Headhunters on My Doorstep Read online

  Here was Robert Louis Stevenson. He was, I’m embarrassed to admit, a stranger to me. I knew, of course, that at some point in his life the author of Treasure Island had become a creature of the Pacific. When I’d lived on the sun-blasted atolls of Kiribati, I’d been aware that Stevenson was of that small tribe of foreigners who’d once weathered its shores—the few, the proud. And when I’d settled in Monterey, I was dimly cognizant that he was somehow tangentially associated with the town. A plastic-sheathed menu at a Cannery Row restaurant would inform visitors that the day’s specials included Calamari à la Robert Louis Stevenson alongside John Steinbeck’s Famous Clam Chowder. But I’d never actually read him. His books, in my mind, were homework, the sort of thing you’d be assigned to read for an eighth-grade book report. He was someone you were supposed to read for your edification, and much as my ten-year-old son scrunches his nose at Huckleberry Finn while counting the days for the next Rick Riordan book, I passed on The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in favor of, well, anything but the musty prose of some muttonchopped Victorian. Robert Louis Stevenson, I thought, was boring. He was stuffy. He was probably English.

  So I was an idiot. Perhaps it was the lingering effects of the drink, the harrumphing triumphalism often found deep inside the second or third bottle of Pinot Noir. But as the months rolled by and the cobwebs lifted, as I returned to earth from whatever awful orbit I’d been inhabiting, I found myself strangely attached to this, ahem, Scotsman. Perhaps it was the descriptions of him. Robert Louis Stevenson, a contemporary noted, was prone to “smoking cigarettes without intermission except when coughing and kissing.” Wasn’t RLS some kind of weak-lunged, tubercular, sickly waif, the sort of unfortunate that was said to be suffering from consumption? Encountering Stevenson on a beach in the South Pacific, a missionary observed that he strode barefoot, “dressed in a shabby suit of white flannels that had seen many better days, a white drill yachting cap, a cigarette in his mouth.” I liked the cut of the man. In fact, I sort of dressed like him. While I no longer smoke—inexplicably, I’d taken up long-distance running; something had to give—I recognized immediately a kindred spirit. Robert Louis Stevenson, I sensed, was animated by the fuck-its.

  How else to explain the moment he found himself aboard the Casco, a ninety-foot schooner, he’d chartered in San Francisco? Imagine the scene: Stevenson, five foot ten and weighing all of ninety-eight pounds, standing on the bow of a rich man’s pleasure yacht, his only experience at sea a short jaunt around the Hebrides, a lazy meander through the rivers and canals of France, and two Atlantic crossings on board ships ten times the size of the Casco. He wouldn’t know it, of course, but once he escaped the shadow of California he’d never set foot on a continent again, unless you count Australia, which—let’s be honest here—is just a large island. For two years he’d voyage among the Marquesas, the mysterious soaring islands that are the bedrock of Polynesian culture; the Tuamotu Islands, the Dangerous Archipelago where slivers of land encircle luminous lagoons alive with sharks and manta rays; and the Gilbert Islands, my erstwhile stomping grounds in Kiribati, as remote in my day as it was in Stevenson’s. He’d build his home in Samoa, call it Vailima, and dress his staff in tartan lavalavas, and write of his escapades and encounters in the fabled South Seas with an earthy realism that defied the twittering primness of the Victorian era (official motto: We are not amused).

  But why go all the way to the South Pacific? He was an ill man when he’d boarded the Casco. Half resigned to an existence as the perpetual patient, ceaselessly nursed and fussed over, he’d told people that he decided to decamp for distant islands to restore his health, which had been failing since the day he was born. While it certainly made sense for a man prone to lung infections and fever to depart cold and damp Edinburgh—I reach for a scarf just thinking about Scotland—he’d already long ago assumed the itinerant life, wandering the European continent before setting forth for America in pursuit of a woman. Now, this I understood. You meet someone, they end up on the other side of the planet, you go follow them. It’s called stalking, and sometimes it works. Stevenson married Fanny Osbourne, an American divorcée ten years his senior, and after several years in Europe, they returned to the United States. While spending a winter in upstate New York, where he began The Master of Ballantrae, it occurred to him that it might be an excellent idea to set forth for the South Seas. Well, duh, you think. That’s what everyone says after spending a winter in upstate New York. But why go, really?

  Of course, it was relief from his lung-splattering cough that he was seeking. It’s what brought him to the Adirondacks in the first place. It was that same quest that caused Stevenson to move to England, and to France, and to Switzerland, and to California. It was the reason he gave for boarding the Casco. No doubt this was true. Illness, as only the sick know, is maddening. But, in his letters, one senses another motive for the long journey to the South Seas. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go,” he wrote. “I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” He was irrepressibly restless, a born wanderer. He traveled, I thought, not because he was ill, but in spite of his health. He was, he noted, prepared “to visit like a ghost, and be carried like a bale.” Frail or hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson had the twinkling eye of the nomad. To be still was to languish.

  And yet, a few years later, after what he’d planned as a seven-month sojourn to the South Pacific had become the odyssey of his lifetime, he wrote from his home in Samoa: “Few men who come to the islands leave them”:

  They grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor.

  The rootless exile had found his place in the lush islands of the South Seas. He’d become known as Tusitala, the teller of tales. Among his readers in England, there was little love for his dispatches from the Pacific. Where was the serialized fiction, the colorful yarns, that’d made him famous? What on earth would compel a gentleman to live among cannibals and heathens? Stevenson, true to his character, cared not for the opinions of London society. The vagabond had settled in the distant backwaters of Empire, where he immersed himself like a highborn chief, signing his letters as the well-pleased South Sea islander.

  What happened, I wondered, after he passed through the Golden Gates of San Francisco? Roaming the South Pacific as his fancy dictated, Stevenson lived like a jaunty beachcomber, flitting from island to island, the warm breezes offering him the sustenance that would carry him through his remaining years. It wasn’t merely a lazy idyll that he’d inhabited. Rarely did he write about beaches and ukuleles. He did not, as far as I could tell, spend much time in tiki bars. The mai tai remained unknown to him. Indeed, he’d come to know the Pacific as a “stir-about of epochs and races, barbarisms and civilizations, virtues and crimes.” Drama there was aplenty. But what did he find there, in what realm of experience did he now live, that caused this man, racked by illness, to embrace his world with such saucer-eyed glee? “The whole tale of my life is better to me than any poem,” he’d write. Were the restorative powers of Oceania so great that a sick man could reclaim a life of wonder? Could a person, adrift in the continental world, find redemption on the temperate islands of the Pacific?

  I pondered this question for a long time. It’d been a year since I crossed borders other than those found in my own mind, and suddenly the world beyond seemed alive and inviting. I reached into my bookshelf and finally pulled out Stevenson’s In the South Seas, and as I did so I felt a lean hand grip mine, and soon I was aloft, floating over arid plains and towering mountains, the night a whirl of stars and motion, until at last I was set down on the deck of a boat rolling in the swell of the blue blue sea.

  Chapter Two

  You don’t quite realize how imponderably vast the Pacific is until you are up
on it, rolling in a ten-foot swell, legs splayed, accompanied only by the occasional porpoise or Wandering Albatross, the air redolent of ocean spray, the fumes of a diesel engine, and the faint odor of a landlubber’s vomit. Out here, the smell is vaguely metallic, like blood, and there is not a hint of the continental world anywhere, except possibly in the dormitory sink, where one of your half-dozen cabin mates has expelled lunch. Turn your gaze to starboard and it is exactly like the vista offered from the portside railings of your vessel, a million shades of blue extending toward an infinite horizon, a heaving panorama where waves are singular and entrancing, pulsating bursts of energy that only hint at mysterious forces and faraway storms. Standing on the deck you feel like a remora, a furtive stowaway, as if you shouldn’t really be here at all.

  But this was exactly where I wanted to be. Ever since I was a kid, my life has been marked by the sweet incongruity of travel. One moment I’m in some East Coast metropolis, grinding out days, the white noise of contemporary American life enveloping my world like an encroaching dome—a cacophony of grim economic stats and dismal politics with an occasional Kardashian popping up like a bobble-headed gopher in an arcade game—and suddenly I’m on a boat in the marble-blue South Seas. I picked up my phone, pleased to see that I had precisely zero bars, and then saw an albatross fly low. There is a topography to the ocean, and as I watched the bird disappear in an ever-shifting seascape of peaks and valleys, I felt pleasantly stunned by the change in my environment. Not forty-eight hours previous, I was nursing a café mocha in the departure lounge at LAX, quietly tapping out the last e-mails, utterly uncertain where I’d be a week hence, and now here I was, acquiring my sea legs on a flat-bottomed boat plying the great expanse of the South Pacific. Some say it’s all about the journey, that the wonders of travel should be revealed layer by layer, like the peeling of an onion. I do not subscribe to this. Give me the adrenaline shot, the caffeinated jolt, the pleasure buzz that takes me from A to Z in the shortest time possible. I’ll concede right here at the top that my wiring might be a little defunct.

  I’d set out, as much as possible, to replicate Stevenson’s journey through the great sweep of the Pacific, sailing with the tide from San Francisco Bay and tumbling down the arc of the planet until we crossed the equator with a great huzzah and found a steady current to the Marquesas. From there, I would make my way to Tahiti and the emerald lagoons of the Tuamotus and then fall off the map in the Gilberts before emerging in Samoa, where I’d make my pilgrimage to the great man’s grave on the summit of Mount Vaea. But immediately I encountered obstacles. Stevenson, of course, had chartered a well-appointed ninety-foot schooner to sail the great distance between California and Polynesia. He did this because, if only for a spell, he was loaded. A New York City newspaper publisher backed up the money wagon at Stevenson’s front door and said, Go, write what you see, send us a letter from time to time. When I read that I’d wept a little as I thought of newspapers today, which barely cover the cost of a pastry at Cinnabon during a layover in Denver. Then I got over it and got all practical-like.

  It was January, cyclone season in the South Pacific. There were no sailboats departing California for the islands at this time of year, at least none with a sane captain. I’d briefly considered tracking down one such Ahab, determined to impose his will over nature, and offer to crew for him, but then rejected it out of hand when I recalled the cyclones I experienced in Vanuatu—the felled trees, the crumpled homes, the dozens of sunken boats in the harbor, their masts peaking above the surface like forlorn tombstones. What would it be like to endure such a tempest at sea? I didn’t really want to know. Death, I figured, is like a coiled snake. It’ll get you in the end. Why provoke it?

  Nor was it possible to hitch a ride to Nuku Hiva, Stevenson’s first landfall, on a commercial ship. There are thousands of container vessels plying the waters between the Americas and Asia, but not one calls on the Marquesas, not even to pick up some bananas. I know this because I checked ship manifests from Canada to Chile. This swath of the Pacific—a wet cosmos so remote and underpopulated that the only thing you’re likely to see afloat is an occasional exhausted seabird or a weathered flip-flop—is the last corner of the world to remain immune from the trade flows of globalization. It is lonely out here.

  It wasn’t always thus, of course. Back in Stevenson’s day, in the 1880s, when the tales and exploits of Captain Cook, the drama on board the Bounty, and the lurid romanticism of De Bougainville’s prose were just freshly mythologized, thousands set forth for the sun-speckled islands of the South Pacific. Oceania was brimming with vessels carrying whalers, traders, explorers, missionaries, and blackbirders—slavers that descended on the islands to ferry laborers to Peruvian mines and Australian sugar and cotton plantations. Others came for breadfruit, sandalwood, and bêche-de-mer, turd-like reef-cleaners prized as a delicacy in China. They came for the guano, dried bird dung, found on the most isolated islands and noted for its excellent qualities as a fertilizer and as an ingredient in gunpowder. Many came for the sperm whales and hunted them to within a whisker of extinction. Planters, like those romanticized in James Michener’s South Pacific, converted immense swaths of ancestral lands into coconut factories, supplying the world with its need for copra. Hundreds of emissaries were dispatched to the islands to proclaim them protectorates and colonies and that henceforth they would be ruled from Paris, London, Berlin, or Washington. It was for their own good, the locals were told.

  Ships to the South Pacific there were aplenty, ferrying dreamers to the islands, lured by the promise of wealth, empire, or everlasting life in the hereafter. If there is such a thing as a sea-highway, this was it. In our imagination—or at least mine—Robinson Crusoe typified the South Seas dream, the solitary explorer, marooned, living in an uncharted world, unencumbered by the weight of history. But even in Stevenson’s day, Defoe’s tale was one hundred and seventy years old. Many islands remained unmapped, and yet already they carried the whiff of possibility, the promise of exploration and conquest. Of course, one man’s dream inevitably becomes another man’s curse. Bring a ship full of rats, pigs, and unwashed men from the Midlands, or Brittany, or Prussia, or New Bedford, and anchor it off an island in the South Seas that’d spent the previous millennia or so in utter isolation from the world beyond the reef, and the result is biological mayhem. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, plague, smallpox, elephantitis, syphilis, and a host of other ailments decimated the indigenous population of the South Pacific. On many islands, a 90 percent mortality rate was common. When the first Russian to circumnavigate the globe, Admiral Adam Johann von Krusenstern, visited the Marquesas in 1804, he estimated a population of 100,000 people. By 1926, there were but a mere 1,500 Marquesans left.

  Seeking to explain this desultory state, Stevenson framed the problem thus: “Where there have been fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there the race survives. Where there have been the most, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful, there it perishes.” Insightful, no? And yet not even Stevenson could have envisioned what would befall the islands in the years ahead.

  By the 1930s, the Japanese decided that, come to think of it, they’d like to have an empire too, and we all know what happened next. The Imperial Army deployed troops throughout a huge swath of the Pacific, building fortifications in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Micronesia, the Marshalls, and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, ensuring that any approach to Japan would have to be fought one sandbar at a time. The subsequent fighting was among the most brutal the world has ever known. Accounts of that era, however—riveting and appalling as they are—rarely mention what, precisely, the locals may have experienced during the war, and as a result you sort of assume that they were in the bleachers, mere spectators. This wasn’t true at all, but perhaps this lack of attention to the islanders’ experience was a kind of foreshadowing, because after 1945 it was as if a dream had ended. For more than a hundred years, the South Pacific had fired t
he imagination of imperialists and romanticists, and then, suddenly, the flame died, and the islands faded into the obscurity from whence they came. True, from time to time, some great power—the United States, Great Britain, France—would nuke an atoll just to make sure things were still hunky-dory with their nuclear arsenal, and dreamers still roamed the islands with visions of eco-resorts and coffee plantations, but mostly the South Pacific reverted to what it’d always been, a sleepy backwater on the far side of the world.

  This, ultimately, was what drew me to the more remote corners of Oceania. It is difficult to disappear on earth today, but if you are so inclined, few places can match the isolation offered by the islands of the South Seas. Here, I’d thought, I’d find Stevenson’s idealized world, the places with the fewest changes, important or unimportant, salutary or hurtful. Of course, not so long ago, many of these isles were nearly extinct of people and more than a few were bombed to the edge of oblivion, but leave something alone for long enough, and it will return to its natural state, like a seedling on the slopes of Mount St. Helens or a colony of cranes in the DMZ. People, I’d thought, would thrive in unexpected ways in lands unreached by iPhones and container ships. Of course, such places are few and far between, and to find them requires hacking through the jungles of Amazonia or dogsledding across the frozen Arctic tundra or climbing the precipitous slopes of the Himalayas or . . .

  . . . or you could fly to Tahiti on the red-eye from LAX.

  Which is what I’d done. For a brief moment, as I accepted the flowered garland on board Air Tahiti Nui and settled in to a double feature starring Juliette Binoche while perusing Paris Match—and particularly as I tried to refrain from making googly eyes at a short-skirted Tahitian flight attendant named Hotette—I thought, perhaps, Robert Louis Stevenson would have disapproved, and that I should have constructed a raft like the Kon-Tiki to take me to Polynesia. Somewhere down there, I’d thought, as we crossed the ocean, Robert Louis Stevenson endured mountainous seas while subsiding on cabin biscuits, whereas I’m up here being served tea by Hotette, she of the gravity-defying curves and melodic voice, and then I figured that being attended to by a beautiful Tahitian woman with a resonant name was in itself a kind of old-school South Seas anthropological experience, and so it was good, and acceptable, and a kind of immersion experience all its own.