A nasty-beautiful

odyssey

Simon Winchester

The Globe and Mail

25 September 2004

The Last Heathen :

Encounters with Ghosts

and Ancestors in Melanesia

By Charles Montgomery

Douglas & McIntyre,

314 pages, $24.95

[NOTE: The Last Heathen is published outside Canada as The Shark God]

With this sprawling, complicated book that has at its narrative heart the impossibly difficult corner of the world called Melanesia, comes a display of a very real and memorable new talent. Charles Montgomery, a cadet member of a family distinguished enough to contain both the Second World War's lisping and irascible Field Marshal as well a Victorian Bishop of Tasmania once responsible for the spiritual well-being of these islanders, decided three years ago to embark on a sinuous journey through the steaming archipelagos that divide the Pacific Ocean from the Coral Sea. He returned home to Canada to create from his journeys and jottings a script as delicate and impressively beautiful as any essay of exploration that I have read in recent years: A distinguished and prosperous career is very clearly within Charles Montgomery's very capable grasp.

The only shortcoming about this otherwise stellar work is that it happens to be devoted to one of the most gruesome and disagreeable places on the planet. It is, of course, no longer proper to label anywhere less pleasing than anywhere else; but some years ago, when a group of us wondered idly which was the nastiest place on earth, the winner, about which we then wrote a long profile, was the Equatorial Guinea over which Mark Thatcher is currently in a spot of bother. We thought very hard about including in the contest the malevolent delights of most of the islands of far western Pacific, everywhere between Guam and Johnson Island, most of them distinctly horrid.

Kwajalein, a U.S.-run test-range terminus up in Micronesia, where the islanders are addicted to Spam, is probably the least pleasing place of all; but the untidy skein of dystopias that speckle the seas between New Caledonia and New Guinea, atolls divided by colonial invaders into what are now the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, seem to belong on any outsiders' long-list of candidates. There is not a great deal about any one of these islands that is not corrupt, unattractive, violent and unstable, and the whole place seems cursed — and not just to an ignorant and fat-headed Westerner — with far too much religion and otherwise overwrought beliefs to offer anything approaching health and happiness to those who either live there or visit.

Religion is the mortar that binds this admirable book's story together, and which begins and ends with the retelling of one of the more notorious murders in the South Pacific, that of John Coleridge Patteson, the first-ever bishop of Melanesia, who was clubbed to death in the chief's hut on a remote outpost of paganism called Nukapu, in what is now the southern Solomons.

The bishop was the epitome of the Imperial Man: he was a Devonian, an Etonian, a Latin scholar, a cricketer, an overall Good Egg. On the way out to the South Seas he taught himself Maori, he declared the Melanesian boys to be keen little scamps given neither to idleness or dawdling, and he taught them just as he had been taught back at Eton (which, with the muscular eagerness of Empire, had established a Melanesian Society to raise funds to teach them). So it is perhaps no great surprise that the English-speaking world was shocked, shocked, to learn in 1871 that this eminently decent fellow had been murdered by a bunch of caddish blackamoors.

And when in the lumber room of his parents' farm on Vancouver Island Charles Montgomery discovered that his own great-grandfather Henry had gone out to Nukapu 20 years later to learn more, and had written his own account, The Light of Melanesia, his writerly instinct was instantly and impeccably delineated: He too would go to wander around this pattern of islands, and would try to see for himself what imprint his Christian forebears might have left behind them, and wonder at where this benighted and anything-but-god-forsaken place might be bound.

The endurance he displayed on his travels was admirable, the adventures he survived were tremendous, and the quality of his prose seems matched only by the wisdom of his observations. What he found, in a dangerous, menacing place that had been traipsed over both by well-intentioned Lambeth missionaries and by exploiters of the islanders' fondness for cargo cults, was “a whorl of cultural convergence . . . a psychedelic collision of evangelism, kastom and globalization . . . a hybridization of myths, magic and spirit.” And I don't think he liked it very much.

I am not sure he altogether dismissed, as it is presently fashionable to do, the efforts of those Christian Englishmen who did try to bring some light into what they saw as the impenetrable darkness of this corner of the planet. But he is well aware of the shortcomings of the whites. He bravely tells of the homosexual wants that brought some clerics here (and reminds us that his own family was not immune to such needs: His Field Marshal kinsman had a fondness for bathing adolescent boys), and he is properly horrified by the “blackbirders,” the slave-hunters who stole Melanesian men away to work on the sugar plantations in Australia. But he has much affection for his great-grandfather, and for Bishop Patteson too — men who tried their best, but who shouldn't have interfered, and in far too many cases paid the price for doing so.

Charles Montgomery has not interfered, however. He went to Melanesia to observe, he did so with a careful delicacy, and he returned to tell a tale of a place that few of us would as a consequence wish to visit. When I did once, I came across a grossly fat and all-too-homely lady with whom, to my great surprise, I found I shared a surname. She told me that a Dundee jam-merchant bearing this name had once come to her island, presumably searching for slaves, and had spread his seed liberally and cruelly around, leaving offspring and disquiet in abundance.

I was unaware of having any close relatives in Scotland, and so I think my branch of the family was not directly to blame. But I knew a little of the frightful interference of the Pacific slave trade, and of the marginally less frightful interference of the Pacific god trade, and my conclusion then — tinged by some small measure of personal shame — is only amplified now by what I read in The Last Heathen : that wherever we Westerners go, we risk bringing misery, and wherever we Westerners leave, we risk leaving a legacy that is very different from what we might have intended. Whether it is Nukapu or Baghdad, the overarching message should surely be what Charles Montgomery's book implicitly reminds us: Hands off.

Simon Winchester is the author of Krakatoa and A Crack in the Edge of the World.