‘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. ‘Tellus. 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 calledmana– 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.
