The Sex Lives of Cannibals

CHAPTER 10

In which the Author recounts the arrival of the I-Matang, who introduced Fair Trade (say, one bead for three women), the Wonders of Civilization (tobacco, alcohol, cannons), the Maxims of Christianity (Thou shalt wear thy Mother Hubbard, never mind the heat), and Modern Administration (Queen Victoria knows what’s best for you), which has resulted in a Colonial Legacy, as evidenced by the continued use of the Fathom as a unit of measurement.

The first westerners to stumble across the islands of Kiribati were Spanish mutineers. They murdered their captain, Hernando de Grijalva, in 1537 after months of desultory sailing across the vast, seemingly boundless Pacific Ocean. Theirs had been a voyage of exploration, and just like Magellan in 1521, de Grijalva and his crew had pretty much missed every island in the Pacific, except for two, which they called the Unfortunate Islands. One can only imagine their disappointment, having rounded the Horn, endured mountainous seas and the searing doldrums, only to discover nada except for two islands so pitiful that their very existence was deemed regrettable.

De Grijalva then decided to head toward California. Sadly for him, the winds drove him back, and when he refused the crew’s pleas to run with the wind to the Moluccas, they killed him. While following the equator, the mutinous crew was racked with scurvy and mad with hunger, and yet they did not stop at the two islands they encountered, which they called Acea and Isla de los Pescadores (Island of the Fishermen). It is probable that Acea was Christmas Island, then uninhabited and awaiting a visit from Captain Cook two centuries later, and that Isla de los Pescadores was Nonouti, four islands south of Tarawa in the Gilbert group. No doubt worries about finding a safe anchorage dissuaded the crew from attempting to land anywhere near an uncharted coral atoll, but still, as someone with an affection for the islands, I can’t help but feel a little miffed by this. Surely, some trade could have been attempted with the I-Kiribati fishermen they saw. Coconuts are useful for treating scurvy. Maybe they could have pretended to be gods, though as Captain Cook learned, this could lead to problems. Instead, the crew kept sailing, dying one by one from their deprivations, until finally the seven remaining survivors arrived in New Guinea, where the natives promptly sold them into slavery. The mutineers could be heard muttering: “Hey, Pepe… Isla de los Pescadores… what was wrong with it again?”

Nor did the next Spaniard to sail this way bother stopping. This would be Pedro Fernandez de Quiros on Spain’s final great voyage of exploration in the Pacific. He spotted Butaritari, in the northern Gilberts, and called it Buen Viaje, but apparently the viaje wasn’t buen enough to risk losing his ship on the reefs. And that was pretty much the end of contact between the I-Matang and the I-Kiribati for the next two hundred years.

In the two and a half centuries that passed after Magellan’s crossing, only five expeditions cruised the Central Pacific, discovering a mere six islands and it is a wonder that it wasn’t fewer. One can see the prominent hills of Samoa and Hawaii from many miles away, but to see one of the low-lying atolls of the equatorial Pacific one has to be very close. Ships that had the misfortune of stumbling upon an atoll at night found themselves desperately tacking away from the ominous sounds of a reef-breaking surf.

One gets the sense that after a few months of sailing the great emptiness of the Central Pacific, where no land exists save the occasional boat-chomping atoll, captains simply gave up looking for anything interesting. After much Traversing of the Equatorial Pacific, one can imagine a captain writing in his journal, in which we were often Tormented by Heat and frequently Becalmed, I have decided in the interest of Scientific Curiosity to Examine more Thoroughly the Peculiar Mating Rituals of native women in Tahiti.

Without recourse to the Global Satellite Positioning system, or—at least until well into the nineteenth century—an accurate chronometer to determine their longitude, it behooved captains to stay close to the known routes across the Pacific. As early as the sixteenth century, Spanish galleons laden with gold made frequent crossings between Mexico and the Philippines. By the late eighteenth century, there was a bustling fur trade between China and the Northwest United States. But this movement of ships occurred far to the north of Kiribati, which bestrides the equator where maddening doldrums sap the spirits of even the most well-provisioned ships. Sailors learned to fear the heat and windless stagnation of the equatorial Pacific as much as the towering seas of the Roaring Forties in the Southern Ocean. Commodore John Bryon, known as “Foul-Weather Jack”—a name which suggests that he was not easily disturbed by weather—wrote that when he was off the coast of Nikunau in the southern Gilberts, the heat of the doldrums had caused his crew to be “seized by the flux.” I could relate. I too often felt seized by the flux.

It was the settlement of Port Jackson in 1788 that finally brought a few ships to Kiribati. Port Jackson, which was to become Sydney, was where England sent its unlucky people. I am not exactly sure why they did this. It seems to me a lot of bother to ship thousands of petty criminals from one side of the planet to the other. And it’s not as if they were just dropped off there and told to fend for themselves. No, they were placed in dank, wretched prisons that were similar to the dank, wretched prisons back in merry old England. What was the point? Plus, as the medal tallies at subsequent Olympics suggest, England managed to ship out its entire gene pool of athletes.

Nonetheless, it was this movement of convicts that initiated the first real contact between the I-Matang and the I-Kiribati. Once ships had divested themselves of the English convicts who would one day become the hale, hearty Australians who regularly whup English arse on the playing fields, a few headed toward China on what became known as the Outer Passage. The more direct route between Australia and China was fraught with reefs and islands, whereas the Outer Passage contained uncharted reefs and islands, which made sailing on a wooden boat particularly interesting.

In 1788, after delivering the very first convicts to Sydney Cove, Capt. Thomas Gilbert of the Charlotte and Capt. John Marshall of the Scarborough were chartered by the East India Company to ferry tea from China to England. On the way, they passed Aranuka, Kuria, Abaiang, Tarawa, and Butaritari. Gilbert and Marshall decided to call these islands the Gilbert Islands. They did this because they could. The next island group they encountered to the north was called the Marshall Islands. Why not, they figured. In the 1820s, the name Gilbert Islands was validated by the Russian cartographer Adam von Krusenstern, and so to this very day, the islands retain the name of Gilbert, which I think is a great shame. When it comes to naming things, vanity and flattery are dull motivations best suited for deciding on a child’s middle name. Much more interesting are the descriptive names that suggest a story or happening of interest. Captain Cook was pretty good about this. From him, we have Cape Good Success, Cape Deceit, Cape Desolation, Adventure Cove, Devil’s Basin, Great Black Rock, and Little Black Rock, all in Tierra del Fuego, names that suggest that rounding Cape Horn in the late eighteenth century was probably a fairly up and down experience. So too was getting stuck within the Great Barrier Reef—Cape Tribulation, Thirsty Sound, Isle of Direction, Wednesday Island, Thursday Island, and finally, Providential Channel. In New Zealand, Captain Cook was good enough to leave us with Hen and Chicken Island, Cape Kidnappers, Poverty Bay, Murderer’s Bay, Cannibal Cove, Cape Runaway (clearly, this was an eventful trip), and, my favorite, Young Nick’s Head. In 1777, Cook found himself spending Christmas on an uninhabited atoll, and so it was inevitable that he would call it Christmas Island, the only island he visited that would one day become part of Kiribati. The crew caught fish and turtles, but Cook was not much impressed with Christmas Island. “A few Cocoa nut trees were seen in two or three places, but in general the land had a very barren appearance.” No doubt, early Pacific explorers came to the same conclusion, which is why Christmas Island would remain uninhabited until well into the modern era.

Gilbert and Marshall were a little more taken by what they saw, particularly the I-Kiribati sailing canoes, which Marshall called “lively, ingenious and expert.” Still, they could not persuade the I-Kiribati to come aboard, nor did they think it wise to seek an anchorage. With no reason to tarry, they sailed on to China, which they called Gilbertland. In 1799, the explorer George Bass, traveling aboard the Nautilus, reached Tabiteuea and Abemama. He described the I-Kiribati as “a brown, handsome and courteous people.” James Cary, captain of the American ship Rose, wrote of his encounter with the I-Kiribati off Tamana in 1804: “By their behavior, we suppose they never saw foreigners before. They were inoffensive and knew not the use of firearms and seemed pleased with the reception they met with from us.”

By 1826, when the American whaler John Palmer alighted upon Beru and Onotoa, all of the Gilbert Islands had encountered, in one manner or another, the world of the I-Matang. These first encounters were almost always benign, though they no doubt left the I-Kiribati perplexed. In the book Kiribati—Aspects of History, which is the only book on Kiribati written by I-Kiribati, Ahling Onorio recounts the arrival of the I-Matang on Makin:

It is said on Makin that the coming of the I-Matang was foretold many days before the actual voyage by old men who could interpret signs in the rafters of the maneaba, which was then under construction. When the strange sailing ship approached the island, the people were frightened and called upon Tabuariki (the god of thunder) to cause a great storm to blow the ship away. It is said that Tabuariki succeeded two times in preventing the ship from approaching Makin, but the third time the ship arrived safely and anchored off the island.

The people of Makin were both frightened and astounded at what they saw. They had their weapons ready, but were mostly curious about the strange object. Because of its U-shape, they called the boat “te ruarua” (babai pit), and when several boats were lowered into the sea they exclaimed “te ruarua has given birth.” When several oars came out from the sides of the boats, the bewildered people shouted, “Look, its fingers are falling off.” They hid when the boats landed and the men inside came ashore.

According to the story, the people were even more astounded at what they then saw. The gleaming white beings with strange color hair began to rub their bodies with something that, when mixed with water, made white foam like the waves breaking on the shore. Then they wrapped their bodies in clothes—very strange to the Gilbertese since they were used to going naked. When the strangers put on their shoes the people later compared them to hermit crabs—they hid their feet inside things which looked like shells.

Curiosity finally overcame the Gilbertese. They came out of their hiding places to investigate more closely these new beings and the strange things which they had brought with them. As the story goes, they were especially interested in the slippery, fragrant substance which formed white foam when wet. It is said that several people started biting bits off and soon several became sick. Thus, this first contact with the Europeans had a dramatic ending—the soap victims became the patients of these strange beings.

What this story illustrates, of course, is how really sick and tired people were of eating fish. Nothing else could explain the peculiar urge to eat a bar of soap that had just been used to wash the critter-ridden body funk of a pale and hairy sailor. But as first contacts go, these early encounters between I-Matang and I-Kiribati were remarkably untroubled, particularly when compared to elsewhere in the Pacific, where often enough it was cannon shot that marked the beginning of a new era for the islands. This would not last, of course. The islands of Kiribati, as became apparent after even the most cursory exploration, had almost nothing of value to the early-nineteenth-century I-Matang. They lacked fresh food, potable water, gold, silver, spices, fur, fabrics, sandalwood, just about everything that drove trade and exploration during that era. What Kiribati did have, however, was women.

By the 1830s, whalers had begun cruising the waters of the southern Gilberts. They were after sperm whales, and after months of hunting sperm whales, the whalers got to thinking and they drifted over Kiribati-way. I-Kiribati women soon became renowned for their beauty, and fortunately for the whalers, some of the islands had a class of women called nikiranroro, fallen women who were not quite married and not quite virginal, and these were made available to the whalers. The cost for their services was typically one stick of tobacco, and it was not long before the I-Kiribati became mad for the weed. Soon, whenever a ship was spotted nearby, the I-Kiribati would yell te baakee, te baakee! They gorged themselves on any tobacco that made it to the islands, smoking it, chewing it, even swallowing it, and here things began to go wrong. The whalers soon discovered that there weren’t that many women of the nikiranroro class and that the licentious reputation of Tahiti was well deserved, and like apparently every other male who rounded Cape Horn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whalers too began seeking most of their entertainment in Polynesia.

This was good for Kiribati, which was not nearly as afflicted by the epidemic of venereal diseases that racked Tahiti. But, as I can attest, nicotine withdrawal can make one decidedly grumpy. This is why the crew of the Columbia found themselves taken hostage one day by nic-fitting I-Kiribati, who refused to release them until they received one hundred pounds of tobacco. Soon the I-Kiribati developed a reputation as devious marauders, a reputation that was no doubt enhanced by the local custom of considering anything and anybody to wash ashore, ships included, as fair game. In addition to the assault on the Columbia in 1846, raids were conducted on the Triton (1848), the Flying Fox (1850), and the Charles W. Morgan (1851), among others, and whalers soon began to avoid particular islands all together, including Tarawa, no matter how great their lust or hunger. A number of these attacks, however, could probably be attributed to simple misunderstandings. Stealing or borrowing? There can be a gray area. The I-Kiribati perceived property differently than the Americans and the English, two societies whose very foundations were based on property. And being surrounded by canoes does not necessarily mean one needs to blast them with cannon shot, which is what the captain of the Charles W. Morgan ordered when he found himself becalmed off Nonouti.

Nonetheless, the I-Kiribati reputation for forging cunning attacks on visiting ships proved to be well deserved. It wasn’t the ships themselves they wanted, but their tobacco and their parts. If taken, the vessel was stripped of iron and nails, weapons and wood, tools and sails, and what was considered useless was allowed to rot on the reef. It was a good thing, however, that the I-Kiribati gained practice and confidence in assaulting ships. By the 1840s, the blackbirders had arrived. These were slavers contracted to obtain labor for the plantations in Fiji, Hawaii, New Caledonia, and Peru. The slavers used both force and deceit to fill their holds. On the friendlier islands, they invited villagers aboard, where they were promptly given rum until the entire village lay passed out on the deck, at which point the crew would quietly sail off with them. At other times, blackbirders raided a village, hunting in particular for women. Said one blackbirder: “They fetch in the Fiji Islands twenty pounds a head, and are much more profitable to the slavers than the men.” According to one account of a raid on Arorae, “thirty-eight young women were all made fast by the hair of their head and led into the boat.” Most never saw their home islands again.

By the 1850s, however, resistance from the I-Kiribati and changing European attitudes toward slavery convinced the plantation owners that they had a bit of a marketing problem. From here on they would no longer engage in slavery but in the “Pacific labor trade.” Instead of armed slavers, there were now recruiters visiting the islands. Instead of being sold as slaves, the I-Kiribati were contracted as laborers. Possibly, contracted laborers might even return home one day. It says much about the hardship of life on an equatorial atoll that over the following seventy years, thousands of I-Kiribati left their islands to work the sugar, cotton, and coconut plantations of Fiji, Tahiti, Samoa, Peru, Central America, and nearly everywhere else where Europeans needed labor. One often reads of the masses of Indian and Chinese indentured laborers in the nineteenth century, but when one looks at the labor trade as a percentage of a country’s population there is probably no nation that exported more of its people than the I-Kiribati. Between 1840 and 1900, nearly a third of all I-Kiribati were laboring abroad. Half never made it back. Still, during this era most of the I-Kiribati recruited to work abroad went willingly. Drought and starvation were the most compelling reasons. No place on Earth is more unforgiving than an atoll during a drought. For generations, starvation and infanticide kept populations in check, but the labor trade offered another way. The laborer’s life was a harsh life, but it was life.

Curiously, upon returning to their islands the laborers were quickly reabsorbed into the village community, where they followed the same beliefs and traditions as those who had never left the islands. It was as if the intervening years abroad counted for little more than a source of colorful anecdotes to be shared in the maneaba. There was no challenge to religion, no usurpation of local hierarchies, no defiance of custom. That you could take one-third of a country’s population and scatter them around the world, where they would toil in strange environments, eat peculiar foods, and be exposed to a life profoundly different than what they knew, and then return some of them to their islands without social consequences, suggests that the I-Kiribati are a fairly stubborn people, utterly content with the culture they have developed to survive on an atoll. It would take a little doing to mess with the culture here. Enter the beachcomber.

Consider the situation of an illiterate, low-class English seaman in the mid-nineteenth century. The pay was low, floggings common, death at sea highly likely, possibilities for advancement negligible, and when he returned to England he would be cast adrift into a country that was well on its way to becoming the industrial hell vividly described by Charles Dickens. Life on a tropical island where polygamy was the norm might not seem like such a bad option. Some jumped ship and hoped search parties would decline to search very hard. Atolls are very small and hiding places few, particularly when the I-Kiribati were offered a tobacco bounty for the seaman’s return. Occasionally, escaped convicts from Australia were deposited by obliging whalers. Most often though, it was a seaman who had made such a nuisance of himself aboard the ship that the captain felt either compelled to maroon him or accede to his wish to be marooned.

The first beachcomber known to have set ashore in the Gilbert Islands was one Robert Wood, who arrived on Butaritari in 1835, where he quickly taught the locals how to brew sour toddy, an ill-tasting alcoholic concoction for which a certain I-Matang was nonetheless thankful for more than 150 years later, when he was experiencing acute beer withdrawal. By 1860, there were around fifty I-Matangs living in the Gilbert Islands. I think it is fair to say that the early beachcombers in Kiribati were Question Authority kind of people. Most were itinerant, spending a year or two on an island before seeking a working passage elsewhere on an obliging ship, but a number settled for the remainder of their lifetimes, where they happily acquired wives, leaving enough offspring to ensure that within a couple of generations every I-Kiribati carried a dollop of the beachcomber. It is a small country. Of the beachcombers, Richard Randall, originally from England, lately of Australia, became the most renowned. He asked to be set ashore on Butaritari in 1846. His ship’s captain obliged him and within a short while Randall had four wives and was living the beachcomber’s dream. Soon enough, four wives led to forty children and Randall began thinking about getting a job. He became a resident trader.

Early trade in Kiribati consisted of bêche-de-mer and turtle shells, which were exchanged primarily for tobacco. Randall was thinking bigger. Coconut oil was used in the manufacture of soap and candles and its trade had long been a sideline for the whalers. Randall muscled in and within a decade he was by far the most important player in the coconut oil trade in the Gilbert Islands. Producing coconut oil did not alter the I-Kiribati lifestyle. They used it themselves, primarily as a skin lotion. The coconut oil trade, however, did lead to change. According to one local historian writing of Randall: “For [coconut oil] he traded such things as rifles and ammunition, food, cannons, whiskey, gin and rum. There was, thereafter, much drunkenness and fighting and many people were killed. The cannons, some of which were quite big, were used for making a noise and frightening people.”

Clearly, in the latter half of the nineteenth century there was a lot of sinning going on in the Gilbert Islands. And if there’s sinning, there will be missionaries. The first appearance of missionaries in the Gilbert Islands occurred in 1852 when the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions sent three missionary families to the Marshall Islands. The missionaries called on Butaritari and, I must confess, I really wish I had been there. With Richard Randall acting as the interpreter, the missionaries offered Bibles and a letter of introduction from King Kamehameha IV of Hawaii to the high chief of Butaritari. The high chief of Butaritari, Na Kaiea, was fourteen years old. Like most fourteen-year-old boys, Na Kaiea was a little preoccupied and so he had but one question for the missionaries. Does Christianity permit polygamy? When he heard that Christianity forbids polygamy, Na Kaiea decided to hold out for the Mormons. One can imagine Richard Randall escorting the missionaries back to their ship. “Well, it’s been fun. What’s that? Do you mean those four naked women? No, no, we’re just friends. Off you go now. Bye-bye.”

It would take a lot of doing before Christianity supplanted traditional I-Kiribati beliefs. Indeed, it wasn’t until well into the twentieth century that most islanders proclaimed themselves Christian. It is a wonder that it did not take longer. Think of the I-Kiribati male of the nineteenth century—he’s smoking, he’s drinking sour toddy, he’s naked, he’s dancing, and he’s got options, fornication-wise. These are significant lifestyle issues for the missionaries to overcome. The first to try was Hiram Bingham, a frail Yale-educated American, who arrived on Abaiang in 1857 accompanied by his wife, as mandated by the Missionary Board, lest he be tempted by a dusky savage. Bingham immediately saw that he had a lot of work to do.

The sight of naked men, boys, girls and more than half naked women, their observance of their extreme poverty, their worship of false gods, their extremely immodest manners and customs, their great licentiousness, their unbounded lying, their covetousness, theft, warlike spirit and bloody warfare, a realizing sense of their ignorance of a final judgment of heaven of hell of Jesus Christ, have made me long to preach to them.

To do so Bingham set about learning “the heathen jargon which noisy savages were shouting about my ears.” Bingham was successful in mastering the heathen jargon. He essentially created the written I-Kiribati language, though one senses he failed to offer every letter of the alphabet out of spite. By 1890, he had translated the Bible into I-Kiribati. There his success as a missionary more or less ends. His services were poorly attended, and Bingham found that those who did attend were “very slow to learn propriety in the house of God. Many of them, caring little if anything for the truth, habitually sprawl themselves out to sleep; not a few often laugh, talk, move about.” His first two converts soon reconverted to heathenism, while Abaiang was beset by a long period of drunkenness and clan warfare.

Bingham’s work was largely carried on by Hawaiian missionaries, who were increasingly sent to the Gilbert Islands because the Missionary Board deemed the islands too savage for the white man. By the 1870s there were Hawaiian missionaries on seven islands and they had managed to convert 112 I-Kiribati, though only seventy-eight were church members in “good standing.” A number of missionaries were a little lackadaisical in their work, preferring instead to concentrate on trading opportunities, but here and there Hawaiian missionaries conducted their work with the zealotry of the newly converted. This was particularly true on Tabiteuea, which had the misfortune of finding its mission led by Kapu, a Hawaiian missionary entrusted by Bingham to spread the good word. Tabiteuea means “kings are forbidden,” and it seems likely that Kapu took this as a challenge. Evoking the hellfire and damnation that would surely befall those who clung to the old beliefs, Kapu managed to convert much of North Tabiteuea. He became known as Kapu the Lawgiver, and soon he drew his zeal toward South Tabiteuea, where the inhabitants remained stubbornly opposed to him. Kapu decided that this would not do and he organized an army of the converted to descend on the south. Until then, warfare had been unheard of on Tabiteuea, where disputes were traditionally settled mano a mano. Unlike a number of other islands in Kiribati, Tabiteuea had no experience with a chiefly system and the wars that chiefs initiate to keep themselves busy. Instead, on Tabiteuea every family had land, every man was a king, and governance, what there was of it, was conducted in the maneaba by the village unimane. Kapu’s effect on Tabiteuea was like Napoleon’s on Europe—revolutionary and immensely destructive. With his army of Christians, Kapu descended on the south of the island. Armed with shark-teeth swords and spears fitted with the lethal barbs of the stingray, Kapu’s army swarmed around the pagans, who had gathered around an old cannon salvaged from a wrecked ship. The cannon was fired once until rain extinguished any hope of fighting the onslaught. Within hours, nearly a thousand southerners lay dead. Most had been decapitated. And thus Tabiteuea became Christian.

As the years went by, the zealotry of the early Protestant missionaries lessened, primarily because on most islands it got them nowhere, but also due to competition from Catholic missionaries, who were amenable to smoking and drinking and dancing, which gave them a powerful competitive edge in the pursuit of I-Kiribati souls. Indeed, by the early twentieth century, the northern Gilbert Islands, long the domain of the American Board of Missionaries, had become predominantly Catholic, while the southern Gilberts, which had come under the sway of the more lenient Samoan missionaries sent there by the London Missionary Society, had become largely Protestant, a division that continues to this day. The Catholics, however, drew the line at polygamy and nakedness and gradually, island by island, the tradition of having multiple wives withered into memory, and the I-Kiribati began to cover themselves up in cloth, which allowed them to experience the same skin infections that bedeviled the I-Matangs.

Into this atmosphere of agitated missionaries, unscrupulous traders, and chiefly wars fueled by drink, guns, and delusions, the arrival of the British Empire was not entirely unwelcomed by the I-Kiribati. In 1892, Capt. E. H. M. Davis of the Royalist arrived on Abemama to plant the Union Jack and declare that henceforth the Gilbert Islands would exist as a protectorate of Victoria, by the Grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and Empress of India. He then moved on to every other major island in the group and said likewise. The I-Kiribati said okeydokey, possibly because Davis immediately banned trade in guns and alcohol, and soon went so far as to banish the more obstreperous missionaries, including Kapu the Lawgiver, two moves that in a very short while returned to the islands a peaceful languidness that they had not seen since the advent of the whalers. The chiefly wars that had riddled life in the northern Gilbert Islands gave way to Land Commissions and local magistrates. A few of the more murderous I-Matangs who had long stirred trouble on the islands were tried and either expelled or shot. The activities of traders were regulated, and as a result of there now being actual rules, many traders left. The Protestant missionaries were told to lighten up when it came to dancing. The power of the chiefs, which had been artificially enhanced by guns and traders, devolved to the unimane. In short, within a remarkably brief period of time, Pax Britannica descended on the islands. That this occurred I think is less a tribute to the peripatetic colonial officers, who were ordered to administer both the Gilbert and Ellice Islands without the Colonial Office actually providing them with a boat, but more to the desire of the I-Kiribati to reclaim their world from the rancorous influence of the I-Matang reprobates who had settled on the islands. The British certainly didn’t invest much in Kiribati. In fact, they didn’t even want it. The islands were claimed solely as a check on German and American aspirations in the region. But the power of empire resonates, and for a few happy years, the British colonial model of benign paternalism brought to the islands a stability and order that many had thought lost. The British colonial habit of training locals to handle most administrative tasks is quite likely what introduced something approaching a national identity among the I-Kiribati, whose collective identity was focused almost exclusively on their home islands.

The British experience in Kiribati, such as it was, considering that at no time did the British have more than a dozen colonial officers stationed there, might have remained essentially benign were it not for the discovery that on one of the islands there existed an actual, honest-to-goodness, extremely valuable natural resource. Since this is Kiribati, it is not surprising that this resource was based on shit, specifically old bird shit, which is also called phosphate, probably because it is considered impolite to discuss bird poop, whereas discussing phosphate seems sophisticated and manly, if also boring. This treasure trove of bird shit was discovered on Banaba, long called Ocean Island by I-Matangs, an island that lies by itself, roughly three hundred miles southeast of Tarawa. Unlike the other islands in Kiribati, Banaba is a raised island, shaped like an upturned canoe, with a peak that rises to a lofty one hundred feet above sea level. The island is only about four square miles in size, but it had twenty million tonnes of phosphate deposits. For these twenty million tonnes of phosphate, in 1900, the Pacific Islands Company signed an agreement with someone they presumed to be the chief of Banaba. This agreement gave the Pacific Islands Company, which was to become the British Phosphate Commission, the right to mine all phosphate deposits on Banaba in exchange for an annual payment of fifty pounds sterling, “or trade to that value.” The agreement would be in force for 999 years. Someone listed as King of Ocean Island signed with an X mark. Of course, there was no need for such a lengthy contract. The phosphate deposits were thoroughly extracted by 1979, the year of independence for Kiribati. But with the phosphate, so too went the soil, the pandanus trees, the coconut trees, and pretty much everything else necessary to sustain life on an island. Today, only about thirty people live on the blasted remains of Banaba. The rest of the Banabans were removed to Rabi, an island in Fiji, in the 1950s, when the British realized that phosphate mining had rendered Banaba uninhabitable.

Obliterating islands in the Pacific, of course, was the prerogative of superpowers, both rising and diminishing, and in the 1960s the British decided to drop a few nukes on Christmas Island, just to see what would happen. I am always stunned by the presumption of nuclear testing in the Pacific. What if some Pacific Islander decided to blow up an A-bomb in Yorkshire, or a hydrogen bomb in Minnesota, or a nuclear bomb in Provence, just to see what would happen. There would be a fuss, I’m sure. Just imagine the letters to the editor. The British say that their testing on Christmas Island, a renowned bird colony, led to no long-term ill effects. The Fijian soldiers stationed there, however, might think otherwise. They were subsequently bedeviled by cancer. Their wives miscarried and the children that were born often had birth defects.

One would think that the I-Kiribati would at least have some very mixed feelings regarding their historical experience with the I-Matang world, but this turns out not to be the case. When I asked Bwenawa what he thought of about it, he said: “It was very good. They civilized us. Before, we were very savage. And now we are all Christian.” You never knew for certain whether Bwenawa was just messing with your head, or whether he meant to casually dismiss the entire narrative of colonialism and exploitation that fills Western college textbooks. Christianity was certainly very important for Bwenawa. He has, at various times in his life, been a Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Seventh Day Adventist, a Mormon, and even a Baha’i. Today, he is an elder in the Kiribati Protestant Church. “It is all the same. We must love God and we must love one another.” To this end, Bwenawa was seeking to unify the Kiribati Protestant Church with its archrival, the Catholic Church—just a heads-up for the guys in Rome.

And the I-Kiribati are positively effusive when it comes to the British colonial era. This was brought home to me one night when we were invited to attend a reception for the visiting British high commissioner. Typically, the diplomatic cocktail circuit on Tarawa, such as it is, is characterized by a highly immoderate consumption of beer, the occasional fight, and a general atmosphere of keg-party debauchery. The reception for the British high commissioner, however, had ambition. I knew this because on the invitation it mentioned that men would be required to wear “trousers.” The English, of course, are well known for fancying a peculiar sense of decorum over things like climate. They are, remember, the nation responsible for kneesocks. The half-dozen lawyers in Kiribati still do their business in horsehair wigs and black robes that billow above their flipflops. But never before had an invitation on Tarawa stipulated that men had to wear “trousers.” I could understand shirts, and possibly shoes, but pants on Tarawa seemed pretentious. Only Mormon missionaries wore them.

Nevertheless, on the appointed evening I donned a pair of trousers, and like everyone else at the beachside reception, began to sweat profusely. I envied Sylvia.

“I’d kill to wear a skirt,” I said.

“I think you’d look very fetching,” she replied.

Sylvia was unfazed by my sartorial preference. Every culture that has developed along the equator has very sensibly included skirtlike garb for men. Like most men in Kiribati, I generally wore a lavalava. Shorts were for formal wear. Pants were an imposition by an alien culture.

My mood lifted, however, when I saw the British high commissioner. He was an enormous man, freakishly tall with a beefy heft, and he lived in Fiji with his diminutive mother, which struck me as a very English arrangement. The British no longer have an embassy on Tarawa. They have, in fact, been doing everything possible to disentangle themselves from the Pacific. Their semiofficial representative in Kiribati was the wife of a Scottish aid worker, and so, once a year, air travel permitting, the British high commissioner of Fiji made an appearance. This year he had been taken to Buariki on North Tarawa, where Captain Davis had first planted the flag on Tarawa. It takes about two hours to cross the lagoon in a Kiribati-8 canoe powered by an outboard engine. It took a little longer for the high commissioner when it was discovered midway on the return trip that they had run out of fuel. In the long hours of paddling that followed, the high commissioner developed what must have been an excruciating sunburn, and so when he finally appeared at the reception, in khakis and a blue shirt that would have looked perfectly respectable were they not stained dark throughout with sweat, he looked like the world’s largest, ripest tomato. He was good enough to inform us, however, that he had recently spoken to the queen and that she was thinking of her subjects in Kiribati, a Commonwealth country. More likely, the queen was busy considering the implications of leaked tapes and licked toes, but this is why high commissioners get paid the big bucks. The president of Kiribati, looking uncomfortable in pants and sandals more commonly found in Bulgarian flea markets, circa 1974, rose and spoke about how grateful the I-Kiribati were to the British for their wise rule during the colonial era. “You civilized us,” he said. The high commissioner nodded magnanimously. And then we tinked our beer cans and toasted the queen.

Feeling very silly, I looked around and watched the gathered ministers, who were all as sodden through as I was in their ill-fitting pants. “Hear, hear,” they enthused. “To the queen.” As one, we guzzled our beer. If it were not for the beer, and the heat, and the bad clothes, the scene would not have been out of place in the House of Lords. They wish the queen well in Kiribati. They really do.