724: Rarotonga was . . .
What a Piece of Work I Am, Chapter 38 continues
[continuing the entry on Rarotonga from Scented Isles, a guidebook to the South Sea Islands by the Christensen sisters]
Rarotonga was first settled by migrating Maoris from Polynesia, perhaps as long ago as 500 a.d. An ancient Maori road on the island may be as much as a thousand years old. James Cook was the first European visitor to the island group that now bears his name, but he seems to have missed Rarotonga. During his 1777 expedition, Cook discovered the breadfruit plant.
The breadfruit is a starchy fruit about the size and shape of a large cantaloupe. It grows on a tall, handsome tree with a thick trunk. Although the breadfruit is a staple food throughout the South Sea Islands and has been successfully transplanted throughout the tropics all the world round, its popularity mystifies us, since we find it about as exciting a foodstuff as the potato. In fact, it is cooked in a manner similar to the potato, often baked in hot coals, sometimes stuffed with bits of fruit or vegetables.
Accompanying Cook at the time of the breadfruit discovery was that famously stern taskmaster William Bligh. Breadfruit, and the possibility of transplanting it profitably, brought Bligh back to the islands on HMS Bounty, in 1787. The first Europeans to set foot on Rarotonga were, apparently, Fletcher Christian and the other crew members who joined his mutiny against Bligh.
An island staple every bit as pulse-quickening as breadfruit is the starchy taro root, which can be boiled or baked, but the local delicacy that these intrepid travelers find truly repulsive is called in French bêche de mer, which means “spade of the sea” and doesn’t make any sense at all, but is actually a corruption of the Portuguese biche do mar, which makes perfect sense, because it means “worm of the sea.” This tasty treat is also called “sea slug” or “trepang,” or, in an example of the sort of wishful thinking that English-speaking diners seem to display when confronted with the foods of the wider world, “sea cucumber.” It is, to be precise, a wormlike holothurian, an echinoderm, a relative of the considerably more attractive starfish.
We do not consider ourselves squeamish, but the thought of the bêche de mer did give us pause whenever we approached the dinner table, as did the knowledge that the Maoris had for a span of their history eaten one another, a practice that, we speculate, may have been encouraged by the Maori concept of mana. The Maoris believed that people existed on both natural and supernatural levels, with the supernatural aspect of a person manifested in his mana, a kind of bank balance of the soul. One began with a certain strength of mana, but the account might be increased or depleted over the course of one’s life, in part due to the effect of one’s good or evil deeds.
Mana could give one person power over another, the way in our society a persuasive politician or gigolo may have an indefinable power more influential than physical force or even the intangible power of influence and money. A Rarotongan chief, for example, derived his power to govern in part from an abundance of mana and in part from his control of the rules of taboo, a system of prohibitions beyond mere governance, carrying the force of the supernatural or spiritual. Something led to the practice of cannibalism among the Cook Islanders. We suspect that it was the idea that one could increase his stock of mana by consuming someone else’s. This is, we admit, only our theory, but you know how travel gets a person to thinking about these things.
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