The Shark God (32 page)

A fierce, betel-stained drunk lurched out of the crowd toward me. “
Yu go wea? Fren! Fren! Yu go wea?
”

What eyes! What breath! What teeth! The man was a complete mess. I gave him the standard brush-off: “
Jes walkabaot
.”

He grabbed me by the hand before I could escape. “
Yu no rememba mi?
”

There was something about his face, those broken teeth, the foam gathered around the edge of his lips. Of course! This was the man I had been harassing for weeks. It was the captain of the
Eastern Trader
.

“My friend, we are all fueled up,” the captain spat excitedly. “
By yumi go long Santa Cruz! Olgeta cabins booked-up nao. Sori! Sori! But yu savve slip insaed cabin blong mi!
”

The thought of bunking with the captain was horrifying. I knew the decrepit
Eastern Trader
would only be sailing if the MV
Temotu
was leaving, too—that way there would be a quick rescue if the old girl foundered at sea. But was the captain drinking in celebration or fear? I shook free of his grip and lost him amid the hundreds of Santa Cruzians and big-boned Polynesians who crowded the pier. There was a desperate excitement in the air. Everyone was flush with compensation money. People climbed over the
Temotu
's rails, tossing aboard sacks of rice, rolls of chicken wire, and jugs of petrol. I joined them.

The
Eastern Trader
gave a wail and pulled bravely away. We
all assumed the
Temotu
would follow, and there was much joyous smoking and spitting, at least until a loudspeaker crackled and hissed to life. “
Wantoks
, this is your captain,” a voice boomed. “We should go now. We are ready to go now. But we cannot go now.
Mi sori tumas
, but human life is too precious to risk. We will try again at ten a.m. tomorrow.”

What had happened was this. The police had finally mustered the courage to confront Jimmy Rasta's boys over their pirating of the Langa Langa ship
Sa'Alia
. There'd been a shootout on the beach east of Honiara. The police had won. Five of the pirates had been captured and taken to jail, but Rasta had returned to his compound for cocktails, and everyone knew that when Rasta hit the booze he got angry, and when Rasta got angry he tended to steal ships and bludgeon people with the butt of his gun. The seas would be much safer when he was hung over.

The loudspeaker crackled again: “I want to warn anyone who would steal any of the personal belongings left on this ship, especially the person who has lifted the calico, that we
tasiu
are here as God's witnesses. Think hard. If you want to enjoy the rest of your life, do not steal on this ship. God will punish you.” It was Brother Clement.

When I returned to the port the next morning, the voice of the
Temotu
's captain was echoing off the warehouse walls. “If you don't come on time,
wantoks
, how can we leave on time? I'm serious now! We're going home! Brothers and sisters, we're going home!”

I climbed aboard. The ship's pastor read a prayer, finishing it with an imploring, “Lord God,
olgeta laef blong mifala stap insaed long hand blong yu
.”

God, our lives are in your hands. The tone of the prayer didn't do much to inspire confidence in the ship itself.

The lines were loosened and tossed aboard. The engine rumbled. I went to check on my berth. I had fought with the ship's agent until he had agreed to assign me a first-class berth. This, I
now discovered, gave me the right to occupy a painted rectangle of floor, roughly the size of my inflatable air mattress, in a cabin with sixty other people. I had left a blanket on my square to mark it. Now the blanket was buried under a heap of bagged rice, Chinese noodles, grass mats, and plastic buckets.

I squeezed between two families: on one side, a mountainous Polynesian matriarch whose children crawled over her breasts like ants on their queen, and on the other, a prematurely seasick woman with a gaggle of teens who took turns wiping the drool from her chin.

Brother Clement appeared, and I remembered his vow of poverty. I invited him to my painted square for a picnic of crackers and peanut butter. He fell asleep on my inflatable mattress and stayed there for a day. I curled up on the linoleum with the Polynesians.

I realize I have complained about my ocean passages, and I would like to tell you that this one was different, that I sat with my legs dangling over the bow, experiencing the mariner's camaraderie and the exhilaration of the sea. But that's not how it was at all. My passages were getting exponentially miserable.

We were welcomed by the bruised folds of an approaching storm shortly after leaving the shelter of the strait that separates Guadalcanal and Malaita. As usual, the head overflowed. As usual, the wind picked up. As usual, the waves grew beneath us, lost their form, and became a mishmash of monstrous lumps, like giants writhing under a blanket.

The
Eastern Trader
turned back at Santa Ana, last of the islets that trailed from the eastern tip of Makira. For the first time on my journey, there were no islands left on the horizon. The optimism of our departure evaporated. The cargo mountains collapsed, and the babies began to howl. The cabin was transformed into an infernal day care of screaming tots, glassy eyes, swollen breasts, and bile.

Occasionally the
Temotu
corkscrewed, sending cargo and babies and vomit buckets tumbling across the cabin and unleashing a chorus of “
O, Jisas Krais! O, Jisas Krais!
” The cries sounded like accusations, as though God were letting us down horribly. “
Tasiu!
” people shouted after one nasty lurch, as though Brother Clement could calm the tempest. But he snored through the night and into the morning, oblivious, on my mattress.

We crashed through another afternoon and evening. I could not sleep. Near midnight, I climbed to the top deck to watch the ship's dogsbody wrestle bucket after bucket of trash over the rails. “We must not carry this mess with us to paradise,” he shouted, “so we must feed the sea, my friend. Ha ha! The sea will consume it!”

I watched the garbage disappear into the night. The storm had exhausted itself. A light appeared on the horizon just off the bow, a faint crimson glow. It grew and became not a fire but a damp reflection of fire, like a red spotlight projected up onto the belly of the clouds. My heart raced at the sight. The light could only be Tinakula, the volcano around which the Santa Cruz Islands were scattered like the remnants of an ancient eruption. Tinakula! The volcano had inhabited my dreams for years.

Tinakula has guided explorers and missionaries to their deaths for nearly half a millennium. Like poor Alvaro de Mendaña, who discovered, named, and sweated to death in the poorly named Graciosa Bay in 1595. Or the mysterious comte de la Pérouse, the French navigator who had ably explored much of the North and South Pacific, but who was never seen again by Europeans after he left Australia's Botany Bay in 1788. Nearly forty years later, relics from la Pérouse's two ships were discovered on Vanikoro, a day's sail southeast of Tinakula. Islanders reported that their ancestors had slaughtered most of la Pérouse's crew and retired their skulls to a local spirit house.

Then came the missionary martyrs. First to die were Nobbs and Young, Patteson's beloved protégés. But a decade later, the
British commodore James Goodenough, protector of the Melanesian Mission, sailed past Tinakula and waded ashore at Carlisle Bay on Santa Cruz. He walked from one village to another, leading to much confusion among the warring natives as to whose side he was on. The locals attacked, and Goodenough recognized his diplomatic blunder. He ordered his men not to bomb or burn the village, then he died from his wounds.

“To step ashore at Santa Cruz! To sleep among people so famed for outrages committed in moments of excitement! The very thought was inspiring,” gushed my great-grandfather after landing on the island in 1892. I felt the same way as the glow of Tinakula drifted toward the stern of the
Temotu
. We were turning, following the great shadow that had grown from the sea to starboard. This was Nendo, Mendaña's Santa Cruz. The calm water that soon steadied the ship was Graciosa Bay, where the Spaniard's adventures ended. We steered toward a constellation of quivering flashlights. A hundred people waited for us on a rubbly pier.

Nobody wanted to unload cargo in the rain, so we stayed in Graciosa Bay for two nights. I slept at the village rest house. So did the captain and crew of the
Temotu
, because there was a gas stove at the rest house, and a woman who was a cousin of a crew member and could therefore be ordered to cook.

I ate with the ship's crew. We found warm beer. The crew drank to get drunk. I drank to stop the world from swaying. It felt like we were still at sea.

“You go to Nukapu? I'm half-Nukapu!” said a thin man with an enormous, stretched mouth. He might have been the ship's engineer. “And I can tell you I am a proud man. It was my people, my blood, who killed Bishop Patteson.”

“Then perhaps you should be ashamed.”

“Aha! Wrong. You know, the bishop predicted that he would die on one of our islands. And he said he would die for us. My people helped him achieve his destiny. We made him a martyr.”

“Stronger in death…,” I said.

“Yes, much stronger in death!”

“Just like Obi-Wan Kenobi,” I said.

“Yes! Just like…
hao
?”

I told the crew the great tale of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi master from
Star Wars
. I liked the film because it was unambiguous. Kenobi was the wise man of the story and the keeper of sacred knowledge, like Patteson. I told the crew how Kenobi had confronted Darth Vader, the personification of darkness, in a duel. Kenobi did not win by slaying his opponent. No. He warned the Dark Lord: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,” and then he raised his light-saber above his head and allowed Vader to cut him in half. But there was no blood. Obi-Wan Kenobi's body simply disappeared. The martyr's spirit lived on to inspire and guide the forces of goodness. There was also the part about the Force, which I explained was something like
mana
.

“Oh, yes, our story is like that exactly,” said the engineer. “Patteson is more powerful now than ever. You know what we call the spot where he was killed? We call it ‘the Clinic.' Because if you are sick, you just go to the bishop's cross and pray, and you will be healed. Ah! And when cyclone Namu hit in 1986, the only place that wasn't drowned on Nukapu was the Clinic. Everyone gathered there and was protected from the waves.”

The residents of Nukapu are now so proud of their place in history they stage a feast on each September 20, the anniversary of the bishop's murder. The next party would take place in four days. If I could reach the Reefs and find a canoe, I could get to Nukapu in time for the martyr's anniversary, suggested the engineer.

“And what do you know of Mr. Forrest,” I asked. I knew his answer would be
nothing
, and it was.

I cannot let this story continue without Actaeon E. C. Forrest, the fly in this mythological ointment. It was Forrest who revealed
that Patteson's murder may not have been a message to Queen Victoria to stop the blackbirding. It was Forrest who reported that the murder was nothing more than an overreaction to an episcopal faux pas. And according to
The Light of Melanesia
, it was Forrest, not Patteson, who saved Nukapu. But his story and his name have now been crumpled up and tossed into the dustbin of mission history.

I must tell you the tale of a misfit whose life did not match the missionary template. Actaeon Forrest was a man of faith and a lay missionary who came to the Santa Cruz Group sixteen years after Patteson's death. My great-grandfather was in awe of him. He described how Forrest had heroically survived ambushes and assassination attempts. How Forrest had repeatedly dashed out between two parties of warring natives, determined to halt the whistling arrows and make peace. How Forrest had braved the seas by canoe to initiate the pacification of the Reef Islands, despite having once been capsized and stalked by a giant horned sea monster. How Forrest had survived by pluck and wit, built a school on Santa Cruz, and finally begun to win over the hotheaded natives. “This gallant man,” wrote Henry, “single-handed, is fighting our battles here in perils among waters, in perils among arrows, in perils among fever, and in loneliness.” It was Forrest alone who had begun the Christian conquest of Santa Cruz.

A photo in
The Light of Melanesia
shows Forrest standing with a group of Cruzian men. The men are naked except for what look like woven handbags hanging in front of their genitals and, of course, their spectacular shell jewelry: wide hoops through their ears, moonlike discs strung from their necks. The men are stern and muscular. Forrest is bookish and shy among them in his white, three-quarter-length trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He looks like a schoolboy hoping desperately to be chosen for the cricket team.

Forrest's name was not wiped from
The Light of Melanesia
simply because my great-grandfather published it before his downfall.
The rest of Forrest's story has survived only in bits and pieces. I found scraps of it at Lambeth Palace, in the private correspondence of colonial administrators and church leaders. In 1896 the third bishop of Melanesia alerted the archbishop of Canterbury that Forrest and another teacher had fallen into very great sin. “They were both found guilty of indecency with the native boys,” wrote the bishop, who elsewhere lamented that Forrest had shown a damning lack of remorse: “He says that [the natives] do not think much of his offence; if so, his work during the 9 years he has been here has been worth nothing.” Charles Woodford, the resident commissioner of the Solomon Islands, wrote that tales of Forrest's “sodomy” were a matter of common report among steamship crews.