Report from an urban atoll

I've written for EyeContact about the Tanoa International Dateline Hotel, a luxurious atoll set amidst the poverty of Nuku'alofa, and the place where Tongan nobles, cocaine-sniffing palangi businessmen, and Chinese diplomats with casino tans make squalid deals. Tanoa is a place of perfect racial equality and extreme class privilege. Amidst the ugliness of the hotel Tanya Edwards' paintings appear all the more beautiful.

The perils of over-excitement

In 1840 Taufa'ahau, the founder of modern Tonga, had problems. The king had converted to Wesleyanism, but many of his people refused to abandon their old gods or, worse still, chose to embrace Catholicism, a religion associated with the Wesleyan missionaries' French rivals. Taufa'ahau was holed up in the hill fort called Sia ko Veiongo, beside Nuku'alofa harbour, which had been renamed Mount Zion after a chapel was raised on its summit.

A few miles away, the pagan warriors of the village of Pea had built their own redoubt, complete with a deep ditch, palisades, massive walls, & cannons. The big guns were operated by a man nicknamed Jimmy the Devil, who was one of at least two Europeans who had jumped from passing ships, settled in Pea, and joined the village's army.

In an attempt to stop Tonga's Civil War, the British Empire despatched a ship filled with marines to Nuku'alofa. The troops were led by Captain Walter Croker, who soon decided that Tonga's Christians were fighting a Holy War, & that Mount Zion was a sacred place. After asking to be buried on the hill, Croker marched his men to Pea, drew his sword, & charged at the village's high walls. He was shot dead after taking a few paces; another dozen British troops were killed or wounded, before the force retreated to the safety of the sacred hill.

Kaloka, as the Tongans call him, got his wish, & when we climbed Mount Zion Sio, Aneirin & I stopped for a minute or so beside the martyr's grave. Sio and I told Aneirin the strange story of Croker's death, & Aneirin ruminated. 'I think' he said eventually, 'that Captain Croker might have gotten a bit overexcited'.

Explosions

History rhymes. At the end of last month a boat exploded off Herald Island, lighting the sky & waking locals. In the same week 75 years earlier, an American plane on a secret mission crashed just off the island. The plane was flying Japanese & Thai women from NZ internment to freedom.

When they took off from Whenuapai airport, the pilot & crew of the Liberator Express were suffering that most serious mechanical problem, fatigue. They forgot to check their altimeter, & the wartime blackout & a storm meant they could steer by neither stars nor city lights.

Some of the Japanese civilians died in the wreck of the Liberator; others waded through the Waitemata, towards Herald Island. Islanders saw fire, & heard shouting in the enemy's language, & decided that the invasion must have begun. They hid from the bleeding & burnt women.

Technical problems

My laptop melted as soon as I'd returned from Tonga, and blogger.com has been doing strange things to my account and to the homepage of this blog. I'll sort it all out early next week, when I have a new machine and a childless study, but I wanted to mention that I've continued to tweet during my absence from blogland.

The Island

In the 1820s the emissaries of a dour Wesleyan god reached Tonga, & began to coax chiefs to their side; at the same time, in Wesley's homeland, William Mariner's account of his life as a castaway & captive in pagan Tonga was being read excitedly by radical intellectuals. The teenaged Mariner had lived in Tonga for four years, as the adopted son of the warlord Finau Ulukalala, after Ulukalala's soldiers stormed the British ship Port au Prince in Ha'apai & killed almost all of its crew. Mariner's memoir gave precise and often fond accounts of Tongan feasting, fighting, spirit possession, surgery, & sailing.

According to his first biographer, Lord Byron was obsessed with Mariner's account of the Friendly Islands, & 'never tired to talking about it to his friends'. Byron's last long poem, The Island, is a paean to the pagan, sensual Tonga that the poet's Wesleyan countrymen were about to dismantle.

In The Island, Byron reimagines Fletcher Christian's mutiny & flight from justice, so that one of Christian's fugitives finds refuge in lush Tonga, rather than bleak Pitcairn

Byron wrote The Island in exile, without access to most English-language accounts of the Pacific. In his poem, islands are lifted from one archipelago & dropped in another. Byron sets most of the action on Tubuai, aka Toboonai, but shifts that island from the Australs to Tonga, and fills it with Tongan detail. Byron takes his readers to Mu'a, aka Mooa, the ancient capital of Tonga, & to Pulotu, aka Booloto, island of the dead. He shows the tautahi, or sea warriors, of the Ha'apai Islands, leaving their kava bowls to fight Fijian rivals.

When the British Empire comes hunting the Bounty fugitive, Byron hides him and his Tonga lover, a Princess Neuha, in the speleological marvel often known nowadays as Mariner's Cave. The cave's entrance is covered with water, but it curves upwards, and ends in an air-filled chamber, which swimmers with strong lungs or a tank of air can reach. Today Mariner's cave is a tourist attraction; in the nineteenth century, though, it killed a series of palangi adventurers, including the captain of the naval vessel HMS Esk in 1869, who cut his back on the watery's tunnel's roof.

I'm bringing Byron's poem up to Tonga with me. I hope that my friend Visesio Siasau, who is trying to remember & revive the pre-Wesleyan Tonga in his art, will see the great Romantic poet as a comradely spirit, a collaborator.

Bad blood?

I've been rereading Forgotten Fatherland, Ben McIntyre's account of his journey up Paraguay's torpid, circuitous rivers in search of the pigmentopia that Nietzsche's fascist sister founded in the 1880s. McIntyre's book travels through unhealthy ideas, as well as malarial jungle.

Nueva Germany was intended to purify Europe by transplanting the continent's finest Aryan specimens to a site isolated from the menaces of Judaism, socialism, & atheism. Peasants from Saxony followed Nietzsche & her husband Bernhard Forster upriver from Asuncion.

By the time McIntrye arrived in the 1980s, Nueva Germany was a series of shrinking clearings in the jungle the colonists had planned to fell. The polemics of termites & rats had collapsed the pillars of Nietzsche's mansion. Bored chickens slept on the colony's main road. After a century, the results of Nietzsche's experiment in eugenics were written on Nueva Germany's inhabitants. They had fair hair & blue eyes, but also slack jaws, drool-speckled chins, permanent squints. Spurning Paraguayan partners, generations of Aryans had married cousins. 

It's hard to read about Nueva Germany & not think of Puhoi, the valley north of Auckland where German-speaking Bohemians settled in 1863. Puhoi's decaying pub is full of frayed photographs of Bohemian dancers, bagpipers, violinists, priests who prayed to a guttural god.

Puhoi's settlers intermarried. They were reluctant to take partners from nearby Protestant communities, but felt superior to Irish, Dalmatian, Maori Catholics. Today Puhoi is attracting new settlers: commuters, lifestyle blockers. Some mutter about inbred locals.

Allan Titford, the far right activist serving a long prison sentence for rape & racially motivated arson, is the scion of an old Puhoi family. Bad blood?

The triangular dancers

The slab of beachrock, with its dancing, triangular figures, had been lying for centuries under the sand. It might have been an ancient tablet buried in a Sumerian or an Egyptian desert, covered in a script that had become archaic, that was recognised only by scholars and madmen. Then, at the end of 2008, a storm lurched through the Ha'apai archipelago, and wiped the beach clean. Suddenly the dancers of Foa island performed for a new audience: astonished local fishermen, uncomprehending palangi holidaymakers.

David Burley hurried to Foa. He knew the seas were rising, that the low islands of Ha'apai sinking. Another storm might submerge the dancers, or veil them again in sand.

Burley remembered how, on the neighbouring island of Ha'ano, fourteen years earlier, locals had dug up & destroyed a centuries-old temple he had only just rediscovered, surveyed, described in an academic article. The Christians of Ha'ano did not want to be reminded of their pagan ancestors. Ancient Tonga is fragile.

Burley called his study of the stone dancers 'Triangular Men on One Very Long Voyage'. The rock on Foa's coast had been carved, he decided, by Hawai'ian visitors. It remembered an epic ancient voyage, between West & East Polynesia.

For Tongan scholar 'Okusi Mahina, the petroglyph was no surprise. It was written proof for the oral histories he had collected, collated. It showed that his ancestors' homeland had been a liquid continent, an ancient superpower, not an isolated archipelago. 

Last year Visesio Siasau heard a story from his home island of Ha'ano, a place where the sea gnaws old canoe landings & where stone tombs and songs remember chiefs and fish conjurers. Another storm had taken more of the beach, the story said. A strange stone tablet had been exposed. 

Next month I'll be visiting Ha'apai with Visesio Siasau. Sio wants to land at Ha'ano again, to see the newly exposed stone for himself. Is it another fragment of ancient Pacific history? And can it avoid the fate of the temple David Burley rediscovered?