The Shark God Read online

  Port Vila proper was a discordant place, an eager collection of postcolonial cement blocks, duty-free shops, and French supermarkets. It wanted to be Tahiti, or perhaps Waikiki. It had the turquoise harbor full of yachts and pink paragliders, and a smattering of tiny patisseries, where tiny pink princesses with tiny white purses kissed each other on both cheeks. But down in the market, husky Melanesian matrons still followed the dress code introduced by missionaries a century before: Mother Hubbard–style dresses that billowed in the breeze above bare feet or hung from ample breasts like drapery. Their skin was the color of copper or dark roasted coffee. Their frizzy hair was styled into pumpkin-sized Afros.

  The streets were full of rough-cut young men who lounged curbside or hooted at each other from the open boxes of pickup trucks. The men braided their hair into loose dreadlocks and twisted their beards into artful knots. They furrowed their brows fiercely in the sunlight. They were sinewy and strong. I wrote in my notebook: “wild-looking.” But then I saw their faces melt into generous smiles. The men held hands in the shade. They giggled like schoolboys or Hobbits. Small carved crosses dangled from their necks.

  The shops and the giggling were merely a backdrop to the real business of Port Vila, which was religion. The town was crawling with American and Australian missionaries. There were Mormons in pressed white shirts and ties, severe Seventh-day Adventists, burger-gulping members of the Assemblies of God, tongue-speaking Pentecostals, and charismatic holy rollers in business suits. Men shouted the gospel from street corners.

  I was standing on Kumul Highway, the town’s main street, trying to get my bearings, when the flow of minibuses parted to make way for an acne-scarred white man in his twenties. The foreigner wore jackboots and a white robe, and he carried a flag with a Christian cross stitched on it. With his Aryan aesthetic and severe countenance, he might have been leading a Ku Klux Klan procession, but this white hood was followed by a hundred brown children. They handed out greeting cards depicting a hedgehog in vestments. “I forgive you,” said the cartoon hedgehog. The children sang: “Jesus hem i numbawan. Hem i luvim yumi”—Jesus is number one. He loves you and me.

  The scene would have warmed the hearts of the first missionaries, who were not well received when they arrived in the nineteenth century. John Williams, Melanesia’s first evangelist, sighted the New Hebrides in 1839. His interdenominational London Missionary Society had already converted most of Polynesia; Williams thought Melanesia would be just as easily won. His optimism was misplaced. He rowed to shore on Erromango, a day’s sail south of Efate, with an assistant. The two men were promptly chased back into the shallows and clubbed to death. Accordingly, the LMS recruited Polynesian teachers to serve as cannon fodder in this spiritual war of attrition. Dozens of Samoans died from disease or treachery on Erromango before the society gave up and a pair of Nova Scotian Presbyterians took over. George and Ellen Gordon landed in 1851. They managed to convert a handful of people in the course of a decade, but then they made a fatal error. When an epidemic of measles broke out and killed hundreds of Erromangans, the Gordons announced that Jehovah was punishing islanders for remaining heathen. The couple were blamed for the epidemic, hacked down with axes, and eaten.

  The Erromangans had much cause for hostility. The scum of European civilization had beaten the missionaries to the islands. First came traders, hungry for the sandalwood that grew throughout the archipelago. The aromatic wood was in such high demand in China that traders would do anything to get it. They stole what they could or paid with axes and muskets. As sandalwood supplies were depleted, the Europeans became more creative in their attempts to collect it. In 1848 the crew of the Terror kidnapped men from Erromango and sold them to their traditional enemies on nearby Tanna. Other traders figured the wood would be much easier to harvest if they eliminated the middlemen. In one case, a man from Tanna was shut in a ship’s hold with sailors suffering from measles, then sent home to his island, where thousands eventually perished from the disease.

  Then the white traders started harvesting the Melanesians themselves—they knew the islanders would make hardy laborers for sugar cane plantations in Queensland and Fiji. When young men didn’t want to leave their islands, they were lassoed from their canoes like wild horses, dragged aboard the labor-recruiting vessels, and locked belowdecks. Sometimes the blackbirders—as the labor recruiters came to be called—simply shot villagers who wouldn’t cooperate. Occasionally they dressed up as missionaries to win the natives’ trust. Indigenous populations in the New Hebrides plummeted from the effects of introduced disease and the labor trade.

  Depopulation made it easier for European traders and planters to gain a foothold, sometimes acquiring paper title to thousands of acres of land in exchange for a few bolts of calico or bottles of gin. Soon Europeans were fighting each other over the land. When French plantation owners asked their government to annex the islands, Presbyterian missionaries, incensed by the prospect of French (meaning Roman Catholic) rule, demanded that England take over instead. Neither government had the resources or desire to do so, but neither was inclined to concede territory to the other, so they agreed to share the islands in a bizarre exercise in cooperative colonialism.

  The New Hebrides Condominium was declared in 1907. The deal gave the islands two heads of state, two bureaucracies, two police forces, two separate legal systems, and two separate national courts, as well as a joint court presided over by a Spaniard, who was fluent in neither English nor French. The system was soon dubbed the Pandemonium for the anarchy it spawned. But it did create a town at Port Vila, where the British commissioner and French consul flew their respective flags across the harbor from each other, hosted cocktail parties, and desperately tried to uphold an atmosphere of sophistication. They banned horse races in the town center and forbade Melanesians to stay out after dark—except when planters happened to be using their black laborers as collateral in poker games. The Condominium lurched along until 1980, when islanders gained independence and began to call themselves Ni-Vanuatu—the people from our own land.

  The schizophrenia of the Condominium era was still evident. On the one hand, Port Vila was Melanesian: the prime minister and the bureaucrats were Ni-Vanuatu. And look at all those dark faces, all those dreadlocks, all those shacks serving nightly rounds of kava, the narcotic juice squeezed from the root of a local shrub. Then again, perhaps Vila was French. Quiche was as easy to come by as coconuts and yams. Or maybe it was English. Pubs showed Aussie-rules football matches with English-language play-by-play, even if the commercials were voiced-over in Papua New Guinea pidgin, the lingua franca of the northwest end of Melanesia. The Ciné Hickson played American films dubbed in French. White plantation owners rumbled into town to scour Au Bon Marché for foie gras, then left in their pickups, boxes crowded with dusty black hitchhikers.

  Then there were the tribalists: eyebrows pierced violently, noses caked white with zinc, hair bleached freakish shades of blond, arms tattooed with thorn garlands. Australians. They invaded precisely at noon, disgorged from a cruise ship. They descended on Vila with the ferocity of Anzacs at Gallipoli and the steely sense of purpose common to suburbanites on safari. I watched them from the shade of the Cannibal House, where they paid $10 each for the opportunity to take photos of their children standing in a waist-high stew pot, surrounded by spear-clutching “warriors” in loincloths. The warriors hammed it up, pinching their Australian customers under their arms, exclaiming playfully: “Mmm, nice and fat!”

  One is supposed to be mortified by this kind of thing. And I would have been but for the Ni-Vanuatu, who were absolutely keen to keep the cannibal mystique alive. It was good for business. Albert, a boat pilot from nearby Lelepa Island, boasted shortly after we met that his people had been among the last to be converted. “My great-grandfather was born in the darkness time, before the Christians came,” he told me proudly. “The first missionaries on Lelepa were from England, a husband and wife. They brought their twelve-year-old son with t
hem. My ancestors killed those missionaries and ate them. Ha! Ha! Not the boy, though. They wanted to adopt him, but that boy just would not stop crying. It was awful! They couldn’t bear it. So they tied a rock around his neck, took him out, and dropped him in the middle of the bay.” Now Albert gave tours of the harbor where the boy was drowned. The tourists enjoyed hearing about cannibalism, he said, especially if the victims were missionaries.

  Apparently, Vila’s heathen past had been reduced to caricatures and souvenirs. The missionaries had won. A cross hung from every neck. But if all the locals were Christian, why were missionaries still flocking to Vanuatu? Why the weekly revival crusades at the sports stadium? Why was the airport full of black-tied Utahans with name tags supplied by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints? Why the sense of evangelical urgency in the scrubbed faces lined up for burgers at Jill’s American Way Café, why the hallelujah processions down Kumul Highway?

  “Because people here still live with so much wrong thinking! We are just trying to offer them what they need: a purer, more powerful gospel message,” said my first friend in Port Vila. Kay Rudd lived with her husband, Jack, in the manicured hillside compound of the Joy Bible College. Kay wore farm dresses printed with tiny flowers. Her cheeks were thick and rosy. Jack favored khaki leisure suits. The Rudds were as warm and proscriptive as grandparents. They were missionaries. When I told them I was hunting for heathens, they invited me to their bungalow for ice cream.

  “Vanuatu might call itself a proper Christian country. People might claim to be Christian,” Kay told me. “But voodoo, black magic, spirits…folks still live in utter fear of all these things. And you know, dear, a true Christian doesn’t have to be afraid.”

  “Because ghosts and magic don’t exist,” I said. “You are helping people overcome their superstitions.”

  Kay sighed and gave me a look of strained patience. “I didn’t say that. Evil is real. But Christians have the power to break its spell. If we can get Bibles into people’s hands, in their own languages, they will see they have the power to beat the black magic. They don’t have to fear it.”

  “But everyone I’ve met in Vila is a Christian already,” I said.

  “Honey, we are still fighting the battle out on the islands.”

  The sun had disappeared beneath the banyans. Cicadas screamed from the trees. Fluorescent lights flickered on through distant windows. Kay put away the ice cream and told me an Inspirational Story. It was about Tanna, an island at the south end of Vanuatu.

  A Very Bad Thing had happened on Tanna in the 1940s. Just when the Tannese seemed to have given up their ghosts and other devils, just when the missionaries thought they had won the island for Christ, along came a false prophet. The fellow called himself John Frum and made himself out to be some kind of messiah. He promised the islanders that if they abandoned the church and went back to their heathen ways, he would return one day on a great white ship loaded with goodies from America. The islanders bought the story hook, line, and sinker, said Kay. They nailed church doors shut and ran the priests out of their villages. Except for a few tenacious congregations, Tanna was gripped by John Frum fever—and lost to Christianity—for more than half a century.

  But in 1996 that white ship from America finally appeared. On board was a friend of Jack and Kay’s. His name was John Rush. Tanna’s beleaguered Christian pastors decided Rush was the savior they had been waiting for. After all, he was American, he had arrived on a great white ship, and—best of all—he was named John. The circumstances were too close to the Frum myth not to be put to use.

  “You get it, right?” said Jack, rubbing his hands together. “John from America: John—Frum—America! When that ship pulled in, it was like a prophecy fulfilled, and the pastors knew it. They figured our John could go to the John Frum chiefs and tell them to stop waiting. Tell them that America was not going to come solve all their problems.”

  “He didn’t want to do it. He really didn’t want to be mistaken for John Frum,” interrupted Kay. “But the pastors begged him. So he went down to Sulphur Bay, the main Frum village, and would you believe the John Frum people were waiting for him? They rolled out the red carpet. They lined the path with flowers and gave him a big feast.”

  “John’s visit was the beginning of the end for John Frum,” said Jack. “That cult is finished now. The Presbyterians have rebuilt the church in Sulphur Bay. God is in. Frum is out. But our John won’t take any credit for the good work. He says it was all because of the wise chief who let the Christians in.”

  “Chief One was his name. Isaac One,” said Kay. “They call him that because he never repeats himself. Chief One. Isn’t that cute?”

  Isaac One. I scribbled that name in my notebook, and I mourned secretly. One more cult down the drain. But the Rudds were so full of down-home cheeriness they were hard not to like. Kay shone with perspiration and motherly concern. I let her hug me good-bye, and then I headed for the harbor.

  I wandered along the darkened waterfront, where shadows moved among shadows, murmuring indecipherably and erupting into laughter. Somewhere a loudspeaker creaked and hissed, and occasionally let forth the sad squeal of a Chinese violin. Lights from yachts, canoes, and distant villages shone on the slickened surface of the water, as though this was the edge of the universe, beyond which swirled some terrible struggle between good and evil, white and black magic, unseen and formless but still clashing endlessly just beyond the horizon, singeing every life it touched. That, or it was the edge of nothing at all, an emptiness that could be filled only by the force of imagination.

  3

  Tanna: A Conflagration of Belief

  The Natives, destitute of the knowledge of the true God, are ceaselessly groping after Him, if perchance they may find Him. Not finding Him, and not being able to live without some sort of god, they have made idols of almost everything; trees and groves, rocks and stones, springs and streams, insects and other beasts, men and departed spirits, relics such as hair and finger nails, the heavenly bodies and the volcanoes…

  —JOHN G. PATON, Missionary to the New Hebrides: An Autobiography

  When you read the accounts of Victorian adventurers, it is easy to be convinced that life at sea is exhilarating and romantic. The open horizon, the salt spray, the implied danger and possibility of all that heaving ocean. What could be more inspiring?

  My great-grandfather wrote affectionately about his three-month tour of the Diocese of Melanesia aboard the mission’s flagship, the Southern Cross. The three-hundred-ton schooner, the second to bear the name since Patteson’s death, was built in 1891. She was fitted with an auxiliary engine, but generally relied on the sails of her three masts, the foremost of which was square-rigged. The ship cut languidly through the waves as it zigzagged from island to island. There were cabins on deck for the white clergy; the Melanesians ate and slept in the hold, so were apt to spend their free time dangling from the rigging or stretched asleep on the ship’s dolphin striker. The passages across rough open ocean were trying for the bishop, but he preferred to remember the moments of prayer, the singing of canticles and hymns, the daily Evensong, and the delightful transformation he saw in the natives: “The boys come on board decorated with all sorts of earrings and nose rings, but by degrees these disappear. Before they reach Norfolk Island they have to put on shirts and trousers, and appropriate garments of English pattern are served out to the girls.”

  There was no sweeter moment for the bishop than dusk, when the Southern Cross had anchored in a quiet bay and a sense of peace settled on his mind. “At such times,” he wrote, “it was permissible even to sit on deck in those suits, light and not elegant, which men find useful as ‘garments of the night’ in the tropics.” Now and then, from some village hidden among the coconut palms, he would hear the tinkling of a bell, the whistle of a conch-shell horn or the bang of a drum, and he would know that the converts were being called to prayer, and he would be touched.

  There was a certain deception in his f
ocus on the bucolic.

  This I know: The ocean is not romantic. Not when you have left the calm of the harbor and the swell is up and the vomiting has begun. The ocean is not a gentle mother, not a bucking stallion, not an adversary you can grapple with. The ocean is a great rotting blanket that won’t be still. It is a pool of rancid milk. A gurgling toilet. Something to be endured. This is what I learned on my first sea passage.

  The MV Havanna had been making the three-hundred-mile run from Port Vila southwest to the island nation of New Caledonia—with a stop at Tanna—for three months, and was said to be the finest ship in the archipelago. She created a stir wherever she went. She had seats, the agent who sold me my passage told me excitedly. But the Havanna was more a floating warehouse than the ferry I expected. She had an enclosed main deck with room for a dozen shipping containers, and a passenger compartment welded on top, like an afterthought. Her bow fell open like a broken jaw onto the government wharf.

  Scots Presbyterians had laid claim to Tanna Island long before my great-grandfather’s journey. He had sailed right past. So technically, Tanna was off-route for me. But I was hooked by the Rudds’ story about the mysterious John Frum. I wanted to know why the Tannese had given up on their prophet. And so, the moment the Havanna’s crew let their guard down, I charged with two hundred others across the loading deck into the maw.

  We sailed at dusk. Once we left the harbor, there was nothing to see. There was no squall. There was no lightning. But the spray rose like ghosts each time the Havanna’s blunt nose plunged into the undulating shadow of the southeast swell. The ship twisted and rolled unnaturally, and the night was filled with the hollow boom of waves striking the bow, the groan and flex of the hull, and a screeching that sounded like twenty-foot containers sliding across the steel floor of the hold. We did not use our cushioned chairs. We clung to the floor like lovers and vomited into plastic bags, purses, and open palms.