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the island Mallicullo, and it is generally understood that this was a play on the French expression mal a cul, which translates as “pain in the ass.” I found this a little fanciful, a little out of character for Captain Cook, who is widely regarded as having been particularly humane and tolerant in his relations with people in the South Pacific. It seemed unlikely that he would name an island in a fit of petulance, but after reading his notes on Malekula, I wasn’t so sure. “The people of this country are in general the most Ugly and ill-proportioned of any I ever saw,” he wrote. “They are almost black or rather a dark Chocolate Colour, Slenderly made, not tall, have Monkey faces and wooly hair…We saw but few Women and they were fully as disagreeable as the Men.”

Sadly, the Malekulans did not write, so we do not have any notes that could tell us what they thought of Captain Cook and his crew, who had spent the previous two years tightly confined in a rat-infested wooden ship, much of it spent in the tropics, without access to a shower or deodorant, and as they were Englishmen in an age before sunscreen, their skin must have been of particular interest to Malekulans. “These Creatures are the most Repellent beasts we have yet encountered,” one can imagine a Malekulan writing. “They have Red skin that flakes and sheds like a serpent, except for the parts that they cover, which is a Hideous white. Many are Furry like our swine and they exhibit a most Malodorous stench. They have no Females among them, and we take them for Sodomites, with an Unnatural appetite for Buggery.”

In the end, Cook did not stay long. Though he was in need of food and water, the Malekulans had made it clear that they really rather wished that he and his men would just mosey on and leave their island. Presumably, they thought Cook was a ghost, and who could blame them for wanting little to do with the Undead? As they left, Cook and his officers dined on a couple of fish they had caught, which caused them to be “seiz’d with Violent pains in the head and Limbs, so as to be unable to stand, together with a kind of Scorching heat all over the Skin.” Perhaps this was his pain-in-the-ass moment.

As I made my arrangements for Malekula, it occurred to me that if I had the choice, I would much rather sail to the island in a rat-infested wooden ship than fly Vanair. I do not like to fly. A 747 reduces me to sweaty palms and heart palpitations. A Twin Otter in a mountainous third-world country is basically a full-on cardiac event for me. Not long before, a Vanair Twin Otter had crashed into the ocean near Port Vila, downed by a violent squall. Though miraculously four people were able to swim to shore, eight died. A few years earlier, a Vanair Islander had slammed into a mountain on Aneityum. There were no survivors. That’s two planes lost by a four-plane airline. I wondered whether I should pack a defibrillator.

At the time, Sylvia was on a business trip to Bali. It’s rugged work, international development, but if someone was needed to attend a weeklong conference on coral reefs at a beachside resort in Indonesia, Sylvia was willing to do it. With a week to myself, I had decided to spend it in a hut on a malarial island far away from the resorts on Efate. But as I caught a minibus to the airport I began to regret Sylvia’s absence immensely. No man likes to be reduced to a quivering, sobbing wreck in front of his wife, and in the past, whenever we had flown on small planes together, it was that fact alone, I felt, which had prevented the onslaught of panic. I had some dim hopes that I would be flying the ATR, a forty-five-passenger prop plane, the largest in the Vanair fleet, but I knew that those hopes were misplaced. The ATR required a proper runway. Malekula didn’t have a proper runway. It had a clearing in the bush. And so I boarded a Twin Otter with about the same enthusiasm I’d feel if I were settling in for a root canal. To my mild surprise, I wasn’t the only Westerner aboard. There were two missionaries, a middle-aged couple from Australia. ELDA WOODRUFF,