Vahineatua

McCoy up the top mast looking out. Everyone looking for signs. No more talking, only watching, waiting. Nothing but burning points of light all round. No giant clam rising up, no bird, no stalk of weed. No Border of Passing Cloud.

Not knowing what god to pray to under the burning moon. Everyone listening, even the remaining animals fallen silent.

Clanking, creaking, shuddering, Bounty straining beneath us.

That’s how it was. Let me speak now. I was there.

Afraid. Yes, that the truth. I, the orator’s daughter, Vahineatua the pure, was afraid, finding myself on that ship of wild men.

Why hadn’t I returned to Matavai and my people after the bad events that took place on Tupuai?

I could have gone ashore with the others, but not even Maimiti guessed that Titriano would leave Matavai in the middle of the night. She was the worst surprised, for half the women aboard wanted to get off, and everyone looking to her for what to do.

When I saw her tell Eti Young to take the ship back to Aimeo, I knew I had to stay with her. Our eyes met across the deck. She trusted me to stay with her. She was my distant cousin, with many shared ancestors, and although her bond friend Teraura was with her, sometimes a cousin is better.

Mills was the oldest man on Bounty. Other girls had the better men – Maimiti and Teraura the best. My own choice, James Morisson, had been left at Matavai.

After we were ashore at Pitcairn, Mills claimed me as his own, same as Quintal claim Tevarua and McCoy, Teio.

Prudence, he called me. That a name meaning caution, he say. ‘Ye’re a good girl, a good, quiet girl,’ and because he was older, I hoped he be wiser, more fatherly to me. But I don’t know what kind of fathers those white men had. Only thing they knew about fathering was one thing.

On Bounty, we kept Teio’s baby Sully below in the big cabin with us most the time, but sometime we come up for fresh air. Eti Young the only one like to dance that baby girl and play games with her. Swing her out over the water, make her mother scream with fright, but Sully laughing, she love the ship, never cry on Bounty.

When we landed at Pitcairn we swam ashore, too impatient to wait for the little boat to come back and forth to Bounty, swerving over the dangerous rocks into the tiny bay. Eti Young helped Teio surf to shore with Sully in a barrel. ‘She didn’t utter one cry! Came out laughing!’ Teio boasted ever after.

Must have been the daughter of a merman, that little sullen.

We came ashore at the bottom of a steep ascent, and looked up its raw ragged flanks, no other way up. That was the Hill of Difficulty, but Teio had those strong legs to go up a hill with a baby on her back, and Sully grew them too.

That day just the beginning of climbing up and down hills on our new island. That day the track untried, a slippery red knot of roots and rocks between the toes. But we knew it was a track, others climbed this way long before. The chiefess Hauvana’a, arriving with her husband, with her mats and her ti’i tied to her as ours were. Hauvana’a, Hauvana’a, Hauvana’a, I heard in my breathing, grasping for handhold and footing. This was the standing place of that courageous chiefess, the place her legend came to.

Hiti a Reva Reva, Border of Passing Cloud, we set foot upon you at last! O fenua maitai, the good land that fed and clothed and swallowed Hauvana’a’s blood and bones without trace! Mother to our children, grave to our husbands! Hiti a Reva Reva, I salute your wet red paths, your unassailable cliffs, your heights and depths, your fresh-flowing spring of water, your green thatch and abundant larders. I salute you, home of my hina tini, hidden treasure of the sunrise!

Yes, she had appeared like a promise of tomorrow, silhouetted in the last rays of the setting sun. Hiti a Reva Reva! ‘Land ahoy!’ McCoy was shouting up the top mast, and all was impatience on board that night, no sleeping.

Morning the island burst out of the dawn, bristling with sunrays like a vision, so beautiful was Hiti a Reva Reva, some of us began to weep. All eager to get ashore and taste her sweetness.

Soon we stretched out on her green and breezy heights. We, breathing her air and smelling her smell.

Through the trunks and fronds of the groves we spied Bounty below, riding the swell on her anchor. Titriano had ordered some of the men to stay there and begin to unload, but the three Tahitian men had climbed up with us. Now we stood surveying our new home. The fenua maitai, the good land.

It was Manari’i who said, as if to joke, ‘Now is our chance to kill the white men as they come up the hill.’

‘Don’t be a fool,’ Teraura said. ‘They will have their muskets ready to fire even as they climb. Do you think they trust you so much? You should be husking coconuts for them to eat.’ She herself was already plucking a chicken.

That night, the men ate with the men, according to our custom. We women took our own food separately.

Later, years gone by, our daughters came to eat with their fathers and brothers at the same table, according to Christian ways, but in the beginning we could not eat with the men, the way they slurp the food and suck the bones. We ate quietly aside, from our own end of the oven. Through the palm tops the stars were our own stars, the moon our same moon as always. ‘It’s a good land,’ we agreed. ‘Fenua maitai. We can live here.’

We walked and climbed all over our new home next day and next while the men emptied the ship. Every kind of good plant for weaving baskets and mats was there – the aute tree was there for cloth beating, and tu’tui for lighting. The breadfruit groves were thick, untended maybe two, three generations. The cane meadows covered the slopes of our mountains, all kinds bananas and plantains springing from the tangle of vines and weeds. The pigs and goats would soon begin to clear it. From the treacherous ridges that hang like ropes between the peaks, no other land is seen in any direction. O fenua maitai!

But the gods of the vanished people of that land were not pleased by us. At their marae above the bay, four tall ti’i were turned inland to watch us with stony eyes from its corners.

Maimiti and I were the only ones bringing our own ti’i with us. So sudden our final departure from Tahiti that all were unprepared. We should have had stones from our own marae, and sacred feathers to offer to these occupying gods, and prayers to chant to the deities of Hiti a Reva Reva. The correct way to arrive at an uninhabited land, please its spirits.

Instead we had to improvise with offerings of withered plants and roots carried from Tahiti, and the insignificant prayers of women and manahune boys, all under the disbelieving eyes of the white men, who had no fear of any gods and mocked our ways.

It was the white men who threw the ti’i over the cliff into the ocean below. We knew it was a bad thing, but we couldn’t stop them. ‘Ugly bits o’ stone, starin’ at us. Good riddance tae them!’ said Mills.

They never listened to our warnings. Even the bones of a chief, buried under the marae stones with a huge pearl shell for a pillow, they threw over the cliff onto the rocks below.

Then we women knew there would be trouble, and we listened at night for the voices of angry ghosts. Aue.