Luxury Link 11

Where we were going was under an immense waterfall, and Matavai Bay where it all began, and the Fare Suisse, to spend the last night, before our redeye flight Out of Eden to Easter Island. And in the late twilight of my last few hours in Tahiti, I reflected on the luxury link to paradise that we had double-clicked on. Had Dr. Hamilton been right? Before the colliding colonial creeds and commerce and casks and contagion and cast iron and cannons, had Tahiti really been the New Cytherea? Or was it a hopeful alternative to the Seven Year’s War, a disastrous conflagration that both the English and French were looking for a way out of?
If Tahiti had been paradise, the Europeans would soon change that forever, almost immediately, according to the musings of Cook.

  ‘I have reason to think that we had brought venereal disease along with
   us which gave me no small uneasiness and did all in my power to
   prevent its progress, but all I could do was to little purpose for I may
   safely say that I was not assisted by any one person in ye Ship, was
   oblige’d to have the most part of the Ships Compney a Shore every day
   to work upon the Fort and a Strong guard every night and the Women
   were so very liberal with their favours, or else Nails, Shirts &c were
   temptations that they could not withstand, that this distemper very
   soon spread it self over the greater part of the Ships Compney...’

It didn’t take long for the whalers, the merchants from the Australian penal colonies (bringing arms and alcohol and prostitution), the Methodist and Baptist and Calvinist and Wesleyan and Presbyterian missionaries, ultimately replaced by the Catholics, to bring the apple to Adam and Eve.
And then, there came the French, who simply shrug, when confronted with the odiousness of their oppression. The République got rid of its own monarchy, and did the same for the Tahitians. But, as Montesquieu had insightfully observed, luxury ruins republics, and poverty ruins monarchies. And the French had brought both ruinations, and worse, to paradise.
The worst endowment, without question, was radioactive. From 1960 to 1996, France detonated 193 nuclear bombs in the Society Islands. The one that exploded 17 July 1974 exposed Tahiti to 500 times the maximum accepted level of radiation exposure, showering the island with plutonium for two whole days. Thyroid cancers and leukemia spiked all over French Polynesia. Observers stationed 15 miles away, in shorts and T-shirts without so much a pair of sunglasses, were told to ‘look the other way’ when the ‘test’ occurred, and then sent into the mushroom cloud to inspect the damage. Only 11 people have received reparations.
Tahiti was hit 36 more times by plutonium 239 fallout, and isotope so toxic that it has to be contained for 240,000 years before it can reenter the wider environment. Almost half the New Zealanders on observer ships have died of cancer-related deaths, as well as one photographer, blown up by French secret agents in Auckland Harbor in 1985, who had entered the country with the intention of sinking the Rainbow Warrior, leaving to protest the next planned detonation at Mururoa atoll. The agents were released. And French President Jacques Chirac, resumed nuclear explosions in the South Pacific, after being elected in 1995.
The French also brought hypocrisy. The dogs that the Tahitians had as pets and food, now stand guard against their old masters as fierce chiens méchants. The French girls cavort around naked, while the Tahitian vahines have to dress more modestly. And the Heiva Tahiti festival ‘celebration,’ the day the French forced Queen Pomare IV to abdicate, is held on Bastille Day.
Paul Theroux, despite his surname, hadn’t thought much of the French, referring to them as ‘the most self-serving, manipulative, trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical, and corrupting nations on the face of the earth.’
I asked the Tahitian sitting next to me on our Lan Chile redeye, how he felt about his paradise.
“The French have taken our freedom, the Japanese have taken our fish, and the Americans have taken our Happy Hours.”



   “The land is like our mother. People come from the land. We must
    always respect our mother, not explode bombs in her belly.”      
                                                                              Jacques Ihorai