RETURN TO THE SOUTH PACIFIC

My work as a naval officer in World War II enabled me to serve on 49 different South Pacific islands, so that I came to know the area about as well as anyone. Obviously, I grew to respect and love it, and my first writing dealt with the men and women who lived on its remote islands.

When peace came in 1945 and I returned home after a double tour of duty, I suspected that some lucky day I would go back to see how things were working out in a part of the world I had chosen for my own. And that’s what happened. On some half-dozen occasions I was able to revisit the scenes of battle, hitting such memorable spots as Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Manus and Rabaul. For several years I lived in Hawaii, and on four trips I made it back to the gorgeous isles: Tahiti and Bora Bora.

So I kept in touch, for I was always ready, even on short notice, to scurry back to the islands, which happened last year. Hawaii, Fiji, Port-Vila in the New Hebrides--these were the way stations on this trip, and each was a place of the most powerful meaning to me. In Hawaii I had written one of my best books. In Fiji, with its population half Asiatic Indian, half black Melanesian, I had spent some of the most meaningful days of the war. And in the New Hebrides I had lived for three years, familiarizing myself with all aspects of that curious French-English condominium, the only instance I know of in which two major powers shared the government of one territory.

Now let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Hawaii and Fiji are two of the best island groups in the world to visit as a vacationer. The great hotels, the fascinating local people, the exciting history of the two contrasting island groups, and the unmatched scenery make these two of the most enticing stopovers. If you’ve never been to Hawaii and Fiji, go now. The rewards will be magnificent. The flight from Honolulu to Nadi is somewhat shorter than the one from Los Angeles to Honolulu, and the differences between Hawaii and Fiji make the trip worth the extra effort.

But it was Port-Vila, the capital town of the new nation of Vanuatu, which was the biggest surprise on this return to paradise. In 1980 I had served in Port-Vila as the official American representative of President Carter when my former home, the New Hebrides Condominium, gained its independence as the nation of Vanuatu. I had known the area for about 40 years, and I was charmed by the way in which this little seaport with the simplified name of Vila, population 15,000, had become what many, including me, consider the finest spot in the South Pacific to visit if you want to see the islands as they were in the great days at the beginning of this century.

Honolulu is a metropolis. Papeete in Tahiti has traffic lights and overpasses. Suva in Fiji is a bustling, modern city. But Vila, situated on the shores of a heavenly bay in Vanuatu, preserves the best of the old traditions. It has good hotels, excellent small restaurants, complete medical facilities and a competent, stable local government. It represents, I believe, one of the best values in Pacific tourism, and from the airport the traveler can fly by short hops to many islands that are completely primitive. When I first pitched my Navy tent on the island of Espiritu Santo to the north of Vila, the natives on nearby Malakula were cannibals. Today they have representation in the United Nations.

In praising Vila as highly as I do I am not overlooking other attractive tropical towns in the area, Noumea in French New Caledonia and Honiara on the island of Guadalcanal in the free nation of the Solomons. I lived in both these areas during the war and have visited them as capital towns in the postwar period. They’re exciting and rewarding with fine hotels and restaurants, but Honiara has recently been devastated by a hurricane and should be avoided for the time being, while New Caledonia has for some years been disrupted by its struggle to establish itself as a nation freed from French supervision. Both towns should be visited some years from now when the dust has settled. Vila, having put down its own revolution some years ago, is a haven.

The highlight of my most recent return to the South Pacific came when I flew to Espiritu Santo, a big, unruly jungle island in the northern portion of the Vanuatu island group. There we visited two French plantations that had played a crucial role in my life, and I was pleased to find that one still prospered, saddened to learn that the other had vanished.

The first, to the west of the principal town of Luganville, had been owned during the war by a fine French copra planter named Aubert Ratard, who became my good friend and who introduced me to the complexities of life within a condominium: “They grant any newcomer a grace period of some weeks . . . to look around . . . listen to gossip. Then you must elect which body of law you are going to live under, French or English. Most people think French is best.”

Ratard had a fine, spacious tropical house--in which he entertained many naval officers--and, what was to prove more significant to me, a long row of little cabins in which his Tonkinese fieldworkers lived. One of these women, a betel-chewing woman with a profane vocabulary, struck my fancy and became the character Bloody Mary in my novel about this part of the world.

I went out to the plantation that I had once known so well and found that it had acquired new ownership. The Ratards were gone. The wooden plantation house I had known so intimately was in ruins. A bright new stone one with electricity had been built. And a brooding spell seemed to hang over the place. But Bloody Mary’s old row of huts still stood, still occupied by field hands. Forty years dropped away as if they had been four weeks, and amid the ruins of the old house I could still hear Ratard and his gracious wife as they served roast chicken and good French wine. Salut , Aubert! You got me started as a writer.

The other plantation had belonged to Mme. Gardel, an amazing French woman almost 20 years older than I whom I had known with great affection when I was stationed about three miles from her front gate. She was a buccaneer, a feisty woman who played the American brass like a fiddle:”Monsieur Capitan, what I really need is a new generator, and a 500-gallon tank, and some gasoline so that I can continue to entertain you men.”

Her plantation became my club away from home, and I never heard her ask for any cumshaw that weighed less than a ton and which required fewer than a dozen enlisted men and two trucks to move. By the end of the war Mme. Gardel had the finest plantation in the New Hebrides.

Now it was vanished. Erased. The jungle had reclaimed it. And I suppose that my dear old friend, always a thorn in the side of any government that tried to discipline her, must have been long dead. But when I mentioned her name in Luganville, I heard a remarkable story: “Mme. Gardel! She’s still living. Her son participated in the revolution and lost. She’s fallen upon evil times, I must tell you.”

“Could I see her?”

“Mai, ouis!” And I was off to one of the most remarkable expeditions I’ve ever taken. I drove to the end of the road, far into the jungle, and then along a trail leading to a pair of one-room grass huts cowering under huge trees covered with matted vines. In the hut to the right lived a black family, the kind that Mme. Gardel used to employ by the score, and in the other hut, to the left, lived an old, old woman of 95 with only one dress, one plate, one knife, one spoon and no fork. It was Mme. Gardel, once the mistress of a great plantation. When she was told that her old friend was coming to see her I doubt that she could have remembered me, but she burst out of her hut, pointed an imaginary gun in the air and blasted away at flying pigeons, as we used to do in the afternoons at her place.

As we sat there in the jungle talking, I think that some memory of our times together must have returned, because we used to sing a lot together, and suddenly she burst into one of the old French songs she had taught me. When we were about to depart, with her still singing, she was asked: “Madame Gardel, is there anything we could give you to make things a little easier?” and without hesitation she said, excitement flashing in her eyes: “Mais oui! Une voiture! Une coupe Subaru.” (Oh yes! A car! A Subaru coupe.) As I said, she never asked for anything trivial. So when we returned to Luganville, still unable to believe we had found her, I made arrangements with the manager of the Burns Philp store to send help: “See that she gets some of the things she needs. Especially a dress and a fork.”

When you live in an island town like Vila, Honiara or Noumea, two cities become of great importance to you: Sydney in Australia and Auckland in New Zealand. So after saying farewell to the island I had once known so intimately I flew down to Auckland to meet another grande dame who had played a crucial role in my beginning days as a writer.

Aggie Grey could properly be called the Queen of the Pacific. As a young woman in Western Samoa, the British part, she had been a dazzling beauty. In World War II she had run a fine small hotel to which American military personnel from our Samoa flew whenever they could promote an airplane, and loud was the singing at dusk. In the postwar period Aggie judiciously enlarged her hotel until it became one of the top tourist spots in the area. And throughout the three contrasting periods of her life she managed to retain an endless supply of friends, helpers and investors. She was a great woman, a fine singer and the top dancer in the islands.

I first knew her when I was a mere lieutenant in American Samoa, but I heard so many stories about her and her beautiful sister that I simply had to negotiate the few miles that separated the two Samoas, and when I did I fell completely under the spell of this remarkable woman. She was some years older than I and much more sophisticated; she was also involved with the many problems of holding her small hotel together and enlarging it when the time was ripe. But we struck up a firm friendship. She said, some years ago, in answer to an Australian newspaperman, for she is a famous woman now with a postal stamp issued with her portrait as Queen of the Islands: “Michener? Of course I remember him. He used to sit in the corner and memorize the songs we sang.”

Well, in 1985 we tracked Aggie Grey down at the Auckland seaside home that she uses during the hot spell in Samoa. She was still the grand lady, stately, jovial, a great singer and a grave, beautiful dancer of the Samoan siva-siva . It was a sentimental reunion as Aggie and I sang the fine old songs of the islands: “Samoa Siva-Siva,” “Tofa, My Felengi” (Goodby, My Friend) and the song that reverberated through all the islands during the war: “You Are My Chunchine “ (Sunshine).

Why do I say that Aggie was important to me when I was trying to write? Because she taught me so much about the South Pacific, because she encouraged me to go to distant islands, and because she taught me the songs, the dances and customs. Such things are the backbone of writing, and without those days at Aggie’s, sitting in the corner and listening, I might never had found the courage to make the big attempt, and without the experiences at Aubert Ratard’s plantation and Mme. Gardel’s I might have had nothing to say when I did start; I could never have written “Tales of the South Pacific.”

I wish I could end this report with the above happy paragraph, but I cannot. Shortly after I left Vanuatu things began to turn sour. A friend of many years wrote: “The white people who elected to stay after independence are being brutally kicked out. A man with a store and 30 years’ experience in Vanuatu is given two day’s notice to liquidate his holdings and leave. More than two dozen businesses have closed. Banks are leaving. And we’re told: ‘In the new Vanuatu there will be no place for white men.’ ”

Most surprising to me is the rise of a vicious anti-Americanism. Prime Minister Walter Lini, a Presbyterian clergyman, has recently sent Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi a message condemning the U.S. raid on his country and pledging solidarity with Libya. Vanuatu is now expecting aid from Kadafi at the same time that it accepts political guidance from Cuba, which it declares to be a nonaligned country.

In regional politics, in neighboring New Caledonia it supports a native revolution that strives to throw out all Frenchmen, even if their families have lived in the island for the past century. It also supports incipient revolution in New Guinea and Timor.

It looks as if I saw these exciting islands just in time. American tourists may not be entirely happy there in the immediate future.