I’m asked to be the photographer and arrive with Stellio, who arrives with French champagne in hand. I’m introduced to his chic sister-in-law, Taipivai’s prettiest vehine, Michellin, whose name is apropos, as she becomes my main guide.
Henri arrives surprised, blows out 47 candles, champagne corks pop, hors d’oeuvres (shrimp from the stream) are served, presents bestowed and a good time is had by all, presided over by shop proprietor Jean Vaianui. Jean is Taipivai’s sole flic (cop), but I never see him in uniform as there seems to be no crime. A high school graduate, Jean is the village intellectual and an avid Melvillean.
I’m intrigued by what Taipis think about the man who immortalized them. I broach the subject of cannibalism: “Is it true the Taipis wanted to eat Melville?”
“I doubt Taipis would eat him,” Jean says. “He was paranoid.” I point out “that if the Taipis wanted to eat Tommo’s (as Melville called himself in the book) flesh, why’d they insist on tattooing him?” Everyone agrees that this is an obvious contradiction; why would they bother to waste the art of a tattoo on someone they were about to eat?
Jean notes that “Toby escaped (before Melville)-they did not eat him as Melville feared” and adds: “The Taipis thought this white man was more of an honored guest than prisoner. He was a window to the outside world.” (As Melville wrote: “They plied us with a thousand questions . . . (with) reference to the recent movements of the French, against whom they seemed to cherish the most fierce hatred.”)
But in other matters, today’s Taipis contend Melville told the truth in “Typee,” a book that almost went unpublished because it was considered mere fantasy until Richard Tobias Greene-Toby-appeared to verify Melville’s account. They believe Melville stayed four months, as he claimed, and not four weeks, as most scholars believe, due to the amount of intertribal warfare described.
As for his sweetheart Fayaway’s “strange blue eyes,” Jean says Capt. Porter, an American who fought the War of 1812’s most bizarre battle at Nuku Hiva-could be responsible. (Porter, with a small fleet, briefly took over the island as a base against British ships in the South Pacific.)
Even current critics, such as Gavan Daws in “A Dream of Islands,” doubt Melville, discounting a lake scene in “Typee” when Fayaway “disengaged from her person the ample robe of tappa . . . and spreading it out like a sail, stood erect with upraised arms in the head of the canoe . . . a prettier little mast . . . never shipped aboard any craft.” Daws writes, “The lake . . . was invented by Melville,” but Jean insists “while there is no lake today, one used to exist here.”
Stellio is less generous. “Melville was a traitor. We gave him everything, made him a part of us-and he betrayed us by running away.”
On Saturday, Michellin drives seaward across the river, on another dirt road through the jungle to the black sand beach where Melville escaped. Outrigger canoes are beached. Waves ripple in from a sea flanked by sheer lime-green ledges and Cape Tikapo jutting out in the distance. Behind bushes are pigpens and taro patches. Rawhide is lashed to trees, drying. A mother and child fish with a bamboo rod. Boys shoot the rapids in inner tubes, wending their way through rocks like flowers.
Later I join my “professors” for their lavish Saturday supper-a feast that included breadfruit and banana poes (a form of mousse akin to the Hawaiian poi), poisson cru (South Seas sashimi) and lobster. “Kai kai metai! (Bon appetit!),” they wish me.
Sunday, I’m late for church; Nuku Hivans are Catholic now. The monsignor is farani (French). The singing is sonorous, Marquesan words ringing in the church, its wooden Jesus bedecked by huge leis of fragrant frangipani.
In addition to Christianity, one major difference between Melville’s era and today is that the 1990s Taipis work very hard. In addition to cultivating crops and hunting, most adults are copra crazy, gathering coconuts, slicing them open, drying them at small homemade coco-factories. Stellio rises most mornings before dawn to go to his plantation-but never on Sundays.
On the sabbath, the “perpetual hilarity” Melville wrote of truly “reign(s) through the whole extent of the vale.” After church, Taipivai is given over entirely to bocce ball, billiards, bingo, banquets and outrigger canoe rides.
Stellio invites me to canoe practice and we race into Controleur Bay, men against the sea. “Hoe ta’ata va’aka (paddle men of the canoe)!” cries the coach. “Hoe! Hoe! Hoe!” We glide to the mouth of the superb bay, paddles slicing the sea. The outriggers cut a wide swath, like seafaring scythes harvesting the Pacific. We return to the beach, surfing on low-riding waves. We turn over the sleek racing canoes and carry them ashore.
The following day, Michellin drives me over another nearly non-existent road into the empty interior, past overgrown paepaes. Plummeting off the verdant mountains hemming in Taipivai are two cascades that meet in one mighty waterfall.
Rounding a bend, we watch the Plateau open up perfect panoramas of Hatiheu and Anaho Bays. Another cataract becomes visible; though not well known, Nuku Hiva’s Ahuii at 1,148 feet is claimed to be the world’s second highest waterfall. (Melville wrote: “Perhaps there was nothing . . . more impressive than those silent cascades, whose slender threads of water, after leaping down the steep cliffs, were lost amidst the rich herbage of the valley.”)
Atop a 984-foot-high peak overlooking Hatiheu-a favorite haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson, who visited the island in the 1890s-is a white dot, which Michellin informs me is “a statue of the Virgin Mary.” A small islet is barely visible off Anaho, hidden by the weather-eaten mountains. Taking in the airy view, I understand why Stevenson wrote that his first sighting of the Marquesas “touched a virginity of the senses.”
Tuesday is a drizzly and uneventful day during which I revisit some of the island sites. In the evening, Stellio, Billie and I watch TV, appalled by riots in Strasbourg, France. They’ve downed a few Hinanos, and Billie pronounces: “We hate faranis-they talk too much. Faranis have too much class-they eat bananas with fork and knife.” Billie waves his machete wildly above his head. “We’ll kill faranis! We won’t let them live in Taipivai!” Billie shouts.
Later, the Marquesan night silence is broken by the radio, as-here, at the end of the global village-a French announcer reports the latest on “l’affaire de Woody et Mia.”
My final full day is my best. Michellin and Jean pick me up for our last expeditions. Fifteen minutes out of town, we disembark in bush gear, plunge into the Marquesan jungle and slash away with our machetes. At last we find it. Jean smiles and points at a 20-foot paepae by a river. Overgrown with vines and flowers, the rocky foundation of what was once a native hut still stands tall.
“There,” Jean says, breathing heavily. “Melville’s paepae.”
In silence, we pay tribute to the author who made Marquesans famous and was made famous by them. There is no plaque stating “H. Melville slept here.” Jean reminisces softly. “You know, I used to live and play here when I was a child.”
As we take off for our second excursion, Jean asks, “Are you afraid of tupapau (evil spirits)?” I reply mockingly, “The devil and I are best friends.” Michellin pulls over by the sign to the tikis; tired, I join Jean on a 20-minute uphill muddy walk to what Melville called “the taboo groves . . . the idolatrous altars of the savages (where) the frightful genius of pagan worship seemed to brood.”
The Marquesas have Polynesia’s largest stone statues outside Easter Island; tikis stand at two rocky mounds of this me’ae (temple). Here, Tommo saw the “feast of the calabashes,” the “hoolah hoolah” (dance) and discovered “disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!”
I ask Jean to shoot me between two tikis, but he misunderstands my less than perfect French, pressing the automatic rewind button by mistake. I’m anguished, losing 12 precious shots, and perhaps rare pics of Melville’s paepae. (Later, after reboarding the Aranui, I find out a tourist broke her arm at the taboo groves. And back at Honolulu, out of 17 rolls, the only one the lab fails to return has my me’ae shots. I get the film and my Melville paepae shots are saved. Nevertheless, I realize that with my flippant attitude toward tupapau I’d broken a taboo.)
Later, I join in a rousing canoe race. This time we round the point, leaving Controleur Bay, paddling west toward Taiohae, past “bold rock-bound coasts, with the surf beating high against the lofty cliffs, and broken here and there into deep inlets.”
As Stellio’s paddle pounds the water, he exclaims: “We are free men at Taipivai!” But when I spy the Aranui off Cape Tikapo heading toward Taiohae, I know my time in “Te Henua Te Enata”-“the Land of Men,” as Marquesans call their isles-is ending.
After two hours at sea, we return, waves carrying us ashore. Approaching the beach for the last time, I think about Tommo, escaping on a small whaling boat against the same surf’s “flashing billows” 150 years ago:
“Although soon out of the reach of the spears, our progress was extremely slow; it blew strong upon the shore, and the tide was against us. . . . The wind was freshening every minute, and was right in our teeth, and it was one of those chopping, angry seas in which it is so difficult to row.”
My last night I muse; I came to Taipivai with an open mind, to write truthfully. But in my heart, I hoped Melville’s fears were not realized and the “happy valley” was not another cliched “Eden after the fall,” ruined by civilization’s malcontents. But 1990s’ Taipis do not disappoint; they are worthy descendants thriving in a vale still happily cut off from most worldly woes.
There are no evicted, homeless and landless natives at Taipivai; no collection agencies or multinational corporations perversely bent on profit; no trial lawyers and endless litigation; no poverty-stricken, hungry people; no abused children; no beggars (even tipping is contrary to custom); no drugs; no AIDS; no industrial pollution; no crime; no big brother nor big government; no Frenchmen (the priest lives in Taiohae); no landlords or real estate brokers endlessly driving up prices; no income tax, golf courses or mega-resorts; no parking meters, gridlock traffic or ugly high rises at Taipivai, where everybody is part of one big communal family. No Greed! “That root of all evil”-money-may exist here now, but it still has not taken control of the valley.
There is, however, literally a fly in Utopia’s ointment-the aforementioned nonos, those post-Melville pests introduced by popa’as (white men). I discovered these invisible sand fleas are omnipresent in Taipivai. Everywhere else in the Marquesas, white nonos exist only at beaches (except where eradicated), requiring clothing or oil (nonos drown trying to penetrate monoi) to be worn near sand. But in Taipivai, a second variety of black nonos are universal, and the price for being flea-free is constant vigilance. I got the worst bites of my life. I was more in danger of being eaten alive by the nonos than Melville was of being devoured by cannibals.
The next morning at 6, Tetua picks me up. I bid a Hawaiian aloha oe to my host, and we leave.
Atop a ridge, I look down at the valley as the sun rises. The song “Only You” plays on a cassette deck: “Only you can make my dreams come true . . . You are my destiny, my one and only you.” Like Fayaway when Melville leaves, I’m “speechless with sorrow.”
At Taiohae, the Aranui is docked-waiting to take me back to civilization, just as the Australian whaling ship Lucy Ann carried Tommo away. Tetua drives me to the new wooden monument at the edge of the bay, with photos of Melville and Toby, a carved depiction of their escape route from the Acushnet and a plaque.
I meet Nuku Hiva’s barefoot mayor, Lucien Kimitete, who asks how Taipivai was. I praise everything but the nonos.
“You know,” His Honor says wisely, “those nonos are the saviors of Taipivai. If it wasn’t for them, the valley would be overrun by outsiders.” Lucien says Nuku Hiva recently nixed plans to build a resort. But, he adds, an international airport is planned (the Marquesas are 800 miles closer to Los Angeles than Tahiti), as is a Taipivai nono eradication project. “Change is inevitable,” his wife, Debora, says. “But the question is: `Who controls change?’ “
I wonder what the next 150 years will bring to paradisiacal Taipivai-and to Melville’s literary legacy. Even today, he’s largely unread and often misunderstood. Western critics still just don’t get it. In 1992’s “The Creators,” Daniel Boorstin writes, “No Melvillean mystery is more tantalizing than how and why he became a writer.”
But nothing is further from the truth. Melville’s brief glimpse of a South Seas Shangri-La gave him a lasting utopian vision, transforming a dropout into a writer. The Taipivai of 1842-a leisure society minus economic hardship-was, in some ways, a superior civilization to 1842 America, with industrial revolution in the North and slavery in the South. Marquesans had such an aesthetic culture that they tatooed themselves head to toe, becoming living works of art. Inspired by his experience, Melville created the Great American Novel as well as a new Pacific art form-50 years before Stevenson and Gauguin.
Now, my ulterior motive for this trip: In 1919, the centennial of Melville’s birth led to renewed interest in the forgotten writer, lifting him into literature’s pantheon. I hope this South Seas homage inspires you to read Herman Melville’s books. As for me, I’m shipping out to the library to get the third of his Pacific novels, “Mardi.” –
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The author’s first book, “Tu Galala (Freedom),” printed in 1992, deals with a Melvillean theme: colonialism’s effects on Oceania. He also contributed a photo exhibit on Melville and the Marquesas to Hawaii’s Melville South Seas Sesquicentennial Celebration and was a consultant on a Melville film festival at Honolulu’s Movie Museum.
