Reece's Place 5

                            “Lily white man from across the sea,
                              I'll eat you, or you'll eat me...”
                                  Leonard Wibberley, A Feast of Freedom


Three hours from Nadi, down the only road on the island, three hours from Monoriki, where Tom Hanks and Wilson the Volleyball were filmed in Cast Away, was the history of real castaway, and the de facto capital of Oceania.
Robyn and I crossed over naked muscular sugarcane hills and the Sigatoka River, along the southern Queen’s Road mangroves, tidal mud beaches and fringing reef, the hotel glut of the Coral Coast, to the busy peninsular harbor of Suva.
Paul Theroux, who ‘needed happiness to write well,’ was less than charitable. (Suva) reminds me of an aunt of mine who drank too much, delightful, prone to stumble, clothes a little askew, and always a strap of her slip showing... the sort of place you could buy a screwdriver or teapot or roll of tape, but never a pair of shoes or clothes you liked. His description of the city as ‘seedy,’ may have sprouted from the fungus on his namba. We found it charming, an old colonial blend of Melanesian melatonin and missionary monotony. The sun radiated down on the steep steps of the South Seas Private Hotel. Robyn and I sat on the veranda, watching lawn bowls and a rugby game, in the green of Albert Park below us. It was my birthday, and the Fiji bitter wasn’t. We had just returned from the Fiji museum, in the Thurston botanical gardens. Implements of the country’s history were displayed in static cases behind glass, in a deliberate civilizing effort to sanitize the savagery, but you could still smell the air inside.
The story, like many in the Southern Sea, began with a real castaway, actually three shipwrecks and two castaways. In 1798, the first ship arrived in Port Jackson, Australia.

         ‘The Argo, an American schooner, arrived from the Isle of France,
           having on board a cargo of salt provisions, French brandy, and other
           articles on speculation; which, as usual in this country, found a ready
           sale, much more to the advantage of the owners than the colonists.’

Two years later, on her way from China back to Sydney, the Argo was wrecked on Bukatatanoa reef, east of Lakeba. Aside from the crew, which managed to reach Tonga before all but two were killed, the Argo left three surviving legacies, which changed the archipelago forever.
The first was a dysenteric epidemic that tore through Fiji’s virgin immune system. No one knows what ‘the wasting sickness,’ Na lila balavu, was (it may have been cholera), but it ravages devastated native communities so badly, the remnants were left to weak to bury their dead. It was accompanied by other gifts of civilization- measles, tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, and rum and muskets.
The two Argo survivors were rescued in 1802.
One of them, Oliver Slater, had spent the two years after the wreck near Bua Bay, where he discovered prodigious numbers of sandalwood trees. The news of this, on his arrival in China, led to an explosion of sandalwood exploitation on Vanua Levu. Four years after Slater’s rescue, a second ship’s disaster occurred, again in Tonga, on Lefooga, in the Ha’apai Group. The crew of the tall privateer warship Port au Prince, almost 500 tons, armed with 24 long nine and twelve pounders and 8 twelve pound carronades, were massacred, and the ship burnt to the waterline. There was but one survivor, Charlie Savage, who was to become ‘the most notorious beachcomber in the South Seas.’ His luck didn’t change much, when he was rescued a year later by the third ship, the Eliza, a 135 ton American sandalwood trading brig out of Providence, Rhode Island, on its way from Sydney to Fiji. In June of 1808, it was wrecked on Mocea reef, off Nairai Island. Savage was equal to the promise his surname. Fluent in Tongan and Fijian, and violent to the point that even large Fijian warriors were wary of him, Charlie salvage a large number of muskets from the wreckage of the Eliza, demonstrated their potential to the great Vunivalu Bau Island chieftain, Ratu Naulivou, and with the powerful combination of circumstance, personality, and technology, launched the terrible carnage of the Fijian Wars. Lacking any of the cultural inhibitions of the Bauian leaders (like not immediately attacking enemy chieftains at the beginning of battle), he brought a lethality never seen before in the islands. His ‘victims were so numerous that the townspeople piled up the bodies and sheltered behind them; and the stream beside the village ran red.’ Charlie took credit for the victories, and numerous wives and a share in the sandalwood trade, in more physical remuneration. Drawn by tales of wealth, unscrupulous seamen from other ships loading sandalwood, deserted or obtained discharge, bought muskets and ammunition, and joined Charlie’s growing band of mercenaries at Bau. Within two of three years there were twenty reckless, cruel, pampered profligates, living the morality of the poultry yard.
But Charlie Savage only lasted five more years. In 1813, he briefly joined Captain Robson’s Calcutta sandalwood trading ship, Hunter, and went ashore on Wailea, to destroy a number of local canoes. They walked into an ambush. According to the account of the third mate, Peter Dillon, several thousand natives chased the crew up what was to become known as Dillon’s Rock, and laid siege. Charlie suggested they break and run, but was overruled by Dillon. Several Wailean chiefs climbed the hill, to offer friendship and peace, and Savage, ‘accompanied by a Chinaman,’ went down to parlay. When Dillon refused his instruction to come down, and another sailor tried to escape, the Wailea took out their frustrations on Charlie, drowning him in a well, and baking him with his companion, as ‘long pig’. His bones were later made into sail needles. When Olle Strandberg visited some of the smaller islands in 1950, he found local Fijians still singing traditional songs about their most famous castaway.

                          ‘Charlie Savage with the purple beard
                           Was eaten by men from Vilear.
                           His hands and his feet gave them strength.
                           His fat women were driven up into the hills,
                           Charlie Savage with the purple beard
                           Fed a hundred warriors with his flesh.’