Beyond Gauguin : When Writer Paul Theroux shipped out by South Seas freighter to the remote Marquesas, he discovered the reality beneath the painter’s romantic French Polynesia

It is very hard to board a ship for the Marquesas Islands, where Paul Gauguin lies buried, and not squint at the passengers and recall the title of the painter’s enigmatic picture, “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”

Perhaps it is better not to size them up, but I can’t help attempting to spot the smokers, the drinkers, the boasters, the fanatics, the Germans. This looks like a honeymoon couple and surely that one’s an escapee and why is that skinny old man--Gandhi to his fingertips--wearing such a skimpy bathing suit and nothing else? The two macho women look rather fearsome in their iron pants and their tattoos, but the mother and her middle-aged son seem rather touching, sharing a cigarette by the rail, and those big beefy Australians with the flowers in their ears could be a bit worrying. The more nervous among us revert: It becomes an assertion of national characteristics, the French pushing, the Germans snatching, the Australians drinking, the Americans trying to make friends, the Venezuelan couple holding hands.

How wrong I was about most of them. The “honeymoon couple” had been married for three years, the “escapee” was simply a dentist, Gandhi was an elderly fresh-air fiend, the macho women were mother and daughter, the “mother and son” were a married couple--Americans--and the fellows from Melbourne lovably challenged me with their tolerance. I would say something critical of a passenger and when I was through they’d disagree, saying, “I think she’s fabulous !”

But that was later. In the meantime we were settling in for a longish voyage of 16 days in the Marquesas. True, Herman Melville was in the islands for about 10 days longer, but he wrote an entire book about it, his first literary success, “Typee.” Robert Louis Stevenson visited the archipelago, looking for a place to ease his tubercular lungs--but the postal service worked better in Samoa so he settled there instead. Paul Gauguin came a few years later, fed up with the colonial snobbery in Tahiti. Thor Heyerdahl went native in Fatu Hiva in the 1930s and wrote about it. Maugham visited and found an original Gauguin, which served as some local fellow’s door.

I did not know much more than this. The Marquesas were far and few; beyond the Tuomotu chain, three days sailing northeast from Tahiti, a dozen high islands--six big, six small, only 7,000 people on them altogether. These details don’t make a picture, but something I had repeatedly read was more persuasive: The Marquesas had the reputation for being the most beautiful islands on the face of the earth.

Our ship the Aranui was one of several that made the inter-island trip; two others were cargo ships that carried some passengers, and one was a luxury vessel, the Windsong--very chic, very expensive, nice boutiques, no cargo. The Aranui had a hold full of cargo, 40-odd passengers amidships in cabins and about 50 more--depending on the run--sleeping rough on the stern decks and sharing bathrooms. But nothing is cheap in French Polynesia--the fellows from Melbourne were paying about $1,500 each to sleep out on the Bridge Deck, and although this included meals, their nights were noisy with humming ventilators, winds in the ratlines, the sloshing sea, and one said to me, “Earplugs are a must.” I was paying about $1,900 to share a tiny cabin near the Plimsoll line. On rougher days, with the porthole awash with the sudsy ocean, it was like being in a washing machine.

As darkness fell over Papeete, the great steel hatch covers were slid across the cargo hold, and I took my last look at Tahiti’s capital. It is rather an ugly, plundered-looking town. Its buildings are scruffy and flimsy and ill-assorted, and they rise cluttering the lovely slopes of the extinct volcano that lies behind it. Tahiti’s road--there is only the one that encircles the island--is quite famously bad and dangerous. To complete this unromantic picture, Tahiti I found to be one of the most expensive places I have ever visited--a pack of cigarettes is $5, a liter of gas $4, a meal in a good restaurant almost prohibitive, but as there are few good restaurants this is academic. And yet if you decide to have a pizza instead, you will be paying about twice what you would at a Pizza Hut in Pasadena. There is no income tax in French Polynesia, you see, but indirect taxation can be just as brutal. You may congratulate yourself that you don’t smoke or drink spirits, yet even the most frugal vegetarian is in for a shock when he sees the Tahitian cabbages (grown in California) priced at $8 in Papeete’s central market.

That first night we sailed straight into a gale, and the ship was rolling in a figure eight.

“Whoops! There we go again!”

“I spilled my tea.”

“I’ll be spilling more than that if this keeps up!”

“That woman’s laugh is diabolical,” I muttered.

“I think she’s fabulous !”

Bad weather and heavy seas inspire facetiousness and intensify the confinement; people stay below and giggle insincerely. That day and most of the next, people kept staggering and falling, and they talked disgustingly about being sick. Most wore--uselessly--seasickness plasters behind their ears. The folk wisdom is probably true: “The only cure for seasickness is to sit on the shady side of an old brick church in the country.”

Later that day, as the sea moderated, a succession of green stripes appeared on the horizon. These were the first islands of the Tuomotus, the archipelago that lies between Tahiti and the Marquesas. They are a chain of flat coral atolls of which distant Mururoa is one. The French use Mururoa as a testing site for their nuclear devices, and they have just about succeeded in making it unsafe for human habitation for generations to come. Elsewhere on the archipelago, the many shoals and poor anchorages have given it the reputation of being one of the most notorious ship swallowers in the Pacific.

Under a cheddar-colored moon that rose through black shreds of cloud and glimmered in shattered light on a rippling tropic sea, the crew began emptying clattering barrels overboard--waste paper and plastic bottles and crushed tins and vegetable peelings--but it hardly disturbed the sea, because the radiant rubbish was bobbing in the moonglow in this remote and peaceful place, and the junk and detritus had a lively phosphorescence all its own.

I woke to shouts and the sound of cranes the next morning. I could see the whaleboat through my porthole, ferrying cargo to the tiny village on the harbor at the croissant-shaped atoll of Takapotou. We were anchored just off shore. In the whole voyage only once was the ship moored alongside a quay, with a gangway from the deck to dry land. In every other instance we were brought ashore in the whaleboats, which necessitated a delicate (and at times wet) transfer. It should have been hell for the elderly passengers but it wasn’t: The powerful Marquesan crew members lifted the feebler ones bodily into the whaleboats, and at the edge of the pounding surf hoisted them again like kids and carried them to shore--little twittering women and men in big brown tattooed arms.

These same crewmen also hauled the cargo--13 hours repeatedly going from the ship to the quay and back again, that same quarter mile--the 20-foot whaleboats always piled high. The cargo could be surprising--loaves of bread, sanitary napkins and toilet paper by the crate, mineral water, breakfast cereal, a large pea-green lounge suite, and in a place that teemed with fish, crates of canned fish. The rest was predictable: lumber, bricks, pipes, cement and rice, sugar, flour, gasoline and immense quantities of beer and soft drinks.

A cloying odor of decayed copra hung over the quay at Takapotou, where it was stacked in bulging sacks, quietly smelling like a mountain of last week’s dessert. Copra has the look of brown rinds and is in fact chunks of dried coconut meat that is later processed into coconut oil. The French heavily subsidize the copra crop, making it profitable for the grower. But the islanders shrug, the harvest is in decline and the shortfall is made up by copra imported from Fiji.

Forget copra, the locals say, the great business today in Takapotou is black pearls. The seed pearls are slipped between the valves of the giant black-lipped oyster that is happiest in the lagoons around Takapotou and, if the transplant is successful, in about three years a pearl-fisher could become very wealthy.

The Japanese have thrust themselves into the black pearl industry and now--to no one’s surprise--almost totally dominate it. Even so, some fortunes have been made by Tuomotuans on some atolls that are little more than desert islands--a coral beach, a few palm trees and cringing dogs.

I had hardly been in Takapotou an hour when a woman named Cecile sidled up to me and asked me whether I wanted to buy some black pearls. She said they were from Takaroa, a neighboring atoll where the best colored pearls are found.

“This is my son,” Cecile said.

But he didn’t hear anything: He was listening to a rock music cassette on earphones, and it was presumably turned loud--I could hear it--to overwhelm the sound of the pounding sea. And the dogs--we were being followed by nine barking dogs.

Cecile was in no hurry, nor was she interested in bargaining--haggling is not a habit in Polynesia. She slid open a matchbox and showed me the four pearls--a tear drop, a polyp and two round ones--and she mentioned the price. That same amount would have bought three loud Tahitian shirts or two meals in Papeete.

“Done,” I said, and handed over the money. As we walked back to the quay, where the atoll’s whole population (“Four hundred--plus children,” Cecile said) had gathered, we were still followed by the dogs--about 15 of them now.

“About those dogs,” I began. We were speaking French.

“So many of them,” Cecile said, not looking.

I wanted to be delicate. “In the Marquesas the people eat dogs.”

“We eat them too!” She seemed to be boasting, as a way of setting me straight.

“Do you eat sea turtles?” I had noticed that the shells of this endangered species were hung up to decorate many of the box-like houses on Takapotou.

“We love turtles,” Cecile said. “We make them into soup.”

Food was not a problem on an atoll like this, where fish and coconuts were plentiful. There were pigs in the place, too. They could have managed without dogs, but as Cecile said, they ate them because they tasted good.

It was dark when the last of the copra was brought aboard and by then I was sitting with some of the Marquesan passengers: Therese, a medical worker; Charles, a powerfully built former soldier in the French army--he had seen action in Chad and had the scars of bullet wounds to prove it--nonetheless, he had flowers in his shoulder-length hair, and Jean, who claimed that he was descended from the last king of the Marquesans and just returning from Tahiti where he had been combing through the birth records and genealogies to establish his royal connection.

They had not known each other before the voyage, but had fallen in together and they agreed on most things--hated Tahitian politics, were against French nuclear testing (“Everyone is against it--it poisons all of nature, the sea, the fish and it causes sickness”), and they wanted the Marquesas to be independent of the rest of Polynesia.

“We want a free Marquesas,” Charles said, and then confusingly added, “It doesn’t matter whether the French are there or not. We just don’t want Tahiti politics.”

He also said what many Marquesans said: His islands were a family--a large Catholic family. The rest of French Polynesia was rather despised for having gone over to the Mormons and the Jehovahs Witnesses.

Just before I went below, I saw one of the fellows from Melbourne looking over the rail.

“Did you see that movie ‘Cocoon,’ where all those old people got into the boat and then the boat was beamed up to another planet?” He was smiling. “When I saw them hobbling on board the first day, I thought to myself, ‘Oh God, hold on, we’re off to outer space!’ ”

In a way it was true: The Marquesas were a world apart. The next morning, 4 1/2 days after leaving Papeete, we raised the first of them, the little island of Ua Pou.

It did not look like a South Seas island--Melville had been right. It was high and wooded and dark green, some of its mountains shaped like witches’ hats and others like steeples and domes--everything furrowed and slender and perpendicular, and cliffs of black rock plunging straight into the sea and beaten by heavy surf. Where are the sandy beaches? Where are the translucent lagoons? There are not many in the Marquesas, and they are hard to find. It is almost impossible to overstate the ruggedness of the islands--their strange steepness or their empty valleys.

We went ashore at Hakehau--a tiny town on a snug harbor--and a few of us, egged on by a Frenchman desperate for customers, went for a two-hour ride to the stony beach at Hohoi, where we saw a brown horse. Several minutes later the Frenchman said we must leave. The road was muddy. The Landrover got bogged down. I wrenched my spine helping to push the thing. Back in Hakehau he charged each of us $21 and tried to sell us framed photographs he had taken of the volcanoes. We were just in time for the dancing--15 young men doing “The Pig Dance”--snuffling and oinking and nimbly hurrying on all fours. They finished with a great shout and then we feasted on lobster and octopus, breadfruit, bananas and the raw tuna marinated in lime juice and coconut milk that goes under the name poisson cru .

Strolling back to the ship I came upon a big family behind a hibiscus hedge hacking a dead cow apart with axes and machetes, skinning and butchering it at the same time, while seven dogs fought over the scraps. Just before we set sail I saw these same people running up the gangway, with bulky sacks of the butchered cow slung over their shoulders. They were off to another island with enough meat to last them a month.

We went ashore the next day at the village of Taipivai, a deep river valley in the southeast of Nuku Hiva. At the sacred site nearby, the passenger I thought of as Gandhi displayed for the first time his uniquely obnoxious habit. At every ancient platform, and at all the stone tikis, he turned his back on the rest of us and yanked his swimsuit down and, sighing with pleasure, relieved himself against the noble ruins. Thereafter, for reasons that are still obscure to me, Gandhi desecrated every marae in every so-called Tabu Grove we visited in the Marquesas.

“That man is so disgusting,” I would say.

“Isn’t he fabulous? “

Perhaps he was no worse in his way than the missionaries who had castrated these very statues. But some tikis are “live” and they can be vindictive, the Marquesans say. Anger these fat black demons that look like the gods of constipation and you will be cursed with bad luck or death.

It was here in Taipivai that Melville had spent most of his month (he fancifully claimed it was four months). Here it was that he had got the title for his book: Typee was just another way of writing Taipi, and vai or a variation of it means water all over Polynesia.

The ruins and the tikis in the marae just above the village were only part of the story. There were ruins all over the valley and they were practically invisible until you looked closely into the jungle. Then you could see stone walls, altar-like structures, carvings and petroglyphs, tangled in the vines, and with trees--very often a banyan--bursting through them.

And this was true of the Marquesas generally. Entire hillsides, covered in jungle, hid enormous ruins made of black boulders. It was in this respect like Belize or Guatemala--full of huge tumbled structures, strange statues and walls. Where the walls were intact the construction was like Mayan stonework. These jungles had once been full of villages and big houses, the population must have been immense. And now it was all overgrown; some of it had been documented, but very little of it had been excavated.

After a picnic in the hills, some of us walked across a high ridge and nine miles down to the main town of Nuku Hiva, Taiohae, and met the Aranui, which had just sailed here to discharge some more cargo. In the early evening we sailed to another island.

That was the pattern of the voyage: a new island each day; going ashore to walk or swim or look at ruins while the cargo was being unloaded, and then anchors aweigh for a nocturnal run to a different island. The following day it was Tahuata, the village of Vaitahu on a black-sand beach. Vaitahu was typical of most of the larger Marquesan towns in a number of respects: a Catholic church, a canned food shop, wonderful ruins at the edge of town and an insulting plaque on the seafront speaking of all the Frenchmen who had given their lives battling to take possession of the place. Melville’s jaunt in 1842 coincided with the French adventure and his book mocks the whole affair: “Four heavy doubler-banked frigates and three corvettes to frighten a parcel of naked heathen into subjection! Sixty-eight pounders to demolish huts of coconut boughs, and Congreve rockets to set on fire a few canoe sheds.”

As I loudly jeered at the monument in Vaitahu that spoke of the French soldiers and sailors who had “died on the field of honor,” I was overheard by the woman I thought of as The Duchess. She was half-French, half-German and often strolled along, holding a tape recorder to her lips and nagging into it. She said she was somewhat struck by my sarcasm. It so happened (she went on) that she was a travel writer. Thus the tape recorder.

“I am writing a story about this trip for the most brilliant newspaper in the world”--and she named a German daily paper. “They respect me so much that in 17 years, they have changed only one sentence of mine.”

“What was the sentence?”

“It was very reactionary you will think.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“All right then. ‘Three hundred years of colonialism have done less harm to the world than 30 years of tourism.’ ”

I smiled at her and said, “That’s brilliant,” and thereafter whenever she felt the need to unburden herself she sought me out. “My husband was a genius,” she said later. “I myself have written many books about clothing.”

“I hate children,” she told me another day. “I love doggies.”

I told her I had seen some puppies with wire on their necks being taken out by some Marquesans in a canoe to be used as shark bait.

“They should use babies instead,” she said, and laughed like a witch in a pantomime.

Dolphins riding our bow wake preceded us the following day into Hiva Oa, Gauguin’s last island. He arrived in 1901 and died two years later having spent 10 years altogether in Polynesia--two extended visits, during which he fathered numerous children between painting masterpieces. Here in the little village of Atuona, under the great green Matterhorn of Temetiu, he built a fine two-story house, which he called The House of Pleasure. And having carved on the wooden frame one of his favorite maxims-- soyez amoureuses et vous serez heureuses (“be in love and you will be happy”)--he took a 14-year-old girl as his mistress. Their child was still living in the valley in the 1980s.

Gauguin lies buried high on a slope in the cemetery above the village. His grave is simple, made of pockmarked volcanic rocks and shaded by a large, white-blossomed frangipani. Garlands of flowers were strewn over the grave. The grave marker was his own statue of a wild woman, lettered “Oviri,” which is a little ambiguous but appropriate. The word means savage . Gauguin once said, “I am a savage in spite of myself.” And the goddess Oviri-moe-aihere presides over death and mourning. As with his paintings, the grave was a colorful mixture of truth, imagination, suggestion and rough brilliance.

The faces in Gaugin’s paintings can be encountered all over Tahiti and the Marquesas, but the backgrounds and landscapes are idealized and dreamlike--the pink meadows and blue beaches are experiments in color relationships, not expressions of geography. Instead of depicting the Marquesan landscape of great rocks and black cliffs, deep valleys, cataracts and green mountains sides, Gauguin invented Polynesia. So people came. What they find is just as magical.

The proof of that was on that same island of Hiva Oa on the northeast corner, for there at Puamau was a vast ruin with many carvings, some beheaded and castrated--souvenir hunters or missionaries--but others intact, one of which was the strangest and most beautiful frog-faced tiki, horizontal on a pedestal, apparently flying.

There were more stone terraces and house platforms on pretty Fatu Hiva (pop. 500), the smallest, prettiest and most vertical island in this group. Thor Heyerdahl’s account of how he got away from it all by coming here resulted in an influx of people to Fatu Hiva trying to get away from it all. The Aranui first stopped at Omoa, and the walkers among us trekked 10 1/2 miles over the high ridges among wild horses and wild goats to Hanavave and the Bay of Virgins. The interior of the island was perfectly empty. Walking was something Marquesans seldom did. They sat, they hung out, they rode four-wheel-drive vehicles and sometimes horses; but I never saw any islanders hiking the up-country paths. Some frankly said they were afraid of the tupapau , ghosts that lurked in the dense upland foliage. That could have been one reason. But Marquesans also seemed a sedentary lot and were never happiest than when sitting under the palms on the seafront, holding a big blue can of Planter’s Cheez Balls between their knees and munching.

The Bay of Virgins was a misnomer, but deliberate. The bay is surmounted by several unmistakably phallic basalt pillars, and was originally called Baie des Verges--Willy Bay is a fair translation of that. But outraged missionaries slipped an “i” into the word, making it vierges , virgins. I thought at the time that it was the most beautiful bay I had seen, but back on Nuku Hiva (the Aranui was still meandering among the islands), near Hatiheu, was Anaho Bay, the best of all. Anaho had coconut palms and--unusual for the Marquesas--a coral reef. Were there sharks on the reef? Yes, big ones, the spear-fishermen said, “But they don’t bother us.”

This bay was so tempting that I got off the Aranui in Nuku Hiva and revisited it, taking a truck back to Taipivai, and then to the north side of the island, where I walked over the mountain to the blue lagoon and went snorkeling. When I got thirsty I hacked open a coconut. I somewhat missed the Aranui, which was at that point heading to Rangiroa and Bora-Bora. Like almost everything else in French Polynesia, it was vastly overpriced, but there was no alternative. How else could one visit all these empty and orchidaceous islands except by such a ship? And everyone on board agreed that the food was good, the service friendly, the accommodations clean, and that Pierre the bartender was the cheeriest of souls. In the evenings when the crew had finished their work, they crept to the lounge deck and serenaded us, playing ukuleles and singing.

Still, the islands seemed paradoxical to me. The soil was fertile, but no one bothered to plant any vegetables. The people were intensely proud of their ancient Marquesan culture, but they were also God-fearing Catholics. They spoke proudly of their ruins and carvings in the jungle, but did nothing to preserve them, letting them fall into greater ruin. They said they disliked the French, but they let the French run all their affairs. It made no difference to them that 85% of their food was imported as long as the few really important items like rice were subsidized. They loved eating loaves of French bread, but there were only a handful of bakeries in the islands. They let the Aranui deliver bread from Tahiti--it was stale and expensive coming by ship but that seemed preferable to their baking it themselves. They lived hand to mouth, but no matter how hard-pressed they were for money they would not accept a tip. They were eager for tourists, but there was hardly a hotel on the islands that was worth the name. The Ministry of Tourism--no doubt this is a blessing--is almost wholly ineffectual where the Marquesas are concerned.

There are all sorts of little guidebooks to the Marquesas, but the liveliest and the most informative, for all its fiction and inaccuracies, is Herman Melville’s “Typee.” Give or take a few roads, and one video store, the little post office and the usual curses of colonialism, not much has changed in Nuku Hiva since Melville fled the cannibal feast almost 150 years ago. Indeed, the islands are emptier, the valleys are silent, the Tabu Groves more ghostly, and at the head of most valleys there is an enormous waterfall--and sometimes three or four--coursing hundreds of feet down from the cliffs.

About that water: Seeing those cataracts often made me thirsty. One day just before I left, I stopped by a little shop in Nuku Hiva and asked for a drink of water. A half-liter of Vittel was opened for me, and I paid $2.50 . It was unthinkable that I should want the vile water from the pipes of Taiohae, and no one questioned the absurdity of buying this little bottle of Vittel from halfway around the world. That it is available at all is something of a miracle; that it might be necessary is a condemnation of this lovely, baffling place.

GUIDEBOOK

Cruising the Marquesas

The Aranui is a 343-foot cargo/passenger vessel that sails 16 times a year from Papeete, Tahiti, carrying travelers and vital goods from island to island throughout French Polynesia. The original Aranui freighter was replaced in 1990 with the “new” Aranui, a larger ship built in 1976 and retrofitted in Germany to add 32 cabins, a dining room, bar, library, sun deck and even a small pool to the stern superstructure. Cabins (housing about 60 passengers) are Spartan by cruise-ship standards but are air-conditioned; 25 have private bathrooms. Cabins, dining room and sun deck are appreciably larger and more comfortable than on the previous Aranui.

Meals in the Aranui’s dining room, not quite large enough to serve all passengers at one seating, are served family style. Food and wine are plentiful and, while not haute cuisine, meals are hearty and flavorful.

Sailing on the Aranui is not for everyone. Passengers should be in good enough shape to handle the heat, humidity and the physical rigors involved in exploring these largely undeveloped islands.

Cabin prices for the 16-day voyage range from $2,500 per person (shared bath/toilet) to $3,495 for deluxe quarters with a queen-sized bed, mini-bar, and full private bath. Cost includes meals (with wine) and all shore excursions. “D” Deck passengers pay $1,300 for mattress, meals and shore excursions. Because of the current low value of the U.S. dollar, Americans pay an additional 7% surcharge on all fares.

For reservations, contact the U.S. agent for the Aranui, Jules Wong, at Compagnie Polynesienne de Transport Maritime (CPTM), 595 Market St., Suite 2880, San Francisco 94105, (415) 541-0677; fax (415) 541-0766.

Getting there: Air France, UTA, Hawaiian, Qantas and Air New Zealand all fly from LAX to Papeete, Tahiti, home port of the Aranui. Round-trip coach fare, with 14-day advance purchase, is about $925. Add about $175 during the peak season of July, August and the last two weeks of December.

For more information: Contact the Tahiti Tourist Board, 9841 Airport Blvd., Suite 1108, Los Angeles 90045, (213) 649-2884.