The English mariners thought of the Tahitians as natives of an inferior civilisation. Samuel Wallis stuck a flag in the sand and named the island King George the Third Island, though it already had a name. Bligh came as an envoy of commercial enterprise: to uproot a thousand breadfruit plants in exchange for nails and beads.
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I found it hard to decipher Lady Myre’s tattoo. It looked as if someone had kicked her bottom. She was unconcerned and confident that it would ‘settle down’. She’d had it done in a booth by the market that was open night and day. She said Roley wouldn’t mind if she got engraved with seven continents and changed her name to Lydia. I told her tattoos were spells printed on the skin and that Taaroa was the god of tattoos. First he painted the fishes in colours and patterns, then taught the art to mortals. I said tattooing was a ceremony, which should be accompanied by music from drums, flutes and conch shells. She said her man had an electric needle, which sounded like a dentist’s drill. I explained that ‘Tatua’ was a Tahitian onomatopoeic word for the sound of the teeth of a boned comb as it punctured the skin with pigment. For the Polynesians, I told her, tattoos were emblems of virility and status, for the sailors they were signs of macho brotherhood, or sexual involvement, but for the mutineers they became the ruddled marks for slaughter.
She said it was irritating, the way I pontificated, as if I knew everything, and that I was an encyclopaedia of useless information. If I wasn’t so cute, she’d run a mile. In the tattoo booth she’d done some research on kava, the traditional Polynesian intoxicant. You made it by chewing the root of the pepper shrub, spitting this into a bowl, then adding coconut juice mixed with pepper leaves. The effect was befuddlement, stupefaction and sleep; it suppressed appetite, made the skin go scurfy and the eyes red and inflamed. She said I should try some. I should drink a lot of it. It might improve my libido and stop me turning into a bore. Then she ordered Buck’s Fizz and shish kebab to be sent to the room.
In a huff I phoned and booked air tickets to Tubuai, to leave in two days.
Lady Myre sat apart from me in the foyer of the Sofitel as we waited for the jeep that would take us inland. An Israeli couple who spoke only Ivrit were waiting too, and the Chinese woman from the dining room, who seemed calmer than on the previous evening. There was a display of Tahitian dancing for our entertainment. A printed blurb advertised it as a traditional welcome, the movements representing earth, wind and the rising sun. The hair of the girls was plaited with flowers, their shoulders and arms were bare, but not their breasts, their skirts were feathered, their petticoats white, their makeup by Lancôme – or was it Elizabeth Arden? To my embarrassment, after a minute Lady Myre joined in too, with a gardenia clenched between her teeth. She beckoned me to join her, but I pretended not to notice. The staff behind the counter started clapping, and guests gathered to watch the leg kick of this not-so-young Englishwoman. I was the only discomfited one. I feared identification with her, though in my heart I admired her joie de vivre. The Chinese woman resumed her coin-tossing when she felt secure from scrutiny.
Our French guide was impatient and his driving fast and erratic. He considered himself underpaid. Lady Myre sat in the front with him, the rest of us held on tight in the back. We followed the coast road to Matavai Bay, where the Bounty had anchored. There was only a glimpse of a grey, metallic, ferrous-oxide beach shrouded with rain, the coastline sprawl of a modern town, and no ship on the horizon. The driver wouldn’t let us get out of the jeep. There wasn’t time, he said. He turned inland along a rough track. On either side were steep mountains with white clouds trapped on their jagged peaks. He looked over his shoulder to inform us: ‘We will go to the central crater of the island. To the Papeeno River. To the hydroelectric power station. And then we will return to the hotel.’
‘Slow, please, slow,’ said the Chinese lady. He took no notice or didn’t hear. ‘Papeete means “City of Springing Water”,’ he turned to say. ‘There are five hundred waterfalls on the island.’ The Israeli couple addressed him excitably in Hebrew. ‘Hoopla,’ Lady Myre sang as we hit a pothole. She’d shown the same enthusiasm in a small boat at sea in a force twelve gale. The Chinese lady began talking to herself in her original tongue.
I looked at the green valley and retreated to thoughts of Bligh and the gardener David Nelson in breeches, waistcoats and neckcloths, setting up camp by the streams and potting breadfruit plants; of the tribal chiefs, tattooed, long-haired, wrapped in cloth and decorated with feathers; of the women cooking on ovens of stones. It seemed strange there were now no settlements in these valleys, so fertile with waterfalls and dense vegetation.
The tribal Tahitians had felt such connection to this land. To give birth a woman squatted on her heels with a helper behind her pushing the child out. The umbilical cord was then buried in the land to become the land. Taaroa was their god of first creation. For aeons of time he’d lain in the darkness of his shell, then cracked it open as he pushed it apart. The upper half became the dome of the sky, the lower became the foundation of the earth, the seabed, the earth’s crust. Not so far off, I thought, from Gaia, the biosphere, the thin spherical shell around the incandescent centre of the earth. Other Tahitian gods created stars, the sea, islands, the winds and tides. They filled the
