As we stayed there, giving out gifts and peace-brokering with ribbons, I saw a face in the crowd that I recognised. It was a man I had seen before.
He was holding a wooden board and he was wet from the sea. I had seen similar wooden boards on my last visit to the Pacific Islands. They were used by fishermen to go out to sea. They would stand up on them, riding waves. Sometimes they had seemed to do this wave riding simply for fun. But none of this explained how I could know this man. How could this be? I had never visited this island before. I tried to think. It didn’t take long before it came to me. It was the man whose hut I had refused to torch. The handsome one with the long hair and wide eyes. But that had been on Tahiti. It wasn’t a vast stretch of ocean he had travelled over, but it seemed ridiculous to imagine he’d done it on nothing but a board of wood. And in Tahiti he had been bedecked with necklaces and bracelets, denoting a status his unadorned chest and arms would suggest he no longer had.
He looked exactly as I had remembered him. I supposed four years wasn’t that long. His face looked at me with a kind of longing, a desperate need to communicate something.
I looked around, at Arthur and some of the other men, hoping perhaps that the man’s attention might be diverted elsewhere. But no. It stayed solely on me. He spoke words I couldn’t understand. Then, with his right hand, he pinched the ends of his fingers together and brought them to his chest. The fingers beat against his chest in rapid staccato succession. I understood the mime.
I.
Me.
Him.
Then he pointed to the sea, to the boats, then beyond to the horizon. Then he looked down at the sand and gave a look of either fear or disgust. He kept that expression as he turned to look behind him, towards the breadfruit trees and lush green jungle beyond the beach, before looking again to the boats and the ocean. He did this a few times until I was clear about what he was saying.
I heard boots in sand walking towards me. I saw Captain Cook and Commander Furneaux, together, sharing a mutual frown.
‘What is happening here, Fines?’ asked Cook.
‘Frears,’ corrected Furneaux, with soft authority.
Cook shook the correction away as if it were a midge-fly. ‘Tell us. There seems to be some sort of minor commotion with this . . . gentleman.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘Well?’
‘I believe he wants to come with us.’
Pacific Ocean, 1773
His name was Omai.
We later learned, when his English was better, that his name was actually Mai, and what he had been saying was ‘I am Mai’ in Tahitian. Anyway, the name stuck, and he never corrected us.
When we stopped off at other islands he would try to get me to stand on his board. The use of ‘surf’ as a verb was still a long way away, but that is what he was doing, and he could stay upright for as long as he seemed to want to, whatever size the wave. Unlike myself, of course, who fell off to great laughter every time I tried to stand up on it. Still, I often like to think I was the first European ever to use a surfboard.
Omai was a quick learner. He grasped English with remarkable speed. I liked him, not least because he enabled me to escape the more mundane duties on deck. We would sit in the shade, or find a quiet corner below deck, and run through nouns and verbs and share a jar of pickled cabbage.
I talked to him a little about Rose and Marion. I showed him Marion’s coin. Taught him the word ‘money’.
He educated me about the world as he saw it.
Everything contained something called mana – every tree, every animal, every human.
Mana was a special power. A supernatural power. It could be good or evil but it always had to be respected.
One fine day we were out on deck and he pointed at the boards. ‘What is this called?’ he asked.
I followed the line of his finger. ‘That is called a shadow,’ I told him.
He told me mana lives in shadows and that there are lots of rules about shadows.
‘Rules? What kind of rules?’
‘It is very bad to stand on the shadow of a . . .’ He looked around, as if the word he was searching for was somewhere in the air. Then he saw Furneaux heading sternwards over the poop deck and pointed to him.
I understood. ‘Commander? Leader? Chief?’
He nodded. ‘When I first saw you, you did not stand on my shadow. You came near. But you did not stand on it. This was a sign that I could trust you. The mana inside you respected the mana inside me.’
I found it interesting that this seemed of more significance to him than my decision not to set fire to his home. I shifted a little distance away from him.
He laughed at me. Put a hand on my shoulder. ‘It is not bad when you know someone, just when you first meet them.’
‘Were you a chief?’
He nodded. ‘On Tahiti.’
‘But not on Huahine?’
‘No.’
‘So why did you move from Tahiti to live on Huahine?’
He was generally quite a light-hearted person, and remarkably relaxed for a man heading away from all he had ever known, but when I asked this his brow creased and he chewed on his top lip and he seemed almost hurt by it.
‘It is all right,’ I assured him. ‘You don’t have to tell me.’
This is when he told me.
‘I know I can trust you,’ he said. ‘I know it as much as I know anything. You have been a good teacher. And you are a good friend. I also sense something about you. The way you talk about the past. The look in your eyes. The penny you have which you tell is old. All the knowledge you have. I think you are like me. You are a good friend.’ He kept saying it, as if needing confirmation.
‘Yes. We are good friends.’
‘Muruuru. Thank you.’
There was some understanding that passed between us then – a confidence to move out into the open.
Hollamby walked by. Hollamby, who I slept next to, had already told me that he thought it was a bad idea to have Omai on board: ‘He is a burden, eating the rations and bringing unknown curses with him.’ He gave us a sideways look, but let his eyebrows do the talking and walked on by.
‘I am older than other men,’ he said. ‘And I think you are too. Your face has not changed in five years. Not one bit.’
‘Yes,’ I said, lowering my voice to a whisper. I was too shocked to say anything else. It felt like the most terrifying and wonderful release, a century before seeing Dr Hutchinson, to find someone like me, and to be able to tell the truth. It was like being shipwrecked on an island for decades and then finding another survivor.
He stared at me and he was smiling. There was more relief than fear with him now. ‘You are like me. I am like you. I knew it.’ He laughed with relief. ‘I knew it.’
He hugged me. Our shadows merged. ‘It does not matter! Our mana is the same. Our shadows are one.’
I cannot express the magnitude of that moment enough. Yes, Marion was like me but I still hadn’t found her. And so Omai made me feel less alone. He made me feel normal. And I immediately wanted to know everything. Looking around, making sure the other crew were below deck or elsewhere, we began to talk.