IT WAS A TWO-DAY SAIL to Pago Pago (pronounced Pango Pango), chief town and port of American Samoa. I was back in civilization and not liking it too well. The islands boast six television stations, luxury hotels, a jet airport and a bus service that almost keeps to its timetable.
Several ocean-cruising yachts were in the harbor. There is a comradeship among yachtsmen in a foreign port, a comradeship created by common experiences. Sailing in the South Seas brings out the best in people. They become warm, free and friendly. Parties aboard are fun, the talk sincere—not the phony talk often heard in the suburban lounge and country club.
Later I was to meet in their home environments a number of yachtsmen I had known at sea. The Jekyll and Hyde transformation was weird. The fellow who had laughed in Polynesia and who was ready to lend you a jib or a jar of pickles could become cold, aloof, suspicious of real friendship as soon as he walked the soft carpets of his home. And when his wife changed her salt-stained jeans for a cocktail dress she too often reverted to another personality—not the kind I liked.
Not every yachtsman changes back to what he was before he sailed. Some carry with them to their homes and to Main Street the spell of the islands, the honesty and fun of the islanders.
It was still the hurricane season, and it seemed a good idea to hole up in Pago Pago. As it turned out, Dove, riding at anchor in the harbor, came through the worst hurricane to hit Samoa in seventy years.
On January 29, in the early afternoon, a port official rowed past Dove and shouted, “Batten down. She’s on her way.”
The barometer was dropping fast, so I took down the wind vane, lashed the sails, removed the awning and put out extra mooring lines. My California friend, Jud Croft, who had flown to Samoa a few weeks earlier, joined me aboard Dove.
Sunset was red, ugly, ominous, and a gusty wind began to whip up the harbor water. The barometer continued to drop, falling from 29.70 to 29.20 in a few hours. Two oceangoing yachts scuttled into harbor as if the devil were at their heels. Down in Dove’s snug cabin Jud and I watched the mounting drama through the portholes. We were excited, the way you feel when you know something big is going to happen. I turned on my tape recorder to give a running commentary:
Nine o’clock at night. Gusts of wind are hurling spray through the air like snow in a blizzard…. Dove swinging and rolling from gunwale to gunwale…. Ten o’clock. Man, I never imagined there could be wind like this…. Through the ports I can see the lights going out in the town—whole streets suddenly blackened as the power fails or telephone poles crash…. Radio says full force of hurricane won’t hit till midnight…. But here we go! Hold on! Wow! That blast dipped the port gunwale under water…. Midnight…Noise now unbelievable. Radio says winds are topping one hundred miles an hour…. The boat—no! I can’t believe it! The wind is picking her up and throwing her on her side until the ports are covered. Imagine that! No sails, just bare poles…. Sea pouring over cockpit combing. This is really swinging, man! Ports have gone right under…. Boy, my ears are popping…. Suzette and Joliette keeping their cool. Guess they know they have nine lives…. On the shore I can just make out palm trees kissing the ground—looking like sea urchins when the tide goes out…. Wow! I thought that was it! We heeled over eighty-five degrees.
In the replay Jud and I can be heard screaming, yelling with laughter and exhilaration. Nature provides nothing to match a hurricane—devastating though it always is—for sheer thrill which tightens the nerves like violin strings. It was a fantastic night.
Winds began to ease before dawn, but the radio reported some gusts went off the scale. The yacht Marinero with a crew of three whom I’d recently gotten to know was missing. Several days later parts of the Marinero wreck were found—but not the bodies of my friends.
Next morning I looked over Dove for damage. There was almost none. A small section of the jib had been torn free from the lashing and had shredded.
On the island it was a different story. Armed with cameras, Jud and I hitchhiked along rubble-strewn roads to the village of Tula, which had taken the worst of the storm. Half the village had been blown away.
Most native houses in Samoa are lightly constructed and cheap to replace. At Tula we found neighbor helping neighbor to clear the debris and to build new homes. Jud and I joined the clean-up force and the islanders seemed grateful. A Polynesian lady, Mrs. Fa’ava Pritchard, invited us to dinner and to spend the night in her home, which had survived because it was one of the few built of concrete blocks. We talked a lot about the hurricane and exchanged stories of escapes, and then Mrs. Pritchard asked me what I was doing. I told her about Dove.
When I had finished she nodded her head and was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I’m giving you a new name. You are Lupe Lele. In our language that means ‘Flying Dove.’”
I was quite touched. After dinner they turned on the radio to a local rock station and the old grandmother asked me to dance with her. Her face was as wrinkled as a walnut but she outdanced me.
Next morning Mrs. Pritchard taught me how to make banana pancakes with my fingers. I’ve forgotten how much flour she used, but I remember the rest of the recipe. Mash up ten bananas into a creamy paste, add three teaspoons of sugar, three cups of sour milk, one cup of water and stir well. The mixture is then fried in hot oil until brown. Finally each pancake is dipped like a doughnut in sugar and served with fresh fruit. This makes a breakfast for a Samoan family of five. I recommend it.
Pago Pago is one of the busiest ports in the South Seas and is visited by a variety of ships of many nationalities. An anchored Russian freighter especially intrigued me because the Coast Guard patrolled it twenty-four hours a day, and the port people treated the crew unkindly. I talked to a couple of the crew and they invited me aboard. When I gave the men a bag of coconuts they pressed some evil-looking cigarettes into my hand. A third crew member, who spoke broken English, handed me a pamphlet, promising me several times over that it was “not political.” I cannot vouch for that because I lost the pamphlet before I’d had a chance to read it. I was sorry for the crew, though, because they seemed to be so controlled and did not appear to have much fun—and the Samoan islands are made for fun.
One evening when I returned to Dove, Suzette was missing. Earlier I had tied up to a wharf and the cats went wild as they rediscovered the smell and feel of earth and grass. A raffish-looking tomcat was working his way through trashcans, and I suspected pretty Suzette had been rapidly seduced. I never saw her again and missed her more than I cared to admit. When her sister was gone, Joliette stuck close to my heels, but she must also have had her night, because a few weeks later it became very obvious she was going to have kittens.
On May 1, after too long on land, I left Pago Pago for the Vavau group, a cluster of two hundred islands, some only a few yards across, of overwhelming variety. It was a good sail, through blustery winds and heavy seas, the kind of weather to test my seamanship once more. After four days I anchored Dove in Neiafu’s harbor, which was cluttered with inter-island craft—a picture of masts, furled canvas and rolling sailors. I could have believed I was in Boston at the time of the Tea Party.
As I set foot ashore an old man came up to me and, taking off his hat, invited me to meet his friend Chief Kaho. I replied that what I wanted to do immediately was to charge Dove’s batteries, so he said he would help me do this.
I wondered why these islanders were so friendly, and at first thought it was because I was young. But soon I was to learn that Tongans extend Polynesian hospitality to all palalangi (the name they give to foreigners, because it was the name they gave to the first white settlers). Explorer James Cook had well logged the archipelago the “Friendly Islands.”
On the evening of my arrival I taped: This must be one of the loveliest spots on all the earth. It is easy to understand why Chief Kaho said to me, “You will be happy here until the end of the world.” My only complaint is that I ate too much of his lobster.
After exploring some of the islands over the next few days, I told my tape recorder: How different they are, these islands, different as flowers from flowers, trees from trees. People are too. Why do we lump people all together?
The weather was marvelous and I cruised around the tiny islets and coral reefs of the southern part of the Vavau group. When the wind died completely I used my outboard, and in water as smooth and as clear as glass I dived and explored the marine life. The colors of some of the fish were unbelievable as they swam among the coral fronds. It was a new world down there, and it provided me with food too. I often found shells and began my collection, which in time was to grow quite large. I boiled the meat from the shells and soon learned which made the best meals.
In these islands and in other islands I visited some of the natives seemed to have a way of communicating with sharks and turtles. I was told of a ceremony at which the women actually call up the “mother of turtles,” a huge creature said to be several hundred years old.
In the marketplaces on the bigger islands I bartered a few pieces of used clothing for mottled cowrie shells, handmade necklaces and fascinating tapa cloth. The cloth is made from beating out tree bark, drying it and painting it with geometric designs.
In the Vavau group I attended my first of several ritualistic kava ceremonies. Kava, a slightly narcotic drink, is the “coffee” of the islanders. It is made from the root of a pepper shrub and has a slight earthy flavor which I never really liked. If I drank a cup or two it simply dulled my tongue and lips as if I had had a light injection of Novocain. When I drank a gallon my legs seemed to be not quite my own. Many shops and offices keep kava bowls permanently filled. Kava is drunk by customers and staff in the way that Americans use office water fountains.
I was invited to a birthday party and sampled octopus, a special Tongan delicacy. My host told me why the fishermen go hunting octopus with rat-shaped lures.
Long ago, the legend goes, some birds, a hermit crab and a rat went canoeing, but a jealous kingfisher left out of the party pecked a hole in the boat. As the canoe began to sink, the birds flew away, the crab swam ashore but the drowning rat was saved by an octopus. Reaching the beach, the rat deliberately pissed on the octopus, which was naturally pretty upset. From the day of this insult octopuses look upon rats as their mortal foes. So Tongan fishermen still profitably exploit the ancient feud.
The gentleness of these people reaches into their language and I could sit for hours on a wharf or at a kava ceremony and just listen to the conversation. Almost every dialogue, even with a policeman, ends with the greeting “Mal e lelei, mal e folau” (“Good day, and thanks for coming”).
It is not uncommon in the islands to give special names to visitors, and at a party in the Tongatabu group Chief Kalaniuvalu dubbed me Kai Vai.
“That means ‘Eat Water,’” he said, and when I raised my eyebrows he laughed and added, “Now don’t please be offended. It is the name given to the warrior in the prow of a boat, the warrior who protects his chief from spray. It is a name of honor.”
At Nukualofa I was invited to the special kili-kili ceremony which marked the end of six months’ mourning for the beloved Queen Salote, who had ruled Tonga for nearly half a century. The memorial rites lasted three days, during which the chiefs and elders covered the queen’s tomb with thousands of gleaming volcanic stones collected mostly from Tofua island, about one hundred miles to the north.
My Tongan hostess loaned me a black costume and a taovala—a mat of plaited grass worn round the waist. At the ceremony at the “Abode of Love” I saw the new king, Taufaahau Tupou IV, but did not meet him. Although he weighs 350 pounds he is one of Tonga’s best surfers and scuba divers.
The Tongans are a very religious people, and as their islands are close to the international date line they proudly claim that “This is where the new earth day begins, and so we are the first people in the world to pray each morning.”
It was as hard for me to leave the Tongatabu group as it had been for Captain Cook two centuries before. I used Cook’s own words to enter in my logbook:
“Thus we took leave of the Friendly Islands and their inhabitants after a stay of between two and three months, during which time we lived together in most cordial friendship.”
On June 21 I set sail for Fulanga, in the Lau group, 210 miles away, in company with the yachts Corsair II from South Africa and Morea from California. Fulanga is an isolated atoll with bleached white beaches and a village of grass huts, as old as time. I traded ballpoint pens and clothing for carved kava bowls and tapa mats. Two days later Dove and the other two yachts put out for Suva, the busy port of the main island of the Viti Levu group, and the Fijian capital.
We had hardly passed Fulanga’s northernmost land point when we were struck by a heavy sea and had to beat into the wind. As Dove was taking plenty of water, it seemed sensible to fall into the lee of Kambara island and wait for the weather to improve. I tried to signal my intention to the other yachts, but Morea, a sleek forty-three-footer, had already pulled ahead. I waved vigorously to Corsair’s skipper, Stanley (“Jeff”) Jeffrey, but he mistook my flailing arms for a friendly salute. He waved back cheerfully and sailed on.
The other yachts made Suva, assuming I was on their tail, but when after a couple of days I still had not arrived, they feared I had foundered. Jeff Jeffrey arranged for a radio alert.
I took my time, laying over for two days at Kambara island, where I was asked to take a sick woman to Suva. At the last moment the woman’s family looked over Dove and shook their heads. I guess they decided that the sick woman would have a better chance of surviving if she stayed at home. So I sailed on with Joliette, now quite recovered from the birth of her stillborn kittens.
Under a full moon on July 2 I anchored Dove near Corsair and Morea in the harbor of Suva, the queen of the South Sea ports, and next morning went ashore. Here was an outpost of the British Empire, and I expected typical British hospitality. But a newly appointed Fijian port official pompously demanded a bond of one hundred dollars. I turned over the cash in my pocket. It amounted to exactly $23.43. Fortunately the American consul, who had apparently heard of me, came to my rescue by giving a guarantee that the U.S. government would grubstake me if I was stranded.
The local yacht club was a tourist center and Dove became a special exhibit. There was no escape for me, even in the cabin, because tourists peered through the portholes as if I were a new marine creature shipped in for the Harbor Light aquarium. The situation was not improved when the local paper talked about a “kid who had sailed the Pacific in a teacup.”
The Fijians themselves are a handsome race, the men generally well muscled and towering over my five feet eight inches. They are true Melanesians, with very dark skins and frizzy upstanding hair that pleases them so much that it used to be a mortal offense even to touch a Fijian head. The Fijians are now outnumbered by the Indians, who first came to the islands as indentured labor in the last century and now control most of the commerce. Here, as on other islands which stretch from the Pacific to the African coast, there is considerable hostility and tension between the easygoing natives and the shrewd, hard-working immigrants from India.
For a few coins old men are ready to talk to tourists about the days when their forebears cooked mbokola (human flesh) by boiling it or by baking it in underground ovens. But the Fijians off the tourist paths do not like to be asked the flavor of missionaries. A taunt that can provoke a Fijian to fight is “Kana nai vava Baker” (“Eat the boots of Mr. Baker”), referring to the Reverend Thomas Baker, who was boiled at the last cannibal feast in 1867.
While I was at the main Fijian island I had the chance to explore the interior with a family friend from Hawaii, Mrs. Louise Meyer, skipper of another oceangoing yacht. Mrs. Meyer rented three horses and five of us took turns riding. The mounts were so scrawny that I preferred to walk. In the heart of the island we attended a Fijian kava ceremony which differed from the ones I had attended in Tongatabu.
Here the kava (called yaqona) was prepared by women, one of whom placed the ground root in a bowl and ritually added water from a segment of bamboo. The chief brewer pounded the root to a thin paste the color of mud, then strained it through the fibers of a hibiscus plant. Meanwhile the men chanted and clapped rhythmically and beat on a lali, a hollow wooden drum. The cupbearer received the drink in a coconut shell and then handed it to each of us in turn. The idea was to drain the cup in one draft and to shout “Maca!” (“It is finished!”)
When the kava was gone, the local Fijians began a native dance with four bare-chested men beating a tattoo on their lalis and singing a ballad about the devil circling the world faster than an astronaut, with stopovers at New York, Cape Town and elsewhere. Although Christianized, the Fijians still like their ancient superstitions in which the devil plays a leading role along with soothsayers, sorcerers and the like.
Up to now on my voyage, when short of funds I had successfully bargained for food with my supply of used clothing and ballpoint pens. In Samoa and among the Tongans the bargaining had been a game, its rules unwritten but played with humor. In Fiji the response was altogether different. Attempts to trade seemed to bring out greed and cunning, a surliness suggesting that I had taken advantage of the vendors.
I spoke of this problem to a yachtsman friend, Dick Johnston, who had spent a lot of time among the Fijians and knew their language. He urged me to stop bargaining and quit giving away my old clothes and pens. He warned me not to return a gift for a gift, but only to make my thanks.
The idea sounded strange but it worked well. As a bonus, my attitude toward the Fijians changed. From this time on I was rarely short of food and found I got on much better with the islanders.
Dick Johnston, who had fallen out with his yacht skipper, sailed with me from one of the Fijian islands to the port of Suva. At the Suva yacht club Dick overheard someone mention the name of a girl he had once known in California. The girl was apparently on the other side of the main island, at Lautoka. Dick decided to take a bus and see if he could track her down.
So I was alone again on Dove, moored off the yacht club, when a club waiter came down to tell me that Joliette had been run over by a truck.
The waiter gave me the report as lightly as though he had been talking about the weather. He could not have understood that Joliette had been my shipmate for a year; that she wasn’t just another cat around the harbor, now kicked into a gutter, but a proved comrade of the high seas.
At that moment I would have traded half my gear on Dove to have her back, to feel her nuzzling my ankles or to hear her crying for her dinner. I locked myself inside Dove’s cabin and cried like a kid. I had not felt lonelier five hundred miles from land. There was no one to talk to, least of all some of those people at the yacht club who made no secret of their dislike of me—“that barefoot boy in torn pants.”
At dusk and in savage gloom I went to the yacht club bar and bought a bottle of vodka. I returned to Dove and then proceeded to get totally and blindly drunk.
Two days later I was awakened by someone thumping the cabin roof, the noise hitting my eardrums like cannon fire. My mouth tasted of smoldering tennis shoes and the light streaming through the companionway looked like the inner fires of hell. I had the kind of hangover that could have been written up as a cautionary tale in the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Dick was bumbling on about a girl—some girl who needed a place to sleep because her boss hadn’t paid her wages and “she’s rather short on funds.”
I sat up and covered my eyes with my palms. “What are you talking about?” I croaked.
Dick took in the situation—the empty vodka bottle, the chaos in the cabin. “Look,” he said, “it’s just for the night. We’ll fix her up somewhere else later. Come and meet her?”
“Can’t you get out of here?” I said, and scanned the blurred face of my watch. “Wow! Is that the time?”
Unbelievably it was midafternoon. I hadn’t eaten for forty-eight hours and was shivering with nausea. Dick came down the companionway and shuffled my arms into a sweaty shirt and my legs into oil-stained Levi’s. Painfully I came up on deck and climbed to the wharf. I stumbled toward the lawn in front of the yacht club and raised my head.
This was my first sight of Patti Ratterree.
She looked gorgeous. Her head was thrown back in laughter, and she was wearing a brilliant blue island dress, very feminine. Her wheat-colored hair was long on her shoulders. I looked enviously at Dick.
“Nice,” I drawled, and then to Dick, “I can see why you went to the other side of the island.”
The girl stopped laughing, and with a slim, honey-colored leg kicked my bottom.
“What’s that for?” I protested.
She studied me for a few seconds with mock gravity. “That’s one of my friendly kicks, but it’s just to remind you that I can look after myself.”
Then she laughed again, her teeth marvelously white, her eyes very blue. There was a splash of amber in her left eye as if it had caught and held some of the sunlight. I grinned.
Dick was looking at each of us, at first anxiously and then with relief. He said, “You two are obviously going to hit it off.”
The three of us returned to Dove and Patti picked up the empty vodka bottle. She didn’t say anything. She just went over to the stove and started to brew some coffee.
Patti slept on Dove, but if anyone at the yacht club had played Peeping Tom he would have demanded his money back. I didn’t even touch her hand. It wasn’t because of inexperience. Kids grow up quickly in California, quicker still in the South Seas, and I was now in my eighteenth year.
But we were in unknown territory, strange and full of tension. It was not religion or anything that held us back, for both of us were as pagan as Congo pygmies, and I didn’t care a damn what those people in the yacht club were thinking. Some dirty little minds were working overtime anyway.
Patti and I tried to pretend there was nothing between us, each of us putting up a front of flippancy, our conversation bantering, our laughter too easy. But it was like putting up a picket fence against the tide.
A few days later I asked her if she would sail with me to the Yasawas, a Fiji group beyond the usual tourist routes.
“We can get away from people there,” I said quickly. “We can get into clear water. We can go diving together, go hunting for shells.”
She was sitting on the cabin roof, her brown legs dangling over the companionway. She studied my face seriously for a long time. Then she nodded her head.
I began preparing Dove for the trip and was ready to start the outboard when I remembered it was Friday.
“We can’t go today,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I once made the mistake of sailing on a Friday.”
She laughed. “You don’t look like the superstitious type.”
We did not sail till after midnight—two minutes after.