The Pacific Triangle

by Sydney Greenbie

It had not been that way in Hawaii, for there already the grip of the girder has made rigid the life of nature and the people. But down beneath the line one could still look over the corrugated iron roofs of sheds and forget. Everywhere in the Fiji or the Samoan islands something of antiquity cools one's senses with unheard questionings. Instantly one wants to know how it happens that these people came to be here, what accident or lure of paleolithic life led them into this isolation. One cannot get away from the feeling—however far inland one may go—that the outer casings of this little lump of solid earth beneath us is a fluent sea, a sea endless to unaided longing. Homesickness never was like that, for ordinary homesickness is too immediate, too personal. But this longing for contact which comes over one in the mid-Pacific islands is universal; it is a sudden consciousness of eternity, and of the atom. One begins to conceive of days and events and conditions as absolutely incompatible with former experience. One's mind is set aglow with inquiry, and over and over again, as one looks into the face of some shy native or some spoiled flapper, one wonders whence and how. And a slight fear: what if I, too, were now unable ever to return, should I soon revert to these customs, to the feeling of distance between men and women, to the nakedness, not so much of body as of mind?

That was what happened to Tahiti, to Maoriland, to Hawaii, to the popping peaks of illusive worlds which to ante-medieval isolated Europe could not exist because it did not know of them. For thousands of years these innumerable islands in the Pacific had been the habitation of passionate men, of men who had come out in their vessels from over Kim's way with decks that carried a hundred or more persons; persons who doubtless also entertained themselves with games because too busy to play; persons with hopes and aspirations. A thousand and more years ago the present inhabitants of Polynesia may have dreamed of rearing a new India, a wider Caucasia, just as the Pilgrims and the persecuted of Europe dreamed, or the ambitious Englanders of New Zealand. Welcomed here and ejected there, they passed on and on and on, as far as Samoa and Tahiti. And slowly the film of forgetfulness fixed their experiences. The big ships and the giant canoes rotted in the harbors. They had come to stay. The sun was burning their bridges behind them. What need for means of going farther? Eden had been found. And the soft, sweet flesh of young maidens began, generation after generation, to be covered with the tattooings of time, the records of the number of times the race had been reborn. So, while the nakedness of youth was being clothed, mind after mind stored up unforgettable tales of exploit and of passion, till fancy sang with triumph over things transitory, and tawny men felt that never would they have to wander more.

Is not this the history of every race on earth? Has not every nation gloated over its antiquity and its security? Was not permanence a surety, and pride the father of ease? And have not song and story been handed down from generation to generation, or, with the more skilled and the more proud races, been graved in stone or wax or wood? And have not the more mighty and the more venturesome come over the pass, or over the crest and invaded and conquered and changed?

So it was when Polynesia awoke to see that which could only be a god, because fashioned in the form of its own imaginings, swept by its gorgeous sails into view,—the ship of Captain Cook. Thus the racial memories that had lain dormant in the Polynesians for centuries were revived by Europeans. Narrative renders vividly their surprise and wonder, especially on seeing the vessel girt in iron such as had drifted in on fragments from the unknown wrecks and had become to these natives more precious than gold.

It seems to me that in the hearts and minds of heliolithic man when he ventured eastward across the chain of islands which links, or rather separates, Polynesia and Melanesia from its home in Asia, he must have felt just as Cook and Vancouver and Magellan felt. Bit by bit I picked up those outer resemblances which give to men the world over their basic brotherliness. They may hate one another justly, but they cannot get away from that fraternity. And they generally reveal relationship when they least expect it.

Thus, as we kicked our way up the smooth waters of the Rewa River, Fiji, in a launch laden with black faces and proud shocks of curly hair, mixed with sleek people of slightly lighter-hued India, a suggestion of the origin of these people came to me. As these alien Indians, so must have come these native negroids. I should have felt successful in my method of inquiry, hopeful of feeling my way into a solution of this wondering, had not an outrigger canoe dragged itself across our course with a dilapidated sail of bark-cloth.

"Where did they learn to sail?" I asked the white skipper.

"They have always known it," he answered. "But you seldom see these sails nowadays."

I wanted to take a snap-shot of it, but the lights of evening, as those of tradition, were against me, and we were clipping along too rapidly. The last example of an art which brought the whole race eastward was being carelessly retained.

A few days later I caught another glimpse of a past that was working my sun-baked brain too much. We were going up the river in a comfortable launch, some missionaries and I, their unknown guest. We were about twenty or thirty miles up the Rewa. With us was a young native who spoke English rather well. I plied him with questions, but his shyness and reticence, so characteristic of isolated human beings, inhibited him. At last he spoke, with an eye to my reactions, of the methods of warfare along the palisades of the river.