Amnesia
The Southern Sea
‘Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made
for man- who has no gills.’
Ambrose Bierce
It lives in the hole where the moon used to be. And for most of the worst part of the northern winter, over the last two decades, so have we.
I started off to write an idyll, but that didn’t work out. Robyn and I remembered only the Southern Sea bliss that filled our nets, oblivious to the centuries of salt water that had run through them without sticking, like the lesson of the patriarchal fish.
‘There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to
meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and
says “Morning, boys. How's the water?” And the two young fish swim
on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other
and goes “What the hell is water?”’
Memory travels in the opposite direction of the water that got us here, and the water that got us here was less than utopian. The Pacific hadn’t been very pacific at all. Instead of Rascals in Paradise among the Happy Isles of Oceania, I found myself shipwrecked on a catalogue of crime and calamity.
The Stories of the Southern Sea are the stories of migrations, traders and whalers, headhunters and cannibals, blackbirders and pirates, beach bums, and of misfits and missionaries and mercenaries. The primus inter pares of misfit missionary mercenaries was its European discoverer. Vasco Núñez de Balboa was a bankrupt Hispaniolan planter and pig farmer, who stowed away in a barrel with his dog, Leoncico, on Fernández de Enciso’s expedition to what would eventually become Cartegena, in what would eventually become Colombia. Balboa was discovered, and spared long enough, to suggest that the settlement be moved to found the new colony of Santa María la Antigua del Darién. He went on, through ambition and subterfuge, to become the governor of Veragua, and was known for, among other things, his intolerance of homosexuality. Balboa had fifty native men torn apart by his fighting dogs.
‘The Great Nations of Europe had gathered on the shore
they'd conquered what was behind them and now they wanted more
so they looked to the mighty ocean and took to the Western sea
The great nations of Europe in the 16th century
Hide your wives and daughters, hide the groceries too
The great nations of Europe comin' through...
Balboa found the Pacific and on the trail one day
he met some friendly Indians whom he was told were gay
So...
he had them torn apart by dogs on religious grounds they say
the great nations of Europe were quite holy in their way...’
Randy Newman, The Great Nations of Europe
A true conquistador, Balboa attacked some tribes and befriended others, explored rivers and mountains and miasmic swamps, searching for treasure and slaves, and enlarging his territory. He collected a fortune in gold, from the ornaments worn by the native women, but he wanted more.
In the lands of cacique Comagre, he heard of more. Comagre's eldest son, Panquiaco, angered by the Spaniards' avarice, knocked over the scales they used to measure gold. ‘If you are so hungry for gold that you leave your lands to cause strife in those of others, I shall show you a province where you can quell this hunger.’ He told Balboa of a kingdom to the south, where people were so rich that they ate and drank from gold plates and goblets, but that he would need at least a thousand men to defeat the tribes living inland and those on the coast of ‘the other sea.’
Balboa started his journey across the Isthmus of Panama on September 1, 1513, together with 190 Spaniards, a few native guides, and a pack of his dogs. For the next three weeks he would fight tribal battles and dense jungle. At noon on September 25th, he reached Pechito Parado, the summit of the mountain range along the Chucunaque River. Far away on the horizon he saw a shimmering and, four days later Balboa raised his hands, his sword in one and a standard with the image of the Virgin Mary in the other, walked knee-deep into it, and claimed possession of the new breakers and all adjoining lands, in the name of the Spanish sovereigns. He named the ocean Mar del Sur, the Southern Sea, since he had traveled south to reach it.
On January 19, 1514, Balboa arrived back in Santa María with a treasure in cotton goods, more than a thousand pounds of gold, and as much in pearls. Five years later, Balboa was arrested on trumped-up charges by another conquistador named Francisco Pizarro (but he’s another story). He was placed on trial by his father-in-law, Pedro Arias Dávila, and beheaded in a clumsy effort requiring three axe strokes, on January 15, 1519. A year after Balboa’s head went on display in Panama, Ferdinand Magellan renamed his Southern Sea the Pacific Ocean because of its calm waters. A year after that, a bamboo spear in the Philippines would discredit the choice of appellation. Balboa would have a lunar crater named after him; Magellan would have two. But the San Diego park named after Balboa would slowly evolve in flamboyant irony, to host the largest gay pride festival on the west coast of the New World.
The Southern Sea has been promising paradise and delivering dismemberment since Tahitian temptation gave Captain Sam Wallis and his Dolphin crew a full bare-breasted welcome in 1767. The overactive Western imagination mutinied and ran off with Rousseau’s pretty Noble Savages, until our gifts of whiskey and guns and venereal disease and Christianity caught up with the palm frond perfection in their blue lagoons. Melville and Stevenson and Somerset Maugham and Michener spun us the great yarns of this ocean. And now it’s my turn, to spin you a tapestry of tales.
Two hundred years after Pandora’s box discharged its tortured contents into the Pacific, the frangipanis that once adorned their ears have morphed into mobile phones. Tattoos have become tacky. Dancing is done in the clubs, rather than with them.
The romance of the Southern Sea runs as deep as its trenches, but after years away from and behind it, an old man’s subtropical mind can become torpid. We develop an amnesia of the alluring, in the same way and for the same reason that untold numbers of us travelled to the Pacific in the first place- to forget.
This is what I still remember of the islands, now so far in space and time. It is not a travelogue or a travel guide. It is in no way exhaustive or complete. I haven’t been to all the islands, not even some of the bigger ones you’d think I should have visited. You won’t find any stories of Hawaii or New Guinea or the Marquesas. I haven’t so much written you an inventory, as a book of saline psalms. This is water.
It is what it is.
“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time.”
Steven Wright
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