8

Islands of the Many-Coloured Waters

Our plane landed in Tahiti at about three in the morning, and despite the ungodly hour, a little ukulele band was there to greet us. Three rather large women plinked their way through a song of welcome. The air was warm and thick with orange blossoms, and overhead, stars were scattered across the sky like sugar on a black countertop. The women swayed in their muumuus, singing along to the ukuleles, and I thought, Hey, this is going to be great. Classic South Pacific.

I planned on camping in Tahiti. I’d brought my tent and all my gear and now struggled with it, lugging it through customs and into the airport arrivals hall. Now what? I thought. I didn’t really know where I was going, and it was still the middle of the night.

It didn’t turn out to be much of a problem. A young woman stood near the doors holding a sign that read HITI MAHANA CAMPING, and soon I found myself bouncing along a road in the open back of a truck with three or four other travellers. Trucks take the places of buses here. They’re simply called le truck, and I sat in the back of this particular one while the strange stars of the southern hemisphere whipped by above me. I gazed at them and tried to pick out the Southern Cross, the great crucifix of stars that can only be seen south of the equator. Scouring the sky, I scanned from one horizon to the other, but I couldn’t spot it.

The campground was an old coconut plantation, and it was pretty much dawn by the time I started to erect my tent. An old Polynesian villager came down to watch me. “Ia orana,” he said, which is the Tahitian greeting. I nodded back at him, and he watched me as I set up the tent.

I fumbled with the ropes and pegs, and when I finally finished, the old man shook his head slowly. I couldn’t figure out why until his eyes strayed upward and I followed his gaze. I’d put my tent beneath a coconut tree. It had seemed like the right thing to do in the South Pacific, but by the time his eyes returned to mine, I understood him. Coconuts fall out of trees, and my tent was directly beneath them. The villager laughed and walked off as I swore and began to tear down the tent.

It’s actually a fact that one of the leading causes of death in the South Pacific is being killed by falling coconuts. But I didn’t know that then. For me it was perfectly reasonable to set up a tent under a tree. It afforded shade and some protection from the elements, and where I was from things hardly ever fell out of trees.

The word for tree in Tahitian is auteraa. That’s important, because a tree in Tahitian and a tree in English aren’t really the same things. Words can stand in for all sorts of information. They represent a whole range of things — in this case, not just a tree but what a tree looks like, what it feels like, even what can be made out of it. For Polynesians, auteraa is mental shorthand for the way a tree’s bark is used for the skin of an ocean-going outrigger, for the way its palm fronds dance in the wind like waves, and for the way those fronds can be woven together for roofing. And yes, even for the fact that it might drop coconuts on the unwary.

Tahiti is one of a constellation of islands called the Society Islands. They include several hundred reefs and atolls spread over an area roughly the size of Europe. Tahiti is in the middle and is the biggest island. Many of the islands have volcanic peaks, like shards of broken green glass slicing into the hot blue sky. White sailboats bob gently inside the coral reefs that encircle the old volcanoes, and the lagoons are a neon shade of turquoise.

The ancient name of Tahiti is Tahiti-nui-I-te-vai-uri-rau, all one big fat word that translates as “Great Tahiti of the Many-Coloured Waters.” They’re fond of long words in Tahiti. Tahitian is an agglutinating language, one of those boring linguistic terms I remember only by imagining that it refers to glue. It means that, like Turkish or Hungarian or many of the aboriginal American languages, Tahitian works by “gluing” prefixes and suffixes onto root words so that a single word can encompass an entire thought.

The language is part of the Polynesian group of languages, which in turn belongs to the larger Austronesian family that includes Malay and Indonesian. In fact, Polynesians are believed to have sailed from Indonesia several thousand years ago. They likely crossed vast stretches of water in nothing more than outrigger canoes, travelling from island to island in what was probably the world’s most remarkable migration. Surveying only by stars, and certainly the Southern Cross, they managed to find their way to all the far-flung islands of the largest ocean on Earth.

It’s thought that these Polynesian explorers reached Tahiti about a thousand years ago. The people of Tahiti call themselves Maohi, and that’s a clue in itself. It’s only a slight hardening of the final consonant to the word Maori, and there you have it. These people came to Tahiti from Samoa via the Cook Islands and then some mysteriously circled back to wind up in New Zealand as the indigenous people there — the fierce Maori. All of them are Polynesians.

On the north shore of Tahiti there was a small clapboard village on a black sand beach not far from our campground. I was sitting at the edge of the beach with a plump couple from northern England watching the sunset when one of the young men from the village strolled up and sat beside us to talk.

His name was Tavita, the Tahitian equivalent of David, and like all Polynesians, he was quick to smile and make conversation. He spoke three languages: Tahitian, of course, and French for dealing with officials and the police, and lately he’d taught himself English, good for nothing except speaking to backpackers who occasionally ambled down to his beach.

His olive skin, tattooed with turtles and geometric patterns, rippled with muscles, and his face, handsome and hardened, set him off from pasty-faced tourists like us. Tavita was slightly drunk and carried a large water container filled with beer. After greeting us and introducing himself, he leaned into us a little aggressively. “I am like the wind,” he hissed. “I can brush against your cheek gently.” Here he swept an opened palm across his cheek. “Or I can sting and cut you.”

That frightened the British couple, so they moved off and cowered together in whispered conversation, leaving Tavita and me alone. For some reason I was more curious than intimidated and launched into a conversation with the towering Polynesian. He was poor, but he seemed to possess a tremendous intelligence, and I soon warmed to him.

We talked about the French government that still rules Tahiti as a colony and how it tested, until recently, nuclear weapons on the tiny atolls far out to sea.

“Do you wish the French gone?” I asked.

“It is not for me to say. It is not a choice for me.”

“No, but if you could, would you have them leave?”

He regarded me wistfully, patting his chest and the multitude of tattoos there. “It is not a choice.”

“Okay,” I said, determined to get an answer, something that would satisfy my Western thinking. “But the French are a problem.”

“No … no problem.”

“But …”

“It is only a problem if you choose to see it as a problem.”

I let the wisdom of those words sink in and began to understand him. Tavita was like the multicoloured fish that flitted and sparkled through the coral reefs. He was like the birds that swooped among the palm fronds. Tavita belonged here — beyond governments, rules, and borders. This was Tavita’s place, his beach.

I asked him about one of his tattoos — an elegant turtle. “Very sacred,” he told me, but he wouldn’t say more.

Tattoo comes from the Polynesian word tatau. The root tata refers to an act performed by the hands, while the suffix u means something of colour. People here get their first tattoos at about the age of twelve, marking the division between child and adult. Girls receive their first tattoos on their right hands. After that they’re allowed to prepare meals, and more important, take part in the ritual of washing a deceased’s body with anointed oils. For men, historically at least, the more tattoos they had, the more prestige they were accorded in the community. When the first European sailors appeared, they seemed to like them, too. They brought the practice with them back to their home ports, and tattoos became marks of the sea.

Tattoos, like words, are symbols. Polynesians never had a writing system, but they most certainly had a complex language of symbols. Symbols are prevalent in all cultures whether there’s a writing system or not. This manipulation of signs or symbols seems to be an essential human trait. With a squiggle or two we manage to indicate complex ideas. Whether something is carved into stone, marked on paper, spoken into the air, or cut into the body, it’s all the same. These marks, or symbols, say where we’ve come from and what we believe in. We construct them carefully to say exactly who we are.

After a few days on Tahiti, I decided to make a run to the legendary island of Bora Bora. Bracing myself on the deck of the heaving, chugging rust bucket of a ferry, I desperately clutched my guidebook to the South Pacific despite the fact that it had already failed me badly. There was nothing in it to warn me about the stomach-churning, seventeen-hour marathon I was enduring. In fact, for a good part of the voyage the book lost all relationship with reading and metamorphosed into a hard but necessary pillow.

A cyclone, apparently, had blown up from the Antarctic. It had kicked up the sea and wind, and the waves around the ferry were easily eight or ten metres high, like black hills rolling, frothing, and tossing.

In order to escape seasickness, I gobbled a pill given to me by a girl I’d met on Tahiti. I didn’t know what kind of horse tranquilizer it was, but it worked. All through the night I faded in and out of a coma. I felt the ferry rise on waves as high as a house, then drop like an elevator on the other side. But I didn’t get sick, and in the early morning at last we inched through a break in the coral reef that had been dynamited by American GIs in 1942 and entered the emerald lagoon of Bora Bora.

My guidebook opens its section on Bora Bora with a quote from James Mitchener, declaring the island to be the most beautiful on the planet. It might have been then, but it was hard to see that now through the driving rain. The book, of course, also insisted that this was the dry season, “somewhat cooler and more comfortable.”

In the comfort of the somewhat cooler howling maelstrom, I disembarked from the ferry. Palms swayed in the wind like dancers, and I was again told not to stand under the trees. For one thing they offered almost no protection from the rain, and for another they were dropping coconuts like drunken jugglers — cannonballs that thudded into the sand with lethal force.

I hoisted my bags and tottered to a tiny campground called Chez Pauline. It was set between a Club Med and a second, even more extravagant resort. Either of them were available for about fifty-two thousand South Pacific francs a night or $500. My little spot cost me $10.

The only other camper was Irene, a fellow Canadian, a pharmacist from Toronto who looked like Queen Victoria in the prime of her reign. To call her portly would be to wrap her in the kindest of descriptions. She bore her great bulk regally and solemnly, keeping much to herself and the affairs of her personal royal court, which she kept in a bag in her tent.

On the next day, when the rain stopped but the winds still raged at almost cyclone force, Queen Victoria and I rented bicycles to take in the sights of the island. The bicycles were a sight themselves — ancient rusted things with metal baskets in front that rattled and clanked over the palm fronds and the occasional unexploded coconut littering the road.

It’s only about twenty kilometres around the whole island, and when we turned the very first corner, we were humbled by our initial sight of Mount Otemanu. A green felt covering rises in the centre of the island, but then from the very heart of it a colossal bare black slab of granite thrusts a further thousand metres into the sky. This is picture-postcard stuff, but as we wheeled a little farther we realized the photographers were conveniently cropping out the clapboard village of Vaitape that lies beneath the mountain.

Polynesians are like any other first peoples. They’ve been swindled and gouged by the French, though it could really have been any other “enlightened” superpower. The South Pacific, like the Caribbean, was neatly divided among all the formerly great powers of Europe. Funny thing is, though, the people here seem really happy. Everyone says hello, and if you answer back in Tahitian, you receive the largest and most heartfelt of smiles.

Perhaps they’re happy because, unlike other first peoples, their culture is thriving. All the signs are in French, but everyone generally ignores them and speaks Tahitian. The little shirtless children are everywhere, roving in chuckling, tumbling packs across the streets and fields. And everywhere there’s singing, accompanied by ukuleles and sometimes terrific drumming.

The highlight of the bicycle trip was the discovery of a marae. I say “discovery” because, though my guidebook mentions it, we had to double back up and down the road several times before we spotted it. A marae is an ancient ceremonial site, usually a walled platform of rocks. This one was half tumbled into the sea, but on the rocks that still clung to land there were petrographs — paintings on the stone.

I bent to peer at one of them. It was a sea turtle. The simple lines were almost identical to the one Tavita had tattooed on his shoulder. The symbol was the same.

I remember long ago going through the ordeal of writing my master’s thesis in linguistics. At the end of the process, with a three-hundred-page manuscript in my hands, I still had to undergo the defence. That entailed sitting at a long table with four professors facing me. It was a bit like a job interview. The professors hammered me with objections to my thesis, and I had to defend it.

Everything went very well. Most of the process was polite. One professor, I think, told me I should use more commas in my writing. Another thanked me for my analysis of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. But there’s always someone who plays the devil’s advocate.

For me it was Dr. Hirabayashi. He was of Japanese descent and therefore had quite an interest in words like mokusatsu and the whole idea of cross-linguistic misunderstanding. He sat quietly through most of the second round of my thesis defence and then, just as things seemed to be concluding nicely, stabbed me with a question.

“Where, precisely, does culture fall in all of this?” he asked, staring me down.

I had talked of nothing but language and grammar, and I was a bit taken aback. My work wasn’t about culture. I was researching languages.

“How can you separate the two things?” he pressed.

“I … ah … ah …”

Another professor jumped in to save me, but I’ve never forgotten that question about culture. Not that I bear any grudge against Dr. Hirabayashi. In fact, he probably pushed me to think harder than the other professors did, especially since I didn’t need more commas, just more common sense.

It’s taken me ten years to come up with my answer, but I’m ready for you now, Dr. Hirabayashi. A decade of travelling through the countries, cultures, and languages of the world has finally given me some understanding.

A language is made up of symbols that we call words. It’s what we term a semiotic system, a method for creating meanings. The basis of semiotic theory has its roots in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who noted that languages consist of a vast array of what he called “signs.” Such signs are made up of two parts: the signifier, that is, the symbol; and the signified, the thing that’s being represented. What makes Saussure’s theory different is that symbols don’t necessarily stand in for real things in the real world. Symbols stand in for meanings.

The thing is, though, symbols are found in a wide array of things, not only languages. A culture is made up of many symbolic, or semiotic, systems. Tattoos, for example. The tattoo of a turtle, to expand on Saussure, doesn’t represent a real turtle. Instead it signifies a meaning — in effect, what turtles mean to Polynesians.

All the trappings of what we might call culture — clothing styles, food, dance, art, architecture — are kinds of semiotic systems. And all of them have their various symbols.

Language is merely one of these systems. Whether individual words are spoken or written, they are, in plain terms, a random group of sounds, or a random group of lines, standing in for meanings. It’s like what I said earlier about trees. In English we use the symbol tree to represent a whole lot of information about the thing that’s growing in our backyard. Tahitians use the word auteraa, and though some of the meanings are going to be the same between the two languages (both have roots and leaves, both need water and sunshine to live), there’s also a whole lot of other things that differ, such as the fact that an auteraa can bonk the unwary with its coconuts.

So words can’t always be translated easily from one culture into another. A turtle is clearly a turtle no matter where one goes in the world, but the symbol for a turtle, whether it’s a tattoo, a word, or a pattern on a dress, doesn’t necessarily refer to the same thing at all.

And that, Dr. Hirabayashi, is precisely where the rough edges and sharp corners of language bump solidly against the bigger picture that is culture. Just like recipes, architecture, clothes, dances, or hairstyles, words are symbols, the building blocks of cultures. Certainly, languages aren’t the only way we create our worlds, but they’re the most intricate, the most nuanced. Languages are the most efficient and versatile means we’ve come up with so far for defining our worlds.

I boarded the ferry back to Tahiti with Queen Victoria the next day. She threw up once on the trip back but wasn’t amused. On Tahiti-nui-I-te-vai-uri-rau I set up my tent on the beach again, nowhere near a coconut tree this time. The beach I stayed on was beside a spit of land called Point Venus. There’s a story to that. It got its name from a voyage in 1769 by another of my many patron saints of travelling: Captain James Cook. Cook sailed to Tahiti in his ship the Endeavour to document a transit of Venus — that and discover Australia and New Zealand.

The Endeavour sailed into this very same bay, and the sailors must have seen immediately that they had entered paradise. The stories of bare-breasted women paddling out in canoes to meet the gob-smacked sailors are all true.

But while his men were enjoying themselves, Cook and one of his navigators, a certain William Bligh, were working on charts. The Royal Astronomical Society had partly funded Cook’s trip, sending him here specifically to observe the transit of Venus. A transit occurs when a planet moves in front of the sun. It appears as a small black dot moving from right to left across the solar plane, and with the right instruments it can be timed and measured quite accurately. So, as a true child of the Enlightenment, Cook measured the angle of the sun at the first sign of the transit, while at precisely the same time on the other side of the world, in Greenwich, England, a royal astronomer measured a second set of angles. All this then produced an exact triangulation whereby the exact distance between the Earth and the sun was, for the first time, revealed.

I’m a little lost on the exact mathematics here, but somehow this measurement was used to determine longitude on Earth (the lines running north to south) with considerable accuracy. Navigators had long been able to determine latitude (the lines running east and west), but until Cook’s measurements there was no real accurate method to determine longitude. So this was a major breakthrough. The mapping and measurement of the entire planet’s surface could now be completed.

Venus, actually, pops up all the time in the study of the world’s cultures. It’s called, alternatively, “the morning star” or “the evening star.” Even in English we’ve hung on to those terms because they make sense. That’s how we see them in the night sky, and it takes some fairly complex math to show that the two stars are actually just one, a planet, in fact, seen in different places in the sky at different times of the year.

So the word star (te fetia in Tahitian) is a pretty complicated little ball of meaning. Stars mark time as well as place and were surely the signposts by which ancient Tahitians navigated their way across the ocean. Like trees, they’re real things in the real world, but humans manage to infuse them with meanings far beyond their simple existence.

Let me tell you now that I made a very foolish decision on this trip. I bought myself what’s called an Island Pass. That means that one ticket allowed me to stop at any five islands I liked, any islands at all in the broad Pacific.

There are a number of reputable companies that offer this kind of a pass, but I opted for the cheapest one. Big mistake. I ended up buying a ticket on what might be the worst airline in the world.

I first had problems with this airline way back in California. When I arrived in Los Angeles, ready to fly to Tahiti, I wandered 181 around the airport for some time searching for the airline’s ticket desk. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Then, finally, I shuffled over and asked a security guard where it might be. He spoke into his walkie-talkie, looked concerned, then said, “I’m sorry, sir. That airline’s no longer allowed to fly in U.S. airspace. The FAA has banned it.”

That should have been my first clue.

Well, all right, what happens in this sort of circumstance is that, under international law, I’m able to get on another carrier to take me to the first place my airline is allowed to fly into. And they have to pay for it. So I spent a few hours kicking around the L.A. terminal and eventually got onto an Air New Zealand flight that took me to Tahiti. Not bad, I thought. I felt as if I’d been bumped up onto a better airline, anyway.

So now I’d had a few weeks in Tahiti, and it was time to try out this little airline again. I hefted my bags and headed for the airport with my trusty little Island Pass in hand.

The flight left Tahiti at around two in the morning. This was the usual time for arrivals and departures in the South Pacific. The planes come in from Los Angeles or Vancouver, West Coast cities, and jump across the wide Pacific, making stops at all the major islands along the way. These planes eventually head for Taipei or Singapore, and in this case, Auckland, New Zealand. With my Island Pass, though, I was bouncing over to the next group of islands — the Cooks — a thousand kilometres farther west.

I got on the plane, and we took off without any problems. The flight was only a couple of hours, and I must have nodded off because the next thing I recall was the runway at Rarotonga coming up fast beneath us. Rarotonga is the biggest of the Cook Islands. It’s where the international airport is.

Our jetliner had its landing gear down already, but something wasn’t right. Out of the small window I could see the ground rising to meet us, but we were coming into it too hard. The pilot must have realized that because all of a sudden he threw the plane into full throttle. We were thrown against our seats, sucked back with the G-force of the plane’s emergency acceleration.

We zoomed back into the sky, and for a few moments no one reacted. Everyone glanced at one another politely as strangers in strange situations usually do. What the hell was that all about? I wondered.

After a few minutes, the pilot spoke to us over the intercom. His voice sounded professional and reassuring. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “we’re experiencing some tailwinds so, uh, we’re just going to go up and come in on the runway from the other way.”

That sounded reasonable. What I and the other hundred passengers in the plane didn’t know was that the next time would bring us all as close to sudden death as we’d probably ever get.

Now, admittedly, the runway at Rarotonga is short, ending with a pebbled beach and thundering surf. And the typhoon winds were real enough. Still, a bigger carrier would have allowed for that. It would have known. It would have at least told us we should probably fasten our seat belts.

We were above the clouds again. The plane banked widely through the early-morning sky, and we felt ourselves descend. I dared to peer out the window and saw the black runway rise beneath us again. Fifty metres, forty metres … and then thump. The plane’s engines throttled into full acceleration. Now this wasn’t the swell of power in a plane taking off. This was a sudden, mighty blast so that we were thrown back into our seats and a few loose bags and purses were swept down the aisle. At this point there were no longer any polite smiles. This time there was raw fear.

Rarotonga disappeared beneath us as we rose to cruising altitude once more. It was a good hour before the pilot spoke over the intercom this time. “Uh … ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking. We have, uh, had some problems and we’ve decided to turn around and head back, uh, for Tahiti.”

There were groans around the cabin and nervous, excited chatter. What the hell was going on? It was another two hours back to Tahiti. Why were we going all that way? What was wrong?

When we finally landed in Tahiti, we hurried down the steps that had been wheeled up to the plane. Out on the tarmac an uncomfortable-looking airline official came out to meet us. He tried to speak, but the crowd was too noisy. A lot of people were quite angry.

Eventually, his message was passed along by those in the front of the mob who managed to hear him. Again, by law, the airline had to put us up for the night in Tahiti — at the carrier’s expense. Or, as the official tried to explain, there was another possibility for those who wished to take advantage of it. This plane was needed in Auckland. That was the way things worked. These were glorified bus routes so that if a plane didn’t arrive at its final destination, then the next flight after that wasn’t going to happen, either. So the airline had decided to send our plane directly on to Auckland. Anyone who wanted to ride along was welcome, and the airline would then try to arrange a flight from there back to the Cook Islands.

Well, I’d already been in Tahiti for a few weeks, not that it was a bad place to spend a few extra days, but I’d never been to New Zealand, and here I was being offered a free trip. I put up my hand. “I’ll go,” I said. Surely, I figured, the plane wouldn’t have a problem a third time.

The end of this particular story is that I spent only five or six hours in Auckland. The airline did indeed arrange for a much smaller plane to take us the six hours back to the Cook Islands. The weather had settled down by then, and after some twenty or so hours of back and forth over the whole Pacific, I eventually made it to Rarotonga.

The next morning, still a bit of a zombie from lack of sleep, I was walking along the beach, surveying the new place, when a guy sitting on a beach towel began to wave at me. “Hey!” he called. “Hey, you! Yes … you!”

I pointed at myself, and he nodded, waving at me to come over. “Listen,” he said when I got a bit closer, “you were on that plane yesterday, right?” He didn’t have to explain which plane he meant. I didn’t recognize him, though obviously he’d been on the plane, as well.

“Look at this,” he said, holding up the Cook Island Times. On the front page in bold type was: NEAR DISASTER AT AIRPORT. There was also a large photograph of our plane angling over the airport terminal. One of the wings, clearly, had just missed the edge of the roof by mere metres. Fire trucks and a couple of ambulances had been assembled on the runway, as well.

Shit! I thought.

The next morning I woke up to the singing of angels. It took me a minute to realize I was still alive and lying safe and cozy in a bed in Rarotonga. Drifting in through the window was the sound of several hundred voices raised in song. I got up and glanced out the window. A little church stood just up from the beach. It was Sunday morning, and the service had begun.

Now I’m not a religious man, but I was drawn to the church like a cartoon character floating on the waft of an alluring scent. Most of the townspeople had gathered there, and from infant to elderly they were singing in five-part harmonies, a rich swell of chords accompanied faintly by the breaking surf two hundred metres away.

I stood for a while on the doorstop, and when a few villagers turned to see who was arriving late, they smiled and waved me in. They were singing a hymn in Maori that had been translated a hundred years ago, and I closed my eyes and let the sound fill the air around me. The Cook Island Maori are closely related to the New Zealand Maori. In fact, the Cook Islands are a protectorate of New Zealand to this day. The Cook Islanders have been on their islands for more than a thousand years.

In July 1823, Reverend John Williams of the London Missionary Society stormed onto the beaches here. He claimed to have discovered the Cook Islands, though there’s ample evidence that a number of ships had already been here. Captain William Bligh anchored briefly in 1789. His ship was named the Bounty, and his arrival here was only a few weeks before the famous mutiny.

All over the South Pacific the countries of Europe were grabbing territory, but Reverend Williams was interested in territory of a different kind. He was concerned about human souls. Lucky for him, the Maori already happened to have an ancient religion that spoke of a central power, an ultimate god who ruled over a litany of lesser deities. Williams simply started smashing the tiki, the statues of the lesser gods. He spoke forcefully of the singular importance of the ultimate god, and over time the Maori began to listen to him.

Now here’s something I’d seen before, this mapping of new symbols onto older ones. It was the “Blue Jesus” idea again. Sometimes, if the situation and the symbols are right, you can graft a new symbol, a new way of thinking, onto an older one. Symbols, after all, are constructions. We use them, like tools, to do the things we need them to do.

Williams’s new religion stuck, and most Cook Islanders today are largely Protestant, though at least a few of the old ways remain. In the central villages of Rarotonga, for example, it’s still quite common to see burial vaults in the front yards of many of the houses. These concrete structures are usually the graves of female relatives. It’s thought to be disrespectful to throw dirt on females, so they can’t have regular Christian burials. So dearly departed females aren’t tucked away in cemeteries. They’re put in the front yard, with the family car parked beside them, surrounded by spare tires and lawn ornaments.

After Reverend Williams converted the Cook Islanders, he continued preaching westward and met a strange fate in the New Hebrides (what’s now called Vanuatu). The people there are Melanesian and didn’t quite identify with the new set of symbols the missionary was handing out. Moreover, they were cannibals. They bludgeoned Williams to death on the beach as he arrived and carried his corpse off to the cooking pot. It’s even said that his flesh had a faintly bitter taste, a hint perhaps of Protestant sanctity.

Melanesia was my next destination. I was scheduled to leave in two days, and already I was scared. The back of the now dog-eared Island Pass instructed me to phone and confirm my flight forty-eight hours ahead of time. When I phoned, I was greeted with another catastrophe.

“Your plane is leaving tonight, sir.”

“Are you kidding me? I’m supposed to have two more days here.”

“No, sir. It leaves at ten, sir. Tonight.”

“Shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, never mind.”

Springing into action, I packed my things and hurried my goodbyes. It was already eight o’clock, and the sun had long since set. I raced to the airport, but it didn’t matter in the end since the flight was predictably delayed. We ended up taking off around midnight.

I was now headed for Fiji, and the flight was meant to be about six hours. But this was, as I’ve said, quite possibly the worst airline in the world, so when the plane began to descend at 2:00 a.m. — four hours early — there were quizzical glances but not much panic. We’d all become quite familiar with this carrier’s questionable operations.

We touched down, and as the plane rolled to a stop on the tarmac, a few of the passengers began to ask out loud, “Where are we?”

“Samoa,” someone said. “Western Samoa.”

“Samoa … Jesus. Where’s that?”

We all sat in the darkened plane for an indeterminable time. No stairs were rolled up to the fuselage, no bags were unloaded. Time is a relative thing on Western Samoa, so it took about an hour for us to get off the plane. Once more a harried airline employee arrived in a taxi to meet us on the tarmac.

“Why aren’t we going to Fiji?” we pressed him. “Where are we? Where are we supposed to stay?”

Word filtered through that we would be stuck in Western Samoa for a couple of days, though no real reason was given. Some sort of international law kicked into effect again, and it became the airline’s responsibility to accommodate us. (This airline wasn’t only one of the most dangerous in the world but a financial disaster, as well.) A couple of buses arrived, and as luck would have it, they took us to the Aggie Grey, a rather legendary four-star resort in the main town of Apia.

I’d been living out of a backpack and a tent for almost a month, so I almost cried with joy to see a warm shower, a clean bed, and a room set in a beautifully manicured garden. At last I had found a real paradise.

If you look at a map of the world, you’ll see something interesting about Samoa. The International Date Line runs right through it, or should, because actually the date line makes a special zigzag around Samoa. This deviation was made so that half of the island wouldn’t be in Monday while the other half was in Tuesday.

In fact, it’s still true that if you swim out far enough from the beach, you’ll find yourself swimming on a different day than the day you left on dry land. For this reason a number of my fellow passengers started to call Samoa “the island at the end of the world,” and our hotel became “the hotel at the end of the world.”

Besides that, I really only knew two other things about Samoa. One was that the two main island groups were Western Samoa (to the north, in reality, and not to the west) and below it American Samoa, whose name I imagine had something to do with the U.S. presence there during the Second World War. Second, these were the islands where the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead did her groundbreaking work in the late 1920s. Her book was entitled Coming of Age in Samoa, a classic in the field, and it included her well-known descriptions of Fa’a Samoa, or Samoan customs.

She wrote of a place where there was sexual freedom before marriage. The teenagers, boys and girls, were encouraged to enjoy as many partners as possible, and as a result, there was almost no incidence of rape or any real violence against women. Her book, quite frankly, shocked the world. The “inept lover is a laughingstock,” she wrote. There is absolutely “no frigidity,” and no one resorts to pornography of any kind. Masturbation “is a universal habit.” Homosexual activity is “very prevalent” and is regarded as “simply play.” In general, Mead concluded that on Samoa the passage from childhood to adulthood wasn’t burdened with anything close to the kind of emotional distress and confusion found in Western culture.

Unfortunately, she got almost everything wrong. It’s a dangerous thing to dabble in cultural matters. That’s why Dr. Hirabayashi scared me so badly. Cultures are incredibly complex things, and it’s pretty easy to mess things up.

Mead didn’t exactly falsify her findings, but somehow her projections of what she wanted to see came out in her writing. Or it could have been that the villagers were telling her what they thought she wanted to hear.

Fa’a Samoa, as the island culture is known, might have sexual mores that are different from our own, but Mead wasn’t even close when she tried to describe them. She was after some kind of sexual utopia that really didn’t exist, at least not in the islands of Samoa.

I spent a couple of more days on Western Samoa and saw the most traditional culture I’d seen yet in the South Pacific. Many of the homes are thatched huts called fales. They’re a simple construction with walls made of what look like bamboo blinds. They can be rolled up in the heat of the day and rolled down again at night when either privacy is needed or the breezes blowing off the ocean are cool.

The morning star here is called Tapuitea, pretty close to the word te fetia in Tahitian. The Southern Cross, which I still hadn’t seen, is called Koluse I Saute.

Most of the people still seem to wear the traditional lavalava, a brightly painted cloth that wraps around the midsection. And most inhabitants are large. Imagine sumo wrestlers and you get the idea. I don’t mean to steal a page from Margaret Mead’s notebooks, but someone told me that body weight has something to do with respect. A person’s girth, apparently, is a direct indication of wealth and therefore the measure of respect one receives in the community.

So though I won’t stand behind that statement, I’ll say that Samoans are a large people. When I finally got on the plane to leave, I was one of the only foreigners and a skinny runt at that. Among the one hundred and fifty or so passengers, I was sure that only a handful weighed less than a hundred kilograms, with a vast majority clocking in at something nearer one hundred and fifty.

That made me think of the world’s worst airline again. Had it allowed for this sort of weight? What was the load capacity of our plane? I didn’t want to appear rude, but surely we were sagging at the seams. Given all the trouble we’d had before, I wasn’t feeling particularly safe. In the end, however, all was well, and we took off into the starry night quite safely, headed at last for Fiji.

Fiji is a scatter of islands in the eastern South Pacific. The people are no longer Polynesian, but Melanesian. Melanesian is a politically incorrect word that basically means their skin colour is darker. It’s clear they’re a different people, perhaps more closely related to the indigenous people of Australia or the islanders of New Guinea, though the Fijian languages remain in the general sphere of Polynesian.

There are two main islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, though most tourists wind up on the former. The last of my flights with the worst airline in the world arrived there safely, outside the city of Nadi.

I took a lumbering old school bus down the coast and got off in the middle of nowhere. I’d heard about an eco-lodge there and had phoned ahead to say I was coming. For a few moments I stood with all my stuff by the side of the road, just me, the palms, and the distant sound of surf. Then a jeep appeared on the horizon, rumbling in a cloud of dust up the dirt road behind me. A friendly woman was behind the wheel. “Bula,” she said.

“You for the Tambua?”

“That’s me.”

“Well, hop on in then.”

By the late afternoon, I was sitting on a wooden chair gazing out over a coconut-strewn beach when something dark broke the surface of the water inside the reef. Then, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a hulking shape rose and stood on two legs. He was wearing a black neoprene scuba suit, and in his right hand was a massive spear gun stuck through with a couple of fish. He tugged off his mask. “Hi,” he said.

“Ah … hello,” I replied.

“I’m Barry.” He flippered awkwardly onto the beach. “I think you met my wife already.” Barry shook the wiggling fish at me. “Dinner. C’mon up in half an hour.”

Later that night, after a delicious feast of fresh fish, Barry took me to the nearby Fijian village. “You have to see a kava circle,” he told me.

“A what?”

“Do you know what bula means?”

“Well, I think it means hello.”

Barry laughed. “That’s right, but there’s a whole lot more. You’ll see.”

Bula is a word that turns up a lot in Fiji. Literally, it means “health” or “life,” and the one place you really hear it is at a kava circle. No one gets out of Fiji alive without trying kava. It’s a mild narcotic served in a great wooden bowl and tastes something like dishwater, though it’s tremendously rude to refuse it. E dua na bilo? roughly means “Would you like to try a cup?” And the only answer is to brace yourself and say, “Yes, please.”

As the wooden cup is passed to you, social decorum requires that you clap and enthusiastically exclaim, “Bula Bula!” (something, I suppose, like “To your health”), and swallow it in one foul gulp. When I drank the concoction, I felt my tongue swell and loll around helplessly in my mouth. A strange bit of tingling crept up and down my arms, but it wasn’t unpleasant, and the villagers seemed delighted with my attempt.

A kava circle can be a real gossip session. It can also be a fairly serious discussion or meeting, but always it’s a social occasion, and I’m told that because of it the incidence of alcoholism on Fiji is actually relatively low. Samoans are much more interested in kava.

Later on I staggered to my feet, and one of the villagers led me outside. We sat for a while on the beach under a great dome of stars. The surf washed in, and I felt warm and happy. For the moment the world seemed a very peaceful place.

“Kalokalo,” my new friend said, pointing at the heavens.

High overhead, I made out a pattern of stars. All of a sudden it came into focus, and I almost leaped in recognition. Maybe it was because of my near-death experience on the plane. Perhaps it was because the kava had loosened me up a bit, but there it was — the great Southern Cross, Koluse I Saute. It leaned a little to the right and was bigger than I’d thought, but there it was — four bright stars sparkling in the tropical night.

This time I created my own meaning for it. Seeing the Southern Cross was, I figured, a sign that I had survived the worst airline in the world. It was a sign that I was truly in paradise. Like Margaret Mead, I had learned that things are often not what you expect, that what you think, especially about other people, is often coloured by your own way of thinking. In other words, I only saw the Southern Cross when I wasn’t looking for it.