Festivals of thanksgiving and prayers were to celebrate the ripening of fruit, the harvest, the averting of disaster. A booby bird alighting on a turbulent sea meant the water would calm, the sight of an albatross meant luck for canoeists, the white sea swallow was a messenger of peace. In tribes they worked with the island. It lived with them. They interpreted the moonlit stillness, the fall of meteors, the flight of clouds. Unseen gods inhabited the hills, woods and seashore. They heard the cry of spirits in the screech of nightbirds, felt them in gusts of wind, tasted them in the flesh of crabmeat.
Tahitian men were as murderous as their visitors. They fought with spears, clubs, stones, bows and arrows, and axes honed from pearl shell. They ran their victim through with a rasp made from the serrated backbone of a stingray or with a forked stick studded with sharks’ teeth. A victor might beat his victim’s body to a pulp, cut a slit through it large enough for his own head, then wear it poncho-fashion. If a chief fathered a child with a woman who was not of his class, it was killed before it drew its first breath. The physically infirm were rejected. The insane were avoided but respected as inspired or possessed by some god.
The death of those who were loved was met with great display. The bereaved gashed themselves and chopped off their own finger joints. The corpse was bathed and rubbed with scented oils, and prayers were said to protect the departing soul. When the soul had left, the body rotted away. Its skull was then polished and stored.
We stopped for a minute at the crater, a huge hole lined with ash. I thought of the sound of that explosion and the colour of fire, and how the night after Christian’s coconut saga the volcano at Tofua erupted as the Bounty passed in the dark, so he couldn’t jump ship because the crew came up on deck to watch.
Lady Myre ignored me and photographed the driver. He gave up telling us about Tahiti. He picked a large taro leaf in which rainwater had collected and told us to do the same. He then took birdseed from the jeep and strewed it around. Chickens scurried out from the bushes and a parakeet flew down. He said rats had destroyed many birds of the valley.
The rain washed into me. I hated the bumpy drive and I wasn’t at ease with this group. I felt I’d lost the path to Pitcairn and the fragments of connection to the past. And I grieved the gap that was growing between Lady Myre and me. I looked at her straight back and ridiculous rainhat and felt sad.
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Lady Myre didn’t return to the hotel after the tour. The French guide showed her the town. In the afternoon I went alone to the exhibition about the Polynesian canoe. The Museum of Tahiti was in a coconut grove by the lagoon with a view through trees to the island of Moorea.
I walked past displays about the birth of the island. Projected on to a screen was the eruption of the volcano and the sinking of the reef. Behind glass were large pieces of dead coral, sponges, the shells of sea urchins and lobsters, models of fish from the lagoon, photographs of white sharks, tiger sharks, tuna, flying fish and dolphins. The ‘War Room’ was filled with slings, spears, truncheons and clubs, wooden gods and feathered headdresses, drums and nasal flutes and conch shells. There were contrived displays of games, celebrations and funerals, showcases of tapa cloth made from beaten bark, sandals made from rope, crowns adorned with pearls and dolphins’ teeth, fans of coconut-palm fronds, tiaras of seashells and tortoise shells, bracelets of woven hair, rings made from tropical birds’ feathers. There was a whole room about tattooing; all the instruments – the combs of tortoiseshell and bone, the little mallets to punch the comb into the skin – the geometric designs for warriors and chiefs, patterns for rites of passage and their meanings.
Something of what Tahiti had been was here behind glass. I thought of my walk through Harrods when I was looking for Rosie’s blouse. The same sense of so much stuff and all of it temporal. None of it kept death away.
In the Va’a exhibition was a reconstruction of a wondrous looking ocean-going canoe forty feet long, with huge steering paddles and bailers and stone anchors. There were outrigger paddling canoes of the sort used for fishing expeditions and outrigger sailing canoes for voyaging across the sea. The painstaking work of construction was shown: how the planking was sewn to the hull with ties of coir and the wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl, how pandana leaves were plaited to serve as sails, and fishbones used as needles. Samuel Wallis, when he reached Tahiti in 1767, ordered the destruction of all the canoes moored in Matavai Bay.
The Tahitians had used the ocean as a thoroughfare. They sailed with the protection of gods, saw divine providence in the rising sun, were beckoned home by a tranquil sea. Again it seemed to me that those who went to Pitcairn would not have been deterred by the burning of the Bounty. Pitcairn was not their home. They’d return to where their umbilical cord was buried.
Wanting tea and cake and souvenirs, I got le truc to the market. I bought black pearls and bright pareus and took photos of stalls of pineapples, mangoes, breadfruit, fish and flowers. I wished that Lady Myre was with me. Without her, all that I saw belonged to museums. She was my muse. Her smile lit up my life. I hurried back to the hotel. She was not in our room. I found her stretched out on a lounger by the pool with a Tahitian cocktail and a copy of Hello! magazine. I asked her
