The Shark God (33 page)

Forrest was dismissed from the mission, but he refused to leave Santa Cruz and began a trading business. The missionary conqueror of Santa Cruz soon became the mission's greatest foe. Woodford wrote in 1899 that Forrest, who had more influence among the natives of Santa Cruz than any other living white man, had bragged about reducing the number of mission schools in Santa Cruz from six to one.

The bishop of Melanesia was concerned about a scandal. He wanted Forrest out of his diocese. But Forrest had become so popular among the islanders it took Woodford five years to convince anyone to testify against him. Finally, Woodford had a couple of men from Ulawa sign depositions accusing Forrest of cajoling them into bed some years previously. Woodford edited the depositions, then he declared Forrest “dangerous to peace and good order” and signed a warrant for his arrest.

Forrest was arrested by a passing sea captain, but he escaped from custody immediately upon arrival in Sydney. Using his cutter,
Kia
, he established a trading base in the Torres Islands, south of Santa Cruz—just beyond Woodford's jurisdiction. Forrest settled down and adopted a young man, whom the natives referred to, apparently without judgment, as his “wife.” He lived in rela
tive peace for nearly a decade. But this was the Victorian era. Once the albatross of unspeakable sexuality had been slung around Forrest's neck, he was doomed. It did not help that he warned the natives on his island not to be lured aboard labor-recruiting vessels. When the recruiters complained to the government about this, they never failed to point out that Forrest's wife was clearly no woman.

Forrest had one friend left in the mission, the Reverend W. J. Durrad, who also lived in the Torres Group. When one of Durrad's servants complained that Forrest had sought his cooperation in an “act of indecency,” Durrad informed Forrest that he intended to report the matter. It was now certain that if Forrest did not take drastic action, he would spend years behind bars. He wrote an apology for having troubled the New Hebrides resident commissioner. He left instructions for his debts to be paid through the sale of his boat. He left gifts for his crew. He left his land and personal effects to his “adopted son,” Barnabas Ditwia of Loh. And then he drank poison. The investigations into Forrest's character and his involvement with the Melanesian Mission were suspended, and he began to sink into the murk of history.

There was no place for Forrest in the Nukapu myth because evangelical myth offers no room for nuance or sex. In order for the Nukapu story to sanctify the mission and give Melanesian Christians their martyr archetype, it needed to remain immaculate, asexual, and incomplete.

Sex: according to one English historian, it was very much a driving force behind empire-building, particularly in the repressive Victorian era. In the book
Empire and Sexuality
, which I carried to Santa Cruz in my knapsack, Ronald Hyam argued that imperial expansion was as much a matter of copulation and concubinage as it was Christianity and commerce. He pointed out that while Victorians exported their prudish sexual mores around the world (banning polygamy in Melanesia, for example), those
who carried the torch of empire were frequently refugees from psychosexual tyranny at home.

Melanesia was fraught with temptation, which the missionaries were not always able to resist. So it was that Charles Brooke was dismissed for some unnamed sexual impropriety just three years after he watched Patteson's paddle toward death. Arthur Brittain and C. D. G. Browne were sacked for their lack of self-control in the 1890s. And adolescent sex was “rampant” at the mission school on Norfolk Island: thirteen Melanesian recruits were suspended for sexual misbehavior in 1899 alone.

Forrest had first defended himself by saying the islanders were not offended by his conduct. That was probably true. Early anthropologists reported accounts of homosexual behavior all across Melanesia, notably on Malaita, and on Malekula in the New Hebrides, though the church soon rendered it
tabu
.

I can't help being drawn to Forrest, whom I have decided to remember through the fog of history not as a sinner but as an irrepressible gay adventurer. Perhaps I am drawn to him for the tenacity with which he survived after being abandoned by his colleagues and peers—everyone who shared his skin color. More likely it is because in all my months among the islands, through all those long nights, amid the sad whoosh of wind and waves, among men who would stand close, grasp my hand in their own strong hands for hours, and gaze into my eyes without reservation or intent, I knew how Forrest must have felt. That loneliness. That longing. I could understand how Forrest, who had tried to reach for the infinite, was yet pulled by the desire for something closer, something like, but yet unlike, himself. It was the wrong desire for his times. It was even more wrong now that Melanesia had been transformed into a twentieth-century holdout of Victorian sexual mores. But still it was there, and I felt it acutely. The loneliness that wanted more than a firm handshake. The longing that did not seem to fit into any Christian myth and which was
monstrous in the eyes of Melanesians. So the ghost of Forrest traveled with me in Santa Cruz, as present as Patteson and Codrington and my great-grandfather. But I was careful to keep my own romantic longings secret, and I did not press Forrest's case among the crew of the
Temotu
.

We pulled out of Graciosa Bay at dawn. Everything had changed. The ship was nearly empty. The cargo was gone. So was Brother Clement, and so were all the vomiters. We followed the coast of Nendo, then turned north at a bearing nearly parallel to the swell, which had found its shape again.

I was standing by the rail on the ship's bow when John, the ship's dogsbody and garbage-dumper, gripped my arm, pointed north, and squealed. “Look, Charlie!” he panted. “It's paradise, Charlie! Don't you see it?”

There was nothing to see but a frothy white line on the horizon. It looked like the first hint you get of the Rocky Mountains when driving west across the prairies: a ragged fringe of glaring peaks and cumulonimbus clouds. I peered and peered and saw only that mirage of snow. But by afternoon a faint, dashed line had begun to appear amid the glare. It thickened into tufts of palm. The snow became surf. A wall of foam, a thousand white bouquets of spray, exploded along a reef that stretched as far west as I could see.

John began to leap up and down like a child. A dozen other men climbed to the bow, and they, too, were all leaping and jigging on the shifting deck. They were Reef Islanders, and they were coming home.

The Reefs were as much shoal as they were island. It was as though a vast jigsaw puzzle of coral had been shaken, and a few pieces had shifted and slid atop the rest. Some, with their palms and breadfruit and papaya trees, resembled flower baskets perched on black stone pedestals. The rest were like giant clumps of moss. None was higher than the mist that billowed from the breaking surf.

The sun fell. The palms were seared gold. The lagoon and the sky melted into shades of scarlet. John pulled a lever, and the anchor rattled into the sea. Canoes came from every direction, like iron filings toward a magnet. I caught one to Pigeon Island, last of the old copra trading posts. The traders kept a room for travelers decorated with matching sheets and drapes. Avocado, 1969. They had a generator, which fueled Mozart's Twenty-ninth Symphony in A.

On my map, the Reef Group resembled a jellyfish swimming east. Its head was a brainlike cluster of islands with great tentacles dragging behind. Some of those tentacles began as islets, but they all disintegrated into light blue tendrils and streamers, coral reefs that disappeared, appeared, zigzagged through the sea until the longest finally trailed off more than twenty miles west. Nukapu lay on its own, far beyond the last shoal. It was not an easy place to reach. Fortunately, anyone heading for Nukapu was likely to first come to the trading post for fuel. I waited for two days, and they came: three men and a boatload of mosquito nets. They were health workers conducting an antimalaria campaign. But they had also heard of the impending feast on Nukapu, and they liked the idea of free food. They agreed to take me with them if I paid for the gas.

We left at dawn. The boat was a wide aluminum sled with a forty-horse outboard engine. The lagoon was so broad you could barely see its western fringe. But it was as warm and as calm as a bathtub. Sometimes the water was so flat and so clear that skimming across it felt like flying above a surreal blue desert. It glowed like the sky. Sometimes the coral colonies rose beneath us like giant muffins, clouds, or castles, with parrotfish swirling around their ramparts like flocks of birds. Sometimes the lagoon showed the curve of the earth. Passing islands did not retreat into the distance but sank beneath the ice-smooth horizon. Sometimes I saw people walking on that liquid horizon, casting nets far from any canoe or island like so many fisher messiahs. But when we ap
proached, we found them ankle-deep, teetering on the fringes of barely submerged mesas of coral. Sometimes the water was so shallow we had to cock the engine, climb out of the boat, and push, and then the reef was a miniature forest of grasping fingers, white twigs, and brainlike stones. Orange anemones moved like animated shag carpet. The coral sliced into my ankles, and a flurry of tiny fish the color of Bunsen burner flames rose to chase the trail of my blood.

We approached the northern lip of the lagoon and cut the engine again. The men used an oar to push through what looked like a field of sunken caribou antlers. Then the lagoon floor was cleaved open by a deep crevasse. We followed it as it widened into a canyon and then a valley, and finally a deep blue infinity. The sun and the stillness of the day had pressed the southeast swell into a benign, undulated smoothness.

We passed Pileni, where Henry Montgomery had landed with Forrest. A single cloud hung above it like a white umbrella. A few miles beyond Pileni was what appeared to be the last island in the world, a lonely white dune, bare except for a low fin of scrub and oak. The swell curled into long arcs around its reef. We skirted the reef, and I scanned the island for signs of life.

“Nobody
stap long disfala aelan
,” said one of the mosquito men. What a thought. A desert island. I realized that I had not spent a night alone in four months.

We switched fuel tanks and continued northwest. By midday the horizon had been wiped clean of everything except Tinakula, which we could see if we stood up. The journey began to feel like a descent into a dream. The world was delicate and ethereal. It lost its solidity. We rode up gentle blue hills and down again.

These were our way marks:

A sunbathing turtle.

A leaping porpoise.

A flock of black gulls.

A single cloud grew in the sky to our west. We aimed for it. After an hour, palms rose out of the swell. Nukapu.

It looked just as it should, like the lithograph I had seen in the Melanesian Mission's annual report for 1878. Like a scrap of shag carpet. Like Gilligan's Island.

It was eerily familiar: There was the reef, which we poled across, and the lagoon. There was the sandy shore. There were the thatch huts, and there was the smoke that had twisted up from cooking fires for a millennium. There, on a raised terrace, was Bishop Patteson's iron cross, painted white and decorated with palm fronds. Behind the cross, presumably on the site where the bishop was killed, stood a rickety church. With its palm-thatch eaves, the church resembled the pool bar at a Club Med. I felt as though I was still floating, as though the magic was waiting for its moment.

We were led to the chief's house, an immaculate, split-level thatch hut. The ground level was lined with grass mats. On stilts, at waist height, was a sleeping room. The chief was away. A man who claimed to be the chief, but who was really only the assistant chief, came to introduce himself. Silas Loa was his name. He had thick jowls and tiny eyes. “You are on Nukapu now,” he said, puffing his chest up under his floral shirt. “You will pray tonight. You will bow down before the bishop's cross before you enter church.”

“Yes, of course we will,” I said.

“Watch out for him,” one of my friends whispered when Silas turned his back.

The village grew crowded. People arrived in dugout canoes and fiberglass long boats. There were church choirs in matching T-shirts and swaggering
bêche-de-mer
traders.

At dusk there was a memorial service. A choir from Pileni sang in exquisite harmony. People wore their best T-shirts. Some wore shoes. One boy had sneakers with LEDs imbedded in the soles. They flashed when he walked. The minister, who had come in a canoe from Nendo, retold the story of Patteson's death. “This
is why you and I are Christians now,” he said in Solomons pidgin. “Because someone laid down his life for us.”

Later, as the half-moon crept up through the palms, we carried oil lamps to the clearing beneath the bishop's cross. The children performed a pageant. A dreadlocked altar boy starred as Patteson. The old folks gathered around me and whispered their versions of the bishop's death. The murderer was a Nukapu chief, insisted one codger. No, the murderer was from Matema, hissed his wife. And so on. Nobody could imagine why a palm frond with five knots had been placed on the bishop's corpse.

“What about Mr. Forrest?” I asked.

Nobody had ever heard of a Mr. Forrest.

What people agreed on was Patteson's supernatural legacy. The ocean floor where the bishop's body had lain for decades was moving, heaving, pushing the bishop's bones toward the surface. “The bishop wanted us to remember where he was buried, so he made a reef,” said Silas solemnly. “We call it Patteson Shallows,” said an old woman.

Then there was the site of the bishop's murder. It had been rising every year, too. It was the highest spot on the island. The iron cross that stood on that mound was the nexus of the bishop's power.

“Once a missionary told us that we did not need to go to the hospital if we were sick. We just need to go to Bishop Patteson's cross,” said a man.