The Sex Lives of Cannibals (12 page)

I was breathless by the time I entered the house. My heart was still going thump-thump-thump. Between gasps, I shared my adventure with Tiabo.

“There was a shark . . .
pant, pant
. . . boy oh boy . . . never seen a shark before . . .
pant, pant
. . .”

“You are scared of
te
shark?” Tiabo asked with raised eyebrows.

“Yes, of course, I am scared of
te
shark.”

“Ha, ha,” Tiabo laughed. “The
I-Matang
is scared of
te
shark. I-Kiribati people are not scared of
te
shark.”

“That’s because I-Kiribati people are crazy people.”

She laughed mirthfully. She had another story for the
maneaba
.

AS THE MONTHS
went by and “La Macarena” was etched deeper and deeper into my consciousness, I became increasingly despondent that our package of CDs would never arrive. With each incoming flight I biked to the airport, hoping desperately that our package was on board. The arrival of the Air Nauru plane, the last plane to fly to Tarawa, after Air Marshall finally canceled their service, had become an erratic occurrence. Often weeks passed between flights.

Nauru, a one-island nation of eight thousand people, once had six Boeing 737s. They did not need six planes, of course. But flush with the cash generated by the mining of their phosphate deposits, Nauru set about looking for creative outlets to squander their money. This included financing Broadway shows, supporting the lifestyles of every con man between Taiwan and Costa Rica, buying the world’s most overvalued properties, and maintaining a fleet of six Boeing 737s. No one on Nauru actually worked. The mining of their island was done by I-Kiribati laborers under Australian management. Instead, Nauruans spent their time becoming grotesquely fat. In this they were successful. They are officially the fattest people on the planet. Their planes, when not requisitioned by the wives of ministers who needed them for their global shopping sprees, were often used to ferry Nauruans to Australia, where they obtained the treatment they needed for adult-onset diabetes.

The good times, however, came to a crashing end. The phosphate deposits are nearly gone. The island has been thoroughly ruined. It is nothing more than a desolate moonscape. And the Nauruans have nothing to show for it. They have destroyed their country and wasted its wealth. The planes have been sold off, leaving just the one leased 737. The Broadway shows have closed. The property they own around the world has been allowed to rot. A half-dozen cities are littered with abandoned buildings owned by Nauru. A new government takes power approximately every four months, and during their short terms they do their best to gobble up what remains of Nauru’s cash. Today, the country exists as an international pariah. Nauru has become the global epicenter for money laundering. One would think that by opening up its country to the Russian mafia, Colombian drug lords, African warlords, and Middle Eastern terrorists, Nauru would at least be getting a tidy cut of the loot. But this is not so. Nauru receives no more than a few thousand dollars in shell-company registration fees and mere pennies for washing the money through its system. Clearly, the fat has settled on their brains. Nauru is the most pathetic country on Earth. Try as I might to feel sorry for them, I cannot manage anything better than contempt. The tragedy of this, of course, was that I was dependent on Nauru to bring me relief from “La Macarena.”

Seven long months passed. Once or twice a month, depending on whether Air Nauru had arrived, I biked to the airport, where I searched among the delivered packages for our precious music. The trip was inevitably dispiriting. Not only were the CDs nowhere to be seen, there were often boxes sent from Australia covered in bright red signs:
URGENT
                  
MEDICINE INSIDE
                  
KEEP REFRIGERATED
                  
DELIVER IMMEDIATELY TO HOSPITAL
. Three weeks later the boxes would still be there, in the suffocating heat. It was tragically typical. A Western donor sends urgently needed medicine, but the government cannot manage to pick it up. I offered to deliver it myself, but the clerks would not release the medicine to me. And so it went to waste.

Then, one day the stars aligned, the gods smiled, and as I rummaged among the packages I saw with indescribable happiness my mother’s distinctive handwriting. Oh, the sweet joy of it. I claimed the package, stuffed it my backpack, and biked like the wind.

“Tiabo,” I said, full of glee. “You must help me.”

She eyed me suspiciously as I plundered through our box of CDs.

“You must tell me which song, in your opinion, do you find to be the most offensive.”

“What?” she asked wearily.

“I want you to tell me which song is so terrible that the I-Kiribati will cover their ears and beg me to turn it off.”

“You are a strange
I-Matang.
”

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 Bohème
. 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.

T
he 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 and China was fraught with reefs and islands, whereas the Outer Passage contained uncharted reefs and islands, which made sailing on a wooden boat particularly interesting.

In 1788, after delivering the very first convicts to Sydney Cove, Capt. Thomas Gilbert of the
Charlotte
and Capt. John Marshall of the
Scarborough
were chartered by the East India Company to ferry tea from China to England. On the way, they passed Aranuka, Kuria, Abaiang, Tarawa, and Butaritari. Gilbert and Marshall decided to call these islands the Gilbert Islands. They did this because they could. The next island group they encountered to the north was called the Marshall Islands. Why not, they figured. In the 1820s, the name
Gilbert Islands
was validated by the Russian cartographer Adam von Krusenstern, and so to this very day, the islands retain the name of Gilbert, which I think is a great shame. When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child’s middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest. Captain Cook was pretty good about this. From him, we have Cape Good Success, Cape Deceit, Cape Desolation, Adventure Cove, Devil’s Basin, Great Black Rock, and Little Black Rock, all in Tierra del Fuego, names that suggest that rounding Cape Horn in the late eighteenth century was probably a fairly up and down experience. So too was getting stuck within the Great Barrier Reef—Cape Tribulation, Thirsty Sound, Isle of Direction, Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, and finally, Providential Channel. In New Zealand, Captain Cook was good enough to leave us with Hen and Chicken Island, Cape Kidnappers, Poverty Bay, Murderer’s Bay, Cannibal Cove, Cape Runaway (clearly, this was an eventful trip), and, my favorite, Young Nick’s Head. In 1777, Cook found himself spending Christmas on an uninhabited atoll, and so it was inevitable that he would call it Christmas Island, the only island he visited that would one day become part of Kiribati. The crew caught fish and turtles, but Cook was not much impressed with Christmas Island. “A few Cocoa nut trees were seen in two or three places, but in general the land had a very barren appearance.” No doubt, early Pacific explorers came to the same conclusion, which is why Christmas Island would remain uninhabited until well into the modern era.

Gilbert and Marshall were a little more taken by what they saw, particularly the I-Kiribati sailing canoes, which Marshall called “lively, ingenious and expert.” Still, they could not persuade the I-Kiribati to come aboard, nor did they think it wise to seek an anchorage. With no reason to tarry, they sailed on to China, which they called Gilbertland. In 1799, the explorer George Bass, traveling aboard the
Nautilus
, reached Tabiteuea and Abemama. He described the I-Kiribati as “a brown, handsome and courteous people.” James Cary, captain of the American ship
Rose
, wrote of his encounter with the I-Kiribati off Tamana in 1804: “By their behavior, we suppose they never saw foreigners before. They were inoffensive and knew not the use of firearms and seemed pleased with the reception they met with from us.”

By 1826, when the American whaler
John Palmer
alighted upon Beru and Onotoa, all of the Gilbert Islands had encountered, in one manner or another, the world of the
I-Matang
. These first encounters were almost always benign, though they no doubt left the I-Kiribati perplexed. In the book
Kiribati—Aspects of History
, which is the only book on Kiribati written by I-Kiribati, Ahling Onorio recounts the arrival of the
I-Matang
on Makin:

It is said on Makin that the coming of the I-Matang was foretold many days before the actual voyage by old men who could interpret signs in the rafters of the maneaba, which was then under construction. When the strange sailing ship approached the island, the people were frightened and called upon Tabuariki (the god of thunder) to cause a great storm to blow the ship away. It is said that Tabuariki succeeded two times in preventing the ship from approaching Makin, but the third time the ship arrived safely and anchored off the island.

The people of Makin were both frightened and astounded at what they saw. They had their weapons ready, but were mostly curious about the strange object. Because of its U-shape, they called the boat “
te ruarua
” (
babai
pit), and when several boats were lowered into the sea they exclaimed “
te ruarua
has given birth.” When several oars came out from the sides of the boats, the bewildered people shouted, “Look, its fingers are falling off.” They hid when the boats landed and the men inside came ashore.

According to the story, the people were even more astounded at what they then saw. The gleaming white beings with strange color hair began to rub their bodies with something that, when mixed with water, made white foam like the waves breaking on the shore. Then they wrapped their bodies in clothes—very strange to the Gilbertese since they were used to going naked. When the strangers put on their shoes the people later compared them to hermit crabs—they hid their feet inside things which looked like shells.

Curiosity finally overcame the Gilbertese. They came out of their hiding places to investigate more closely these new beings and the strange things which they had brought with them. As the story goes, they were especially interested in the slippery, fragrant substance which formed white foam when wet. It is said that several people started biting bits off and soon several became sick. Thus, this first contact with the Europeans had a dramatic ending—the soap victims became the patients of these strange beings.

What this story illustrates, of course, is how really sick and tired people were of eating fish. Nothing else could explain the peculiar urge to eat a bar of soap that had just been used to wash the critter-ridden body funk of a pale and hairy sailor. But as first contacts go, these early encounters between
I-Matang
and I-Kiribati were remarkably untroubled, particularly when compared to elsewhere in the Pacific, where often enough it was cannon shot that marked the beginning of a new era for the islands. This would not last, of course. The islands of Kiribati, as became apparent after even the most cursory exploration, had almost nothing of value to the early-nineteenth-century
I-Matang
. They lacked fresh food, potable water, gold, silver, spices, fur, fabrics, sandalwood, just about everything that drove trade and exploration during that era. What Kiribati did have, however, was women.

By the 1830s, whalers had begun cruising the waters of the southern Gilberts. They were after sperm whales, and after months of hunting sperm whales, the whalers got to thinking and they drifted over Kiribati-way. I-Kiribati women soon became renowned for their beauty, and fortunately for the whalers, some of the islands had a class of women called
nikiranroro
, fallen women who were not quite married and not quite virginal, and these were made available to the whalers. The cost for their services was typically one stick of tobacco, and it was not long before the I-Kiribati became mad for the weed. Soon, whenever a ship was spotted nearby, the I-Kiribati would yell
te baakee, te baakee!
They gorged themselves on any tobacco that made it to the islands, smoking it, chewing it, even swallowing it, and here things began to go wrong. The whalers soon discovered that there weren’t that many women of the
nikiranroro
class and that the licentious reputation of Tahiti was well deserved, and like apparently every other male who rounded Cape Horn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whalers too began seeking most of their entertainment in Polynesia.

This was good for Kiribati, which was not nearly as afflicted by the epidemic of venereal diseases that racked Tahiti. But, as I can attest, nicotine withdrawal can make one decidedly grumpy. This is why the crew of the
Columbia
found themselves taken hostage one day by nic-fitting I-Kiribati, who refused to release them until they received one hundred pounds of tobacco. Soon the I-Kiribati developed a reputation as devious marauders, a reputation that was no doubt enhanced by the local custom of considering anything and anybody to wash ashore, ships included, as fair game. In addition to the assault on the
Columbia
in 1846, raids were conducted on the
Triton
(1848), the
Flying Fox
(1850), and the
Charles W. Morgan
(1851), among others, and whalers soon began to avoid particular islands all together, including Tarawa, no matter how great their lust or hunger. A number of these attacks, however, could probably be attributed to simple misunderstandings. Stealing or borrowing? There can be a gray area. The I-Kiribati perceived property differently than the Americans and the English, two societies whose very foundations were based on property. And being surrounded by canoes does not necessarily mean one needs to blast them with cannon shot, which is what the captain of the
Charles W. Morgan
ordered when he found himself becalmed off Nonouti.