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Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth

 | 
Michèle Lurdos
, 
Judith Misrahi-Barak

Travelling

Patricia Ledyard’s ‘Ferry Tales’: Transports around the Tongan Islands

Nelly Gillet

Résumé

American-born writer Patricia Ledyard reached the shores of the Tongan island of Vava’u in 1949 and spent the rest of her life there. Her expatriation led the way to an emotional and cultural discovery: crossing the Pacific ocean was part of her quest for a different life. Her three books, between autobiographical novels and anthropological accounts, tell the process of endearment between the American woman and the Polynesian people, the inspiration behind her writing.

A key character in the story, Tofua the ferry bears a multifaceted symbolical meaning. As a means of transport in and out the archipelago, it represents a place of transition; and when it brings new books or visitors, it becomes the link with the outside world. And when Queen Salote embarks upon it, it becomes the scene for a fervent emotional transport. Patricia Ledyard herself experienced this synchronism between the movements of the body and the movements of the heart for it was on the ferry that she met her future husband, Farquhar Matheson. In Tonga also, means of transports can lead to emotional transports.

Texte intégral

1Nowadays, it is relatively easy to reach the northern Tongan archipelago of Vava’u in the heart of the Pacific; from the main island, Tongatapu, one can reach Vava’u by plane in an hour. The airborne journey totally differs from Patricia Ledyard’s experience of a trip to Vava’u in 1949. When the American expatriate decided to take up a job at the Siuilikutapu College of Neiafu, she had to embark upon a big vessel from Auckland, New Zealand, and travel across the Pacific Ocean to Tongatapu, and then further north to Vava’u.

  • 1 Ledyard, Patricia, Friendly Island, a Tale of Tonga (1956. Tonga: Vava’u Press, 1996).
  • 2 Ledyard, Patricia, ’Utulei my Tongan Home (1974. Tonga: Vava’u Press, 1993).

2In her two autobiographico-anthropological novels, namely Friendly Island, a Tale of Tonga1 published in 1956, and ’Utulei, my Tongan Home,2 in 1974, Patricia Ledyard shares her experience of life in Tonga where she settled for fifty-one years. The double nature of her books shows through the analysis of the theme of boats: first, they are part of the anthropological account given of the Polynesian islands since they are a reality of their past and present life and a necessary means of transport. They are also intertwined with Patricia Ledyard’s personal life, a life a transition and a life of emotional transports.

  • 3 ‘’Recent research indicates that the various Tongan islands were all settled more or less simultane (...)

3A geography based on insularity entails the omnipresence of boats; they are crucial in the transportation of people and goods. Indeed the very first colonisation3 of Polynesian islands itself was made possible by sea transport when sailing canoes crossed the Pacific Ocean looking for new territories. The navigating skills of Tongan ancestors are said to have been remarkable, as New Zealander historian Ian C. Campbell explains:

The archaeological evidence points to an adventurous, seafaring people capable of undertaking long ocean voyages and of transporting colonising groups that had all the necessities for survival.... The introduction of plants and animals did not necessarily happen all at once, but was probably the subject of repeated voyages back to a place of origin... indicating a high order of navigational skills as well as seamanship. (Campbell 1992: 18)

4Maritime journeys played a key role in the economic and cultural exchanges within the region; for instance, tattooing was Samoans’ special skill and Tongan chiefs had to brave the dangers of the sea to get tattooed. Patricia Ledyard refers to that practice when telling one of the ‘tales the people of Vava’u tell of the old-time trips to Samoa’ (Ledyard 1956: 200):

It happened long ago... that ten of the chiefs of Vava’u decided to go up to Samoa to be tattooed. There were no steamers then nor any launches or cutters, so the trip had to be made in outrigger canoes. An average-sized old time canoe could easily accommodate twenty-five people.... A canoe that must go out into the stormy waters of the open sea must be a masterpiece of balance. They were decked over, too, so that the water wouldn’t come in, and they carried sails made of woven mats. (Ledyard 1956: 200)

5A tattoo thus became a sign of courage and fortitude since one had to use sea transport as well as bear the pain of tattooing itself.

  • 4 Helu, ’I.F, Critical Essays. Cultural Perspectives from the South Seas (Canberra: The Journal of Pa (...)

6The ocean has given its shape to today’s Polynesian culture. According to Futa Helu, Tonga’s most renowned historian and thinker: ‘The sea in many senses created the Polynesian society and common culture. Like the Hindu Trinity of Vishnu, Shiva and Brahma, the sea is at once the Creator, Destroyer and Preserver of the Polynesian character.’4

7Patricia Ledyard was well aware of the importance of the sea in her adoptive country’s culture; several figures of boats in her books play different roles according to their size or maritime route. The smallest of all was the key to her freedom, ‘a little yellow outrigger canoe which Felipe made for (her) the first year (she) came to ’Utulei’ (Ledyard 1956: 121). The same boat reappears in her second book written nearly twenty years later: ‘I had a bright yellow outrigger canoe in which we could paddle across the harbour to other islands or float for long hours over the reef’ (Ledyard 1974: 85). Far from decaying under the influence of time, the boat is still ‘bright yellow’ which shows the care the American took of it, but also reveals that the ever active woman was still travelling back and forth between her house and the little harbour of Neiafu.

8The boat that first brought Patricia Ledyard to the Tongan shores was the Matua, ‘a well-built modern motor vessel of 2,000 tons’ (Ledyard 1956: 16). Then the Hifofua, ‘the inter-island boat’ (Ledyard 1956: 57) took her and her family around the archipelago, maintaining connection between the different kingdom islands. The economic role played by sea transports is alluded to in the ‘big coprah boat’ (Ledyard 1974: 24) that carries one of Tonga’s only export products. Lastly, the most important boat alluded to in Patricia Ledyard’s tales is the ‘old Tofua’ which clearly frames Friendly Island by opening the novel and closing it. On the first page, the old ferry is personified to enhance its role in the genesis of Patricia Ledyard’s life in Tonga: ‘One day about a quarter of a century ago, the old Tofua rounded the rocky undercut little island of Kitu and slipped into the quiet waters of Vava’u’ (Ledyard 1956: 7). The same ferry leaves the island on the very last pages of her tale: ‘An hour ago, the Tofua left the wharf at Neiafu and sailed down the harbour bound for Niue island.... Now the sky is streaked with sunset, the Tofua is far out on the open sea’ (Ledyard 1956: 249). Presented in parallel with the sun that rises when the boat comes into the harbour and sets when the boat leaves, the image clearly reflects the writing itself. The book can exist because the boat has taken the American to her new life. In her experience, transports clearly become the necessary means to create. As is the case with travel writing, Patricia Ledyard’s testimony novels were made possible by this first trip over water, this rite-of-passage journey to the place of re-birth. Indeed, the circularity of the book in this allusion to the ferry, still carrying passengers in and out of Vava’u, reflects the universe in which Patricia Ledyard had found her place: an island, the very metaphor of the protective circle.

9However, one of the striking characteristics of Patricia Ledyard’s writing is the often crudely realistic account given of the state of these boats. In the process, the American challenges idyllic images given of the South Seas by generations of explorers and colonisers before her. First she alludes to the Tongan proneness to sea-sickness: ‘Tongans, ’Farquhar reminded me, ‘although they are wonderful navigators, are notoriously poor sailors’ (Ledyard 1956: 64). Then she insists on the derelict state of the inter-island ferries, in particular with the realistic account of her first trip on the Hifofua and the minute description of her room:

An oversized cockroach, scuttling down the cobwebby wall, had crossed the grey sheets of the upper berth and slithered down a pipe to the lower berth where he was sitting quite comfortably in the middle of the soiled and spotted pillow. (Ledyard 1956: 59)
The sanitary facilities of the Hifofua are widely discussed in all parts of Tonga, where they have played their part in hindering much of the travel which might otherwise have flourished between one island group and another. My first glimpse that morning of the small, dark room with its obscure corners and its fetid floor was so brief that Farquhar laughed when, almost on his heels, I bolted up to the bridge. (Ledyard 1956: 67)

10And yet, however off-putting the state of the boat is, the magic character of any journey stands out: a boat, even derelict, is the best and only means to discover the beauty of the sea and the scenery around it. Patricia Ledyard tells many such anecdotes, especially on smaller boats that allow the necessary freedom to meander around the tiny islands scattered around the archipelago. The story of the trip to Ovaka island for example gives the opportunity to describe the enchanting submarine scenery typical of Polynesia:

In the clear, bright outlines of the morning light, the islands on either side of us were like Rousseau landscapes.... The sea, too, had a clarity of its own. When we passed over reefs, we could stare down through depths of luminous green water to the bright-coloured coral that grew on the sandy bottom. (Ledyard 1956: 46-47)

11The very position of the boat offers different possible landscapes to be admired around, above, and below. The character gets the feeling of being right in the core of the surrounding environment. Thanks to the boat, all the mysteries and beauties of the archipelago can be explored and shared with friends and visitors. Writing about these excursions seems a continuity from boat trips around the island, since Patricia Ledyard takes her reader around Vava’u through the process of reading.

12Also like books, boats provide the privileged spaces for moments of reveries, when one’s thoughts are left to float. Trips on boats could be compared to contemplative pauses in life. In Friendly Island, Patricia Ledyard’s second trip on a boat gives her the opportunity to assess her situation after five months spent in Tonga:

As we pulled away from the wharf, there was a final roar of goodbyes and then the haunting strains of ‘Ofa Anga ’Ae Otua’ (the national anthem).... In the five months which had elapsed since first I heard it, all my life had changed. (Ledyard 1956: 62)

13An extract from her second novel refers to the very nature of transports that allow time to meditate: ‘Lying up in my bunk that night as the Matua rolled her way gently up to Vava’u, I tried to sort out my reactions to my first day in Tonga’ (Ledyard 1974: 20). The opportunity to ponder about things comes from the ambivalent nature of transports, when one is immobile on a moving vessel; offering a motionless journey that carries the body from one place to another without it actually moving, and allowing the mind the total freedom to wander about, transports are unique places of transition.

14The Latin root of the word ‘transport’ refers to the notion of ‘carrying across or beyond’; it entails a change of place, of space, but also of state. For Patricia Ledyard, the change of place was constitutive of who she became. For an expatriate, boats are the means to reach new places of settlement. The American was aware of the role of the ferry as the threshold to a new life: ‘And so it was, that with the doctor at my side, I stepped off the boat and walked into the world of Vava’u’ (Ledyard 1956: 34). The ferry gave her the opportunity to belong to a new place. The geographical position the expatriate adopted in Vava’u is quite telling about the process of expatriation. The house located right at the entrance of the sheltered natural harbour of Neiafu offers a strategic place to observe sea traffic. While being motionless on her verandah, Patricia Ledyard could look at all the movements in and out the harbour: ‘Tu’ifua and I were sitting out on the verandah in easy-chairs, following with our eyes the slow progress of an occasional cutter as it made its way up the harbour to Neiafu’ (Ledyard 1956: 109). The house reflects the power of the boat, thus creating a continuity with the American expatriate’s motionless voyage. Her double nature as someone who has travelled and now ‘belongs’ is illustrated by this moment of contemplation. The feeling of ‘in-betweeness’ also comes from the flags that fly above the house since the American flag flies next to the Tongan one. A powerful oxymoron at the beginning of the novel tells of this state of ‘in-betweeness’ characteristic of expatriates who are never quite travelling, yet never quite totally settled: ‘One among them, however, a young Scotch doctor, stood as if rooted to the deck and stared out at the cape’ (Ledyard 1956: 8). To be ‘rooted’ on a moving vessel reveals a desire to go on travelling while finding a place to belong to. Patricia Ledyard and her Scottish husband found a perfect balance between the two. On the last page of her first novel, the writer concludes that the ferry is a vital link with the outside world yet rejoices about the new roots she has dug in her Vava’u garden:

On our first few Steamer Days, Farquhar used to say, ‘Perhaps this makes you home-sick’, and when the Tofua sailed past he would inquire apprehensively, ‘Do you wish you were on her?’ Nowadays he never asks. There is no need; for, although he is bound to Scotland and I to America in the indissoluble way that a child is for ever bound to its parents, we both belong now in our little island world of Vava’u. (Ledyard 1956: 252)

15The capacity of settling down also comes from the very presence of boats that symbolise the umbilical cord linking them to their mother countries.

16 The ferry has long remained the only link with the outside world for the tiny archipelago: ‘whenever a boat came up from Nuku’alofa, I ran to the post office looking for his letters which were like little bridges to help me over the separation’ (Ledyard 1956: 88). It carries news, letters, magazines, books and even food from the rest of the world: ‘Like all the best holidays everywhere, Steamer Day has offerings for both our stomachs and our spirits’ (Ledyard 1956: 250). Indeed the two papalangis have kept on receiving books from America, New Zealand or Scotland. According to Patricia Ledyard, books are a means of transport in themselves; her first ‘trip’ to Tonga was through reading about it in ‘the cold and dreary library of a foreign university’ (Ledyard 1956: 8), ‘for the pages of the book had filled her mind with the bright vision of a sunlit island country and her errant thoughts kept carrying her off to the islands’ (Ledyard 1956: 8-9).

17Transport, be it on a boat or via the act of reading, provides the means of discovering new places, of being re-born in a new world, while remaining a reassuring link with past times and places. In Patricia Ledyard’s tales, trips on boats often are endowed with a womb-like atmosphere, with recurrent references to pregnancy and birth. The story of the ’ohai -tree is a clear metaphor for the American’s second birth: ‘While we were still at college, I planted a seed of the ’ohai tree—the flamboyant. When I came to live in ’Utulei, I carried the seedling across the harbour in a tin. Now it shades half the lower garden’. (Ledyard 1974: 59)

18Transport is seen as a necessary process before a new better life can start; a journey on boat is associated with a form of gestation. The image of the watery womb is obvious on Ledyard’s very first arrival to Tonga; she is caught in the middle of a liquid universe. Water surrounds her with the sea below and the rain above. The boat is the womb carrying her into her new life. In her books, this new life is only referred to as her ‘real’ life; her life before Tonga is seldom mentioned, and the rare allusions present scenes linked to the sea, with reminiscences around water that seem to merge her real childhood with her symbolical one on the boat. Her rebirth by sea transport is also visible in the metaphor of the re-enactment of the creation of the world; when she catches her first glimpse of her ‘new world’ she says:

The whole world—land and sky and shimmering sea—was so fresh and new that I couldn’t help thinking it must have been just so when, after the Sixth Day, God looked at His Creation and saw that ‘it was good’. (Ledyard 1956: 32)

19The ferry allowed the expatriate to be born into her new life and thus discover emotional transports that would have been impossible in her previous life.

20From indispensable means of transport, boats tend to become privileged stages for scenes of emotional and fervent transports. Boats have clearly been both the place and the instrument of the two palangis’ attachment. The parallel between their respective experiences of the discovery of Vava’u from the sea is the first link between them:

The young doctor caught a glimpse of curving water with the crowded roofs of the port above it. If I were sitting on that verandah, he thought, turning back to the house at the cape, I could see up the harbour and down the harbour.... Following a group of laughing brown children, I (the narrator) saw for the first time the big old white house that lies at the foot of the hill in the middle of the grass above the beach. Then I heard some strangers who passed behind me saying, ‘that’s the doctor’s house’. (Ledyard 1956: 8 & 32)

21It was from boats that they saw their future house for the first time. A symbolic continuity between the boat and the house enhances the sense of immediate belonging which came on Patricia Ledyard when she arrived. Her first step on the land of Vava’u was made in the company of the Scottish doctor who became a symbol of continuity, a metaphorical link between her past life represented by the boat and her future settlement on the land of Tonga.

22One of the few romantic scenes in her books takes place on a small boat when a trip to an outer island becomes the occasion for the two friends to realise they have become lovers: ‘Neither of us spoke the obvious word, but we both knew that it was together our hearts were comfortable’ (Ledyard 1956: 55). The chapter is built on a circular structure since they get on a boat in the morning and again in the evening. Their emotional coming together is echoed by a physical movement that brings them closer to the sea: their place of observation on the boat changes from ‘the top of the cabin’ which is ‘the best seat in the boat’ according to Farquhar (Ledyard 1956: 46), to the back of the boat: ‘Farquhar and I sat alone on the narrow stern seat which was so close to the water that we felt a fine spray from the wake that rose just below us’ (Ledyard 1956: 54). The boat was the accomplice in their change of position from observers to actors of their own romance.

23On a wider level, boats can also be stages for scenes of public elation. Some of the most powerful extracts from Patricia Ledyard’s books are devoted to the description of Tongan positive gregariousness, which is often linked to means of transports. For instance, when travelling on boats, Tongans tend to sing, uniting their voices in a movement of communal emotion: ‘Then Tu’ifua and Nia began to sing an old love song. Soon the others joined in. They sang all the way back home to ’Utulei’ (Ledyard 1974: 82). The anecdote of the book relay in the middle of a violent hurricane shows that transport can save people by linking them together:

The book lift proved to be a godsend to the morale of our group. Soon all the men and women were involved, ... taking armfuls of books out of the shelves, passing them along from one another until they reached the hallway.... Tongans cannot work without talking and they cannot talk without laughing and singing. It was good to hear their gaiety rising above the storm. Later I learned that in many places where people had nothing to do but sit and tremble at each fresh blast of wind, many of them had lost all control of themselves and given way to hysteria. Fortunately our group was far too busy and far too merry for that. (Ledyard 1974: 120)

24The image of Rabelaisian popular rejoicing and human community pops up from the carnival procession around the house. Transports entail movement and movement brings out life. Several scenes located on harbours present great crowds greeting friends and families for arrivals and departures. The gaiety of the crowd on such occasion is one of the most salient features of Tongans and gave the impulse to the newly arrived expatriate’s movement towards her future adoptive people: ‘I waved again and the gaiety of the crowd rose up and covered me and I was part of it. I was leaning even farther over the rail, stretching to see as much of the crowd as I could’ (Ledyard 1956: 19). The boat was the place for the first contact.

  • 5 Queen Salote was Tonga’s most revered and admired sovereign both at home and abroad. She became que (...)

25 In Patricia Ledyard’s books, objects and surrounding scenes show empathy with the characters’ emotions. On the day of the famous Queen Salote’s departure,5 the ferry is the first one to show signs of pride:

I had no sooner stepped on to the deck than I realised that the Matua was not, that afternoon, the same ship I had left in the morning. Outwardly, everything seemed to be just as it had been before;... yet some difference there certainly was, for the morning’s dull, wind-tossed old vessel seemed full of a proud new spirit. (Ledyard 1956: 24)

26Transferring people’s emotions onto the boat is one of the characteristics of Patricia Ledyard’s writing; in this scene, both the boat and the newly arrived American are caught in a regal atmosphere. The arrival of the Queen about to depart on the ferry gives the occasion for a powerful scene of fervent transport:

The hymn was just over when gaiety once more seized hold of the crowd. A small naked boy flung his shiny brown self off the wharf in the direction of the departing ship. He might well have been a signal. Before he even touched the water, scores of people, young and old, most of them fully clothed with their mats still around their waists, plunged into the sea after him, screaming and shouting as if they offered themselves in some wild immolation to their beloved queen. (Ledyard 1956: 29)

27 This symbolic sacrifice to Queen Salote is at the core of a crisscrossing network of transports: when a boat is about to carry the queen away, the crowd is carried away by their emotion.

28In Patricia Ledyard’s experience of Tonga, boats, ferries and little canoes play a crucial role in that their omnipresence reflects the importance of transports in an insular nation such as Tonga. They also enhance the Tongans’ capacity to express their emotions and emotional transports. While always remaining American at heart, Patricia Ledyard found her place within the Polynesian people. It is once more through boats that she created a kinship with Tongan ancestors comparing their sea voyage to hers and thus inscribing herself within Tongan History:

My trip—as surely as that of the first Tongans, was a drift voyage. I floated here on the restless tide of youth, full of that melancholy wanderlust that is a search for a way of life and for the people with whom one wants to live it. Like those old time Tongans, I was fortunate; They found here everything they wanted. So did I. (Ledyard 1974: 9)

29Transport to Tonga became a reflected image of her personal trip towards her real self; and transports around Tonga, both real and figurative, shaped her life in Vava’u and her ‘ferry tales’.

Bibliographie

Works Cited

Campbell, I.C. Island Kingdom. Tonga Ancient and Modern. Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury UP, 1992.

Helu, ’I.F. Critical Essays. Cultural Perspectives from the South Seas. Canberra: The Journal of Pacific History, 1999.

Ledyard, Patricia. ’Utulei my Tongan Home. 1974. Tonga: Vava’u Press, 1993.

— —. Friendly Island, a Tale of Tonga. 1956. Tonga: Vava’u Press, 1996.

Wood-Ellem, Elizabeth. Queen Salote of Tonga. The Story of an Era 1900- 1965. New Zealand: Auckland UP, 1999.

Notes

1 Ledyard, Patricia, Friendly Island, a Tale of Tonga (1956. Tonga: Vava’u Press, 1996).

2 Ledyard, Patricia, ’Utulei my Tongan Home (1974. Tonga: Vava’u Press, 1993).

3 ‘’Recent research indicates that the various Tongan islands were all settled more or less simultaneously about 900-850 BC’. Campbell, I.C, Island Kingdom. Tonga Ancient and Modern (Christchurch, NZ: Canterbury UP, 1992): 18.

4 Helu, ’I.F, Critical Essays. Cultural Perspectives from the South Seas (Canberra: The Journal of Pacific History, 1999): 114.

5 Queen Salote was Tonga’s most revered and admired sovereign both at home and abroad. She became queen at the age of 18 in 1918 and died in 1965. For more on Queen Salote, refer to Wood-Ellem, Elizabeth, Queen Salote of Tonga. The Story of an Era 1900-1965 (New Zealand: Auckland UP, 1999).

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