Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [75]
The Rev. thus gave his most animated recount of the crucifixion yet, warning that those ‘who turn from God turn to Satan, trust themselves to flame and pain for all eternity’. The fearful sermon shook all but the king, who sat resolutely in his heathenism, steadily diminishing a pile of bananas that had been peeled by his wives. When the rev. called forth ‘those souls wishing to pledge themselves to the one true God’, the king stood, turned his back and returned to his hut.
Today not one of the congregation swore their allegiance to Jehovah.
25 July 1835
King Tanoa summoned the rev. and myself to his quarters, and confessed that he believed the God of the white man was probably true, and that our ships and guns were testament to His superior powers. But for such a leader as himself to ‘sleep beneath the fin of a white man like a whale calf would its mother’, is untenable. ‘It would be message to my subjects that I had rolled over and died at your feet.’
I did not speak, but I wanted to tell him that the moment Dutch explorer Abel Tasman sighted the shores of Vanua Levu and Tavenui, Fiji had been for ever changed. No longer were we hidden from the rest of the world. No longer did the sun rise in Tonga and set in Fiji.
I should have warned him that the harbours of England were crowded with warships, whole forests of masts swaying in the breeze, and that the word of a single man could dispatch a thousand cannons to our isles and sink it to the bottom of the Pacific.
27 July 1835
The rev. has been of a bitter mood in recent days, and I wonder if this is not only the refusal of King Tanoa to publicly convert, but that his cask of port is now as hollow as a drum. On discovering a young boy pilfering a pawpaw from the mission stores, the rev. pinched his ear and vigorously caned him with a switch of bamboo, as though beating this wretch could bring back his wine.
29 July 1835
Daybreak, the snow-white sails of the American whaler Josephine flared on the horizon. Half the village gathered on the shore, ready to trade hogs and fresh fruit for scraps of iron, blades and fish hooks. None clutched spears and clubs for this vessel, as it was the third time the whaler had called in as many months, with the previous bartering judged in favour of the Rewans.
Crewed by eight men, a helmsman and two officers – each with a pair of shiny pistols tucked into their belts – the pinnace had not even made the shore before the rev. splashed into the surf. He vigorously shook the officers’ hands, almost pulling their arms off, welcoming them on to the sand as though it were his threshold they were crossing.
The crew remained with the landing craft, while the rev., the two officers and myself, made our way to the fort. Officers Dillon and Craig were vigilant but collected, quite accustomed to the travails of the South Seas. With a practised deference, they paid their compliments to King Tanoa, and formally requested anchorage of his bay for the night, along with fresh water and food – which of course would be bartered for at an agreeable price.
King Tanoa, though not a veteran of trade, as the reputation of Bau and Rewa as a cannibal-inhabited port had steered ships clear for decades, possessed acumen enough to remark that the price of breadfruit and yams had risen due to a forthcoming wedding feast – his taking of another wife. Officer Dillon, a tall, pointy-featured man, who had stooped like a wading heron on entering the hut, asked if a present of two dozen muskets would be a fitting gift.
King Tanoa tried to shield his delight that fresh fruit and water would be traded for firepower, but his eyes betrayed his stony face, glinting as sharp as the shine on those polished pistols.
Stolen Car
He woke in a derelict signal house that waited for a train that no longer ran. There was no glass in the windows, no clouds in the sky. The world gleamed as though freshly painted, the sun low on its winter axis, the leafless trees like upturned roots. On a bed of wooden