The Sky Turned Upside Down

Southern Cross, courtesy of Sydney Observatory

When my husband and I flew to Tahiti in 2007, I was eagerly anticipating seeing the night sky in a whole new way. I’d never been south of the Equator but had read many times about how strange it is for northern dwellers to see the familiar constellations turned on their heads. Even the man in the moon hangs upside down above the planet’s south side, his smiling face just an illusion. Above all I wanted to see the Southern Cross, that beacon of the southern hemisphere sky. We’d travelled a long way in search of an ancient story and seeing the Southern Cross would be a symbol of how far we’d come.

I had in my mind a scene from a book by the 19^th century French author Julian-Marie Viaud who wrote under the pen name of Pierre Loti. In 1872, he had spent some months in Tahiti as a young naval officer and later wrote about his experiences in a semi-autobiographical novel called The Marriage of Loti.

One night he played the piano at a ball held by Queen Pomare in the unfinished palace that the French administration was building for her. The Queen sat on her gilt throne above the throng of dancers, tapping her satin laced boot to the music, a tray of native cigarettes by her side. Her ladies sat in a row near her, all “princesses or chiefs in their own right.”  There were the Queen’s two daughters-in-law, Princess Ariitéa and the lovely Queen Moe, first cousin to the Salmons. And then there was “the splendid Ariinoore [Moetia Salmon] in a tunic of cherry-colored satin and a garland of peia.” And her sister, Titaua Brander, in “a constellation of splendid pearls” and her two daughters, Margaret and Marion, just returned from school in England, “as handsome as their mother.”  

Titaua Brander (aged 30) and Moetia Salmon (24) drawn from life by Pierre Loti, 1872

The walls of the ballroom were open to the air, and as Loti played for the dancers he looked out at the Tahitian night: 

“...In broad candle-light rose the mountain peaks, dark in the transparent atmosphere of the Oceanian night, sharply outlined against the starry sky; and in the foreground the picturesque mass of a clump of bananas with their enormous leaves and bunches of fruit, looking like colossal candelabra ending in great black flowers. As a background to the trees the nebulae of the southern hemisphere spread a sheet of blue light, and in the middle blazed the Southern Cross. Nothing could be more ideally tropical than this far-away perspective. The air was full of that exquisite fragrance of orange-blossom and gardenia which is distilled by night under the thick foliage; there was a great silence, accentuated by the bustle of insects in the grass and that sonorous quality, peculiar to night in Tahiti, which predisposes the listener to feel the enchanting power of music.”  

That was the scene I had in mind when my husband and I set off one night from Papeete in our rental car to try to escape the city lights and see the southern stars. We were visiting in the rainy season when the tops of Tahiti’s mountains were always shrouded in cloud, even on the sunniest of days, and that night the sky was murky and unsettled. As we drove, I was hearing the Crosby, Stills and Nash song Southern Cross over and over in my head. 

When you see the Southern Cross for the first time
You understand now why you came this way.
'Cause the truth you might be runnin' from is so small.
But it's as big as the promise - The promise of a comin' day.

When we pulled off the main highway beyond the town of Paea, the roads seemed deserted. Roadside businesses were shuttered and dark. We turned off randomly onto a quiet side road up a valley till the mountains rose on either side of us, almost invisible in the night, and just as I began to feel nervous and too far from civilization, we realized there were houses behind the walls that ran all the way down the dirt road. We could see through gateways into yards with lights on and dogs lying on the steps. A girl walked in her yard next to our car, talking quietly into her cell phone and paying us no attention at all, and we began to hear the sounds of a merry group of people socializing on someone=s patio beyond the houses closest to us.

Despite the houses it was dark enough to see the sky. The grey clouds shifted and crossed over each other against the blackness, giving only glimpses of the new crescent moon lolling on its back. That was my first disappointment. We were only on the island for 9 days and the Tahitian moon would not be full until after we’d boarded our plane back to L.A. We were anxious about having enough gas in the car to make it back to Papeete and found it hard to focus on what we’d come out to see. Craning our necks impatiently we waited again for the clouds to clear like curtains, parting just long enough to show a swathe of indistinguishable stars before rolling back in again. I tried looking in a different direction and just for a moment the sky cleared just long enough for me to catch sight of Orion standing on his head, with its brightest star – Betelgeuse – on the low right instead of the high left.

But still no Southern Cross. It was getting late and we had a lot of ground to cover the next day so we reluctantly got back in the car and headed back to the main road.

I had so wanted to feel the exoticism of being thousands of miles from home, on the island I'd  been immersed in reading about for years. There had already been many frustrations – my difficulties with speaking and understanding French, the intense heat and humidity, the extraordinarily high prices. I felt out of my depth, foolish and presumptuous for thinking I could write the story of people for whom this place was in their blood. Discouraged, I leaned close to the open window as our little rented Kia sped along the well-lit highway back to Papeete. 

But as we passed the edge of the town of Punaauia, a glorious cloud of fragrance engulfed the car and I saw that the high walls next to the road were covered with a vast flowering mass of gardenia and night-scented jasmine.

And suddenly it didn’t matter that I hadn’t seen the Southern Cross. I was breathing in the same sweet fragrance that had entranced Pierre Loti 150 years before as he sat under the “a star-sown” Tahitian sky among the very people whose story I had been called to tell.

Some Enchanted Land of Dreams

“Dawn, Full Moon Setting” Zane Grey Camp, Vairao, Tahiti, 1931

William Alister MacDonald (1860-1956)

 

So many writers have fallen in love with Tahiti over the years. The writer, Zane Grey, best known for his adventure novels about the American West including Riders of the Purple Sage, was no exception. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Grey made several long trips to Tahiti in pursuit of his passion for deep-sea fishing. Being one of the first millionaire bestselling writers, he could afford both the time and the money needed to indulge in the sport. For his long stays in Tahiti, he built a permanent fishing camp on Flower Point at Vairao on the south-west coast.   

“It certainly was a beautiful site. Captain Mitchell had cleared off a bluff, except for the large palms, breadfruit, and other trees, and had put up a number of bungalows, four on top of the bluff and as many more below, including a bamboo-and-palm dining house and kitchen.... As I write here at night the sea crashes on the cliff below, and above that sound comes the boom and thunder of the outer reef. Huge moths as large as bats fly against my screens, attracted by the lights, and slim, croaking lizards dart around over the wire to try to catch them. ... The fragrance of frangipani – than which there is no sweeter on earth – floats through doors and windows. And when I step out on the porch to gaze down upon the lagoon under a full moon, and out to the broken silver line of surf, and across the bay to the grand, black range, crowned by white clouds, I am not sure that it is real, that I am not in some enchanted land of dreams.”

Grey and his crew spent months fishing the waters off Tahiti searching for the massive billfish - swordfish, sailfish, spearfish, sharks, and above all the Pacific blue marlin - that cruise along the edge of the continental shelf on the trail of large schools of  bonito and tuna. He had only partial success in fishing terms, but he fell under the spell of the South Pacific and Tahiti in particular. In his book Tales of Tahitian Waters, he wrote lyrically about the island and the ever-changing, unpredictable sea that surrounds it. Here he describes a storm that suddenly erupted in the midst of “the most perfect day to fish.”

“The grand Pacific was gently heaving, in slow endless swells, and the water was dark purple toward the island – which was hidden in a vast gray pall – and toward the west a shimmering silver. Storms were all about us, except the central west, where some sky showed pale blue. A thunderhead mass of cloud, black as ink, whorled and columnar, with a funnel-shape dragging, occasioned us alarm. But it passed on out to sea. Other storm centers let down lines of wavering rain that trailed along. All the grays and blacks prevailed. As we ran on in toward where the island ought to be, these conditions of light and shade and storm were magnified, until I seemed on neither land nor sea, but in some region of magnificent dark lowering light.  We entered the zone of rainstorm where a soft, seething, silky roar of raindrops fell, gray as steel, and sweetly fresh to the face and hands.  We ran out of the storm, and there loomed Tahiti, vast and black and splendid, a mountain range of sharp lines, peaks, ridges, with not a curve in sight, and not a bare spot of earth or rock. All verdant green, dark in the absence of sunlight.” 

Zane Grey contemplating the jetty at Flower Point

Zane Grey was much too absorbed in his fishing and too averse to Papeete to mix very much in Tahitian social circles, but he did have one brief interaction with a member of the Salmon family. This was Ina Salmon, granddaughter of Tati. Born in 1898, Ina was the eldest child of Tati’s middle son Tauraa, who at 14 years old had lost his forearm in an accident at his father’s sugar mill though this did not prevent him from becoming a hard-working plantation farmer. When Ina was 15, her father sent her to school in Minneapolis to learn English under the guardianship of the famous University of Minnesota botanist, Josephine Tilden, who had come to know the family when living in Tahiti for several months collecting Pacific algae. By the time Ina returned to Tahiti, her father and grandfather had both fallen victim to the Spanish flu, dying on exactly the same day in December 1918. In September 1920, we catch a glimpse of Ina at a traditional Tahitian picnic described by the artist George Biddle with her cousins Princess Takau (daughter of ex-Queen Marau) and Poma Salmon. This was around the time when she was described by one painter, Robert Lee Eskridge, as looking like Helen of Troy. By 1928, aged 30, she was engaged to be married, and Zane Grey put his boat The Fisherman at her disposal. 

“There was an Englishman and Princess Ina, a Polynesian of high degree as well of fame, and these two were going to be married by my skipper, Captain Tobin. They could not be married ashore, because there is a French law that prohibits marriage for foreigners within the three-mile limit. So I lent them my yacht. They were terribly seasick, but had the knot tied securely, which was the main thing for them.”  

Grey wrote his only non-American novel, The Reef Girl, about the prejudice of westerners against the Polynesians, which he saw as a parallel to the way the white man had treated the Native Americans back at home. The novel was considered so racy that it wasn’t published until 1978, nearly 40 years after Grey’s death. It’s intriguing to speculate whether, in creating the ravishing half-native girl Faaone with whom the writer hero falls in passionately in love, Grey was thinking of the lovely young Ina Salmon. 

Long Way to Tipperary

The damage inflicted by the German Navy on the commercial district of Papeete, September 22nd, 1914

For much of 2013, I was absorbed in reading books about or set in the First World War. Most recently I read “Life Class” by Pat Barker and “The Home Front” by Sylvia Pankhurst and dipped into “Testament of Youth” by Vera Brittain, which made me cry as much as the first several times I read it. All this reading has been for the purposes of Albion’s Millennium to help me keep my facts straight about life on the home front - about convalescent hospitals, munitions factories, and Zeppelin raids. 

We tend to remember World War I as a European conflict, but across the other side of the world in Tahiti, the war was just as present and vivid and the national enmities just as strong. Tahiti as a French colony was automatically a combatant in the European conflict.

The biggest event of the war on Tahitian soil took place only weeks after war was declared. On the morning of September 22^nd 1914, two warships hove into view beyond the reef at Papeete. The cruisers – large and grey and menacing – flew no identifying flags. A big crowd gathered on the shore to watch the ships including the Governor and the Bishop of Papeete. Ex-Queen Marau was there with her daughters as was her brother 64-year-old Tati Salmon.

Tati Salmon

Rumors and counter-rumors ran rife among the crowd. Were they German ships? What were their intentions? A bugle began to be played at the barracks to sound the call to arms, and the local defense troops hurried to man the town’s defenses. People started running along the streets, carrying bundles, getting ready to flee up into the mountains behind the town. Even the Governor’s wife was seen getting into an official car with her belongings. 

Suddenly without any warning the cruisers began firing 8½ inch shells over the heads of the spectators on the shore. At first the guns were aiming at a small fort in the hills, but many shells fell in the heart of the town. Fires were soon raging throughout the commercial quarter where the buildings, nearly all made of wood, burned quickly. Clouds of black smoke also came from the 2,000 tons of coal stored at the naval dockyard, which the local commander had ordered to be set alight so it couldn’t be seized by the Germans.

Marau rushed back to her house. Her relatives urged her to join the exodus inland, but she was loath to leave town because her 25-year-old son Ernest Salmon was one of the defenders. 

Ex-Queen Marau of Tahiti

“I packed my papers and most precious possessions in the trunks, which were always held ready in case of cyclones without, however, being able to decide to go and leave my son behind. His post was at the battery of Mount Faiere, which the Germans were peppering with shells. None however had exploded because they were falling onto clay ground. My sister, Manihinihi, my daughter, Terii, and other members of my family whom I was urging to go and shelter somewhere out of the town, declared that they would not go without me. Realizing that I did not have the right to put them at risk and that my presence could not in any way protect my son, I decided to go in the car belonging to one of my nephews which took me to the bottom of a valley a short distance away from Papeete.”   

Princess Takau Pomare

Before they left, Marau’s younger daughter Takau ran through the town to fetch Ernest’s wife Josephine who was eight months pregnant with her first child. The two women had just left Josephine’s house when it was hit by a shell and burst into flames. After delivering Josephine to Marau, Takau insisted the car leave without her while she ran back to her mother’s house to rescue her little dog whom she found hiding terrified under a sofa. With shells flying perilously all around, she and the dog managed to find a place in another car full of people heading inland. 

Tati watched the whole barrage from under a tree in front of the American Embassy. He wrote in a letter to Henry Adams, “I think it was the flag, the stars and stripes at the top of the flagpole, which saved the houses behind it [including] Marau’s house (our old one) and... the old palace.” The German ships fired more than a hundred shells at the city in total. After over an hour of constant firing, the guns suddenly ceased and, under cover of a sudden squall of rain, the warships sailed away to the north. By this time, two onlookers had been killed, and all of the buildings up to the Catholic cathedral had been destroyed by the fire, including Papeete’s famous Municipal Market, a total of £150,000 worth of damage.

Meanwhile, up in the mountains, members of the Teva clan erected a native shelter for ex-Queen Marau and her family, and her sister Manihinihi was able to supply food and other necessities from her own house which was nearby. The women saw the cruisers withdraw but feared they might make a landing at another part of the island. It would be three days before the commander of the local defenses sent word to the women that it was safe to return to town. The excitement had been too much for Josephine Salmon. Two days after returning to Papeete, she gave birth one month early to Marau’s grand-daughter, Monique. 

Lieutenant George Darsie Jnr

Since the end of the civil war in 1847, peace had reigned on Tahiti, so the bombardment was a rude awakening, bringing home the grim reality that this would truly be a global war. While there was to be no fighting on Tahitian soil, a total of 1,057 young men from Tahiti and nearby islands sailed to Europe to serve in the French army. The Battalion Mixte du Pacifique (BMP) played a key role in the capture of three strategic towns from the Germans in the second Battle of the Marne and received a citation for valor. Queen Marau’s son Ernest was one of the Tahitian poilus as was Norman Brander’s son Jock. Both survived the war, but 17 other men from the Salmon/Teva clan were not so lucky. Another member of the family ‒ George Darsie, one of Titaua’s two sons with her second husband ‒ also served, in this case in the British Army in the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry. He was fatally wounded in July 1918 at the second Battle of the Marne – the same battle in which his cousins from the far South Pacific played such a vital part.