MORE THAN A WEEK OUT OF HONOLULU, the Warrimoo reached Suva. It was midafternoon. Clemens, lucky to visit on a sunny day, wrote in Following the Equator that the small, reef-protected harbor was a “brilliant blue and green.” Suva is the capital of Fiji, a sparsely inhabited group of about three hundred islands strewn over hundreds of miles of the southwestern Pacific. When our vessel docked in Suva, the harbor and sky were gray, the hills filigreed by mist. It has been raining intermittently ever since. This is the dry season.
Clemens did not invent his sunny day — the sun does shine in Suva. I saw it myself, now and then, during a four-day stay a few years ago, when the weather was mainly as it is today — soft rain, alternating with the threat of rain.
Suva’s rain once caused an unusual problem. In 1872, Louie, a Filipino cook on a visiting schooner, knifed and killed a fellow crew member. This was two years before the official cession of Fiji to Britain, but after the British had begun to impose their judicial system. Condemned to death by hanging, Louie escaped execution on the appointed date because the sheriff, owing to his wife’s illness, had been delayed.
Louie then appealed to the court to release him, on the grounds that the date specified by the sentence had passed. The court, rejecting this argument, set a new date for hanging.
The day came, Louie mounted the scaffold, stood while the noose was placed around his neck, and dropped when the trapdoor opened beneath his feet. The rope, which had been prepared the night before and left outdoors, was so swollen with rain it could not run in the noose, which caught Louie on the chin but did not tighten around his neck. Stunned by the fall, he hung for about ten minutes before he regained consciousness and began to struggle. He begged bystanders to shoot him. The Chief of Police cut the rope and returned him to his cell.
The King of Fiji commuted Louie’s sentence. Louie was now destitute, having given away all his earthly possessions in anticipation of death. He was provided with funds and allowed to leave the country.
The king who commuted Louie’s sentence was Cakobau. In Following the Equator, Clemens described an interchange between a British official and the king when the latter ceded his islands to the Crown. The official, whom Clemens claimed was trying to comfort the king, described the cession as “a sort of hermit-crab formality, you know” To which the king replied, “Yes, but with this difference — the crab moves into an unoccupied shell, but mine isn’t.” Clemens commented that this was “a neat retort, and with a touch of pathos in it, too.”
The king’s career may have been tragic, but it was not pathetic. Contemporary sources described him as extremely handsome, well built, and athletic, as well as cruel, cunning, and arrogant, a man who devoted himself principally to women and war. He is said to have clubbed to death a vassal who was slow in paying tribute and to have eaten a rebel’s tongue, joking all the while, in the presence of his victim. Such cruelty was characteristic of the semi-divine chiefs of his day. A chief would crush his enemies under the new foundation posts of buildings; he would eat them at feasts; he would force them to serve in place of logs, as rollers for a giant war canoe as it was brought down to the sea.
Cakobau inspired such fear that he became the most important of the Fijian chiefs. But his power eroded in the wake of European settlement. Threatened by both colonial and native dissidents, unable to reconcile the competing interests of Europeans and Fijians, and powerless to prevent imminent bloodshed and anarchy, he ceded Fiji to Britain. “The whites who have come to Fiji,” he said, “are a bad lot… if we do not cede Fiji, the white stalkers of the beach, the cormorants will open their maws and swallow us.”
When the Clemenses visited Fiji twenty-one years later, they stood before a memorial to the fearsome chief, a cut-stone monument set in an enclosure in the middle of Suva. Alice and I, here for half a day like the Clemenses, look for the “notable monument” that Clemens described. The historical marker in the center of town does not mention the king. But farther along the main street, Victoria Parade, on the grounds of the massive, gray government buildings, stands a stone monument to Cakobau. The inscriptions are in Fijian, so we can understand only the dates, all in the nineteenth century. At the top of the stone column is a bronze bust of the great man, presented in 1980 by his great-grandson, Sir George Cakobau, who was then governor general.
The chief's family is still politically active. The day before our visit, Ada Samanunu Cakobau was confirmed as candidate for a by-election later in the month, after an objection to her candidacy had been thrown out. A challenge to a member of a chiefly family would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, according to an editorial in the day’s Fiji Times.
Not far from the monument is the Fiji Museum, which is approached through Thurston Gardens, named for a British civil servant, Sir John Bates Thurston, an amateur botanist who founded the gardens. He is remembered today not for his botanical interests but for his role in the development of Fiji as a Crown Colony. As Cakobau’s chief secretary and minister of foreign affairs, he negotiated the cession of the islands to the Crown and later became governor of the colony and High Commissioner of the Western Pacific. He was a champion of Fijian rights, as he saw them, and established such a distinguished local reputation that when Cakobau was dying, the king installed Thurston as chief of all the Fijians. Sir John was governor of Fiji when the Clemenses visited Suva.
A few days before the Clemenses arrived, Sir John wrote to The Times of London in response to criticism of his administration. “In order to protect themselves against the superior ability and energy of the white man,” he wrote, “[the Fijians] ceded their islands to her Majesty the Queen …There is perfect confidence between the natives and the Government. The Fijian knows his protector and friend.”
In Following the Equator, Clemens reported that he drove out of town to meet the head of state. This was not, in fact, Thurston, then in England on medical leave, but rather the acting governor. Clemens admired the “noble and beautiful view of ocean and islands and castellated peaks from the governor’s high-placed house.” That house, near the Thurston Gardens on the edge of town, survived until 1921, when it burned to the ground after lightning struck it.
Thurston Gardens, soggy from rain, boast glorious hibiscus, which Clemens described as red enough to make one blink. It is still intensely red, but yellow and pink varieties abound as well.
Having traversed the gardens, we enter the Fiji Museum and stroll over to a case containing implements for the consumption of human flesh. A Fijian is passing through the room. “Don’t look at that!” he says with a laugh. Before sustained European contact and Christianization in the nineteenth century, cannibalism was a fundamental feature of Fijian life, sanctified by religion, practiced for millennia, and taken utterly for granted. Victims were usually enemies killed or captured in battle. Eating your foe disgraced him and, in an ancestor-conscious society, insulted his family. When an enemy of high rank was slain, bits of his body would be distributed throughout the district, and sometimes his skull would be used as a ceremonial drinking cup. We gaze at a log with the bones of victims stuffed into the crevices.
It is time to leave the museum and make our way back to the harbor. We return through the damp garden to Victoria Parade, which we follow into town. As we walk, we admire the Fijians. They are, as Clemens noted, a pleasure to look at, tall, graceful, and magnificently built. Clemens admired not only their majestic physique but also their mental acuity. They were, he recorded in Following the Equator, “a fine race … with brains in their heads and an inquiring turn of mind.” As for the benefits of Western civilization, he noted that “only sixty years ago they were sunk in darkness; now they have the bicycle.”
Clara Clemens recalled that the huge, carved wooden club of a Fijian policeman delighted her father, who tried to buy it. The policeman declined, although the offer greatly amused him. As Alice and I return to our vessel, we are approached by a Fijian who holds out his hand to shake ours, asks us where we are from and what we think of Suva, and then offers to sell us a carved wooden paddle.
Clemens did not mention the Indians, who now make up about half the population, because they were then not so numerous, the importation of indentured Indian laborers having begun only sixteen years before his visit. Besides, most of them would have been found on plantations in the countryside. The Fijians were reluctant to work for the plantation owners, and in any case, Fiji’s first resident governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, set up a system of taxation that discouraged them from doing so. (He also halved the Europeans’ land claims, leaving the overwhelming bulk of the land under Fijian control, with the land communally held.) It was the first governor, Gordon, who proposed the importation of Indian indentured laborers, a solution that was, in the words of one historian, “a British substitute for the slavery they had abolished in 1833.”
Poor, uneducated Indian workers were willing to accept the harsh conditions of foreign plantation labor. At least some were. Unscrupulous recruiters misled many and kidnapped others. Once in Fiji, the laborers were required to work for five years. After another five years, they could return to India, their passage paid, or remain in Fiji. Inasmuch as nonagricultural work was initially limited, they often had to spend their second five years under contract again if they did not wish to return to India.
As plantation laborers, they were fed, housed, and cared for at a level of adequacy appropriate for farm animals. Three single men, for example, would share a room a bit smaller than ten by seven feet. But their appalling living conditions were not so different from what they could expect to find as factory or plantation hands in India. And once they had served their time and saved a bit of money, they could exploit opportunities that would have been undreamed of in their own country, where they would have been bound by caste restrictions. In Fiji, where the trauma of transportation and resettlement had weakened such constraints, they began to work for themselves, opening shops and renting land to cultivate sugar or raise livestock. As they increased in numbers and prosperity, they came to dominate the economy.
For many years after independence in 1970, Fiji appeared to be a model of intercommunal harmony. But racial tension surfaced after the fifth election, in 1987, when the political party dominated by indigenous Fijians lost the power it had held since independence. Two other parties, one dominated by Indians, the other by trade union leaders, formed a governing coalition. Fijian chiefs, fearful of losing influence, inflamed their followers, asserting that Indians would take control of the country, annul Fijian land rights, and stifle Fijian culture.
That year, following two bloodless coups, a Fijian lieutenant colonel declared Fiji a republic, severed its ties to Britain, and ordered a new constitution guaranteeing political dominance to Fijians. The Indians, about as numerous as the Fijians, have lived in Fiji for four or five generations, have promoted its economic development, and have no other home. Even the language they speak among themselves, a variety of Hindi influenced by Fijian, English, and the numerous languages the immigrants brought with them, is spoken only in Fiji. Yet the law now restricts them to fewer than one-third of the seats in Parliament, where a majority of seats, as well as the posts of president, prime minister, chief of police, and civil service commissioner, are reserved for Fijians.
Whatever smoke may be rising from smoldering racial fires, casual tourists, in Suva for half a day, do not detect it. The Indians, however, must be exquisitely sensitive to intercommunal tension. Remembering the expulsion of their brethren from Uganda, shuddering at the occasional threat by a Fijian back bencher to evict them, and mindful of this century’s frightful record of violence, the Indians are unlikely to feel as calm as they appear to the outsider.
Alice and I return to the harbor and climb the gangway to our ship. All the entrances to the accommodation block are locked except for one, next to which a seaman stands guard. A sign on the vessel’s side announces the next port of call: Vladivostok.
Whether or not that sign fooled anyone, no stowaways are with us now, one day out of Suva, as we sail to Auckland. We journey southwest through boisterous seas, our first day of rough weather. If we were on the Warrimoo this morning, the staff might be roping fast the furniture in the lounges and fitting the dining tables with higher wooden edges or “fiddles,” perhaps adding wooden covers with cutouts for dishes and glasses. Our freighter’s great size — its carrying capacity, over 17,000 gross tons, is almost five times that of the Warrimoo's — keeps it reasonably stable. The mild rolling disturbs no one. It proves to be our only day of rough weather.
The Warrimoo also experienced but one day of rough weather, en route from Auckland to Sydney. “Atlantic seas on to-day,” Clemens wrote to Rogers, “the first we have had. And yet not really rough. Satchels keep their places and do not go browsing around.” He added that Clara lost her balance on a piano stool, while playing hymns at Sunday services.
Because of the smaller ships, passengers were more likely to suffer from seasickness than they are today. This was well before Dramamine made life bearable at sea for those susceptible to motion sickness. Many remedies were recommended for seasickness, including bismuth, opium, a little soup with cayenne, a pint of sea water swallowed in one gulp, and small doses of tincture of iodine. But according to John Brinnin, a social historian of the Atlantic crossing, “the most time-honored method of treating seasickness was entirely verbal: you simply told the victim — in a tone of voice implying that some slackening of moral fiber was involved — that it was all in his mind.” Brinnin quotes Mark Twain: “We all like to see people seasick when we are not, ourselves.”
A few days after our patch of rough weather, we pass small islands, each with sheer cliffs and a dark green cap, each with its own cloud, like the character in the Lil Abner comic strip with the unpronounceable name. Here and there a beach, a village, a harbor, a few boats.
It is evening. Soon we will reach Auckland. An extraordinary sunset heralds our approach: glowing bands of yellow, orange, and magenta melt into a purple sky. Yellow lights, scattered across hills above the harbor, punctuate the blackness. Our 17,000-ton vessel weaves between channel buoys, red at port, green at starboard, and touches its berth as lightly as a kiss.
Two days later our Pacific voyage is almost over. The absence of four passengers who debarked at Auckland reminds us of change and loss. At its bow, the ship creates great arcs of spray, on our last full day of open sea. Tomorrow, September 16, three weeks after our departure from Oakland, we will land in Sydney, one hundred years to the day after the Clemenses did so.