1950s Archive

Roaming Round The Equator

Originally Published December 1950

If you like eating beyond sin and calories, the place to go is the group of islands known as the Polynesian group. They may not be all the travel posters say, but they are wonderful for food—it has a flavor that is just about this side of heaven.

Mike Murder, my director and cameraman, and I got to an island called Monox Four one lazy afternoon, bent on shooting some pearl divers for the television screens of the world. We were on our way home after exposing a lot of film, and as our journey drew to an end and trouble boiled over in Asia, we felt a little better about getting home.

Monox Four was a company island, part of a group owned by a soap company that bought up its coconuts and kept the natives in comic books, recordings of South Pacific, and hair ribbons worn by both sexes. Mike looked over the island and shook his head.

“We build them better in Hollywood.”

“You mean it looks faked?”

“Sure, the back lot at Metro has a better native village. Look at those roofs, tin roofs made from signs reading Standard Oil.”

“It does keep out the rain.”

“And jeeps! Holy cow, imagine jeeps on a South Sea island.”

“There used to be a war around here.”

“I still don't like it.”

Mike, under his tree bark, was a romantic. I have no use for romantics any more. Maybe because I used to be a romantic myself. I got rid of that dreamy outlook on men, morals, and women after being hit on the head with a baseball bat. It wasn't a real baseball bat, but there was enough shock in it to make me want to see life without the rose-colored glasses. I liked the tin roofs, and the jeep was handy to take us up to Ali's place, a sort of trading post run by a half-Irish, half-Arab gentleman called, of course, Ali. We had a letter of introduction to him, and he stopped sorting some moonstones to smile at us.

“Bad season for camera work. Lousy clouds.”

“Can we see some diving?”

“All the time. Care to buy some moonstones?”

“Maybe later.”

“I'll throw in a free set of recordings of South Pacific. By the original cast.”

“No, thanks.”

“I'm stuck with a hundred sets. At first the natives were amused by the stuff, but now I can't move them.”

“Too bad,” said Mike, “We ran into something like that down under. All the sheephands spoiled by Hopalong Cassidy films. Civilization is the curse of the tropics. Only it's not gin and clothing any more, it's films and records.”

Ali put away his collection of moonstones. “Things were simple in the old days, my old man used to tell me. The missionaries used to land with Bibles, and the natives had the land. In a few years the natives had the Bibles, and the missionaries had the land. A man could make a decent buck in those days. How would you fellas like to go to a big party?”

Mike beamed, “You mean one with native rituals and stuff?”

Ali shook his head. “The headman just got a new Buick and he's celebrating. He put his name down in 1940, and it just came through.”

“That's better than you do in Beverly Hills,” I said.

The party was held in a big grove of coconut trees, and the car was covered with flowers. The headman made us welcome and introduced us to his daughter, who was a real native type in her California sun hat and Hollywood sun glasses. But the food, at any rate, was the real thing. We sat on the ground and thanked the Lord we still could eat in Polynesia.

The food was wrapped in banana and taro and breadfruit leaves and cooked in great pits filled with hot stones. They grated taros and yams and soaked them in coconut milk. The fish, freshly caught and still colored like the rainbow, were packed in huge banana leaves and baked between flat stones heated as hot as they could get. Prawns, crayfish, everything was wrapped and cooked.

The pig was the best of it. It was the headman's own pig. and he was rather proud of that pig. The hair was scraped off, the insides removed, and the animal rubbed down with salt and garlic and lime juice. It was stuffed with hot rocks and mango leaves, also with onions, garlic, and peppercorns. It smells good when it's cooking, and it tastes good while it's being eaten, and it's regretted when it's all gone.

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