The Shark God (11 page)

“Out!” I shrieked.

The rooster didn't take flight. It simply cocked its head and glared at me with cunning, familiar eyes. I hung a towel over my window and locked my door. When I did fall asleep, I dreamed of the
kastom
chief, Geoffrey Uli. I saw him in a clearing in the forest, standing with a knife in one hand and a stone cup in the other. There were black feathers tied to his arms. At his feet lay a pig with its legs bound together. I saw Uli bend down. I saw his knife slice through the beast's throat, saw the blood run in bright red streams
into the stone cup, overflow, and trickle over Uli's talonlike hands. I saw his eyes narrow with pleasure and secret knowledge, and I recalled what he had told me: I have been watching you.

It may be true that people all over Vanuatu were scared of men from Maewo. But here on the island of water magic, people were fearful of absolutely everything. They trembled at the thought of unseen curses and charms, at the terrible power of two small cobblestones. They suspected treachery from visitors, from their neighbors, and from the natural world. All that magic made them vulnerable. It always had. My great-grandfather described an encounter between a white missionary and a murderer on nearby Ambae. The missionary only had to fix a disapproving gaze sternly on the man to send him scurrying for safety. The murderer returned to his home village, declared, “The man looked at me!” and promptly collapsed. He died, I suppose, of shock, or fear, or some life-sucking disorder he felt the white man had directed at him. My great-grandfather was intrigued, not so much by Melanesian magic as by Melanesian fragility. “Like peaches ripened in the hot sun, the slightest shock seems to upset their balance and cause death,” he wrote.

Bad intent, hostility alone, could be lethal. I felt the truth of this on Maewo. I couldn't shake the idea that the rooster that had been prowling my yard each night for a week had something to do with my recurring fever, and with Geoffrey Uli. Yes, this would be a silly hypothesis if proposed from an easy chair in an apartment in London or Toronto or Los Angeles. But when you are breathing the air of sorcery and fear, it is difficult not to absorb the local wisdom about these things. If myth is the form we give to our idea of the universe, of God, then it must also occasionally be the vessel into which we pour our fears. I flew away empty-handed, without proof of anything, and yet carrying an acute sense that the farther I got from Maewo, the safer I would be.

When the
Southern Cross
first appeared in the Banks Islands, islanders assumed the ship could not be of the world, because nobody in the world could make such a big canoe. They assumed the creatures aboard the vessel were not human: after all, humans were black, not white. So there was much debate wherever Bishop Patteson stepped ashore. Some elders thought he might be the ghost of a dead man. But it was the general consensus that Patteson was not a ghost at all but Qat, the mythical hero of all the Banks Islands, returning after thousands of years away.

Qat was born on Vanua Lava. His mother was not a woman
but a stone that had cracked apart to bring him into the world. Like Jesus, he had no earthly father, but Qat was not a god, or even the son of a god. He was a
vui
, a spirit. He was not the world's creator. But he did make men, pigs, rocks, and trees to amuse himself. He did not make day, but he did paddle to the edge of the world and return with a piece of darkness so that his brothers could have night to sleep in.

I wanted to know more about Qat. I imagined sitting by a cooking fire and listening to some
olfala
ramble on through the night about the wonders of the cunning ancestor. There should have been no better place to do so than Santa Maria, southernmost of the Banks Group. Qat's story was written into the remarkable geography of the island. I could see it all through the porthole of the mail plane. Santa Maria looked like a green doughnut floating in the bubbling fat of the sea. The island had clearly once been a volcanic cone even grander than Lopevi, but at some point that cone must have exploded or imploded, leaving a four-mile-wide hole in its center. The doughnut hole was occupied by a lake. Steam billowed from a small cone of ash and orange muck at the lake's edge.

The island looked strange and mysterious and just as it should have, and it was all explained by the Qat stories that Codrington had recorded in
The Melanesians.

In ancient times the caldera had been quite dry. It was Qat's playground. He spent his last earthly years frolicking there with his companion, Marawa the Spider. This is how the lake came to be: When Qat grew tired of the world, he carved himself a huge canoe from a tree he found in the caldera. He loaded his wife, his eleven brothers, and every living thing, even the smallest ants, into the canoe, and built a roof over them. Then came a rainstorm of biblical proportions. Water filled the caldera and flowed over its rim. Qat steered his canoe over the edge, ripping a channel through the crest and tearing a ditch all the way to the sea. Then he floated away beyond the horizon, never to return.

Flying above Santa Maria was like drifting above Oz. There was the mythical lake. There was the gaping wound in the side of the caldera, and a cascade, and a river marking the path of Qat's escape. I saw all these things as the Twin Otter drifted out of the clouds toward a patch of grass at Gaua, the name given to Santa Maria's east coast.

Once the plane had bounced away and its drone had subsided, I went looking for signs of Qat. A family had built a bungalow for tourists by the airstrip. They fed me. I was their second guest in five months. I asked the man of the house for the old stories. He didn't want to talk about Qat. I wandered the cart track that served as the island's only road. I sat with people in the dirt. Nobody cared much about Qat.

You would think islanders would never forget Qat. You would think that with his stories imprinted on the landscape, thoughts of the
vui
would occupy their days. But this is not the history about which Santa Marians now concern themselves. Finally, Paul Wudgor, the paramount chief of Gaua, a thoughtful, shoeless man of about thirty, took me for a walk through the forest beyond the coast road, and showed me why.

The coastal lowlands were covered with ruins: hundreds and hundreds of stone platforms, broken walls, chest-high foundations, all built from stones fitted tightly without mortar in a style reminiscent of Peru's Inca palaces, though more modest in proportion. The ruins appeared in gardens, under mounds of grass among the coconut groves, and in the darkest glades, bound by knots of banyan root. They collected moss in the shadows on the mountainsides, and they whispered that once, long ago, there had been something of a metropolis on the Gaua coast.

That was certainly the impression gained by the island's first European visitor. The Portuguese navigator Pedro Fernandez de Quirós—who journeyed on behalf of the king of Spain, and who gave Santa Maria its name—noted in 1606 that the island was
populated by “innumerable natives” of three different colors: yellow, black, and off-white. Other early visitors estimated the island's population at twenty or thirty thousand.

But now there were few people on the Gaua coast. They lived in a scattering of small hamlets, their houses rustic pole-and-thatch affairs with no tin roofs or stonework or milled timber to speak of. I never saw a car or truck on the coast road, and I rarely saw people. What had become of the metropolis and all its citizens?

Codrington blamed a turn-of-the-century population decline on the labor trade. Tens of thousands of Melanesians had been taken to work on the sugar plantations of Queensland and Fiji in the nineteenth century. But most of the laborers completed their “contracts” and returned home after a few years. That explanation wouldn't do.

Henry Montgomery, who was carried to shore by a young man in 1892, blamed the islanders' own bloodlust. War, he wrote, was as regular and systematic on Santa Maria as cricket tournaments, with marked battlegrounds and strict start times: “Still more curious, is that when such a battle is announced the young men of a neighbouring village, who have nothing to do with the quarrel, will take their bows and arrows and start off to take part in the conflict. Strangest of all, is the fact that such a party, who go from sheer love of fighting, usually divide into two parties and choose to oppose each other.”

The sport resulted in a cycle of murder and vengeance that my great-grandfather insisted only got worse when laborers returned from Queensland with rifles.

But this explanation won't do, either. Such blood sport rarely ended with more than a single death and could not account for the almost complete decimation of Santa Maria and almost every other island in Melanesia. Each year, fewer and fewer canoes came out to meet traders and missionaries. A resident missionary at Wango in the Solomon Islands was shown the sites of forty-six
once-prosperous villages, of which only three remained. In the nineteenth century, the population of Erromango, north of Tanna, fell from more than three thousand to less than four hundred. Some historians estimated that the population of the New Hebrides was reduced by 90 percent in the late nineteenth century. What was killing people?

My new friend Chief Paul had a theory about that. I should have seen it coming. He said it was
kastom
magic that had decimated the island, and it was God who eventually came to the rescue. Santa Maria was once like Maewo: a place held hostage by sorcerers so treacherous and lethal that those who weren't poisoned or murdered finally just got in their canoes and fled.

“Once we had twenty thousand people on this island,” the paramount chief told me as we gnawed boiled fish in his hut. “But then came a time of terrible magic. Sorcerers cursed people using their garbage, their poo-poo, whatever they could find. People had to throw their dinner scraps into the sea to make sure sorcerers didn't use them to cast evil spells on them. Bad men used secret leaves to kill our
pikinini
even before they were born. They used smoke from fires to curse people. Hundreds and hundreds of people died this way.”

By the 1960s, said the chief, there were only seven women left on the Gaua side of the island. Finally the church took action. Esuva Din, an Anglican district priest from Vanua Lava, sailed south to confront the evil with an act of boldness and Old Testament audacity. He harnessed the Holy Spirit to create a boomerang curse: all black magic would now bounce back and kill anyone who tried to use it. Within days, dozens of known sorcerers had dropped dead. One sorcerer confronted the district priest and said, “I don't believe it's true; I don't believe you really have the power to curse anyone who uses black magic.” Esuva Din did not like to be challenged. He said, “Rubbish man, just you wait and see.” The sorcerer keeled over and died the next day.

The chief's version of the crisis and its resolution seemed good enough for almost everyone I met on Santa Maria. I suppose you remember things in the manner that most suits you. But the truth is, the church was the cause, not the solution, of the death plague that landed on the islands. You can see the signs in the early mission writings. You can see the truth dawning, too late, on the Anglican brotherhood.

After a visit to a village on Vanua Lava in 1861, Bishop Patteson complained that local men were avoiding him and that some had remarked quite rudely about the “unusual sickness” connected with his new teaching. Patteson found Mota in good health in August 1863; two weeks later, he returned to find the island in the grip of a terrible scourge of dysentery and influenza. Fifty people had already died from it. Four of every ten baptized Melanesians died in the decade straddling the turn of the century. It would take the missionaries decades to realize—or admit—the part they played in the Melanesian apocalypse. The Reverend W.J. Durrad was horrified to realize it was his own arrival on isolated Tikopia that sparked an epidemic of pneumonia that killed dozens. The incident convinced Durrad, finally, that the
Southern Cross,
oozing with New Zealand–bred germs, was the chief agent of disease. The ship's legacy of death lasted well into the twentieth century. “A fortnight after its visit everyone is ill,” he wrote in 1917. As late as 1931, a stopover on Malaita unleashed an epidemic that killed eleven hundred islanders.

Even when Europeans acknowledged the role they played in spreading disease, they put the catastrophe down to a lack of stamina among Melanesians. As Durrad put it, “There is a fatalism in their outlook which reacts upon their physical organism.” When they fell sick, Melanesians tended to give up and wait to die rather than fight their illness. It was the same with sorcery: anyone who so much as believed he was the victim of black magic died within hours or days. If only they were made of stronger
stuff! The third bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson, responded to all this by suggesting that all that could be done for this “dying race” was to try to ensure its members went to their graves as Christians.

I didn't have my history books with me on Gaua. But I wanted to let the chief know I was ashamed and sorry for my ancestor's ignorance, sorry for the slow dirge of pneumonia, dysentery, and influenza that had decimated the island. He just laughed.

“You just don't understand,” he said. “We have been saved. Esuva Din saved us.”

Once the coast had been purged of evil, hundreds of families arrived from nearby islands to till new life into Santa Maria's ancient gardens. That was during the 1970s and '80s. Now the population had rebounded to almost forty-two hundred people.

Still, the Gaua coast felt eerily empty, like so many of those places—the highlands of Peru, the Thai plains of Ayuttaya, the Turkish Aegean—whose time has passed and where foreigners pay to see the rubble of once great cities. Only there weren't any tourists here. Nor were there ghosts or
vui
.

Who would the ancient souls of Gaua have haunted? Most of their own descendants were dead, and the rubble of their ancient city was suffocating under a thickening blanket of vines. I walked the ruins and the empty forests, bought the last can of tuna from a village canteen, sat out a rainstorm, and then lay down in the tall grass and waited for the mail plane. A crowd of giggling children gathered around me. Since nobody on the island could remember the stories of Qat, I told them one I had learned from Codrington.

Before there was a lake in the caldera, Qat played games there with his companion Marawa the Spider. Once Qat spent six days carving bits of wood into the shapes of men and women. He danced for those dolls, and they stirred. He beat his drum, and they moved some more. He kept on dancing and drumming until
he had coaxed them all to life. Qat was pleased, because he had made the first humans. He had made life. Marawa tried to imitate Qat, but the spider was so startled when he saw his own dolls stir that he buried them in the dirt. After six days Marawa scraped the earth away to find his dolls rotten and stinking. He was horrified. Marawa had made death.