(In memory of Jorge Luis Borges)
‘Ralph William Virgil Barker was the eldest son of the Earl of Sunderland Rollinson Barker, one of the great lords of England,’ Barker began his autobiography through his loyal friend, Mautu. Through Mautu, Lalaga and their children, that autobiography would become part of the memory-bank and genealogy of Satoa, and seal Barker’s right to be ‘our papalagi’.
The Earl of Mall, Sunderland and the Counties of Oakridge and Brightrust, Lord of the Seven Mountains of Slye, Commander of the Queen’s Stables, and the greatest deer hunter with bow and musket in the realm, was still a humble and loving husband to Lady Estelle, daughter of Lord Whiteside of Wallis, and a caring and generous father to seven children and thousands of people who lived and worked on his estates and in his villages and towns.
England was part of Great Britain, which possessed the mightiest empire the world had ever seen — an empire that stretched from Ireland, to India, to Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, South East Asia, to even the islands of Oceania — and a navy that controlled the Seven Seas. This empire was ruled by a great and noble queen called Victoria, cousin to Barker’s father. (Of the foreign powers — Germany, Britain and the United States of America — now squabbling over control of Samoa, Mautu favoured Britain, later telling his family and the Satoan elders that the Germans were still barbarians and the Americans had no history.)
Barker’s mother, a most beautiful lady with the voice of a skylark (Mautu couldn’t describe what kind of bird that was when Peleiupu asked), died of cholera when he was only twelve years old, and his father married a widow (whose name Barker erased from his memory), who had four children from her former marriage to a charlatan who peddled fake cures to royalty for gout and other aristocratic ailments.
His stepmother proved a cruel, uncouth, money-hungry woman who treated Barker and his four brothers and two sisters despicably, favouring her own children. (Much like the parable of Cinderella, which Barker gave Mautu to read, and which Mautu in turn translated to his children, and Peleiupu would, in years to come, retell like a fagogo to generations of her descendants.) Because of this, Barker at the tender of age of thirteen ran away to London, the largest city in the world. (He told Mautu about Dick Whittington and his cat and how Dick Whittington became the Mayor of London.) In London Barker signed as cabin boy on the good ship Lady Mells, sailing for the Americas.
For twenty-five years he sailed the Seven Seas, becoming an expert sailor and eventually a captain, coming across all manner of people and savages and learning many of their sciences and arts and ways, and leading a most adventurous life. (The Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor was a book that Mautu fell in love with, and from which at every Sunday to’ona’i he translated a story for the elders, who fell in love with the tales and took them home to their families, until the tales became part of the tapestry of stories that was Satoa.) For every scar on Barker’s body there was an exciting, sometimes terrible, tale to tell, and Barker was a riveting, inspired teller of those tales.
For instance, when he was in India, the Maharajah of Bengal, who owned fabulous palaces, hundreds of wives and slaves and enormous coffers filled with diamonds and rubies and other precious stones, hired him to train his armies in the use of modern firearms and other weaponry. He was rewarded with anything he desired: wealth, pleasure, comforts befitting a prince. Indeed, he became a prince when he married Sarita, one of the Maharajah’s seventy daughters, and for five blissfully happy years loved her with all his heart. During that time the Maharajah’s magicians and scientists taught him astrology, mathematics, alchemy and a vast assortment of magical tricks. He also travelled the kingdom with his wife, hunting the wily and courageous tiger, the wild but dumb boar, the elusive pheasant, and other game. He learned much about the strange flora and fauna, and the cures you could make from some of the herbs and plants. He observed sorcerers using horns to charm cobras to rise up out of their baskets and dance to their music; sorcerers doing the same to inert ropes, and once the ropes were erect, their heads buried in the clouds, boys in colourful clothes would slide down the ropes from the sky; a skeletal hermit, with hair that covered nearly the whole floor of his cave, who had sat cross-legged on a bed of nails for a quarter of a century; Hindu priests who felt no pain when sharp knives and skewers were driven into various parts of their bodies; and, most incredible of all, priests who could levitate and suspend themselves two yards above the ground.
Tragically, Sarita died in an epidemic that killed half the kingdom’s population. To try to forget his love for her and his grief, Barker left India, taking none of his wealth with him.
Once when they were shipwrecked on the coast of Africa, a continent misrepresented by white missionaries and explorers as being dark and savage, Zulu warriors massacred his crew. (False rumours were later spread by white missionaries and settlers that his crew were cooked and eaten.) For some mysterious reason the Zulus kept Barker alive and took him — through wild country populated by leopards, elephants, lions, rhinoceroses and other ferocious but marvellous creatures — to their King Bumbo, who weighed four hundred pounds and could crush the head of a man between his enormous hands. Once again, Barker’s knowledge of firearms saved his life.
The Zulus were already far in advance of the British in their military tactics and strategies, but needed to know about modern weapons. So Barker trained King Bumbo’s armies in their use, mastered the Zulu tactics, and then led the armies into battle against enemy tribes. Inexplicably, he found that he loved it, Barker confessed. The killing, the blood, the almost orgasmic euphoria of victory as he watched his attack plans succeeding, and most of all he revelled in the sexual orgies he and King Bumbo indulged in after each victory. Violence, death, blood, sex — they all seemed to go together in his new madness.
King Bumbo’s territories increased tenfold while Barker led the armies of conquest. In the five years he was with them he became a Zulu even in mind and smell. Barker believed that every group of people had a unique odour that differentiated them from others. It was a mixture of genetics, diet, environment and history.
This adventure ended when his generous patron and friend died unexpectedly, poisoned by his brother Mungo. Because Mungo was jealous of Barker’s influence over the tribe, he and a group of his warriors ambushed him. In a brisk skirmish Barker shot ten of them and fled. He almost died combating the harsh elements and gauntlet of ferocious creatures in the bush during the months he took to reach a missionary settlement on the Cape.
Years later, after countless adventures in Arabia (Barker gave Mautu The Arabian Nights to read, and though Mautu loved the stories he didn’t want his family to read them), Ceylon, Madagascar, China (Mautu loved the chronicles of Marco Polo and retold those in elaborate detail to his family), Barker found himself stranded in America, where the natives were coloured red like the earth of the vast plains over which they roamed on their fast ponies hunting the buffalo, the most courageous animal on earth, an animal that provided them with almost everything they needed — food, clothing, courage, stamina, and their religion.
He lived with the warrior tribe called the Sioux, fighting as one of their braves, conquering other tribes, until he came to hate the savage in his soul and caught a ship to Hawaii. There he built his own schooner and set himself up as a trader.
While with the Sioux he had learned much about the land, and loving and caring for that land and the environment and the creatures and spirits that lived in it. He would never forget one event he witnessed. The shaman of his tribe, after a period of fasting and eating a special mushroom, changed into a golden eagle and flew over the mountains into the heartland of an enemy tribe who’d raided their village recently and killed his children. He returned with the soul of the enemy chief trapped in a small reed basket. After shedding his eagle form, the shaman opened the basket and the vapour inside smoked up and out of it. It resumed the shape of the enemy chief, whom the shaman then clubbed to death.
In his travels Barker observed and heard of creatures not found in Europe or Oceania, Mautu told his spellbound family. For example, in a group of islands known as the Maldives, while his ship was anchored in an uninhabited bay during a peaceful moon-bright night, a creature surfaced out of the dark water. In the moonlight it looked as if its top half were that of a woman with long black hair and perfectly formed breasts, and its bottom half was that of a giant fish. As it swam towards them they hauled anchor and fled. The creature chased them to the reef entrance.
Later, when he told other captains about it, they said it was a mermaid, a legendary creature who was searching constantly for men to love and to free her from the sea. The oldest captain, a black man with gold teeth, told him that some mermaids in their loneliness were known to get themselves deliberately snared in fishing nets. When they were pulled aboard they flapped across the deck with their clumsy fish tails, pleading to be held. Once men took pity and held them they gasped for air. To be saved, they had to be thrown overboard again, into their natural element. One captain, who was notorious for his unusual sexual tastes, built a large tank and filled it with seawater. He then offered a large price for a mermaid and when he got one he put her in the tank. She was a beautiful red-haired creature, who danced and sang in the depths to impress her master. When he joined her in the water she wove her songs and body around him, and he started teaching her ‘the sinful ways of the flesh’. When Mautu told his family this part of the story, he simply said, ‘While he was wrestling playfully with her, she dragged him down into the bottom of the tank. He drowned before she realised he was totally out of his element.’
Another creature was a unicorn. The Maharajah of Bengal’s most learned magician had told him it existed but could only be captured by a virgin. It was like a pony but with the front legs of a deer, the beard of a goat and — most astounding of all — one long conical horn protruding from its forehead. The magician claimed that he, through the eyes of his virgin daughter, had seen it grazing in the palace gardens one overcast morning before anyone else was awake. It glowed like snow; its body was like water shimmering in the noonday light. As he had observed it he had experienced a profound thirst to know the essence of life, the whatever-it-was that gave life to all living things, and he felt utterly alone, abandoned.
In India, too, it was believed that an indestructible being known as the O, or Bodiless One, lived in a tower at the foot of the Himalayas, guarded by priests who killed anyone who tried to enter. The tower’s interior was tiered with a spiral staircase consisting of 9999 steps.
The O took the form of the staircase and then, as it ascended to the topmost step and the brilliantly clean air of the Himalayas, the O assumed the colour of purity, the feel of a baby’s breath, and the sound of a newly born butterfly’s wings. It was believed that one day, when humankind was worthy of the O, it would leave the tower and make humans immortal with its kiss of purity.
In the swamps near the ancient South American city of the Inca king there lived a gigantic bird that had a wingspan of five yards and a long sword-like beak. It was called a swordswan. It laid thirteen eggs once a year, but when the eggs hatched it devoured twelve of its young and abandoned the last one, a female, in the nest. To save the orphan, the Inca king’s priests took it into the palace and, nursing it carefully, tried instilling in it the instinct to save its young. In spring they released it into the swamps. But once again the king would be disappointed. It was a long tradition in the king’s family never to give up hoping that the swordswan would one day learn to love its young.
In the middle of Africa, in the wet humid jungles that were rarely penetrated by humans, lived families of creatures that resembled humans. These massive beasts shook the earth and jungle with their bellowing and chest-drumming. Gorillas, they were called. Fierce in appearance and sound, but gentle in soul and nature. Like humans, they lived in societies according to rules evolved over hundreds of years.
Australia was a continent inhabited by a most varied and unusual menagerie of creatures, many of them found nowhere else in the world. Hundreds of animals known as kangaroos roamed the land. They had a unique way of bearing their young: they conceived then bore them in pouches around their stomachs.
Mautu explained to his family that Barker could spend days describing a menagerie of beings that would frighten, astound and delight them, and that he, Mautu, would describe more in the nights ahead.
For ten years before deciding to settle in Samoa, Barker traded in most of the islands of Oceania — hundreds of islands scattered like abandoned hopes across the Pacific. Islands with such exotically musical names as Nukuhiva, Tahiti, Moorea, Moruroa, Tuamotu, Uea, Futuna, Efate, Aotearoa, Hawaii, Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Malaita, Bellona, Lifu, Mangaia, Aitutaki, Rarotonga, Mauke, Niue, Fakaofo, Vava’u, Ha’apai, Olosega, Tutuila, Manu’a, Ta’u, Savai’i, Rapanui … like the flowers of a fabulous lei but, according to Barker, inhabited by selfish savages, cannibals, liars, thieves, and papalagi deserters and drunkards, loose women and ignorant missionaries who pretended humans didn’t exist beneath their puritanical navels. Peleiupu and her sisters and brother would spend the next few days making up rhymes using the names of the islands, and reciting them aloud.
In his twenty-five years of sailing Barker didn’t experience any serious illness. It was as if he were blessed with an invisible armour, a magic shield against disease and death. He survived wars and storms, saw hundreds die in plagues and epidemics of cholera, leprosy, whooping cough, syphilis, influenza, beriberi, mumps, smallpox, diarrhoea, tuberculosis and other known and unknown diseases, but not once was he infected by them.
During the first night of Barker’s autobiography, as narrated by Mautu to his family, Mautu ended by saying that Barker, his noble friend, was a truly civilised man even though he denied God, and an aristocratic member of the English race that now ruled most of the earth and were winning souls of pagans for God. Though Barker was disavowing this grand mission for himself, he would one day see the Light — God always favoured the sheep-who-has-gone-astray — and return to the Church to help fulfil Queen Victoria’s Christian plan for the empire.