Hallowe'en, 1963

President John F. Kennedy with his children
Caroline (l) and John (r) in the Oval Office
of The White House on October 31, 1963

Apocalypse Now



The 1938 New England hurricane

I know I harp on a lot about weather in this blog, but where I live, not far inland from the Eastern Seaboard of the Atlantic coast of the United States, it’s a constant looming presence in everyone’s life. Washington D.C. is still recovering from the freak derecho storm that knocked out power across a huge swathe of the Midatlantic earlier this year. The area was rendered post-apocalyptic for several days – no gas stations, no cell phone or internet coverage, no emergency 911 service, and – of course – no means of escape from the 105 degree heat.

Now, a mere four months later to the day, we’re awaiting the arrival of what we’re told will be the most destructive storm of the century, Hurricane Sandy. The region has been under the most stringent of weather alerts for several days and the storm is due to hit us with its full force tomorrow (Monday) night and throughout most of Tuesday. Schools are closed, thousands of flights cancelled, stocks of bread, water, batteries and flashlights are depleted – we’ve even been warned to have plenty of cash on hand in case the ATMs are knocked out. It sounds like the derecho was just a rehearsal for Armageddon.   

But these are all tedious adult concerns. Our neighborhood children are looking forward to the excitement of living by flashlight and having to wear all their clothes at once to stay warm. For them, this will be an adventure, pure and simple, something to look back on as a milestone of childhood.

This perspective was beautifully captured by Sylvia Plath in a 1962 essay called “Ocean 1212-W” that appears in her posthumous collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. In the essay, Plath wonderfully described the devastating New England hurricane of 1938 through the eyes of her childhood self:  

"The sulfurous afternoon went black unnaturally early, as if what was to come could not be star-lit, torch-lit, looked at. The rain set in, one huge Noah douche. Then the wind. The world had become a drum. Beaten, it shrieked and shook. Pale and elated in our beds, my brother and I sipped our nightly hot drink. We would, of course, not sleep. We crept to a blind and hefted it a notch. On a mirror of rivery black our faces wavered like moths, trying to pry their way in. Nothing could be seen. The only sound was a howl, jazzed up by the bangs, slams, groans and splinterings of objects tossed like crockery in a giants’ quarrel. The house rocked on its root. It rocked and rocked and rocked its two small watchers to sleep."

 

Isn’t that wonderful? I leave it with you until I re-emerge - après le déluge.


Postscript (Tuesday, October 30, 2012) - We in the Washington DC area emerged largely unscathed from this one. Sandy gave us a good battering but saved its worst for elsewhere. We feel for those in NYC, my home state of New Jersey, and all along the Atlantic seaboard who weren't so lucky.

Queen of the South

 

Queen Pomare IV of Tahiti by Charles Giraud

In May 1842, when Ariitaimai married her young Englishman, her beloved adopted sister Queen Pomare IV was at her side. It was a difficult time for the young Queen who was coming under great pressure from two directions – from the French to cede her country to their protection and from the resident British consul to resist those pressures.

The American author Hermann Melville who encountered the Queen at about that time:

“She wore a loose gown of blue silk, with two rich shawls, one red and the other yellow, tied about her neck. Her royal majesty was bare-footed. She was about the ordinary size, rather matronly; her features not very handsome; her mouth, voluptuous; but there was a care-worn expression in her face, probably attributable to her late misfortunes.  From her appearance, one would judge her about forty; but she is not so old.” 

In fact she was only 29, but she had already been Queen of Tahiti for 15 years.

When she came to the throne in 1827 after the deaths in quick succession of her father and young brother, she’d been only 14 - too young to assume the mantel of responsibility for her people. In those early days, young Aimata (her given name) was a wild child –  always surounded by a horde of drunken followers, swimming out with her ladies to ships in the lagoon to flirt with the sailors. In defiance of the English missionaries who had been a strong moral force on the island during the reign of her father, she sanctioned the traditional dances that the missionaries had banned, including one in which young girls would be untwirled from their long cloth wraps until they were dancing completely naked. (It is unlikely that Ariitaimai was present during these debauches because, being eight years younger than Aimata, she was still living among the children of the court.)
 

But gradually Aimata began to mature and settle. In 1833 the missionaries succeeded in enrolling her in a temperance society. The following year they reluctantly agreed to allow her to divorce the husband to whom she’d been married at the age of only 9 and marry Ariifaite, a handsome young chief from a neighboring island. In 1833, both Pomare and her new consort asked to join the Church as communicants, and from then on the Queen was a faithful and devout believer for the rest of her long reign.  

Her second marriage was to be a success, but the early days could be turbulent. In his book Omoo, Melville gleefully recounted tales that he’d been told that dated back to that time:

“Six or seven years ago...the town was thrown into the greatest commotion by a conjugal assault and battery, made upon the sacred person of Pomare by her intoxicated Tanee [consort].” Ariifaite, who had been “dismissed contemptuously” from his wife’s presence, had been drinking and, egged on by his companions, he decided he’d had enough.

“Near the outskirts of the town, a cavalcade of women came cantering toward him in the center of which was the object of his fury. Smiting his beast right and left, he dashed in among them; completely overturning one of the party, leaving her on the field, and dispersing everybody else except Pomare.  Backing her horse dexterously, the incensed queen heaped upon him every scandalous epithet she could think of; until, at last, the enraged Tanee leaped out of his saddle, caught Pomare by her dress, and dragging her down to the earth, struck her repeatedly in the face, holding on meanwhile by the hair of her head. He was proceeding to strangle her on the spot, when the cries of the frightened attendants brought a crowd of natives to the rescue who bore the nearly insensible queen away.”

Before one can feel too sorry for the queen, Melville describes another occasion on which Pomare was “giving audience to a deputation from the captains of the vessels lying in Papeete, he [Ariifaite] ventured to make a suggestion which was very displeasing to her. She turned around, and, boxing his ears, told him to go over to his beggarly island....if he wanted to give himself airs.” 

This was the Wars of the Roses Tahitian-style. Fortunately, both parties mellowed as the years went on and Ariifaite became the most loyal of husbands, though he still had a tendency to indulge in intoxicating spirits rather more often than was good for him.
    

After several years of struggle, the French took over Tahiti as a “protectorate” and thereafter there was peace on the island for the rest of the Queen’s 50-year reign. Under her sister Ariitaimai’s influence, Pomare became more devout as she grew older. She had to endure much sadness over the years – the early deaths of two of her sons and the alcoholism of two others, one of whom became a violent madman, not to mention the death of her beloved 6-year-old granddaughter, Maona, of tuberculosis.

In 1872, the French writer Pierre Loti described Pomare “in the massive ugliness of her old age” but with a “bright frank smile” and a motherly warmth. When she died of a heart attack in 1877, Ariitaimai walked at the head of the cortege and the representatives from all the clans of the island gathered en masse behind their funereal drums in a procession that stretched for almost four miles. The Queen’s coffin lay on a gun carriage that was pulled by 30 sturdy Tahitians. An observer noted, ”The sea breaking on the reef provided a muted accompaniment to the wailing of an entire people.”  

Queen Pomare IV in 1869

After the death of Queen Pomare IV, she was succeeded – after a few days of negotiation and consultation – by her dissolute eldest son, who from then on was known as King Pomare V. In return, the new King had to promise the Tahitian Legislative Assembly and the French governor that he would reconcile with his 17-year-old wife Marau Salmon who had fled home to her mother when she discovered the full extent of her husband’s dissipation. The consequence of this rapprochement was that the granddaughter of a penniless London Jew became the last Queen of Tahiti.  

Showing the Way

Tati Salmon in later life

The world is divided between those who believe in an afterlife and those who don’t. And even those who are believers are divided about whether the dead reach out to us from beyond the grave. I used to be a skeptic on that point but I am no longer. The older I get, the more I recognize those signs when I see them. Here’s an example…

When my husband Mike and I were in Tahiti in December 2007, I was very eager to find the site of the Salmons’ famous house in their ancestral village of Papara. The house itself had been swept away in a flood in 1926, complete with its priceless contents – artifacts dating back to ancient Tahiti as well as many family letters and other important papers. The thought of those lost letters is enough to make a biographer turn pale.

I had gathered some clues about the house’s location from the many accounts written by visitors to the house in the 19^th and early 20^th century. The fullest descriptions were left by the American painter John La Farge and the American historian Henry Adams on their world tour in 1891. During their four-month stay in Tahiti, they came to know and love 38-year-old Tati Salmon, the genial oldest son of the family, a man whom Henry Adams described as being big and handsome with “an overflow of life.” Ever hospitable, Tati twice hosted the two Americans at the Papara house, with its wooden frame covered with lime and with a roof of thatched pandanus leaves and shady verandahs on the front and back.

Here’s how the visitors described the house’s location: “The house stands flat on the seashore… a sea that came close up to the grass, and had three lines of surf rolling in through an opening in the reef, and rolling close up till they sent small waves into the entrance of the little river that flows close by the house” (Adams). “The little river runs rapidly a few yards off, hidden in part by trees; at which women go down to wash, and which men and boys cross to bathe, and in which splash the horses when they are washed in the morning. It is all delightfully rustic” (La Farge).  

La Farge also wrote this lovely description of the local children swimming in the river. “I looked this morning at the children playing in the water of the little river, or in the surf that rolls into it or along the shore… It was a pretty sight, the brown limbs and bodies all red in the sun and wet, coming out of the blue and white water like red flowers.”

But neither man divulged the name of the river. Tahiti has many rivers (there are at least four in Papara alone), and each one can have several different names. So it was going to be tall order for us to find the exact site of the Salmon house.

Mike and I arrived in Papara and quickly found the church and the chapel where manyof the Salmons are buried. At the town hall, we were lucky enough to meet a great-great granddaughter of Tati Salmon, but because my French was bad and her English non-existent, I could not find out if she knew where her ancestors’ house in Papara used to stand. So we said our au revoirs and headed back to the rental car. I decided we’d better continue on our way round the island as we still had a lot more ground to cover that day. So Mike pointed the car southwards and I sat beside him, nursing my disappointment.

But as we left the outskirts of the town and passed over a small bridge over the Taharuu River, I happened to glance to my right and to my astonishment saw the very scene La Farge had described 116 years earlier. Sun-splashed children were frolicking in the river’s mouth where it opened out into the lagoon.  

 



“Stop the car,” I yelled. Startled, Mike pulled over. I leapt out of the car and ran back along the bridge, and headed down a dirt track in the direction of the sea. For a second my attention was diverted by a pair of puppies shambling through the mud. But as I paused to watch them, wondering if I was trespassing on private property, I felt a pressure at my back pushing me forward. I swear it felt like exactly a pair of hands in the small of my back pressing me on, keeping me on track. I could almost lean back against the force of it. Propelled by the invisible hands, I kept going all the way down the dirt track to the very edge of a wide black sand beach where a deserted sandwich bar looked out over the bay.
 
It wasn’t a very prepossessing building, but this was the view it commanded (see photo below). It was the very view described by Henry Adams as he sat on the Salmons’ verandah and looked up at “velvet-green mountains, streaked by long white threads of waterfalls.”  

Almost five years later, I still have no absolute definitive proof that the Salmon house was located on the banks of the Taharuu River, though I have accumulated a few more bits of evidence that suggest as much. But for myself, I have no doubts at all that on that day in December 2007 Tati Salmon gently but firmly steered me to the spot he loved better than anywhere else in the world.

The Golden Loads of Autumn

Two poems on the bounty of Fall by the English poets William Blake (1757-1827) and John Keats (1795-1821)

  

To Autumn    William Blake   (Written in 1783)

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stain'd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

 
The spirits of the air live in the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat,
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

 

To Autumn     John Keats    (Written in 1820)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

The Great World Beyond

Arrival of the steamship Marama at Papeete, 1915

“In Tahiti the sea was very near and meant much. One felt towards it as must the mountaineer who lives in the shadow of the Matterhorn. It was always part of one’s thoughts, for all men and things came and went by it,
and the great world lay beyond it.”

Frederick O’Brien “Mystic Isles of the South Seas.” 1921

It is almost impossible for us in the 21^st century to imagine the utter isolation of a South Sea island a century or more ago. Until a telegraph station was established in Papeete at the start of World War I, Tahiti’s only contact with the rest of the world was by sea. There were no planes, no phones, no Skype, no emails, no cable, no wireless. All communication with the outside world came and went by ship – the monthly mail steamer from San Francisco and Wellington or passing naval ships, commercial schooners, or private yachts.

So the arrival of a ship of any kind was a huge event in Tahiti. The whole population of Papeete would flock to the quay, and the girls wore their best peignoirs and put on shoes and stockings to greet the new arrivals. Foreign visitors and returning locals alike were cheered and garlanded as they came down the gangplank. And as the crowd gradually dispersed from the quay, many hurried to the Post Office to await the opening of the great sacks of mail that the ship had carried to Tahiti from across the seas.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that the most important job on the island was that of the keeper of the semaphore.

On a hill a few hundred feet behind the town there was a small house surrounded by flowers and fruit trees. From this viewpoint could be seen the tops of the masts of the ships in the harbour, the gray and red roofs of houses masked by the foliage below, the red spire of the Catholic Cathedral, and further out beyond the reef miles of the Pacific Ocean to the horizon.

View of Papeete harbor and the reef from the semaphore station, 1906

This house was known as the semaphore station. Whenever the keeper of the semaphore, often a retired sailor, spied a ship on the horizon, he would hoist various objects on the tall white pole to let the townsfolk know that a ship was approaching and from which direction. As the vessel came closer, he would hoist other objects to indicate its type (for example, a great white ball for the mail steamers and other symbols for men-of-war, barks, and schooners) and a flag to inform the population of its nationality. All stores and clubs and most private houses on the island had a copy of a guidebook that interpreted these elaborate signals.  

The information conveyed by the semaphore was crucial to every person in the town for the ships that came to Tahiti carried letters from loved ones and money from business partners and all kinds of exotic goods from as far away as London and Paris. The sea was the island’s one and only lifeline, and the semaphore keeper was its messenger, the first herald of the arrival of tidings from the other side of the ocean.

Across the Great Divide

Art Malik as Hari Kumar, Susan Wooldridge as Daphne Manners,

and Tim Pigott-Smith as Ronald Merrick

Granada TV, 1984

 

I have recently finished reading The Jewel in the Crown quartet of novels by Paul Scott, which was turned into a magnificent television series in the 1980s by Granada TV. The books are a powerful portrait of the Brits in India becoming ever more British even as their white-knuckled hold on the sub-continent is slowly weakened by war and inevitability.

The core story is set in 1942 in the fictional Indian city of Mayapore and involves a relationship between an English girl, Daphne, and an Anglo-Indian boy, Hari. Daphne is also courted by the local police inspector, Ronald Merrick, whose unassailable belief in the superiority of the white race runs like a toxic stream through the whole story. One evening he tries to warn Daphne about Hari and she gets indignant.

I said... I personally didn’t care what colour people were, and it was obviously only Hari’s colour, the fact he was an Indian that got people’s goat. Ronald said, “That’s the oldest trick in the game, to say colour doesn’t matter. It does matter. It’s basic. It matters like hell.” I started getting out of the car. He tried to stop me, and took my hand. He said, “I’ve put it badly. I can’t help it. The whole idea revolts me.”

This was a reminder to me of how long the fear of miscegenation continued in Western society. Obviously segregation continued in the US South until the 1960s, but I had imagined the British as having moved beyond that earlier. But while black GIs were being welcomed in Great Britain during the World War II, at the same time in India many Brits continued to treat Indians – even those who were their social and intellectual equals – as literally untouchable.

This fear of contact between the races was also at play in the Pacific theater during the war years if James Michener is to be believed. His stories were the basis for the musical South Pacific in which good old Nellie Forbush from Little Rock, Arkansas loves the French settler Emile de Becque but rejects his marriage proposal because he’d had a relationship with a Polynesian woman. According to the beliefs with which she’d been raised, this had tainted him and had put him beyond the pale (as it were) as a potential husband. Rodgers and Hammerstein included in the musical a song called You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught that addressed this learned racism.

You've got to be taught
To be Afraid
Of people whose eyes
Are oddly made
And people whose skin
Is a different shade
You've got to be carefully taught.

When the show was on tour in the Deep South in the early 1950s, some Georgia legislators reacted by introducing a censorship bill. One of them claimed that “a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life.”

Yet this was an entire century after Alexander Salmon, a white Englishman, fell in love with and married a pure-bred Tahitian woman without a qualm. It made me realize anew just how remarkable that marriage was in its era. Of course Alexander understood discrimination very well himself, having been raised a Jew in London in the years when Charles Dickens was writing the grotesque character of Fagin in Oliver Twist. And he had to take some abuse in Tahiti from visiting Brits like Captain Henry Byam Martin, commander of the HMS Grampus, who called Salmon “a low swindling bankrupt Jew.”

John Brander too was familiar with discrimination because of his illegitimate origins, yet both he and Salmon were both proud to be seen strolling arm in arm with their Polynesian wives not only in Papeete but even in Sydney, San Francisco, and Paris. There were many ways in which these men were remarkable, but this absence of what we would now call racism was one of the most striking. As Paul Scott showed so well in The Jewel in the Crown, even 100 years later the same could not be said of many of their fellow countrymen living in the far flung corners of the world.