The Signature of All Things

get to see one, for they landed in Tahiti in June of 1852. The sailors went one way and Alma went the other, and that was the last she ever heard of the Elliot.

Chapter Twenty-two
    A lma’s first glimpse of Tahiti, as seen from the deck of the Elliot , had been of abrupt mountain peaks rising hard into cloudless cerulean skies. She had just awoken on this fine, clear morning, and had walked onto the deck to survey her world. She was not expecting what she saw. The sight of Tahiti grabbed the breath from Alma’s chest: not its beauty, but its strangeness. All her life, she’d heard stories of this island, and she’d seen drawings and paintings, too, but still she had no idea the place would be so tall , so extraordinary. These mountains were nothing like the rolling hills of Pennsylvania; these were verdant and wild slopes—shockingly steep, alarmingly jagged, staggeringly high, blindingly green. Indeed, everything about the place was overdressed with green. Even right down to the beaches, it was all excessive and green. Coconut palms gave the impression of growing straight from the water itself.
    It unnerved her. Here she was, quite literally in the middle of nowhere—halfway between Australia and Peru—and she could not help but wonder: Why is there an island here at all? Tahiti felt to her like an uncanny interruption of the Pacific’s vast, endless flatness—an eerie and arbitrary cathedral, thrusting up from the center of the sea for no reason at all. She had expected to view it as a kind of paradise, for that was how Tahiti had always been described. She had expected to be overcome by its beauty, to feel as though she had landed in Eden. Hadn’t Bougainville called the island LaNouvelle Cythère, after the island of Aphrodite’s birth? But Alma’s first reaction, to be quite honest, was fear. On this bright morning, in this balmy climate, faced with the sudden appearance of this famous utopia, she was conscious of nothing but a sense of menace. She wondered, What had Ambrose made of this? She did not want to be left alone here.
    But where else was she to go?
    The old pacer of a ship slid smoothly into the harbor at Papeete, with seabirds of a dozen varieties spinning and wheeling about the masts faster than Alma could count or identify them. Alma and her luggage were dispatched onto the bustling, colorful wharf. Captain Terrence, quite kindly, went to see if he could hire Alma a carriage to take her to the mission settlement at Matavai Bay.
    Her legs were shaky, after months at sea, and she was nearly overcome by nerves. She saw people around her of all sorts—sailors and naval officers and men of commerce, and somebody in clogs, who looked as though he might be a Dutch merchant. She saw a pair of Chinese pearl traders, with long queues down their backs. She saw natives and half-natives and who knew what else. She saw a burly Tahitian man wearing a heavy woolen pea jacket, which he had clearly acquired from a British sailor, but he wore no trousers—just a skirt of grass, and a disconcertingly nude chest beneath the jacket. She saw native women dressed in all sorts of ways. Some of the older ones quite brazenly displayed their breasts, while the younger women tended to wear long frocks, with their hair arranged in modest plaits. They were the new converts to Christianity, Alma supposed. She saw a woman wrapped in what appeared to be a tablecloth, wearing men’s European leather shoes several sizes too big for her feet, selling unfamiliar fruits. She saw a fantastically dressed fellow, wearing European trousers as a sort of jacket, with his head all aflutter in a crown of leaves. She thought him a most extraordinary sight, but no one else paid him any notice.
    The native people here were bigger than the people Alma was used to. Some of the women were quite as large as Alma herself. The men were even larger. Their skin was burnished copper. Some of the men had long hair and looked frightening; others had short hair and looked civilized.
    Alma saw a sad knot of prostitutes rush toward the Elliot ’s sailors with immediate, brazen suggestions, just as soon as the men’s feet touched the dock. These women wore their hair down, reaching below their waists inglossy black waves. From the back, they all looked the same. From the front, one could see the differences in age and beauty. Alma watched the negotiations begin. She wondered how much something like that cost. She wondered what the women offered,