The Sex Lives of Cannibals

I popped in the Beastie Boys’ Check Your Head. I forwarded it to the song “Gratitude,” which is an abrasive and highly aggressive song.

“What do think?” I yelled.

“I like it.”

Damn.

I moved on to Nirvana’s Lithium. I was sure that grunge-metal-punk would not find a happy audience on an equatorial atoll.

“It’s very good,” Tiabo said.

Now I was stumped. I tried a different tack. I inserted Rachmaninoff.

“I don’t like this,” Tiabo said.

Now we were getting somewhere.

“Okay, Tiabo. How about this?”

We listened to a few minutes of La Boheme. Even I felt a little discombobulated listening to an opera on Tarawa.

“That’s very bad,” Tiabo said.

“Why?”

“I-Kiribati people like fast music. This is too slow and the singing is very bad.”

“Good, good. How about this?”

I played Kind of Blue by Miles Davis.

“That’s terrible. Ugh… stop it.”

Tiabo covered her ears.

Bingo.

I moved the speakers to the open door.

“What are you doing?” Tiabo asked.

I turned up the volume. For ten glorious minutes Tarawa was bathed in the melancholic sounds of Miles Davis. Tiabo stood shocked. Her eyes were closed. Her fingers plugged her ears. I had high hopes that the entire neighborhood was doing likewise.

Finally, I turned it off. I listened to the breakers. I heard the rustling of the palm fronds. A pig squealed. But I did not hear “La Macarena.”

Victory.

“Thank you, Tiabo. That was wonderful.”

“You are a very strange I-Matang.”

CHAPTER 10

In which the Author recounts the arrival of the I-Matang, who introduced Fair Trade (say, one bead for three women), the Wonders of Civilization (tobacco, alcohol, cannons), the Maxims of Christianity (Thou shalt wear thy Mother Hubbard, never mind the heat), and Modern Administration (Queen Victoria knows what’s best for you), which has resulted in a Colonial Legacy, as evidenced by the continued use of the Fathom as a unit of measurement.

The first westerners to stumble across the islands of Kiribati were Spanish mutineers. They murdered their captain, Hernando de Grijalva, in 1537 after months of desultory sailing across the vast, seemingly boundless Pacific Ocean. Theirs had been a voyage of exploration, and just like Magellan in 1521, de Grijalva and his crew had pretty much missed every island in the Pacific, except for two, which they called the Unfortunate Islands. One can only imagine their disappointment, having rounded the Horn, endured mountainous seas and the searing doldrums, only to discover nada except for two islands so pitiful that their very existence was deemed regrettable.

De Grijalva then decided to head toward California. Sadly for him, the winds drove him back, and when he refused the crew’s pleas to run with the wind to the Moluccas, they killed him. While following the equator, the mutinous crew was racked with scurvy and mad with hunger, and yet they did not stop at the two islands they encountered, which they called Acea and Isla de los Pescadores (Island of the Fishermen). It is probable that Acea was Christmas Island, then uninhabited and awaiting a visit from Captain Cook two centuries later, and that Isla de los Pescadores was Nonouti, four islands south of Tarawa in the Gilbert group. No doubt worries about finding a safe anchorage dissuaded the crew from attempting to land anywhere near an uncharted coral atoll, but still, as someone with an affection for the islands, I can’t help but feel a little miffed by this. Surely, some trade could have been attempted with the I-Kiribati fishermen they saw. Coconuts are useful for treating scurvy. Maybe they could have pretended to be gods, though as Captain Cook learned, this could lead to problems. Instead, the crew kept sailing, dying one by one from their deprivations, until finally the seven remaining survivors arrived in New Guinea, where the natives promptly sold them into slavery. The mutineers could be heard muttering: “Hey, Pepe… Isla de los Pescadores… what was wrong with it again?”

Nor did the next Spaniard to sail this way bother stopping. This would be Pedro Fernandez de Quiros on Spain’s final great voyage of exploration in the Pacific. He spotted Butaritari, in the northern Gilberts, and called it Buen Viaje, but apparently the viaje wasn’t buen enough to risk losing his ship on the reefs. And that was pretty much the end of contact between the I- Matang and the I-Kiribati for the next two hundred years.

In the two and a half centuries that passed after Magellan’s crossing, only five expeditions cruised the Central Pacific, discovering a mere six islands and it is a wonder that it wasn’t fewer. One can see the prominent hills of Samoa and Hawaii from many miles away, but to see one of the low-lying atolls of the equatorial Pacific one has to be very close. Ships that had the misfortune of stumbling upon an atoll at night found themselves desperately tacking away from the ominous sounds of a reef-breaking surf.

One gets the sense that after a few months of sailing the great emptiness of the Central Pacific, where no land exists save the occasional boat-chomping atoll, captains simply gave up looking for anything interesting. After much Traversing of the Equatorial Pacific, one can imagine a captain writing in his journal, in which we were often Tormented by Heat and frequently Becalmed, I have decided in the interest of Scientific Curiosity to Examine more Thoroughly the Peculiar Mating Rituals of native women in Tahiti.

Without recourse to the Global Satellite Positioning system, or—at least until well into the nineteenth century—an accurate chronometer to determine their longitude, it behooved captains to stay close to the known routes across the Pacific. As early as the sixteenth century, Spanish galleons laden with gold made frequent crossings between Mexico and the Philippines. By the late eighteenth century, there was a bustling fur trade between China and the Northwest United States. But this movement of ships occurred far to the north of Kiribati, which bestrides the equator where maddening doldrums sap the spirits of even the most well-provisioned ships. Sailors learned to fear the heat and windless stagnation of the equatorial Pacific as much as the towering seas of the Roaring Forties in the Southern Ocean. Commodore John Bryon, known as “Foul-Weather Jack”—a name which suggests that he was not easily disturbed by weather—wrote that when he was off the coast of Nikunau in the southern Gilberts, the heat of the doldrums had caused his crew to be “seized by the flux.” I could relate. I too often felt seized by the flux.

It was the settlement of Port Jackson in 1788 that finally brought a few ships to Kiribati. Port Jackson, which was to become Sydney, was where England sent its unlucky people. I am not exactly sure why they did this. It seems to me a lot of bother to ship thousands of petty criminals from one side of the planet to the other. And it’s not as if they were just dropped off there and told to fend for themselves. No, they were placed in dank, wretched prisons that were similar to the dank, wretched prisons back in merry old England. What was the point? Plus, as the medal tallies at subsequent Olympics suggest, England managed to ship out its entire gene pool of athletes.

Nonetheless, it was this movement of convicts that initiated the first real contact between the I-Matang and the I-Kiribati. Once ships had divested themselves of the English convicts who would one day become the hale, hearty Australians who regularly whup English arse on the playing fields, a few headed toward China on what became known as the Outer Passage. The more direct route between Australia