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FOOT LOOSE IN CHINA
Adventure to the Hinterlands

The British colony of Hong Kong was Theo’s first taste of a Chinese city, a city of noise, chaos and a million souls reaching out blindly in every direction. He arrived in the middle of a bitter cold spell and in spite of the poor freezing to death in doorways, he liked the city, notwithstanding that it was a British colony. He liked it because it was unlike Basel or any other city in Europe that he knew. It was squalid and overcrowded but filled with wonderment at every turn. Every street was an experience. He was attracted by the fleets of junks down from China, rafted together in the harbor, and he wanted to paint them. Hong Kong was a dynamic drama of human existence and Theo thrilled at being a part of it. He reveled in walking the streets and feeling the pavement beneath his feet. He was tempted to rent a room and start painting but his desire to reach further afield, to tread upon unfamiliar ground, burned strong. He was not a man of prayer but he found himself asking God for time to see and do all the things in life that he wanted to do. Reluctantly, he had to say goodbye to Hong Kong or else lose himself to another temptation. To Theo life was a temptation and there were times he had to be circumspect. And this was one of them.

He deposited a roll of paintings and a suitcase at the Y.M.C.A., and with his easel and paint kit strapped to his back, he boarded a train to Canton. He marveled that the train, belching out black smoke that lingered in the sky in an unending ribbon, must have been a hundred years old, or if not that old, certainly one of the first steam trains to be put into service in China. He was thrilled to be on his way and he hung on the platform between the compartments like a schoolboy on holiday. “Nee how ma,” he learned his first Chinese words-“How are you?”

Theo found Canton to be a city not too much different than Hong Kong, but sadly enough, a city in turmoil. He went to see the Swiss consul, the Honorary Mr. Karl Spalinger, to register into the country as he was told to do. Theo found the consul to be friendly and hospitable, but very much alarmed that one of his country’s citizens was parading around the streets of Canton unaware of his own safety. He invited Theo to come stay with him-out of harm’s way.

The consul lived in the European settlement which was completely enclosed in barbed wire. Inside the conclave, the consul, a silk merchant by trade, enjoyed the good life in the grand style of most Europeans in the East. He lived with his wife, also Swiss, in a Chinese colonial mansion, common in the 1920s, with a balustraded verandah on the upper level, pillars of Elizabethan style at the front facade, a red tiled roof and a carriage porch, and all the rudiments that marked European opulence in Asia. Like all the other Europeans, the consul lived apart from the Chinese. Europeans were under orders that when they ventured outside their settlement, and never on foot, they were to return well before sunset. Theo was advised to follow this rule, which he broke the second night after his arrival. He spent the night in the company of Sing Song girls on the Canton River. He was aware the consul would admonish him the next day but knew he could sweet talk his way through it. What he dared not admit to the consul and his wife was that he found the Sing Song girls very amusing and his only regret was that he hadn’t taken his sketchpad with him. He did do sketches of them on rice paper that he gave in exchange for drinks, and for their services. Everyone was happy.

Canton in 1933 was not a very pleasant place to live for foreigners. It was already overshadowed by the coming war by the time Theo arrived. Many houses were braced with scaffolding as protection against air raids; concrete road blocks were set up in streets; and sand bags as high as a man could reach protected the glass fronted shops. Most unnerving were the hand grenades that exploded at odd times in the center of the city. One grenade blew up under Theo’s very nose, outside the newly inaugurated New Asia Hotel, putting an abrupt end to a wedding that was to have taken place there, and to which Theo had been invited.

Inspite of the generosity of the consul general, Theo found living in the English settlement not to his liking. He discovered that the colonials, everywhere he went, had three things in common: (1) they relished local gossip like who was bedding with whom, (2) they were braggarts about how good their servants were, those trained by them or how bad they were, if trained by someone else and (3) how much cheaper it was living in Asia compared to living back home. Theo figured there were better ways for him to spend his time rather than listening to meaningless gossip and banter.

Theo hadn’t forgotten the letter of introduction given to him from Mr. Wongue, the banker in Tahiti, to his doctor brother, Dr. Wong, in Canton. The first chance Theo had to break away from the consul he went to find Dr. Wong.

Dr. Wong lived in a middle class residential area of Canton. He lived in a gabled brick house with his clinic on the ground floor. When Theo appeared at his door he was quick to tell Theo he didn’t treat foreigners. When Theo said he was not there for medical purposes the doctor became visibly uncomfortable. It was quite unusual for a white man to come looking for him.

The doctor was a tall man, slight of build who wore pince-nez glasses which he immediately removed and began wiping on his smock when Theo replied he wasn’t there for medical reasons. Without further words, seeing that the doctor was uncomfortable, Theo handed him the letter. The doctor took it in his hands, turned it over once or twice and then put his glasses back on. He carefully opened the envelope and slowly began reading. His face changed from that of a sullen, sad man to a cherubic glow. He had to take a seat. He motioned for Theo to be seated across from him. He read the letter again.

The doctor sat there for the longest time. Then he said to Theo that he would never know how much that letter meant to him. He began asking Theo all sorts of questions, how his brother was managing, his family, his health. He ordered tea and they moved into the courtyard and more questions followed. It was obvious to Theo that the two brothers did not have much contact with each other over the years. When the doctor learned where Theo was living, and he was not happy there, he invited him to stay with him. Theo gladly accepted.

Less than a fortnight after Theo’s arrival, the doctor announced his intention of setting off on a month-long pilgrimage to Foochow. It sounded to Theo it might be perhaps a penance for his misdeeds, but he didn’t know. “You can come along if you wish, but I must say to you it will not be an easy trip.” How difficult a trip would it be, Theo asked himself. Dr. Wong didn’t appear to be a Hercules of a man.

“I am sure I can manage it,” Theo said.

The doctor didn’t explain his reason for the mission, only that it would be to the territory above Foochow. “We will travel on foot the whole way with one frugal meal a day,” the doctor said. Theo noted in his journal that it sounded “rather Spartan,” but he accepted anyway. What better way could there be to see China? He strapped his easel to his back and placed his painting kit and canvases in a sturdy leather bag that he slung over one shoulder. “Wa shir ha,” he shouted to the doctor. “Women zhou.” I am fine; let’s go. For the first time the doctor laughed when he saw Theo decked out and ready to go.

As it turned out, it wasn’t as difficult as Theo was lead to believe, at least not for the doctor. He rode on horseback supporting a yellow flag on a long pole. The flag displayed his medical ensign. A few miles from town the road gave way to a rutted trail. Heavy lorries and confiscated military vehicles negotiated the trail, but mostly traffic was oxen carts which bobbled painstakingly along. Some carts were pulled not by oxen but by humans, men and boys with ropes slug over their shoulders. It was most pitiful for Theo to watch them labor as they had to when their heavy burdensome carts got stuck in ruts. Then they groaned and slipped and fell to their knees struggling to get the carts free. At first, feeling pity for them, Theo stopped to help them but he soon realized it was a useless endeavor. He couldn’t help them all.

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PARTING COMPANY

Theo’s stay in Australia was very brief It was winter and the weather was cold and not to his liking. He had grown quite accustomed to the tropics and did not want to linger. Besides, there was a great deal of noisy commotion going on at the time. The HMS Sydney, a light cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy, had arrived in port and the entire town came down to the waterfront to see the pride of the Australian navy. Added to the confusion, the 1933 Sydney Carnival had just opened, marking the eighth celebration of the Australian National Football Carnival. The town was too noisy for Theo.

Theo and Lucas wasted no time and headed straight to the Swiss consul to contact Mr. Eric Bloch, and present him with the letter of introduction the Ethnological Museum in Berne had given them. Scanning the letter, the consul suddenly burst out laughing, and he then handed it over to Theo to read. “Dear-Friend,” it said, “this will introduce Theo Meier, a painter friend, who, filled with enthusiasm, decided to follow in the steps of Gauguin to the South Sea. By the time he arrives in Sydney he is bound to be stone-broke.”

Lucas laughed too, along with the consul, but Theo didn’t think it was funny at all. He didn’t mind the mention that it was likely that he would be broke, but what he didn’t like was the reference to his following in the steps of Gauguin. There it goes again, he thought. He again was being tagged as a follower of Gauguin. He resented it. “I am only treading where Gauguin had gone,” Theo snapped at the two men. ”As for Gauguin’s style of painting, I follow no one but my own.” The opening of a good bottle of schnapps by the consul ended Theo’s anger.

Theo did not care for Sydney, although he did like the pubs where beer was hosed out to fill empty glasses. Sydney, founded by convicts shipped out from England, had served as a penal colony, and Theo wondered if it was still a city of convicts. He did realize, with his heavy German accent, that everyone treated him with suspicion, that he might be German, and Germany was not in everyone’s favor in Australia at the time. Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany. Theo wondered now what would become of the impressionist painters he knew in Germany, those who hadn’t fled. It was written in the books that once Hider became Chancellor he would quickly establish his vision of an autocratic, single party dictatorship. There would be no place for artists who disagreed with totalitarianism.

Theo made a note in his journal that there was little in Sydney that inspired him to take up his paint and brushes. Sydney was not unlike most Europeans cities and he felt he didn’t have to travel half way around the world to find the very thing he was escaping from. He was looking for something else than old Europe. He gave thought to heading into the Outback, to paint the primitive people there, the aborigines but, he reasoned, they were not far distant from their cousins, the Melanesians of the New Hebrides. And like the aborigines he saw in Sydney, had they too completely lost their culture and identity? No, it was time that he moved on to new horizons. China and the tropical islands of Dutch East Indies were waiting.

Theo and Lucas had planned their agenda long before they came to Sydney. Their travel plans included the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies and China. There was not enough time for them to do all that they wanted to do and, besides, their funds were rapidly diminishing. On top of this, the Idiot’s Club back in Basel was waiting for their paintings and 1heo was far behind schedule. And for Lucas, his mother wanted her son back. Since she controlled his purse strings, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

One place that Theo had his heart set on seeing was the island of Bali in the Dutch East Indies. Here even the farmers and fishermen were painters and the music these people created was the music of the gods. Theo had heard so much about Bali he longed to visit the place. He also heard about a German artist and musician who lived there among the people. And there were the women of Bali that touched Theo the deepest. They went around naked, or half naked. There on Bali the artists did not need to beg the women to take off their clothes, as they had to do with the women of Tahiti and Polynesia. Here was the artist’s dream.

Theo and Lucas decided they would have to split up. They agreed to toss a coin to see who would go where. Lucas won the Dutch East Indies and Theo the Philippines and China. They would meet in Singapore in three months-time, swap notes on their experiences and return home to Europe by freighter. Theo, disappointed as he was, would have to wait to see Bali on his next trip. .

Theo booked passage on the Kamo Maru, a small Japanese tramp steamship, bound for Hong Kong. Kamo Maru was hardly first class, or even second class, and more like steerage, but Theo didn’t mind at all. In fact, he found it exciting. When Lucas saw the vessel he screamed in horror. “You are not going to sail in that tub,” he ranted. But Theo assured him he was. He had booked his passage.

Theo bid the consul farewell at his house, and at the dock side he said good-bye to Lucas. Lucas was in good spirits. He had met up with some old friends, was introduced to new ones and planned to remain a while longer in Sydney. Theo was sad at heart to part from his old friend, wondering if they would ever meet again, but he was excited about the unknown that lay ahead, Adventure was calling him. He set sail on the Kamo Maru.

Theo learned on this voyage the true meaning of the word tramp steamer. There were no fixed schedules and no published ports-of-call. The captain in his frayed white uniform pointed the bow towards Hong Kong and trusted in luck that they would make it there. The poor old vessel did hammer and pound and after the first day out Theo began to wonder about Lady Luck. But to the captain and his crew there seemed to be no need for concern. The officers aboard seemed more concerned with the ports they visited than with cargo they collected. In fact, Theo came to realize the cargo didn’t seem to be important at all; it didn’t take a government snoop to reach the conclusion that the photographs they were taking had a purpose other than showing them off to the family back home. Theo thought it strange at first that every time they came to port, the captain insisted Theo come on deck and stand near the bridge. Theo was their decoy. Theo laughed at the thought, that he was a spy for the Japanese. Nevertheless, he took note that the Japanese didn’t let a tower, a godown, nor a fuel tank in any port pass their scrutiny.

When the Kamo Maru arrived in Zamboanga in the southern Philippines, Theo was beyond himself. He came near to jumping ship. He had no complaints about the voyage. It wasn’t that. It was Zamboanga that caught his fancy. Here was a Conradesque port you read about only in adventure books. Here was old Spain, with it walled fortresses and tiled plazas blending with the Oriental life of the Filipinos. Sailing craft from the Sulu Sea, Macassar schooners from the Celebes, tramp steamers from ports in China, private yachts, American and Philippine Men-of-War and every sort of ship flying the colors from every nation in the world, or what seemed like every nation, were all anchored in the roads pulling at their anchors. And gliding among them were fast, double rigger skiffs propelled by noisy outboard engines and slow moving sampans being sculled along. Here was the pulse beat of Asia where coffee-eyed women in lace trimmed skirts and cotton blouses that were about to pop their buttons sat in open-air cafes with smiles on their faces and guitars on their laps. A bottle of rum here was cheaper than a cup of coffee in Basel. Theo could have stayed here forever, and he knew it, but the Idiot’s Club in Basel was waiting for the paintings he had promised. When the Kamo Maru departed for Hong Kong, and Theo was aboard, he prided himself for his diligence. He had to tear himself away from Zamboanga. But he did vow, he would be back.

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LIFE AMONG CANNIBALS
Up-Close-and-Personal

The island trader landed Theo and his belongings at Village Tavio and took off. Theo’s initiation to the island and the people was not gradual. It was as sudden as a bolt of lightning and his sudden appearance came as a shock to the natives. Who was this white man who came from nowhere. They looked at him skeptically and with uncertainty. Theo knew not to hesitate, not to act bewildered. He remembered being told that every village has a center where there is certain to be a nakamal or clubhouse which served as a meeting point for men and a place where they drink kava. Sure enough Tavio had a nakamal. The village was not large and Theo found the nakamal with ease. Looking about he sat on the ground directly in front of the clubhouse. He began unwrapping his easel and paints. The islanders were completely puzzled now. Theo deliberately took his time and slowly set up his easel, He then took a canvas, one in which he had sketched a landscape, and placed it on the easel. Now everyone scrambled to see what it was but Theo didn’t linger long. He took out his palette and squeezed a dab of black and a touch of zinc white in the center. He took out a brush, felt the bristles with the fingers and then held the brush up to the sky and studied it for a minute, while all heads turned to the sky to see what he was looking at. An old man with a terribly wrinkled face had found a place to sit on the ground to the right of Theo. Theo immediately began to sketch him. Satisfied with the outline he then mixed reds and greens on the pallet and before long a painting began to take shape. The islanders looked on in amazement. They had never seen anything like it, the man with the magic brush. Theo soon won his place among the villagers. He was some sort of novelty. Now they all wanted to be painted. He painted until darkness fell and he could no longer see the canvas.

When darkness fell upon them, the men spread out mats upon the ground. A special mat was prepared for Theo and the headman joined him at his side. While this was going on firewood was stacked in a pile in the center of the yard ready to be lit. Then musicians appeared and Theo, who had always been fascinated with primitive music, took notice quickly. They brought out drums of various shapes and sizes, some which they beat like tom-toms with the palms of their open hands. Upon other drums they pounded out rhythms, if they could be called that, with sticks. There were men who made strange sounds on split gongs. Of all the instruments that fascinated Theo the most were idiophones made from bamboo and shaped like fans. These produced the weirdest sounds.

The headman ordered that the fire be lit, and soon the assembly was sparked by flickering, dancing shadows that mystified the surroundings even more.

Theo who should have been frightened sitting among these savages, perhaps cannibals, but he was beyond reproach. It was all too bewildering to him and he sat immobile, transfixed by his surroundings. To the right and to the left of him sat the men, naked men with painted bodies, some with deep self-inflicted scars, and with their penis gourds sticking upwards. They were the guardians, the warriors of the tribe.

Presently women appeared, they too naked, with breasts that hung down to their waists, and they carried large wooden bowls along with roots of some sort wrapped in banana leaves. They placed themselves on the ground, with the bowls between their legs. Once settled, they picked up the roots and began chewing them. Theo watched in awe, wondering what their next move would be.

When they had chewed the roots sufficiently, and saliva began to run from the sides of their mouths, they then spat out the contents into the bowls. This they continued doing, over and over, and when the bowls were half filled they stopped. Now other women appeared with gourds of water which they poured into the bowls. Theo now realized what they were doing. He heard about the drink when he was in Vila but they didn’t tell him how it was prepared. It was kava. The women were preparing kava for the men to drink. Kava and its magical power to tranquilize the body. He had been anxious to try it when he first heard about it; but he would do it only with caution. Now, with caution thrown to the wind, he didn’t have much of a choice.

Young maidens now appeared carrying half coconut shells which they hastily passed around to the men. This accomplished, the girls, taking the shells from the men, dipped them into the bowls and handed them back. The men had to drink, bottoms up, and then hold the shells upside down. Those standing around clapped their hands and cheered. Round followed round until bowls were empty.

Theo found the drink not altogether disagreeable and rather naively thought it had no effect. Wrong. His tongue became numb, and soon his lips felt like pieces of wood. His mind, however, remained dear and the drink did not disrupt his mental clarity.

The night dragged on. Theo began to feel drowsy. The headman nodded and two men helped Theo to his feet and led him to one of the huts that had been emptied for him. Mats were upon the ground and his belongings were inside the opening. A tapa doth draped over the opening served as the door. Theo was taken aback by their hospitality. Were these natives as savage as he heard they were? Could all the tales about cannibalism be fiction, made up stories, or merely rumors? He didn’t have to ponder the thought very long. As he was about to enter the hut, his eyes fell upon an open area. He stopped dead in his tracks. Heaped up in a pile on the earthen floor were bones. They were polished bones that shined, even in the dull light. At first glance the bones didn’t mean much, and then he noticed one was a human bone, a fibula. He recognized others. He couldn’t believe it. They were unmistakably human bones, dear signs of human butchery. The natives of Namuka were cannibals.

Theo lay on the mats for the longest of time, staring out through the opening. He watched figures silhouetted against the sky stroll listlessly about. Not one, it seemed, ever slept. What were they doing? Were they preparing a cooking fire? He tried to amuse himself by asking would they invite him to dinner, to dine with them or to be eaten. The voice of the wilderness beyond the village grew louder and more intense. Theo fought sleep, fearing, almost, that if he slept he might never awaken again. Finally, against his will, he fell fast asleep only to awaken with a sudden start. Someone was laying next him on the mat. It was a woman, for when he reached out to touch her he felt her breasts. They were small and firm, those of a young maiden and not like those of old women he saw earlier that day, women with their breasts that hung down to their waists.

Now he remembered. He had thought it odd when the headman had pointed to the young girls, as though asking him to make a choice. Uncertain what the headman meant, and not wanting to offend him, he could only smile. What else was he to do? Theo now realized what the headman had in mind. He sent a girl of his choice into the hut to spend the night with Theo.

An island custom. Theo did what he had to do. He couldn’t insult the headman.

When Theo awoke in the morning she was gone. He put on his clothes as quickly as he could and stepped out into the open. The whole village was waiting for him to appear. They were all smiling, even the youngest of them. He glanced about. Which one was the girl who had been with him in the night? He looked from one to the other, and each one in turn smiled back at him. He was unable to determine which one it had been.

For the next two days Theo was able to observe the villagers. They fed him baked taro roots and jungle fruit to eat. There was no meat in their diet. There were pigs, strange looking pigs with low-slung bellies that touched the ground when they walked. Through pidgin English he determined those pigs with rounded tusks were considered a symbol of wealth throughout the islands.

A woman’s worth, he discovered, was determined by the number of pigs a suitor was prepared to pay for her. A four-pig girl was quite valuable; a six-pig woman was extraordinary.

There was so much that Theo wanted to capture on canvas, something more than just paint portraits of their mutilated bodies. There were the expressions in their eyes, beady and red. Even the whites were red. Their bodies were covered with coarse skin, very much like the toughened soles of one’s feet who goes habitually barefoot. Their thighs, their flanks, their arms, all were as calloused and as tanned as animal hide. Their skin had never known creams or lotions. They mutilated their own bodies to make them, in their eyes, becoming. They lacked cleanliness. They lived on an island, surrounded by water, but they kept far away from the sea, away from evil demons of the deep. They went unwashed. They beautified their bodies with the ash from fires.

When Theo went down to the sea to wash the second day, they were aghast. They called the clothes he took off laleo-khal, “ghost-demon skin.” They believed his shirt and pants to be a magical epidermis that he could don or remove at will.

Their lack of meat as a food had some bearing on their cannibalism. Other than birds and lizards, the jungles provided no fur bearing animals, not another living creature. Nature, the Ice Age, had bypassed the Oriental jungles of Melanesia. The forests were lush in flora and growth but they lacked animal life. Man turned to eating fellow man for his protein. Theo felt at least partly secure; he heard that cannibals like dark meat over white.

The natives looked at Theo as some kind of oddity and he was free to roam about the island. He wandered from one village to another, from Manday to Burumba and back. The cultures he saw inland were still intact, but alas very primitive. What paintings the natives did make occupied a strictly functional position in their tribal rituals, adorning faces and bodies, shields, poles and skulls. Theo painted wildly and when he ran out of canvas he painted on burlap sacks that the natives used for harvesting dried copra. But all Theo’s work, all his labor, in the end proved to be folly. The natives didn’t mind having their portraits painted, but the paintings were not to be taken away. They belonged to the person painted. In their belief, a painting captured their souls making the paintings part of them. Theo, they believed, was painting them only to give them, in the end, their finished paintings. They looked upon him as a soothsayer, a kind of witch doctor. The dozens of paintings that Theo created were not his to keep. They belonged to those whom he had painted and not to him. When it came time for Theo to leave, and they saw him rolling up the canvas, they became agitated. It took only a moment for Theo to realize what was happening. They were at the brink of violence. For the first time since he arrived on the island he felt threatened. His life was suddenly in danger. Reluctantly he had to surrender his paintings to the people he had painted.

Dancing around Theo in tight circles, the half-crazed men in sweating bodies and bones in their noses lifted him to his feet, handed him his kit and easel and led him down to the ferry landing. Jeering and taunting him with wild gestures they shoved him aboard the ferry. The part-kanaka skipper knew there was no time to waste before the crowd turned violent and quickly threw the engine into reverse and backed away from the island. Theo lost no tears, not even for the loss of his paintings.

They were hardly a few dozen yards from the shore when Theo saw a huge fire spring to life in the center of the village. “Those are your paintings they are burning,” the skipper said. Then after a moment he added, “Better them than you.” Theo had to agree.

Theo sat amid ship, staring at the endless wall of heavy foliage along the shore, knowing now what the jungles hid. The launch moved all too slowly for his satisfaction; and as he looked upon the shore with its continuous sameness, it appeared they were not moving at all. The shore was moving. If he could only have saved a few paintings, hidden them away, he thought. But then he knew he was fortunate that he hadn’t tried. He laughed aloud at the thought. One can only be brave when it’s all over.

In Vila their ship to Sydney was waiting. At last, to Lucas’ delight, the two intrepid travellers were on their way, but Lucas’ delight didn’t last long. New Caledonia, the capital island of the Loyalties, was a port-of-call with a two days stopover. When Theo and Lucas went ashore, Lucas again became concerned. He knew what was going through Theo’s mind. Theo would want to stay and paint the people they saw. Nowhere could there be such a mixed population-European, Polynesians, Vietnamese, and, of course, the many Melanesians as well. There was no visible slave trade like they had witnessed in Vila but they heard that an underground black birding still existed. Workers were needed for the copra plantations in Samoa.

Theo was unhappy to find Noumea was a French Settlement with a colonial governor, very much like Papeete. James Cook was the first European on the scene when he sighted what the chart called the “Grande Terre” in 1774 and named it New Caledonia, after the Scottish highlands, which the Romans had called Caledonia. Then in the next hundred years the French settled in using the island first as a penal colony. Theo thought Amedee Lighthouse that they saw when they entered the port might make a good painting but it was on a barrier reef fifteen miles away and getting there was a problem. He gave up the idea and settled his disappointment by getting drunk in the bars along the waterfront.

After two days they sailed away. They impatiently awaited their arrival in Sydney where changes in the wind were certain.

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LIFE AMONG CANNIBALS
Getting Bored, On to another Adventure

It was August 1933 and time came for Theo and Lucas to leave. “The sadness of our departure was offset by a sumptuous farewell feast provided by Mr. Wongue,” Theo wrote in his journal. “Before we left Tahiti, the banker gave us an introduction to his brother in Canton, since we had mentioned to him that our travels might take us to China.” Theo tucked the letter away in his valise never thinking he would use it. It was merely a polite gesture that he accepted the letter, knowing it would please the banker. Theo left with the farewell promise that if he visited China he would look up his brother.

Their goal now was Sydney, Australia, and from there it was touch and go. But now Theo came up with another idea. It was the wildest and most insane idea that he had ever had. He wanted to visit the cannibal islands of the New Hebrides. When Theo mentioned it to Lucas, Lucas concluded that all the hours that Theo had spent under a tropical sun was beginning to have an effect on him. “But you were fascinated too,” Theo said to him reminding him of the young French doctor, Dr. Pierre Bollard, they had met in the Marquesas.

“Yes, I was fascinated with his tales about savage islands but I don’t need to live those tales,” Lucas said. “I read Dante’s Inferno but that doesn’t mean I want to experience burning in hell.”

Both Theo and Lucas had met the doctor on an inner inland ferry and became fascinated with his stories about the New Hebrides. It wasn’t a long sea journey, only a few hours, but it was long enough to keep them both spellbound. The doctor was returning to his government post after a three-month’s home leave in France. With him was his young bride, going to a place she knew little about, a land she feared with much trepidation. She seemed more terrified with what Dr. Bollard had to say, horror stories which he found amusing. Nevertheless, Dr. Bollard did explain quite well how the island operated. He told how both the British and French had colonized the New Hebrides, or attempted to colonize it, in the late 18th century shortly after Captain James Cook visited the islands. Theo detested the word colonizing. To him it meant taking away from those whose complexion was of a different color. But he listened with keen interest, keeping his thoughts below. Now it was two countries, Britain and France, battling over a blank spot on a map, refusing to relinquish authority to the other, the two governments eventually signing an agreement making the islands a muddled up Anglo-French condominium. “There are two of everything,” the doctor bragged. “Two flags, two languages, two schools. Two police forces, two monies, two legal systems and even two prisons.” Theo found it all amusing but that wasn’t really what fascinated him. He listened to the doctor’s tales about earthquakes, almost weekly affairs, and volcanic eruptions that shake the islands constantly, and that occurred without notice. But there was something else that set Theo’s imagination on fire. “In the jungles live the black savages,” the doctor said. “They are rated as the most fearsome and ferocious cannibals known to man. They are more than willing to dine on stray or shipwrecked sailors who land on their shores. Trespassers who manage to escape the malaria, the dysentery and the fever might well end up in their cooking fires. And would you believe”-he threw up his hands over his head, with a look of revulsion from his wife-“right in the center of Vila is a slave market.” Theo fell silent but an idea began to simmer in his mind: if he could paint these savages he would have what no other artist ever had. He began to make plans, plans that he kept to himself, plans he couldn’t shake off, and when the Japanese tramp steamer, Maru Java, tied up at the quay in Papeete, with the notice that its next port-of-call was Port Vila in the New Hebrides, Theo let his plan be known.

“You want to what!” Lucas shouted.

“I am not asking you to experience Dante’s Inferno,” Theo said, laughing loudly.

“Then what are you doing?” he asked with disdain.

“Look, we don’t have to remain if we don’t like it,” Theo calmly said in an empty attempt to assuage Lucas and his newfound fear-about living with cannibals. Lucas concluded that there was no doubt Theo had snapped. “Look at it this way. Port Vila connects with Sydney,” Theo continued, and then he added, “Think of your studies. You will knock them right out at the academy in Basel.”

Lucas finally agreed. They didn’t have much of a choice, anyway. There wasn’t another ship due for a month.

Theo and Lucas said good-bye to the banker and their friends and shipped out aboard the tramp steamer bound for Port Vila. Hardly had they been out of port than they begin to wonder if they had not made a mistake. The steamer was a derelict of a ship if there ever was one; rusted and badly in need of paint, it should have been consigned to a wrecker’s hammer many a voyage before. She chugged along at a painfully slow speed, five to eight knots, depending on the current. The heat below deck, with the sun beating down unrelentingly on steel decks, was as hot as the inside of an oven. Passengers and crew had to either endure the crushing heat below deck or suffer the belching black smoke topside that rose from the single smoke stack amidships.

The ship’s cook, in his soiled apron and with a face sweltering in sweat, was no cordon bleu chef There was no smoked wild goose and Bouchee Forestier; no braised leg of lamb. Robespierre or pheasant en casserole. Theo dared not even think of the food back in Basel. He was tempted to take over the cooking but when he entered the galley he became so nauseated it was all he could do to make it topside and reach the rail before throwing up. Theo and Lucas were able to endure with the help of two bottles of Tahitian rum their friends in Papeete had given them. The rum gave out after a few days but they survived and two weeks after leaving Papeete they steamed into the harbor at Port Vila. In his journal Theo wrote that their arrival was like reading the opening pages of a Joseph Conrad novel.

The doctor they had met a few months earlier on the Marquesas ferry had not lied. Here was Melanesia, so unlike Polynesia, so completely opposite. Indeed, this was the untamed New Hebrides. The gazetteer may have listed them- Espiritu Santo, Malakula, Efate, Erromango, Ambrym, Tanna, Pentecost, Epi, Ambae, Vanua Lava, Gaua, Maewo, Malo and Anatom-but on the chart they were so small they were merely dots marked with names only. The harbor was what the doctor described, a port replete with gambling halls, opium dens and, yes, even a thriving slave market. The port was pulsating with drama. Theo loved it the moment he stepped ashore. This was what he set out to see, the reason he wanted to travel. But even this was beyond his belief, beyond his wildest thoughts. The two travellers, clinging tightly to their bags, and Theo with his easel over his shoulder and a roll of canvases under one arm, entered the city. They stopped dead in their tracks to see the slave market in business. “I can’t believe it!” Lucas cried. Ahead of them on a raised platform, men, women, children-human beings all, stripped down to their naked flesh and bound in chains-were being offered for sale. Theo immediately scrambled for his sketchpad but when the mob saw what he intended to do, they threatened him with clenched fists and angry looks. He tucked his pad away and with Lucas pulling at his arm they departed, daring not even to look back.

At the government hospital in the French quarter they found Dr. Bollard who was delighted to see them. They detected immediately he was not the same exuberant, happy-go-lucky man, filled with promise, they had met before. He had lost his enthusiasm. Theo surmised what it was, and he was right. At first the doctor was reluctant to say what was troubling him, but finally, after a bit of probing, he admitted what had gone wrong-his wife had left him, gone back to France. She had left after only one month in the colony. She couldn’t stand the heat, the disease and the lot of the natives. She found it all too detestable.

It didn’t take a psychologist to understand what her reason was for leaving. All one had to do was look around the hospital waiting room. Medicine could do little for the mob of people bunched together in the stuffy airless room that reeked with the odors of human depravation. They sat in corners and lay upon a hard concrete floor; they hung out in doorways and peered in the windows; they coughed and they spat and vomited and they moaned mournfully. They looked upon the white man in his white rob to be their savior. It was abhorrent and depressing. By western standards they weren’t very handsome people, especially when they opened their mouth to speak. Their teeth, their gums, even their tongues, were stained from beetle nut they chewed constantly.

They came to the hospital suffering from every sort of tropical malady known to man. Some with yaws and others with scabies and skin ulcers. Others with swollen legs from elephantiasis. They were plagued with all kinds of dreadful infectious diseases. Some patients were too grotesque to look upon, like those with elephantiasis. Theo had seen the effect of elephantiasis before in Polynesia. There was hardly a house on any of the islands that didn’t have a member of the family sequestered in a back room. They were hopeless cases, so sad. Some of the men with scrotums so large they had to carry them around in wheel barrels. No medicine could save them.

Surprisingly, Theo was not that appalled by what he saw, but he was sympathetic to their suffering. He took a keen interest in their sicknesses, the causes and the cures, and he felt like a frustrated doctor. At one time, when he was young, he thought about becoming a doctor, and now he wished he had. He enjoyed discussing medicine with Dr. Ballard who suggested that rather than check into a hotel in town he and Lucas stay in the hospital. He had special quarters for such occasions. He had himself, in fact, given up his house when his wife left him and moved into the hospital. Theo and Lucas found their new quarters both comfortable and commodious but they didn’t have the option to remain very long. The hospital sleeping quarters burned down three days after they moved in. A kerosene lamp had been filled by a kanaka and not with kerosene but with gasoline. It exploded when it was lit. The flames leaped up and devoured the wooden building in one roaring blaze, an instant it seemed, and only embers remained. Theo, Lucas and Dr. Ballard were fortunate they were at the hospital when the fire broke out and the kanakas were able save most of their possessions, Theo’s roll of paintings too. Theo thought hard about losing his canvasses and made up his mind he would ship them all back home once he reached Sydney.

The French governor, Paul Cruyal, seeing the predicament Theo and Lucas were in, invited them to stay with him and his wife in their villa. The governor, like the British governor, the judges and ranking government officials of the condominium administration, lived in lofty villas far above the harbor. They were grand villas, as grand if not superior to those you might find in southern France along the Riviera.

On the governor’s wind-up victrola Lucas whiled away the afternoons playing the governor’s huge collection of records with everything from Handel to Stravinsky. Theo in the meantime picked up a smattering of pidgin English from the “box speaky no fiti-fiti.” But Theo was becoming restless. The villa reminded him very much of Papeete with it colonial government bureaucracy and mentality. The French, however, were more liberal than the British and certainly more than the Dutch.  

But still, the whites in New Hebrides lived their lives in strict segregation from the native population. Even those of mixed blood were isolated from the others, which disturbed Theo greatly. After a few weeks at the governor’s villa, and since there wouldn’t be another ship to Sydney in months, Theo decided to visit some of the other islands.

The French governor was not pleased when Theo announced he wanted to travel to the outer islands. “They are savage islands; you will be eaten,” the governor ranted. Theo merely smiled and joked he would be careful if he were invited to dinner. Would he be invited to dine or to be dined upon? The governor didn’t think his remark was very humorous bur there was little he could do to stop Theo. He had Theo sign an agreement stating the government was not responsible and that he would be traveling at his own risk. Theo signed the paper.

Theo had been helping Dr. Ballard at the hospital and he regretted telling him he would be leaving for a while. The doctor gave him medicine that he might need and wished him well. Lucas was contented remaining behind at the villa with the governor’s victrola. They had three months before the next ship was scheduled to sail to Sydney.

Theo was thrilled. He packed a medicine kit provided by the doctor and bundled up his easel and paints. At the waterfront he found an inter-island ferry that sailed to Namuka the next day.

When the governor heard of Theo’s destination he admonished him against the evil of the island. “You couldn’t have made a worse choice,” he said. “They ate the last Protestant missionary who attempted to settle there.” The governor related how nearly all the island populations suffered at the hands of infamous blackbirders, who captured the natives for work on the Australian and Fijian sugar plantations, but they stayed clear of Namuka due to the savagery of the natives. Theo laughed. “They were Protestants, you say. I’m not Protestant,” he said and sailed early the next morning.

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BACK TO TAHITI AND MOREA

Once back in Tahiti, Theo hired a lorry, loaded Gauguin’s tombstone aboard and made a beeline for the museum and marched into the office of the curator, a kindly old gentleman, half Tahitian and half French. Proudly Theo offered the stone to him.

“We don’t want it,” the curator said.

“What do you mean you don’t want it?” Theo said, stunned.

“Just what I said. We don’t want it,” the curator replied.

Theo fired back, raising his voice this time: “Do you realize this is Paul Gauguin’s tombstone and I paid good money for it.”

“We don’t want it,” the man repeated.

“You cannot be serious,” Theo shouted. “This is Paul Gauguin’s tombstone. Come look. You can see his name, and the date he died.”

The curator followed Theo outside to the parked lorry. He looked at the tombstone. “Maybe you are right. It’s Gauguin’s name, and the date he died is correct.”

“Then you will take it,” Theo said breathing a sigh of relief. “Not at all,” the curator calmly replied. “This is the tenth Paul Gauguin tombstone we’ve been offered in the past few years.” Theo couldn’t even give the stone away to anyone.

Feeling the disappointment and the loss of four hundred francs, Theo still wanted to give Tahiti one last fling. Leaving Lucas at the Pacific Hotel in Papeete he went to paint for a time in Tauteria at the far end of the island. He stayed in the house where Robert Louis Stevenson had lived and worked. But that proved to be a bad mistake. He soon grew weary of visitors coming to see where the author had written Treasure Island. The bungalow hotel, which was but a replica of Stevenson’s original house, was called “Stevenson Camp Hotel” and was built by a Czechoslovakian expatriate named Milos van Vivnac. Theo found him quite interesting, especially when he learned he was escaping from Nazi Germany. He had some harrowing tales to tell.

Theo spent his daylight hours at Tauteria painting the volcanoes and seascapes. At night he and Milos drank themselves silly on coconut wine while the vahines from the village came and danced for them on the verandah. Milos laughed when he saw a village girl clad in a cheap calico sarong. “You know she spent the night in my bed,” he chuckled. He took half of Theo’s paintings in exchange for Theo’s keep. When Theo returned to Papeete, he joked with Lucas that one day art dealers might come to Tahiti looking for lost Theo Meiers and they might well find one or two oils in fishermen’s huts that old Milos had swapped for a catch of fish.

Back in Papeete, Theo looked over his canvases. He was aware, unwittingly, that he was following in the steps of Paul Gauguin and this did not please him. He insisted he was not an imitator. Thirty years before, the French artist had captured the essence and soul of Tahiti on canvas and now, in a real sense, Gauguin was an albatross that hung around Theo’s neck. Whatever Theo accomplished, he knew he would be likened to Gauguin. He felt a need to reach beyond Gauguin, and it was by chance that he did, but not immediately. He slowly began to find himself. He knew he was good. A person knows when he is good and he doesn’t have to ask others to tell him he is. The bell inside rings. He remembered once he painted the portrait of a banker and when his wife saw the picture she was horrified. “He looks just like a master-butcher,” she cried.

“Good,” Theo replied. “That was how he struck me, like a butcher.”

Theo had to be true to his art. He knew as a painter he had to take the colors on his palette and commit them to real life. The process took time to learn. To paint a blue in a tropical landscape, as blue as it actually was, did nothing to the picture. The color was there, the blue was there, but it did not come alive. The tropical landscape is not at all as we see it. It is, rather, an experiment. This landscape for Theo was warm in tone, and so, in simple fashion, he began to paint his pictures over a reddish priming coat. And then the green tones and the other colors stood out.

When the picture was finished, it was redder than nature, but yet conveyed the landscape accurately. One must translate the scene and capture the moment, he concluded, and that became his secret. He liked to work with blue outlines, as the blue to him was a sort of handwriting that went across the picture as to emphasize a specific feature of the painting. As he studied his canvases before him he knew he departed from nature to a certain degree. He was less concerned with an imitation of nature than with a representation of his own thoughts, his own dreams. But by no stretch of the imagination was abstract painting to his taste. Theo’s mind was too much involved with the senses than with the visual, not tied up with a false depiction of reality. Theo sought the simplest form of expression. He loved music, all music, the classics, Balinese gamelan, even Chinese music, and he knew that the beauty of music had naturally influenced his painting. No, Theo learned from Gauguin; he learned from the colors of the tropics, but he did not copy Gauguin.

After three months in Tahiti, Theo and Lucas separated for a spell. Theo wanted to paint by himself on neighboring Moorea. His stay there lasted three months. He had a difficult time deciding whether it was Hiva Oa or Moorea that he liked the best. He did like Moorea for its two bays that cut deep into the island, bays where lofty jagged mountains dropped down right to the water’s edge. The beauty was powerful, like an elixir. When he painted now, he painted with tears in his eyes.

Less than 1,500 people lived on the island. Captain James Cook brought attention to one of the bays when he anchored HMS Discovery and HMS Resolution there. One of the bays that bears his name to this day-Cook’s Bay. And Herman Melville wrote elegantly about Moorea in his book Omoo.

Theo was intrigued by the shadows the cliff cast, changing from hour to hour, so wonderful for an artist. He remembered so well, not so many years before, how he and his friend Karl Moor studied compositions together back in Berne. The two were very much interested in light and shade. They walked under the pale glare of flickering gas lamps in the streets in Berne, and painted what they saw. Anyone who saw them thought they were crazy, painting at night with torchlight in hand. He attempted to do this on Moorea but the mosquitoes drove him mad and he had to retreat indoors.

Theo rented a house on a small promontory with a marvelous view of Tahiti from his porch. He wrote: “I could sit at my easel and watch any boat that came over from Tahiti. If anything looked promising through my binoculars, I’d run down to the jetty to greet the boat.” He returned to Tahiti with a bundle of finished canvases.

Back in Papeete, Theo and Lucas were fortunate to be the guests of a very charming gentleman, Jean Pierre Wongue. “Wong is the correct name, Lee Wong, but I had to change it when I came to Tahiti.” He told how the Chinese came to Tahiti. An American adventurer William Stewart brought them here in the first place. “He arrived from America in 1860 just as Americans started killing one another in the Civil War,” he explained. ”Aside from the dreadful deaths-fathers killing sons and brothers killing brothers-the cotton industry, the lifeblood of the South, was suffering. Steward saw the similarities of the American South and Tahiti and soon realized cotton could grow in Tahiti. He began a cotton plantation, but he could never get the Tahitians to labor in cotton fields so he got authorization from the government to import 1,500 Chinese laborers from Canton in China. The Civil War ended and the cotton industry bounded back in the American south faster than anyone could imagine, and Stewart’s plantation went bust. He fled, without repatriating the Chinese back to their homeland and the French government in the midst of a war in Europe was preoccupied elsewhere. The Chinese were left to fend on their own, and in a short time they were running all the businesses in Papeete.”

Mr. Wongue was the Manager of the Banque de I’Indochine. He and his brother had studied in America. His brother returned to Canton in southern China, and established himself as a respected doctor there, while Mr. Wongue was offered the management of the bank in Papeete where Theo and Lucas deposited what little money they had.

Mr. Wongue lived in a fine colonial home outside of Papeete. His wife had died only a few months before and his two sons were off studying in France. He himself, in his mid-fifties, was a diabetic, and his hopes of one day returning to China had long ago been dashed by his poor health. He took an interest in Theo and Lucas, most likely out of loneliness, and invited them often to dine with him at home. His meals were superb and he fancied himself a gourmet chef Theo, too, took a delight in cooking and together the two men quickly bonded. The banker taught Theo the many intricacies of Chinese cuisine with everything from 100-year old eggs to steamed dumplings. Theo in turn taught him to make pate fois gras. Theo took note that the man never invited his countrymen to dine with him, and he asked Mr. Wongue his reason for not doing so.

“Not on your life,” the banker answered, being the shrewd businessman that he was, like all overseas Chinese. “If I did that, they’d be bound to ask me for a loan at the bank the next morning!”

The banker brought out a laugh but beneath it Theo knew he was serious.

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SOJOURN IN THE MARQUESAS
Falling In Love with Hiva Oa

Theo fell in love with Hiva Oa, as Gauguin had done, and found a thatched hut he rented for a few francs and decided to remain for a month or two. Lucas was not keen on the idea and remained in the Chinese hotel but Theo did encourage him to meet people and interview them for his ethnological material for the museum.

Lucas could certainly find material to write about in these remote Marquesas. The island was ripe with characters that were more than willing to bare their souls. The Marquesas served as a penal colony to which exiles were sent from all the surrounding islands and from some as far away as Tahiti. The prisoners could take employment during the day, if they could find work, but at night they were required to return to their cells. Theo made friends with everyone, including prisoners, and in particular the gendarmes.

When he learned the local gendarmes had confiscated the island distillery, he made it a point to reach out to them. He obviously had his reasons. He convinced them he was an expert at making spirits, a long family tradition, and soon he was producing rum for them to drink for their own parties, parties that Theo organized. It was, of course, raw rum, un-aged and so powerful Theo remembered years later that a drop spilled on the floor could eat through the wood, even iron wood floors. They all loved it.

Theo had working for him one of the most infamous prisoners on the islands, Johnny Hamoi from Samoa. Anyone will tell you the Samoans are the meanest Polynesians in the South Pacific. They thrive on punching one another out. One afternoon when Theo went off to paint, Johnny got into the rum supply that Theo and the gendarmes were hoarding for their Saturday night party. When Theo returned from an afternoon of painting in the hills, he found Johnny had gone wild and chopped up the house with a coconut knife. Fortunately by then he had drunk himself into a stupor and the gendarmes were able to carry him back to prison. It took four men to do it, such was the size of the man.

Theo had painted a dozen good canvases during his lengthy sojourn on Hiva Oa and decided it was time to leave, but not forever. He had made up his mind that he would return one day. Marquesas was to his liking, but Switzerland was calling and he had to fulfill his obligation and return with sixty canvases. He was but half way around the world with still a long way to go. He felt the Good Lord was on his side when one day a sailing yacht arrived at Atuona Bay. It was on its way to Tahiti and the captain had berths aboard for him and Lucas. The yacht was truly a godsend for he and Lucas might have had to wait months for another ship to arrive.

Theo was at the dock in Hiva Oa, with his easel and canvases packed, waiting for the longboat, when an old man, the gardener for a Catholic mission, approached him. The man explained he was cleaning up the graves and had in his possession Paul Gauguin’s tombstone. Did Theo want to buy it? Theo, of course, wanted to see it. The old man led him to a rickety horse-drawn cart, and there wrapped in sacks was the tombstone. It was roughly cut and bore the artist’s name and the date he died. Theo recognized it at once.

“But I can’t buy this,” Theo said.

“Then I will have to dump it into the sea. The mission has ordered a new one, and this is of no use.”

Theo thought for a moment. “How much do you want?” he finally asked.

“How much do you have?”

“I only have five hundred francs with me.”

“Four hundred francs then will do,” the gardener said.

“But I would only have one hundred francs left. You can’t do that,” Theo pleaded.

“Then you cannot have the stone of the great one.”

Theo had been in the islands long enough to know it was useless to argue logically with an islander and he paid the old man four hundred francs. The crew helped Theo load the tombstone aboard yacht and lash it securely on the foredeck. That afternoon they set sail for Tahiti.

The yacht was an American vessel, Coquette, making its maiden voyage in the Pacific, bound for Tahiti. True, the captain agreed to give passage but once they set sail they wondered if they had made the right decision. “The captain was more at home with a rum bottle than with a compass,” Theo noted in his journal. ”At any rate,” he wrote, “we had a much longer, and a much more dangerous look at the beautiful reef-infested Tuamotu islands than we had bargained for.” Luckily they got through the low-lying atolls, some only a few feet above water, without mishap. Theo vowed that one day he would come back and see them properly, and not be in a rush. Lucas listened and smiled.

Once they were at sea Theo began to feel badly about buying the tombstone. The stone did not belong to him. It belonged to everyone, to the world in general. When they arrived in Papeete, he decided he would donate the tombstone to the museum. He felt much better after making the decision.

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TO THE SOUTH SEAS
Painting His Date

Theo wanted more than anything else to see the Marquesas. After all it was here that Gauguin lived and here he had died. He and Lucas booked passage aboard Marechal Foch, the last of the old 19th century three-mast schooners that plied the South Pacific. Theo was so excited Lucas had a hard time calming him down. “Easy, Theo, easy,” he kept saying. There was reason, of course, for Theo to be excited. The vessel was a magnificent double planked oak vessel with skipjack masts, jutting bowsprit and ratlines running up the rigging. A crow’s nest three-fourths up the foremast was an invitation for Theo to climb the rigging while the vessel was still anchored in the harbor. Theo was like a child when school was out and summer vacation began.

Loaded with copra and bound for San Francisco, the schooner was scheduled to make a stop at the Marquesas to pick up more cargo and a fresh supply of water and some live pigs. The helmsman, as chance would have it, was the bearded old Tahitian who had played the priest in the film “Tabu.” Theo was reliving his dream. Seeing the old man was more than he bargained for.

Immediately after setting sail, Theo approached the old man as he stood at the helm and quickly bombarded him with questions. After talking with him at length, Theo returned to his cabin and took out his journal. Obviously disappointed, he wrote: “I had realized that this motion picture, which had impressed me so very deeply years before, was pure, unadulterated fiction, just like the piously beautiful compositions were, no matter how exquisite. Still, I wanted to live them, to see and experience them.”

Theo returned to the helm, this time to sketch the old man. He did one quick sketch and began another. The old man, seeing him start again, said, “You got one, what’d yah wanta another one fur?” Theo couldn’t explain, not in their limited English, but then, some things can’t be explained in any language.

Three days out of Tahiti the schooner ran into a full gale, and so severe was the storm that the half-breed skipper ordered a bishop who was aboard to make ready for their last mass. The bishop was the wine-drinking, red-eyed, unshaven Monsignor of Atouna returning to his mission. He and Theo didn’t see eye to eye from the moment they met. “Can you not behave with your language when I am aboard?” the bishop shouted when Theo cursed at the habitually drunk skipper. The feud was not to end until the schooner anchored in Taiohae on Nuku Hiva.

The storm subsided and the beauty of the South Seas revealed itself as they ghosted along with the trade winds on a starboard tack. With each landfall they came upon, each island that fell into view, Theo could not decide if what he was looking at was more beautiful than the last landfall he beheld. The tropics can do that to one. “I must come back here one day,” he said, a statement he declared so often before. Each time he was just as serious. “No, I swear this is more beautiful than the last one!” How many times had he said this?

Marechal Foch slipped quietly into Taiohae on Nuku Hiva and dropped anchor in the wide spacious bay. Theo could see that Nuku Hiva was a volcanic island. There was no mistaking that. She was not one of those atolls that grew up ever so slowly over the centuries from coral polyps. No, Nuku Hiva had sprung up suddenly, from violent volcanic upheaval at a time when the earth was much different. Greenery clung to the very summits, and cascading waterfalls tumbled hundreds of feet, sending off a thousand rainbows in the downpour of afternoon sunlight. To  

Theo the beauty was overpowering. Here, indeed, were the islands so elegantly described by Herman Melville in his book Typee and Robert Louis Stevenson’s In the South Seas. Theo was so anxious to get ashore when the village of Taiohae came into view that he would have swum ashore had the crew taken much longer to launch the longboat. “Good you didn’t,” Lucas said. “The old man said there are sharks in the harbor.” Theo looked for sharks and was disappointed when he didn’t see any.

Theo lost no time befriending Bob McKitridge, an island trader who ran the trading store in Taiohae. Bob had never met Gauguin, for the artist lived on another island, but he knew of him. Bob, in fact, knew all the foreigners who came to the islands. “We have scarcely two thousand people now in all six of our islands,” Bob said. “When Melville came through – now mind you, that was before my time – there were over two hundred thousand souls, and by the time the French took over in the 1850s the numbers were about sixty thousand. This was, you know, American before the French. Both the Chinese and the white man killed off the natives with their diseases.”

After loading cargo, Marechal Foch, sailed off to San Francisco leaving Theo and Lucas to their own devices. Lucas scribbled in his notebook bits of information he gleaned from. Long talks with Bob as both of them sat on the verandah in front of the store, and both dozing off most of the time.

Theo, on the other hand, hiked into the hills with his sketchpad in hand and, once, he set out to find the valley where the natives had imprisoned Melville when they were still cannibals. He didn’t recollect ever finding the valley, and even if he had, there was no telling if it was the same valley Melville described in Typee.

Theo was never hesitant to admit he was forever hopeful of finding a lost Gauguin. Perhaps, he figured, he might have success and find a painting on Hiva Oa where Gauguin had lived and where he had died and was buried. McKitridge arranged, on his hand-cranked powered radio, for an inter-inland trading schooner to carry him and Lucas to the island. The trading schooner had a cargo of dried copra to pick up at Atuona, Gauguin’s island, and could swing by and pick them up. Had not McKitridge arranged for their passage they might have needed to wait weeks for a passage. Frightful as it was, there was always the thought that at some islands the natives had to wait six months for a trading schooner to arrive, and even then it was without certainly. Theo remembered Frisbee, the storekeeper from Puka Puka, telling him that sometimes the islanders waited a year before they saw a sail on the horizon. It was only a day’s voyage but the two intrepid travelers felt that if it lasted any longer they might have been eaten alive by the copra beetles aboard.

Theo was overwhelmed by every landfall that befell him and Hiva Oa Island was no different when it came into view. He was overjoyed when they entered Atuona Bay and the village of Atuona appeared beyond, framed against a magnificent tropical setting. With Temirtau peak towering 3,980 feet above the town, it would make a fine painting, Theo thought. “If I do the painting,” he quibbled with Lucas, “no one would believe it to be real.” It took Theo no time to decide that it was here, on Hiva Oa, that he would return after fulfilling his agreement with the Idiot’s Club in Basel. Lucas smiled at Theo’s words.

“How many islands does this make it where you want to return?” Lucas asked. Theo acted like he didn’t hear him.

Of course, the fact that Atuona was the final home of Paul Gauguin had some bearing on Theo’s decision. The island took on a deep meaning, a kind of veneration for Theo. He and Lucas had hardly settled in their Chinese hotel in town when Theo set out to find Gauguin’s grave site. He found it, after climbing a high hill at Calvary Cemetery overlooking the anchorage on Atuona Bay. Theo was appalled when he saw the site. It was derelict, unkempt with the headstone missing. A crude wooden cross with the name Gauguin painted on it marked the spot. Nevertheless, Theo paid his respect to the artist and he climbed the hill several times after that to visit the grave.

Although Hiva Oa at the time was the capital and the center of government for the Marquesas shops and stores were sparse and when Theo stepped ashore he sadly knew instantly there would be no chance of finding a lost Gauguin. The artist had lived on Hiva Oa for twenty-two months and was in frequent trouble with the French government for siding with the natives in various matters. For one offense he was sentenced to three months in goal and fined a thousand francs. He died on May 7^th, 1903. His furniture, paintings, books and sculptures were sent to Papeete for auction to pay his fine. He painted over a hundred oils during that period and his last one was held upside down and according to one reporter, sold as the Niagara Falls for seven francs.

Theo was aware that had not the British novelist Somerset Maugham brought Paul Gauguin to public notice he might not have achieved the notoriety that he did. How many fine impressionist artists might there be out there who go unrecognized and become lost in the passage of time? Maugham published his Gauguin-inspired novel, The Moon and Sixpence, in 1919. Gauguin’s paintings at that time were still practically unknown outside of the art circles of Montparnasse.

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THIS CAN’T BE TAHITI

Theo and Lucas disembarked to find themselves smothered in flowered leis. They set out to find lodging.

There were only two tourist-type hotels on the waterfront, and these were clapboard, two-story buildings right on the quay. Theo and Lucas picked the Pacific Hotel, run by a Frenchman who had spent thirty years on Tahiti. He was taking his mid-morning nap when they checked in. His twelve-year-old daughter, a pretty half Tahitian girl, pointed to the key box.

“Take a key, any key you want,” she said giggling in French and then went about her business, playing with the cat. Theo took Room No. 1, and Lucas. Room No. 2. It would be another two days before the Frenchman brought the register for them to sign. The rooms had no bathrooms; the public WC was down the hall, and rooms had no running water or plumbing. There were washstands with basins and large jars with water that had to be dipped out into the basins. There was a bucket under the washstand for dirty water. A ceiling fan was suspended from a beam running across the center of the room. Theo turned it on to test it only to learn it shook the room as it twirled round and round. There was a mosquito net drawn up at the head of the lumpy bed. The net had several patched holes. What was most odd about the rooms was that the walls ran only two-thirds the way up to the ceiling. Theo was told this provided a free flow of air, and what they didn’t tell him that privacy was not on the menu. You could hear the guy snoring in the next room, or doing whatever he was doing. Theo checked out the WC. There was no tub and in place of a shower was a shanghai jar with a coconut dipper hanging on a nail on the wall.

“You okay?” Lucas asked when he heard Theo over the wall unpacking his easel.

“Yea,” Theo replied. “How do we get a drink?”

“Ring for the chamber maid,” Lucas answered sarcastically. “Salute,” Theo said. “Let’s go find a bar.”

They didn’t need to go far to find a bar. There were three or four bars in Papeete and there was no trouble finding them. You could hear them a couple blocks block away. Being boat day, the place was packed with customers. They soon learned when a boat arrived in Papeete-sometimes a month apart-it was a call for everyone on the island to come to town.

The bar they liked best was the loudest and most crowded, and the liveliest. It was run by an American named Mike Quinn and his Tahitian wife, Marcelle. Mike had turned a bamboo grass hut with plaited pandanas walls into a Wild West saloon to which he added the touches of a Dixieland cabaret, like those in New Orleans. The music was good, Western mostly but with a Tahitian twang. Theo was beginning to wonder if Tahiti wasn’t an American colony rather than French for almost everyone he met upon arrival was American.

At Quinn’s the dancing was ferocious and the partying was wild. Gendarmes lingered outside the two swinging doors but seemed reluctant to enter even when a fight broke out, which was every few minutes. Nor, while Theo and Lucas stood in awe, did the gendarmes do anything to stop a drunken French plantation owner from riding his horse though the front swinging doors and out the back door. Some drinkers, sitting at the bar swilling down Hinano beer, didn’t even notice the horse and his drunken rider go galloping by. The place was that chaotic.

The next day the scene changed. Astrolabe departed for Noumea and the town became deathly still. It was not only still, it was dull, the dullest town in the South Pacific the old timers claimed. For anyone craving excitement, there was absolutely nothing to do. Theo was dumfounded. He became half angry to find that Tahiti, after all, was a real place and not a pantomime. And the Tahitians were real, with problems as everyone else might have any place around the world. He began to wonder if paradise was nothing more than an illusion of the mind of the beholder. Was Tahiti really something it was made out to be?

Theo had expected one thing and found something else. He was like a drunk riding high on a glow and the bubble burst and the hangover set in. Tahiti was not what he imagined it to be. He expected to find an old way of life, at least some of the culture left, but it took him only a short time to figure out that the French had destroyed all that. Maybe he was echoing the sentiments of Gauguin who loathed Papeete. What both Gauguin and Theo found was exactly what they had attempted to escape from bureaucracy

In a letter back home to Helga, Theo scribbled out his thoughts; “My feelings at stepping ashore at Papeete are difficult to describe. Guadeloupe and Martinique were thriving commercial centers trading in sugar cane, pineapples, copra and rum. We weren’t disappointed when we saw them. They were exactly as we imagined colonial life to be. Tahiti, on the other hand, was known to the world as the idyllic South Sea island paradise described by Captain Cook, immortalized in the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson and brought to our eyes in this century in the paintings of Paul Gauguin. I expected natives to be living confirmation of Rousseau’s “noble savage” theory. How wrong I was.”

Theo could understand now why Gauguin wrote what he did about Papeete. “Imagine our disenchantment, then, when we found that Papeete was just another colonial town,” Gauguin wrote in Noa Noa. Now it dawned on Theo why Gauguin had written such gloomy letters home to his friends, complaining of bourgeois colonials and petty government bureaucrats, why he fled from Tahiti altogether and took refuge in the Marquesas Islands. Theo figured out that Gauguin’s poetic saga Noa Noa was nothing but a fantasy, like The Marriage of Loti -written not by Loti but Julien Viaud-a French sailor who had spent only a few weeks in Papeete. His romance with Ranthau was fiction. Gauguin’s Noa Noa was his vision of what the islands should be and not what they were. Theo was discovering rapidly that man isn’t a noble savage after all; he’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, and unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved. He found this to be true when he and Lucas took their letter of introduction to the governor. It proved to be colonial snobbishness at its worst. The governor had no time for the two outsiders, and definitely did not want another painter in his midst. “Who was this English writer who came to Tahiti looking for lost Gauguins, wrote a fictional story about his findings and caused all kinds of havoc for new comers to the island,” the governor said to Theo and commented that he hoped Theo was not like him.

Theo didn’t want to admit it, but he secretly hoped that he might find a Gauguin, not for its real value but for its intrinsic worth, which was what he wrote to Helga. Somerset Maugham had been somewhat successful in his search.

Maybe Theo would be too. At a bookstore in town he found a copy of Maugham’s A Writers Notebook. Maugham had written at length about his search for lost Gauguins.

“‘The widow of a chief lived in a two-storied frame house about thirty-five miles from Papeete. The chief who received the Legion of Honour for his services in the troubles at the time the French protectorate was changed into occupation; and on the walls of the parlour, filled with cheap French furniture, are the documents relating to this, signed photographs of various political celebrities, and the usual photographs of dusky marriage groups. The bedrooms are crowded with enormous beds. She is a large stout old woman, with grey hair, and one eye shut, which yet now and then opens and fixes you with a mysterious stare. She wears spectacles, a shabby black Mother Hubbard, and sits most comfortably on the floor smoking native cigarettes.

She told me there were pictures by Gauguin in a house not far from hers, and when I said I would like to see them called for a boy to show me the way. We drove along the road for a couple of miles and then, turning on it, went down a swampy grass path till we came to a very shabby frame house, grey and dilapidated. There was no furniture in it beyond a few mats, and the veranda was swarming with dirty children. A young man was lying on the veranda smoking cigarettes and a young woman was seated idly. The master of the house, a flat-nosed, smiling dark native came and talked to us. He asked us to go in, and the first thing I saw was the Gauguin painted on the door. It appears that Gauguin was ill for some time in that house and was looked after by the parents of the present owner, all ten of then. He was pleased with the way they treated him. In one of the two rooms of which the bungalow consisted there were three doors, the upper part of which was of glass divided into panels, and on each of them he painted a picture. The children had picked away two of them; on one hardly anything was left but a faint head in one corner, while on the other could still be seen the traces of a woman’s torso thrown backwards in an attitude of passionate grace. The third was in tolerable preservation, but it was plain that in a very few years it would be in the same state as the other two.

The man took no interest in the pictures as such, but merely as remembrances of the dead guest, and when I pointed out to him that he could still keep the other two he was not unwilling sell the third. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I shall have to buy a new door.’

‘How much will it cost?’ I asked. ‘A hundred francs.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll give you two hundred.”‘

Theo was also influenced by Maugham’s fictionalized account of Gauguin that he published in his book The Moon and Sixpence that caused a stir in Europe and brought the name Gauguin to the fore.

Probably what disappointed Theo more than anything about Papeete was that it had become a hangout for lost Americans, or as Gertrude Stein called them, the Lost Generation. While many writers were flocking to Paris like Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Pasos, others had discovered Tahiti. Papeete was, in fact, closer to San Francisco than to Paris. The Matson Line was the connection. Tahiti was becoming, after World War One, another home for the Lost Generation in the South Seas.

The islanders called them something else-White Shadows. In the years immediately following World War One, Tahiti was deluged by a great number of visitors-writers, artists, businessmen and yachtsmen, all who were trying to escape from the stresses and strains of a war-shattered world. Most of them, after spending their money or losing their illusions, disappeared again, leaving not a trace behind. Theo disliked being called a White Shadow and was ready to punch anyone who did.

Although Theo was truly disappointed with Papeete, he didn’t give up hope. Perhaps rural Tahiti and the other islands would not be the same. It didn’t take a scholar to determine there was nothing “native” about Papeete. Were Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin all correct in their thinking, as they claimed, that Tahiti was spoiled? Throughout the years, Tahiti’s isolation, far removed from the world’s trade routes, had kept her more or less unspoiled. Not all of the island could be ruined by the evils of civilization, Theo thought. His mind to explore rural Tahiti and some of the neighboring islands.

Although Theo found Papeete not to his liking, he did meet many interesting characters that he came to know. There was Harry Pidgeon, the second solo sailor to circumnavigate the world, after Joshua Slocum, and the first person to do so twice. On both trips, he sailed a 34-foot yawl Islander with long stopovers in Papeete. Theo found Pidgeon agreeable and sat with him aboard Islander drinking Hinano.

Aside from the yachtsmen there was a clique of American writers that Theo met and at times joined in their fun. Robert Dean Frisbie was from Cleveland. Theo admired him greatly, mostly for what he stood for. Frisbie arrived in 1920 and went to live in Puka Puka in the remote Cook Islands. He became a trader and storekeeper, married a local girl and wrote a book about his experience. The Book of Puka Puka, published in 1929, related the tale of his eternal search for solitude on the far-flung atoll of Puka Puka.

It was on Puka Puka that Frisbie met 16 year-old Ngatokorua. They married and she became the mother of their five children. In 1930, the family sailed back to Tahiti and Frisbie started working on his second novel, My Tahiti, and worked on another book, A Child of Tahiti, which was never published. Theo did enjoy Frisbie’s company, and he even considered taking a trading schooner to Puka Puka to visit the island. He definitely would, he promised Frisbie, on his return to Tahiti.

The most interesting characters Theo met were Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall. Everyone on the island knew them. They were writing a book on the HMS Bounty mutiny. Everywhere the authors went they were greeted by: “Hey, how’s the book doing?” Nordoff and Hall were wartime pilots who met in Paris in the autumn of 1918. Both were members of the all-American Lafayette Squadron, and both had been flying more or less continuously since the beginning of the war. They were waiting orders from home when the founder of the Lafayette Squadron called them into headquarters, introduced them to each other, and asked them to write a history of their corps. The two pilots agreed, and thus began a most remarkable partnership. Both Hall and Nordoff had taken island wives.

It was the complete disappearance of all Polynesian culture that had disturbed Theo the most. Everywhere Theo went in Papeete there was a feeling of disillusionment and emptiness, brought in part by the over-zealous missionaries and by the prohibition in America that had done the rest. Tahiti became a smugglers’ port and the amorous services of the vahines were paid for in bottles of whisky. Theo began to meditate on this sorry situation.

“Let’s go to the end of the world,” he exclaimed to Lucas.

“Let’s go to the Marquesas Islands.”

Theo’s experience on Tahiti was a dichotomy of emotions. He wrote in his journal there were hardly enough colors on his palette to do justice to the richly colored beauty all around, but in truth it was more than beauty that he sought.

Theo did love many things about Tahiti though, and these he remembered. There were the smells, the sweet smell of copra drying in a shed, or when the wind shifts, the scent of fresh coffee coming from a plantation. And the fragrant scent of flowers, frangipani and the Taire Tahiti. They were everywhere. There were sounds too, sharkskin drums and wood blocks that filled the air.

All of this, the combination of sounds, smells, sights, affected Theo greatly. They awakened all his senses, and he wanted to imbibe in them, like a savage, in its wild and wonderful madness. Sometimes the beauty of Tahiti-maybe the mist, the way it hung over the mountains in the morning, or maybe the sinking sun at dusk, dropping over the edge of a reef-sometimes the beauty became so overpowering Theo felt he might die right there, instantly, contented. The French had not changed that.

Theo had to flee from Papeete. He left Lucas in his hotel and set out for the countryside where he hoped he could find the noble savage. He went to Punhaauia to seek out the house where Gauguin had lived. Gauguin had found a new vahine, half-French, half Tahitian girl named Paura. Theo located the house, now in ruins with only the foundation still remaining. When he talked to the Tahitians who remembered Gauguin, they said Paura left Gauguin in the Marquesas when she became pregnant and returned to Papeete. She gave birth to a son which she named Emile. Theo returned to Papeete determined to find Emile whom he calculated to be in his late 60s. Theo found him. He hung out around the Cathedral in downtown Papeete.

Emile had become grossly fat, not much different than his fellow Tahitians, and he eked out a living making fish traps for tourists. He had no abode and lived on doorsteps. He knew nothing about his father.

Theo had Bed from Europe but he couldn’t escape the depressing news that came from the continent. The German Third Reich was bringing defamation. Helga wrote to tell Theo that Nolde’s paintings had been confiscated from the museums and his work was labeled Entartete Kunst or “Degenerate Art.” Theo was deeply saddened at this news.

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TO THE SOUTH SEAS
Painting His Date

It was in the Two Mosquitoes bar that Theo saw Maria. She was voluptuous. She was tall, her legs long. Her fine breasts protruded out from her cotton blouse, and she wore no bra. She was very drunk. Here is the woman I have to paint, he said to himself, and she has to be in the nude. He bought her a drink, and then another. He spent the rest of the afternoon buying her drinks, prepping her for what was to come. She could hardly stand on her feet when, half dragging her, he somehow managed to get them both to his room, stumbling and falling all the way. But they made it. Theo hastily unbuttoned her blouse and loosened her skirt and let it fall to the floor. She wore no undergarments. He removed her blouse. She stood there, still as a statue, not attempting to cover her naked body. For the longest time, Theo stood there, immobile, she before him, looking at her and her naked body, longingly. Her skin was the color of mahogany and without blemish. He had never seen such perfection in a human body, so much unlike those models in art classes. He had to hurry while there was still enough light to paint her. He hastily began to set up his easel and pulled up a chair for her to sit upon. When he turned to look for her, she had collapsed on the bed and was fast asleep. The temptation was too great. He tore off his own clothes and fell upon the bed. She didn’t move. These hot Creole women, he thought, and did what he had to do.

Still, he had to paint her. It took all his remaining strength and effort to prop her up in the chair, her naked body catching the last glimmer of light. He worked feverishly and as quickly as he could, squeezing oil from the tubes onto the pallet and applying the colors with the skill that he had mastered. When the light faded completely, he dragged Maria back to the bed, laid her down and fell upon the bed beside her, his model and lover for the day. Neither of them moved.

Theo awoke with the first light the next morning. His head, like one of those drums the night before, pounded painfully, but he was still thoughtful of the painting resting in the easel. He got up from bed and he knew the moment he looked at it that it was good. He knew when his paintings were good. He didn’t have to ask another. Those that didn’t please him he destroyed immediately. This one he would keep. This one any member of the Idiot Club would want. But no, after a thought, this one he would keep. This painting was special. He had to keep it forever. He wondered what Maria would think of herself when she saw the painting. He was tempted to awake her but he would wait until he had coffee and came back. He pulled the bed cover up from the floor where it had fallen and covered her. He did it in great care, almost in admiration for her, for, after all, he had painted her body, immortalizing her for all eternity. He was about to leave the room when he thought she might awaken, and fearing she would admonish him for sneaking out, he took some francs from his pocket and laid them on the table next to his easel.

Theo went out into the street and found the nearest cafe, “Café et cognac,” he shouted to the waiter and then to a group of early morning imbibers at the next table he called out in a loud voice- “Ole.” They motioned for him to join them at their table, which he did happily.

It was noon when Lucas found Theo sitting in a cafe, not the one from early that morning but another one, quibbling with two Creole women sitting nearby for his being too stingy to buy them drinks. “Come, Lucas,” Theo called when he saw his friend. “Buy these lovely girls and me a drink, and pay my bill too.” He looked up at the waiter. “This stupid man wants his money.”

The two women now turned their attention to Lucas.

“You haven’t paid your bill?” Lucas admonished him.

“I don’t have money. Why you think I ask you to buy these ladies a drink?”

“You spent your money. What were you going to do?” “Wait for you.”

“What if I didn’t come?” “You would come.”

“Theo, you’re crazy.”

“No, my friend. I have been working, and waiting for you to see the painting,” He started to swill down his drink, but remembering the glass was empty, he turned it upside down on the table. Lucas paid the waiter. He knew he had to get Theo out of there and back to the ship, but first, Theo reminded him, they had to stop at the hotel and fetch Theo’s things. The girls at the next table cursed when the two men left, for not buying them drinks. With Lucas supporting Theo under one arm they stopped at Theo’s hotel.

“Maybe Maria still sleeping,” Theo said when they climbed the four flights of steps. “You will like Maria.”

Theo pushed the door open, blocking the view from Lucas, and letting out a gasp, fell back against the door. Lucas heard the gasp, and then Theo cry out, “No, no.”

“No what,” Lucas demanded and pushed Theo aside and entered the room. It took a moment for the scene to register in his mind, and when it did, when he realized what had happened, he broke into laughter. It wasn’t a simple laugh, a light laugh, it was a deep resounding hearty laugh. He couldn’t stop laughing, to the annoyance of Theo. Maria was not in the room. She had left but, before she had, she desecrated Theo’s masterpiece. She had taken one of Theo’s brushes, dipped it in brown ocher and attempted to paint a bra and skirt on what was once her naked body. She also added a moustache and goatee to the canvas. The painting was ruined. Lucas stopped laughing when he saw the hurt on Theo’s face. For a moment he even thought that Theo might break down into tears. All the way back to Astrolabe, feeling sorry for Theo, Lucas had to humor and console him, and he felt that sorry for his friend. But still, he thought it was funny.

After Martinique they steamed through the Panama Canal; the heat was unrelenting and the air was heavy with humidity. But once through the canal, they entered the enormous expanse of the Pacific Ocean. It was near the end of the rainy season and the colors were a myriad of hues with patches of tropical sky visible, mixed with shimmering white clouds dotted with dark windswept rain showers. Theo jotted down the names of colors in his sketchpad: turquoise and azure blue, merging into the deepest shade of cobalt. The sea, a spectacle of indigo and navy blue, interspersed with flashes of emerald green.

A week after leaving the Canal, the good ship Astrolabe made an unexpected stopover at Nuka Hiva in the Marquesas. Captain Varva had received a radio message that a few dozen Tahitians were stranded on the island when the trading schooner they were aboard sprung a leak and had to be careened on the beach while repairs were made to the hull. Seeing the possibility of making a few extra francs on the side, Captain Varva diverted Astrolabe to the island. Theo was delighted when it was announced they would be making an emergency stop. The very name Nuka Hiva set Theo jumping with excitement. He would have jumped ship had it been possible. Here in the Marquesas was where Paul Gauguin had come to paint and it was here that he died. The stopover was all too short and furthermore they could not go ashore. All they could was stare at the island from behind the ships’ railing.

“Don’t worry,” Lucas assured Theo. “We will be back.”

Theo had never even met a Tahitian in the flesh; he had never even seen a Tahitian except in photographs and in the movies; and now he was confronted with a shipload of islanders. He was in his glory, mesmerized by their looks, their actions, and their total lack of indifference of his staring at them. He couldn’t refrain from grabbing his sketchpad and begin drawing them. He almost felt if he didn’t hurry they might all go away. His first islanders; they were Gauguin paintings coming to life. They came aboard, uninhibited, young and the old, grandmas and grandpas, infants and swaddlings, smiling and cavorting, the womenfolk bearing pandanas sacks filled with fruit, the men carrying bunches of banana. There were sacks with squealing pigs and chickens tethered together by their feet. Uncomplaining, jolly in their actions, they spread out their mats on the hard steel deck. No sooner were they settled, even before the anchor was weighed, they began spreading out food: baked yams and taro, cooked fish and octopus and fruit that Theo and Lucas had never seen before. They readily shared what they had with the two white men; poppas they called them. As the meal was being prepared, two burly men began strumming guitars. Another took out his sharkskin drum, and a third unpacked his wood blocks. They began making music, wild savage music to the tune of guitars with the beat of sharkskin drums and wood blocks. A young girl, in her early teens, encouraged by the elders, got up to dance. She rose shyly; giggling all the while, did a few gyrations with her hips, to the clapping of everyone’s hands and then quickly dropped down to the deck again. But she was not idle for long. A huge, heavyset Tahitian woman in a flowed muumuu slowly rose to her feet, without being asked, began dancing the tamaure; and now the young girl joined her. One woman reached for Lucas’ hand, wanting him to join in the dance. He backed away sheepishly. But not Theo. This was his gig. He didn’t hesitate, and no prodding was needed: he leaped to the fore. He joined in the fun, swinging his hips in lurid movements imitating the young girl, and bringing hilarious laughter from everyone, even the captain who was standing on the bridge looking down. Theo did make a ridiculous spectacle of himself, and everyone loved it. Theo loved it too, the dancing and frolicking. The gaiety most likely would have kept up into the night had not Astrolabe entered open seas and the motion was not altogether agreeable to everyone. Soon came moans from those who became seasick. Islanders rushed to the rails. Many didn’t make it that far. The deck became a sloppy mess.

The morning they arrived in Tahiti, there was a rumbling of loud voices aboard Astrolabe that spread throughout the ship from deck to cabins. Had they struck something, a reef, floating debris, another vessel? Was the old lady giving up the ghost and sinking? No, it was none of these. Land was sighted and the news spread. Those below rushed on deck and everyone ran to the railing for that first glimpse. Tahiti appeared as a dim silhouette a few degrees off the port bow. With the coming of dawn, before the sun rose, jagged peaks stood out against a red lacquered sky. Theo thought Martinique had been beautiful but the scene that now opened before them was by far the most beautiful, the most striking, he had ever seen.

“Are you nervous?” Lucas asked as they approached the harbor that marked the entrance to Papeete, the legendary Tahitian capital. Theo could do little more than nod. The moment was too emotional for him, for he was too choked up to speak. But what began as a thrill to him turned, slowly, into bewilderment. No outriggers came out to greet them; there were no happy smiling islanders bearing flowered leis. That’s what Theo had read, what he had heard, what happens when people arrive in the islands. Instead, a skiff came out from the harbor and aboard was the pilot, a grizzled old Frenchman with a scowl upon his face and a moustache that cascaded down over his upper lip. He didn’t smile; he didn’t greet the captain or any of the passengers. He joined Captain Varva on the bridge and guided Astrolabe through the entrance into harbor, past trading schooners and copra boats pulling at their anchors. No one moved about the vessels. As they neared the quay, their half asleep crewmen prepared to toss out their mooring lines. The helmsman swung the vessel hard to port and suddenly, at the next bend, the scene changed, like a curtain on a stage play abruptly opening. A cast of players appeared, waiting. It was dazzling and exciting to behold. It was everything Theo dreamed it would be.

Yes, this was “boat day,” always a big event on Tahiti. Word reached Tahiti that Astrolabe had picked up the stranded folk in the Marquesas. When Theo saw the gathering waiting on the quay, he could feel his heart beating, almost out of control, like it never had beat before. Theo knew instantly his dream was fulfilled. Hundreds, no thousands of islanders, were there to greet the arriving passengers. They came on scooters and bikes and broken-down truck buses, and some walking, all to watch the ship arrive. They came smiling and waving, and some strumming guitars. And everyone, man and woman alike, and child too, wore flowers, around their necks, wreaths on top their heads, tucked behind their ears. The waterfront was a sea of flowers. And they brought armloads of more flowers for the arriving passengers.

Theo was thrilled.

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TO THE SOUTH SEAS

Theo was set for the journey when he stepped down from the train in Marseille, dressed in his white cotton suit and solar topee. Lucas, who was a head taller than Theo, and as thin as a rail, rallied in a bright, flowered sports shirt and straw sombrero. Theo laughed at him calling him a tourist. Nevertheless, they were both ready for the tropics. They were as happy as anyone could be as they readied to board SS Astrolabe moored to the quay at the waterfront. She wasn’t a pretty ship, with her hull streaked with rust from bow to stern and the upper superstructure in bad need of paint. But that didn’t matter to the two young adventurers. Theo waited on the dock until Lucas scampered up the gangplank, and then in a shout that could be heard clear across the waterfront, he waved above his head a bottle of cheap cognac in one hand and his solar topee in the other. Lucas waved back from the deck, and now Theo turned and as though embracing the world he shouted, “Salute.” He then staggered aboard shouting, saluting all the way.

SS Astrolabe, the oldest ship in the Messageries Maritimes fleet, was a rickety steamer that was home for Theo and Lucas for the next twenty-seven days. The old ship was due for the breaker’s yards after completing the voyage. The captain, too, was completing his final turn of duty before retirement, and he was not much better off that the rickety ship. He was the picture of a Joseph Conrad sea captain, his white uniform grimy and soiled. He had the face that always looked like it needed a shave, even after he shaved. He was badly in need of a haircut. But looks can be deceiving. He was in good spirits, a jovial Frenchman with a red nose and enormous eyebrows. By his nature, a Frenchman, he didn’t like Germans, and when Theo and Lucas appeared on deck speaking German he was not too cordial, that was until Theo announced they were Swiss and not German and they spoke German, Italian, French and their English wasn’t bad either.

Captain Varva invited Theo and Lucas to share his hospitality at dinner, together with the one other passenger, a doctor bound for a two-year stint in the New Hebrides. As long as the ice lasted, which was ten days, they had cold champagne to drink. Then it was warm gin with bitter lemon. The doctor and the captain talked enthusiastically about the beautiful vahines of Tahiti, a subject that never grew tiresome. The more the two men talked about Tahiti the more impatient Theo and Lucas grew. The anticipation of their arriving was almost more than they could bear. But then, before the Panama Canal and Tahiti, came Guadeloupe, Theo’s first sight of the tropics. It was a sight so powerful, so beautiful, it left upon Theo an impression that would last in his memory forever. Such first sights, like seeing a very beautiful woman, last in most men forever. This happened to Theo. It came at the crack of dawn one morning when he caught a glimpse of the island through his porthole. He grabbed his sketchpad, and while looking through the porthole, drew a hastily outline and then with a charcoal pencil he jotted down the colors, ochre, cyan, magnesia. Before he could finish he rushed on deck. He marveled at the sight of coconut palms aligning themselves against the bluish-grey of dawn’s first light, as though they were performing a dance for him alone and no one else, and these colors he too jotted down. Finally, like a defeated prize fighter, it was all too much, the myriad of colors, and he put away his pad and feasted his eyes on the sight: a curve of beach with sand so white it dazzled the eyes as it came into view, and around the next bend a cove appeared where a cliff with heavy foliage clinging to its rock face dropped into the water’s edge below, and there were jagged peaks in the far distance that looked like prehistoric dragons. Then, a bit farther at the next cove, verdant cliffs rose from the water’s edge to the sky above. Banana plantations appeared in patches; there were trees bearing melon-like papayas: and more trees, the flame-of-the-forest with their glaring red flowers. Captain Varva now stood at the three passengers’ side-the doctor had joined Theo and Lucas and pointed out the ornamental breadfruit trees and ironwood trees and the banyan trees. The sight of the verdant, rich vegetation awakened all Theo’s senses and became, to him, as exhilarating as the most powerful drug. He thrilled at everything he saw. These were scenes that would, of course, repeat themselves again and again wherever he went in the tropics, but they were scenes for Theo that would never lose their charm or excitement. Each new place that Theo visited became better than the last one, if that was ever possible, and this certainly held true for their next stop, Martinique. Theo lost control of himself when he saw the island, and from the experience he feared he would never be able to recover. At the moment, the very moment, his eyes fell upon Martinique, he knew he could never be happy anywhere else in the world except in the tropics.

From the decks of Astrolabe they watched Martinique come into view. They were awed by the dark conical shape of Mt. Pelee volcano rising out of the ocean, looming higher and higher the closer they sailed. Here, for the first time, Theo saw the landscapes that Gauguin had painted in all its natural splendor. Gauguin too had arrived in Martinique before going to Tahiti and it was here that he painted his first lush tropical scenes: bluish-black mountains, sunny landscapes, dark-skinned women garishly dressed with heavy loads on their heads. When Theo went ashore he discovered some women were black and others brown, and every shade in between. They were alive, breathing, no images in picture books or paintings hanging on walls. They were just as Gauguin painted them.

Never had Theo seen a town with such frenzy: battered automobiles, their doors held in place with bailing wire; buses and coal-burning lorries, all with drivers with their hands heavy on the horns. There were bicycles and carts, horse and carriages, bleating goats pulling carts, mule trains straining under loads and occasionally there came into sight sleek roadsters of the rich. The whole town was very much alive, as if ready to explode at the lighting of a match. Yes, it was vibrant. In the open front bars that lined the plaza, customers sat drinking rum punches. And it was only the middle of the day. Here, certainly, was Theo’s world. He felt it through every pore in his body, down to the very tips of his fingers. Here was the world that had existed only in dreams. He was so much alive he felt he could leap up on the tables and dance, but first he needed a drink, and that night he did get up on tables and dance.

It so happened, before they had disembarked, Captain Varva announced that Astrolabe would be in port but two days and one night loading and unloading cargo. Upon hearing this Theo gathered up his painting kit and easel and said he would find a hotel room in town where he could paint. Lucas followed him, offering to carry his easel but Theo refused to give it up, fearing perhaps that they might get separated. Theo found what he was looking for at the first place he stopped, a short-time room for hookers in a small hotel in the center of town. It didn’t have much of a view but it was well lighted, and just what Theo needed.

“I still don’t know why do you need a room?” Lucas asked when they unloaded Theo’s kit and easel in the room. “You can paint in the street.”

“Not what I intend to paint,” Theo said with a mischievous smile. “Come, help me find a subject.”

Out in the streets Theo was dazzled by the colors. He went wild, sometimes even walking backwards looking up at the balconied buildings that hung out over the walkways. He led Lucas from one bar to another, swilling down tumblers of rum in each place. It was all Lucas could do to restrain him.

Theo couldn’t be still, and like a child at Christmas, opening one present after the other, unable to wait to see what was in the next package, he jumped from one place to another, from cabaret to cabaret, from bar to bar. The seedier the place was, the more disreputable, the more Theo liked it. He delighted in walking across floors strewn with sawdust, unlike the septic, clean establishments back home with their polished floors and shiny brass rails. Even the brass spittoons in Berne sparkled. Theo liked wiping his brow with a bright bandana he wore around the neck and he enjoyed calling out to the bartenders in Spanish, “Uno mas, uno mas.” He became drunk not merely from the strong, raw rum but from the wild and untamed atmosphere as well. He relished in the swirl of booze and music.

What thrilled Theo as much as the colors were the women, the marvelous Creole women with their coffee eyes and dark skin. He wanted to paint them all. Each woman he saw he studied, her facial features, the fineness of her skin, the shape of her breasts. He was fascinated with their flawless skin, a wonderful mixture of colors, the descendants of slaves brought over from Africa during the colonial period. Running through their veins flowed the spirited blood of the Spanish and Portuguese. The men were jolly, filled with humor and ready to laugh, and ready to fight; the women were unassuming and untamed, and ready to drink with anyone who asked them. They did as they pleased and accepted lightheartedly the taunts the men lashed out at them. It was all fun to Theo and he reveled in it, but Lucas, was more circumspect. While Theo lunged forth like a jockey riding the lead horse, Lucas held back. It wasn’t that he lacked the spirit that Theo had, for that would have been rare if he had; he just did not have Theo’s fortitude. Theo loved fun at all costs. For the first time in his life he was able and ready to tear loose. Perhaps to Lucas it was a bit frightening but nevertheless he liked watching his friend enjoy himself as he did. It could be that he envied him. But finally Lucas gave up. “You’re on our own,” he shouted at Theo and left him sitting on a three-legged barstool in a bar with bullfight posters plastered on all the walls. “I give you something for your notebook,” Theo shouted as Lucas left but he didn’t hear him. A mariachi band had begun thumping out wild Mexican music in the street outside the bar.

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