they are led, a teacher at each end, past the cagefuls of puppies and rabbits to top up their morning happiness before lessons begin.

Barcelona is exuberant, enterprising and prosperous, with a population comparable to that of Madrid. With the country’s highest standard of living and plenty of money to throw away on whimsical fancies, its citizens can afford unusual and expensive animals, often transported here to an unsuitable environment. Baby chimpanzees are in fashion. You can buy a piranha that requires to be fed on meat, a small Galapagos turtle, or an Amazonian parrot, bilingual to the extent that it can swear in Spanish or Portuguese. Nothing must be
ordinary
. Sellers of dogs concentrate on unusual breeds. Those with long hair (inappropriate to the climate) are in demand. Old English sheepdogs are a current favourite, but woolly versions of the Alsatian are also on offer.