Getting Stoned with Savages (9 page)

N
OW AND THEN, I LIKE TO THINK THAT WE HUMANS ARE
understandable, that for every conceivable action there is some reason driving it, some underlying cause or instinct that makes our behavior, if not logical, at least comprehensible. Lust, for instance. That’s a big one. Where would we be without lust? I daresay we wouldn’t be here at all. Hunger, power, a desire for security—primal, animalistic impulses—these too are all great motivators of behavior. Were one to listen to the grim reductionism offered by evolutionary biologists, one might conclude that all behavior is coldly guided, driven by a simple need to ensure that our genes continue on without us. That seems inadequate to me. Think of all the ways teenage boys, for example, conspire to take themselves out of the gene pool. They do this because, periodically, we are all stupid, and I am willing to acknowledge that simple, base stupidity can explain a lot of behavior. I speak with some experience.

Thinking on a grander scale—and why not fly those lofty airs?—one might ask why societies do what they do. What motivates them? Why, for instance, does one culture send men to the moon (to play golf, of course), whereas another culture will worship it from afar, now and then quivering in terror during a lunar eclipse? This is the territory covered by Jared Diamond in
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies,
a very satisfying book for people like me, who like to think there is a reason behind everything. Diamond argues, very persuasively, that society is shaped by its environment—that its direction is determined by soil fertility, the surrounding animal life, its relative isolation from other societies, even its continental axis—and that nothing changes a culture faster than a change in its environment. I found this very compelling and, finishing the book, I thought,
Well, there you have it. Humanity explained. Finally.
But then there is Vanuatu, which has many peculiar customs, and if there was one custom that defied my book learning, that confounded my understanding of human nature, it was cannibalism. What to make of it? What would compel someone to eat another person?

Most people are aware of instances of cannibalism that result from extreme deprivation. We are familiar with the Donner party and their unfortunate travails in the High Sierras. Hollywood has given us
Alive,
a dramatization of the events that befell a rugby team when their plane crashed in the remote Andes. Grisly as those events were, we can empathize with those who, having no other means to remain alive, take it upon themselves to eat the bodies of their dead companions. Remaining among the living, by any means necessary, is an instinct that is easily understood. No doubt cannibalism of this nature has occurred since we first became carnivores. But as I noted the banana trees and papaya trees that sprouted like weeds in our yard, and as I snorkeled among a million fish, I thought it unlikely that the cannibalism that prevailed throughout Vanuatu had anything to do with sustenance. Nor was it the case, as it was on some islands in Micronesia, that cannibalism in Vanuatu was a form of ancestor worship. In Kiribati, for instance, when someone dies, it is customary for family members to partake of the flesh of the decomposing corpse, ladling it into a kind of soup, which is then consumed, ensuring that, for those in bereavement for Grandma, she will always remain a part of them. I’d prefer a wake of a different sort, but as someone raised as a Catholic, I could get my head around the custom. That starchy wafer produced by nuns, given to us toward the end of Mass—provided, of course, that we had confessed our sins and performed our penance (four Hail Marys and three Our Fathers, typically, for not making up my bed, being mean to my sister, and having unholy thoughts)—was, we were assured by Father David, the very flesh of Jesus.

“But it’s just a wafer,” I had exclaimed during one of the question-and-answer sessions Father David held for us sprites each month at St. Bonaventure.

“It is the body of Christ,” he assured me, and sensing some Protestant proclivities on my part, he went on and explained, once again, what the Holy Eucharist was about, a lesson that to this day remains a little fuzzy for me.

“But…it doesn’t taste like a person. It tastes like a wafer.”

Nevertheless, while I may not have completely understood what Holy Communion was all about, Catholicism did allow me to see the nuances in cannibalism. Eating the flesh of another human being, I understood, might not always be a really, really bad thing to do. If you were a good Catholic, you had some every Sunday. And, stretching my capacity for understanding human behavior about as far as it would go, I could see how eating the flesh of your dead family members might not be an appallingly deviant thing to do. But this was not how cannibalism was practiced in Vanuatu. Cannibalism there was more like the cannibalism practiced by Jeffrey Dahmer: very disturbing.

Until very recently, island life in Vanuatu had been characterized by a state of endless war. This is where my struggle to understand cannibalism begins, for no war seems more pointless to me than the kind traditionally waged in Vanuatu. Typically, the men of a particular village ambushed the men of another village. The goal was to capture one man, who would then be triumphantly carried back to the attackers’ village, clubbed, and chopped into pieces. Good manners dictated that an arm or a leg be sent off to a friendly village. Again here, I sputter in disbelief. Imagine receiving such a package. “Oh, look, honey. Bob and Erma over in Brooklyn have sent us a thigh. So thoughtful.” Of course, now you are obliged to reciprocate, and so you gather your friends and off you go, hunting for a man, and when you capture one, you will thoughtfully hack an arm off and send it along to Bob and Erma, together with a note
—Thinking of you.
Meanwhile, no village will tolerate the loss of a man or two without seeking vengeance, and so off they go, looking for you, and just as you’re taking your leisure underneath your favorite banyan tree, perhaps digesting a meal, you may find yourself surrounded by fierce-looking men wearing nothing more than leaves around their penises and carrying heavy, knotted clubs, and suddenly you know that this day is not going to end well. You will be carried, kicking and screaming, to the enemy’s village, a village that once contained men named Henry, Kenny, Luther, and Jeremiah, but they’re not there anymore, and you know why. You ate them. And now it is your turn to be devoured. If you are very lucky, a good solid blow to your head will the end the misery right there and then, sparing you the sensation of feeling your body treated like a boiled lobster as your flesh and bones are plucked and torn, carved and diced, cooked in flames, until nothing remains of you except the faint odor of a satisfied belch. But worry not. Bob will avenge you.

When Westerners began to arrive in some numbers in the nineteenth century, they too found themselves participating in Vanuatu’s exciting culinary world. John Williams, the very first missionary to arrive in Vanuatu, landed on the island of Erromango on November 18, 1839. Sponsored by the London Missionary Society, which had had considerable success in converting much of Polynesia to Christianity, Williams stepped ashore, no doubt confident that very soon he would be breaking bread with the islanders. Within minutes, he was dead, killed by a fusillade of arrows. And then he became lunch. A half-dozen other missionaries would suffer the same fate, and it wasn’t long before Erromango came to be known as the Island of Martyrs. In 1847, the
British Sovereign
had the great misfortune of finding itself wrecked off Efate. Twenty crew members escaped the sinking vessel on a small boat and made their way to shore, where they were happily received by the islanders. And who wouldn’t be happy to see such a feast? In the end, only two of the unfortunate sailors managed to elude the dismal fate of their companions, who could last be heard asking their hosts, “You’re having what for dinner?”

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the blackbirders began to visit the islands of Vanuatu. Little better than slavers, they were recruiters searching for indentured workers to toil in the mines of New Caledonia and the sugar and cotton plantations of Fiji, Samoa, and Australia. Many Ni-Vanuatu were kidnapped. Most suffered through years of appalling brutality, but if they survived their years of service, they were returned to their islands.
Survived
being the operative word. Of the forty thousand Ni-Vanuatu lured to Queensland, Australia, fewer than thirty thousand lived to return. Of the ten thousand who were sent to New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa, it is unknown how many lived, though the mines in New Caledonia were known to be a graveyard. Some of those who did manage to return, quite naturally, held a grudge against white men.

In 1878, on the island of Ambae, a returned laborer named Sikeri was in need of victims. For men in Vanuatu, prestige and influence were obtained by passing through demanding grade-taking rituals, which allowed a man to move upward in class. On most islands, a chief earned his position by participating in ceremonies that called for an ever-greater sacrifice of pigs. Pigs equaled wealth in Vanuatu. Now and then, however, a grade-taking ritual required the sacrifice of men, and so when recruiters from the
Mystery
arrived one fine morning, Sikeri and his followers decided that they would do nicely. Six men were slaughtered and eaten. Three years later, a similar fate befell the crew of the
May Queen
when another chief on Ambae needed victims to commemorate the death of his child.

But why eat people? Killing people I could understand. It happens all the time. A quick glance at the local news suggests that human beings kill one another for the most trivial of reasons. Indeed, I daresay I too have felt the urge to kill, particularly when I’m driving. If the driver of the white Ford F-150 pickup truck that cut me off last Tuesday is reading this, you should know that I’m looking for you. And in Vanuatu, when one considers what happened subsequent to the arrival of Westerners, it is a wonder that the Ni-Vanuatu did not kill every missionary, sandalwood trader, and colonist who landed upon their shores. Perhaps no country suffered more cruelly from the diseases introduced by Westerners than Vanuatu. Living in such isolation from the rest of the world, the Ni-Vanuatu had not acquired immunity to influenza, measles, whooping cough, and a half-dozen other ailments. What caused a sniffle in London killed in Vanuatu. When the unfortunate Mr. Williams arrived on Erromango in 1839, there were approximately 4,500 people living on the island; by 1930, there were only 500. Aneityum Island had a population of 3,500 in 1850; in 1905, there were 450. On every island touched by Westerners, epidemics followed, and the depopulation of Vanuatu was appalling. In 1800, an estimated one million Ni-Vanuatu lived on the islands. By 1935, there were only 41,000. “Why should we have any more children?” asked one woman on Malekula. “Since the white men came, they all die.”

Local medicine and magic were no antidote to the apocalyptic waves of disease that swept through Vanuatu during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On many islands, epidemics were understood to be the work of sorcerers who had the power to both cause and cure illness. This was a belief that did not work well for missionaries. The death of John Williams had hardly hindered their efforts to convert the Ni-Vanuatu, though the London Missionary Society did think it prudent to send Samoan missionaries for a while to soften the heathens up, as it were, rather than lose another Englishman. For those missionaries who did manage to establish a presence on an island, their work tending to those overcome by measles, smallpox, and the other epidemics of the day was regarded as evidence that they had caused the disease, and for this many were killed and eaten. Some missionaries even went out of their way to take responsibility for an epidemic. When measles swept through Erromango in 1861, George Gordon, an obstinate Presbyterian from Canada, declared that it was his god who did this—a little payback for their stubborn heathenism. Now that the mystery of who was to blame was all cleared up, the islanders felt free to carve up Gordon and his wife for dinner, a fate that befell innumerable missionaries during those dark years.

It is grim stuff. Perusing the country’s history, one begins to realize that Vanuatu is like the Russia of the South Pacific, a place of endless calamities. Most of the misery that befell Vanuatu, alas, is hardly unique. To this day, as Rwanda and Yugoslavia demonstrate, we still find a reason to kill our neighbors. And the diseases that wiped out the Ni-Vanuatu were the same diseases that brought the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the cusp of extinction. A first encounter with someone from the Eurasian landmass was very often the equivalent of a death sentence for the rest of humanity, who had the misfortune of residing in places bereft of the cows and horses and other domesticated animals that conferred a measure of immunity. All this I understood. What continued to baffle me, however, was cannibalism. Not the occasional ceremonial cannibalism, not cannibalism as vengeance, not the
I really need to eat
kind of cannibalism. What perplexed me was the almost casual nature of cannibalism in Vanuatu, its everydayness. As far as I understood, there was neither shame nor reverence attached to the eating of people. A body was just a meal. Clearly, there must be something more to it, or at least I hoped there was. To find out, I figured, I would have to ask a cannibal. And if there was one island where I thought I might find a cannibal, it was Malekula.