Horror in Paradise (9 page)

“But, Paunu, was there no way of undoing the curse of death?”

“Alas! There was none. Maui tried to win back eternal life for man. He wrestled with Tiki at the bottom of the sea, and tried to take out his own internal organs and exchange them for those of Tiki. If he could do that, he thought, he could conquer death, for Tiki’s organs were still immortal; Tiki had created death only by an act of will. But Maui’s brothers followed him and interrupted him with ill-timed questions, so that he failed.

“So mankind was still troubled with decay and death. But Tama saved man many troubles.”

“Who was Tama?”

“He was the son of Tane, lord of the sky. Our ancestors prayed to him to cure wounds, to heal the bites of eels and sharks, and bruises from falling out of trees. He was called the God Who Makes to Live.

“You understand, of course, that all these things are but heathen tales, and things of Satan.”

“Yes,” I replied, “but it seems to me rather significant that this Tuamotuan savior was called Tama, which means the Son, and that he was the son of Tane, the creator of all things good and beautiful . . . and that the name of Tane means Man. For the Christian scriptures, as you know, speak of the Savior as the Son of Man, who is the Light, the Way and the Life.”

“It may be so. It is a deep study. But it is true that our ancestors believed Tama healed the sick. When people are very ill, as you have been, their spirits sometimes leave their bodies and wander into the Great Darkness. It was Tama, our fathers believed, who led such spirits back into the bodies, and the sick people then recovered.”

“Did they always recover?”

“Sometimes the spirit refused to go back into the body. Then the body died, but the spirit lived, and Tama led it to the spirit-world. If the spirit ate the fruit offered by demons in the Darkness, Tama was powerless to save. The demons, in great boats, chased such souls and threw them into a frightful place; the same, no doubt, as the hell of which the priests have told us.”

“If the spirits of the dead are teachers, as I have heard, why then do the people fear them?”

“They do not fear that kind of spirit. But a man has more than one spirit within him. One spirit remains in the body when it is buried, and that is the one that is feared. Such spirits come out of the graves at night, hold parties, and even go fishing. It is very dangerous to meet them.”

There was more of this. And day by day the visitors came.

The elders sat on the floor and chanted. My adopted grandmother Teuringa was the liveliest of the lot, grunting and moving her stiff limbs in an ancient dance as if recalling long-past amorous encounters of her youth. Tinaia, holding her pet pig in her lap, joined in the rousing chants.

So the days passed, in a hut woven of palm leaves and thatched with the leaves of the pandanus, floored with pebbles; under treatment by a mixture of herb doctor and pagan magician, a thousand miles from a hospital, but surrounded by kind and loving friends, who sorrowed at my discomfort and grieved for my imminent departure.

Practically the whole village called. Only Temata the daughter of Maru did not come near.

“It is proof,” charged Roki, “that she has caused this illness by witchcraft.”

“Tell her,” I suggested, “that I myself am a sorcerer and that I will make Hawaiian magic, which is stronger than the magic of Tepuka, to bring trouble upon her worse than mine.”

Tukua, Temata’s cousin, who was sitting in the doorway, appeared startled.

“Temata has made no magic,” she protested. “Temata doesn’t know witchcraft.”

That evening Tukua returned, bringing Temata, who seemed ill at ease. Other visitors watched her narrowly as she entered and squatted near my mat. Temata looked around at them defiantly, then turned to me, saying defiantly: “It serves you right!”

Monday came, and my nurse Tinaia remarked with satisfaction the fulfillment of her prediction. The infected spot, when she unwrapped it, resembled nothing so much as a miniature volcano in eruption. The next treatment, she indicated, was a poultice of soap—red soap, by which she meant the harsh yellow laundry soap that comes in long bars in the schooners from Tahiti. Keneti exhibited a cake of a widely advertised American brand which is much redder, with a strong antiseptic odor. Tinaia was visibly pleased.

“It smells of the spirit-world,” she commented with delight, as she observed its redness and sniffed its medicinal aroma. Surely the gods would now be favorable. She shaved off thin flakes of it and laid them gently on the infected area.

By this time I was feeling much better and had begun to stir around the house and even to walk out into the street. Temata passed, on her way to the well. I had been waiting for this occasion to try a little experiment.

Pouring a few drops of alcohol on a ball of cotton, I touched a match to it and stood in the doorway, tossing the burning cotton up and down on the palm of my well hand, and chanting what I could remember of a Hawaiian prayer which in ancient times was chanted, with proper accompanying ceremonies, to bring retribution upon one guilty of black sorcery.

“The fire burns,

fire of the dense darkness . . .

Fire is in the heavens,

decay, maggots, corruption,

death is in the heavens!

O Kane, o Lono, o Ku,

breathe death upon the sorcerer

and upon him who procured the token of death . . .”

The divergent dialects of the Polynesian language have enough words in common to enable a Tuamotuan to grasp something of the import of such an invocation. Temata was alarmed. She ran toward me, scooping up sand, as she ran, to throw upon the flame.

I chanted on, waving the burning cotton out of reach.

Hurling another handful of sand, she walked away, more uneasy, I knew, than she was willing to admit. The sorcery of Hawaii is famous throughout the Polynesian countries.

“Will she die today?” asked Roki, in awe.

“She will not die,” I reassured her. “I have not made the spell complete. I only wanted to frighten her, because in my illness she mocked me. If I had taken a lock of her hair and burned it with the magic fire that does not bum my hand, then she might indeed die.”

“She deserves to,” said Roki severely. “She is a woman without kindness.”

Next day Toriu bent a long yellow-white fiber of coconut husk into a noose and twisted it gently but firmly deep down in the infected place; then, with a sudden sharp movement, drew it out, removing the “core” of the infection.

“In three days you will be well,” he promised.

He continued to apply the soap dressing for a day or two; then announced that it was time for the final medicine. This was a fine charcoal, made by burning coconut shells in a fire of husks. He dusted this dry dressing carefully into and over the wound.

“Let this powder remain. Don’t bandage the finger with a cloth.”

The following day he came for the final treatment. His little son played on the floor with his pet pig as Toriu dressed the wound.

“A fine boy,” I said, making conversation. “What is his name?”

“His name is Rino. I have a daughter, too,” he added, “a grown-up daughter, fourteen years old.”

“I have met your daughter Temaru. She is very beautiful.”

I refrained from adding that she also had many lice.

“Do you want her?” inquired Toriu hospitably. “If so, I will send her to you tonight.”

“You are indeed kind,” I answered. “But I am still weak from my illness, and the boat cannot be held any longer. Now that I am well, we must sail at once.”

A week later, at Vahitahi, two natives led me to a small house at the farther side of the village.

“This is the house of Hinao. He is very ill.”

There lay Schenck, who had warned me three months before—now propped up in a vast bed, against a pile of pillows, his emaciated features, uncut hair, and drooping mustache suggesting a ghost come back from the Great Darkness. Beside him lay a cane, with which it was his custom, when needing attention at night, to batter on the sheet of corrugated iron that closed in one side of his house, to summon the other white visitor on the island, Ua, to his aid.

“Have you any quinine?” he inquired. “There’s none on the island. I’m having a recurrence of that fever I caught in Fiji”

Quinine was brought from the cutter. Hinao, as they called Schenck there, had lost twenty-six pounds and had been unable to retain solid food for two weeks, but in three days more he was able to ride in the handcart which is used to transport copra to the landing and corpses to the cemetery. We put him aboard the copra schooner for Papeete, in care of the bishop of French Oceania, who was returning there from Mangareva.

“Never eat fish cooked,” the bishop was saying as the sailors dragged the whaleboat off the reef.

His Grace had been a resident priest at our own island of Tepuka Maruia, and had been so long in the service that he had acquired a native palate.

“Never cook fish. Never put salt on it, or lime juice or lemon juice. Eat it fresh from the sea, as the good God made it Only then can you appreciate the subtle distinctions between the flavors of the various fishes that He, in His wisdom, has provided.”

Gavan Daws

The efforts of the citizens of the Territory of Hawaii to obtain the status of statehood for the islands were seriously threatened in the early 1930’s. Although an integral part of the United States, the territory was judged to be a creation of the Congress, which could legally discriminate against the residents. A shocking demonstration of this position was the aftermath of a crime of violence—the so-called “Massie Case.”

Headlines in September, 1931, blazoned the charge that a band of Honolulu hoodlums had assaulted the wife of a young naval officer. At the trial of the indicted youths, the jury was so baffled by uncertainties in the evidence that it was unable to agree on a verdict. While a second trial was pending, one of the defendants was taken and killed by a party made up of the naval officer, his mother-in-law, and two Navy enlisted men. The four were tried and found guilty of manslaughter, but a sentence of ten years’ imprisonment pronounced upon them was commuted by the governor to one hour.

Lurid treatment of the case in the nation’s newspapers resulted in an investigation of law enforcement in Hawaii and some laxity and inefficiency was corrected. The threat of having Hawaii ruled under a commission form of government in which the Army and Navy would have some powers was averted, but for years the echoes of the case blackened the repute of the Territory, and Hawaii did not achieve full membership in the American Union until 1959.

Gavan Daws, born in Australia in 1933, came to study and teach at the University of Hawaii in 1958. He is author not only of
Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands
(1968), from which “The Honolulu Martyrdom” is taken, but also
Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai
(1973) and
A Dream of Islands (1980).
For some years Dr. Daws has held the chair of Pacific History at the Australian National University.

IN ALL the careful social calculations being made at the islands during the twenties and thirties, one large group of men was usually discounted: the members of the United States armed forces who manned the naval base at Pearl Harbor and the army posts strung out from Fort Ruger at Diamond Head to Schofield Barracks on the central plain of Oahu. The servicemen could not be ignored altogether—there were too many of them for that. But neither could they be assimilated—again, there were too many of them. So they were tolerated, but only just.

Pearl Harbor became the home of the Pacific fleet, and Schofield Barracks was the biggest army post in the United States. Even in the years of disarmament after World War One, between fifteen and twenty thousand men were stationed in Hawaii. These figures made the armed services big business in the islands, and especially at Honolulu. The building of a dry dock at Pearl Harbor alone involved a payroll of sixty thousand dollars a month for almost ten years (a period that included a fresh start after the first pourings of concrete collapsed). Walter Dillingham’s Honolulu Dredging and Construction Company and his Oahu Railroad and Land Company did well out of the development of the harbor, an undertaking second in cost only to the Panama Canal, according to one estimate; and all sorts of smaller businessmen—taxi operators, barbers, tattoo artists, nightclub owners, and brothel keepers—made a killing whenever the fleet came back from maneuvers or the enlisted men of Schofield came into town with their pay.

For the most part, however, the serviceman’s money was more welcome than the serviceman himself A surprising number of soldiers and sailors married local girls in Hawaii—thousands of them over the years—and this showed acceptance of a sort, but a feeling of estrangement between the two communities, military and civilian, persisted just the same. The question resolved itself into a matter of ingroups and outgroups, and the dividing line between servicemen and residents could not have been more clearly marked.

This game of ingroups and outgroups had been played for a long time at the islands, and a man’s perception of the game depended upon his place in it. On the plantations—and in the armed services, for that matter—everything was in the open, with rank and occupation displayed for all to see. But there were other versions of the game in which definitions were more subtle, so much so, in fact, that they might escape an uninstructed observer. Someone unfamiliar with Chinatown, for example, might miss the point that more than one dialect of Chinese was spoken there, that the two main groups of Chinese immigrants, the Punti and the Hakka, had not much time for each other, and that community organizations such as the United Chinese Society papered over differences among other groupings based on family, clan, village, district, and provincial loyalties—all jealously preserved, and set aside only for compelling reasons. Someone unfamiliar with the Japanese might not understand that most of them came from the southern prefectures of Japan, and that they wanted themselves distinguished at all costs from the minority of migrants who came from the Ryukyu Islands, the Okinawans. A Korean did not want to be mistaken either for a Chinese or a Japanese, and his country’s unhappy history made his point for him, if anybody took the trouble to find out about it. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans alike took their various positions seriously, especially in relation to those late arrivals, the Filipinos, among whom, in turn, there were divisions—between Tagalog, Visayan, and Ilocano.