fire-and-brimstone Christian missionaries. I couldn’t blame him. For itinerant travel writers, Port Vila is the worst kind of place. It is captivatingly pleasant.
Appealingly situated on rolling hills, offering vistas over the bays and lagoons that jabbed the island like impertinent fingers, Port Vila is quite likely the finest town of its size in the South Pacific. Admittedly, this is saying very little. It isn’t as if the islands are graced with their own Pragues and Romes, but then again, neither Prague nor Rome has palm-fringed beaches. Oceania is a world of villages, each with its own rules and routines. And with strikingly few exceptions, the larger urban areas like Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea are either cesspools of criminality or dissolute slums like South Tarawa in Kiribati, where the inhabitants drift ever further from the village culture that has sustained them for generations. Port Vila, then, is an agreeable anomaly in the South Pacific. It’s nice.
It wasn’t always so. Like all large towns in the region, Port Vila is a town built by Westerners for Westerners. Indeed, until the 1940s, the Ni-Vanuatu were not even allowed to live in Vila, as the locals call their town. Any Ni-Vanuatu men found wandering about after 9 P.M. were arrested. This, remarkably, was an improvement over the state of affairs that prevailed in the 1880s, when Port Vila was little more than a debauched port for planters, beachcombers, ex-convicts, and blackbirders—rapacious labor recruiters who plied the South Pacific, filling their holds with bodies to send to plantations and mines throughout the Southern Hemisphere. One hotel in particular came to be known as the “bloodhouse.” R. J. Fletcher in
Isles of Illusion
(published in 1925) described an evening at the inn:
I have seen recruiters playing poker after a successful season. The drink is champagne…ordered in cases. The regulation method is to shout for a case, kick the lid off and open the bottles with an 18" knife. The stakes are merely the recruited niggers who are ranged solemnly around the wall of the room and change hands many times a night. Fancy the excitement of a jackpot of four stalwart niggers and two women (total value 92 pounds) in the pool.
It is difficult to imagine what Vanuatu must have been like in the nineteenth century, when everyone from unscrupulous sandalwood traders to zealous missionaries began to appear, uninvited of course, on islands whose inhabitants had developed a fine appreciation for the culinary possibilities of human flesh. The Ni-Vanuatu ate a good many of the foreigners among them, but it wasn’t long before the tide had turned and settlers could be found posting signs that said DOGS AND NIGGERS ARE FORBIDDEN TO ENTER INSIDE THE PORTALS OF THESE GATES. ANY DOGS OR NIGGERS FOUND THEREIN WILL SUFFER THE PENALTY OF DEATH.
The settlers were just as charming toward other settlers. By the turn of the century, there were 55 British settlers and 151 French. “We have just celebrated Christmas,” wrote one observer in 1888, “and Christmas in the New Hebrides is a fearful and wonderful sight. Thank God it only comes once a year. The French and the English had a pitched battle but luckily they were all too drunk to shoot straight.” Port Vila’s days as a distant backwater eventually took a turn toward the farcical with the establishment of the Anglo-French Condominium, one of history’s more peculiar colonial arrangements. This joint rule represented an attempt by the British and French governments to restore some order to the islands. The Condominium, which was established in 1906, could best be described as a petulant compromise between the French and the English. Anyone who has ever watched two cranky toddlers argue over an Etch A Sketch can envision the result.
You can’t have it,
said the French, who wanted to annex the New Hebrides to settle their ex-convicts from New Caledonia.
Well, you can’t have it either,
said the
Appealingly situated on rolling hills, offering vistas over the bays and lagoons that jabbed the island like impertinent fingers, Port Vila is quite likely the finest town of its size in the South Pacific. Admittedly, this is saying very little. It isn’t as if the islands are graced with their own Pragues and Romes, but then again, neither Prague nor Rome has palm-fringed beaches. Oceania is a world of villages, each with its own rules and routines. And with strikingly few exceptions, the larger urban areas like Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea are either cesspools of criminality or dissolute slums like South Tarawa in Kiribati, where the inhabitants drift ever further from the village culture that has sustained them for generations. Port Vila, then, is an agreeable anomaly in the South Pacific. It’s nice.
It wasn’t always so. Like all large towns in the region, Port Vila is a town built by Westerners for Westerners. Indeed, until the 1940s, the Ni-Vanuatu were not even allowed to live in Vila, as the locals call their town. Any Ni-Vanuatu men found wandering about after 9 P.M. were arrested. This, remarkably, was an improvement over the state of affairs that prevailed in the 1880s, when Port Vila was little more than a debauched port for planters, beachcombers, ex-convicts, and blackbirders—rapacious labor recruiters who plied the South Pacific, filling their holds with bodies to send to plantations and mines throughout the Southern Hemisphere. One hotel in particular came to be known as the “bloodhouse.” R. J. Fletcher in
Isles of Illusion
(published in 1925) described an evening at the inn:
I have seen recruiters playing poker after a successful season. The drink is champagne…ordered in cases. The regulation method is to shout for a case, kick the lid off and open the bottles with an 18" knife. The stakes are merely the recruited niggers who are ranged solemnly around the wall of the room and change hands many times a night. Fancy the excitement of a jackpot of four stalwart niggers and two women (total value 92 pounds) in the pool.
It is difficult to imagine what Vanuatu must have been like in the nineteenth century, when everyone from unscrupulous sandalwood traders to zealous missionaries began to appear, uninvited of course, on islands whose inhabitants had developed a fine appreciation for the culinary possibilities of human flesh. The Ni-Vanuatu ate a good many of the foreigners among them, but it wasn’t long before the tide had turned and settlers could be found posting signs that said DOGS AND NIGGERS ARE FORBIDDEN TO ENTER INSIDE THE PORTALS OF THESE GATES. ANY DOGS OR NIGGERS FOUND THEREIN WILL SUFFER THE PENALTY OF DEATH.
The settlers were just as charming toward other settlers. By the turn of the century, there were 55 British settlers and 151 French. “We have just celebrated Christmas,” wrote one observer in 1888, “and Christmas in the New Hebrides is a fearful and wonderful sight. Thank God it only comes once a year. The French and the English had a pitched battle but luckily they were all too drunk to shoot straight.” Port Vila’s days as a distant backwater eventually took a turn toward the farcical with the establishment of the Anglo-French Condominium, one of history’s more peculiar colonial arrangements. This joint rule represented an attempt by the British and French governments to restore some order to the islands. The Condominium, which was established in 1906, could best be described as a petulant compromise between the French and the English. Anyone who has ever watched two cranky toddlers argue over an Etch A Sketch can envision the result.
You can’t have it,
said the French, who wanted to annex the New Hebrides to settle their ex-convicts from New Caledonia.
Well, you can’t have it either,
said the
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