The Signature of All Things

let out straight into the sea. The river bisected the beach, which was long and curved, and formed of dense, black, volcanic sand. Because of the color of the sand, the bay here was not the shining turquoise one normally associates with the South Seas; instead it was a stately, heavy, slow-rollinginlet of ink. A reef about three hundred yards out kept the surf fairly calm. Even from this distance, Alma could hear the waves smashing against that distant reef. She took up a handful of the sand—the color of soot—and let it pour through her fingers. It felt like warm velvet, and it left her fingers clean.
    “Matavai Bay,” she said aloud.
    She could scarcely believe she was here. All the great explorers of the last century had been here. Wallis had been here, and Vancouver, and Bougainville. Captain Bligh had spent six months camped on this very beach. Most impressive of all, to Alma’s mind, was that this was the same beach where Captain Cook had first landed in Tahiti, in 1769. To Alma’s left, in the near distance, was the high promontory where Cook had observed the transit of Venus—that vital movement of a tiny black planetary disc across the face of the sun, which he had traveled across the world to witness. The gentle little river to Alma’s right had once marked the last boundary in history between the Tahitians and the British. Directly after Cook’s landfall, the two peoples had stood on the opposite sides of this stream, regarding each other with wary curiosity for several hours. The Tahitians thought the British had sailed out of the sky, and that their huge, impressive ships were islands— motu— that had broken loose from the stars . The English tried to determine if these Indians would be aggressive or dangerous. The Tahitian women came right to the edge of the river and teased the English sailors on the other side with playful, provocative dances. There seemed to be no danger here, decided Captain Cook, and he let his men loose upon the girls. The sailors exchanged iron nails with the women for sexual favors. The women took the nails and planted them in the ground, hoping to grow more of this precious iron, as one would grow a tree from a sprig.
    Alma’s father had not been on that voyage. Henry Whittaker had come to Tahiti eight years later, on Cook’s third expedition, in August of 1777. By that point, the English and the Tahitians were well accustomed to each other—and fond of each other, too. Some of the British sailors even had island wives waiting among the women, and island children, as well. The Tahitians had called Captain Cook “Toote” because they could not pronounce his name. Alma knew all this from her father’s stories—stories she had not thought of in decades. She remembered them all now. Her father had bathed in this very river as a young man. Since that time, the missionaries had started using it, Alma knew, for baptisms.
    Now that she was here at last, Alma was not certain what to do next. There was not a soul in sight, with the exception of a child playing alone in the river. He could not have been more than three years old, was absolutely nude, and acted quite unperturbed about having been left unattended in the water. She did not wish to leave her luggage unguarded, so she simply sat down on the pile and waited for someone to come along. She was terribly thirsty. She had been too excited that morning to eat her ship’s breakfast, so she was hungry, too.
    After a long spell, a stout Tahitian woman in a long, modest dress and a white bonnet emerged from one of the more distant cottages, carrying a hoe. She stopped when she saw Alma. Alma stood up and straightened her dress. “ Bonjour ,” she cried out. Tahiti officially belonged to France now; Alma imagined French was her best option.
    The woman smiled beautifully. “We speak English here!” she cried back.
    Alma wanted to approach, so they would not have to shout at each other, but—foolishly—she still felt bound to her luggage. “I am looking for the Reverend Francis Welles!” she called.
    “He is in the corral today!” the woman called back cheerfully, and went on her way down the road toward Papeete, leaving Alma once more alone with her trunks.
    The corral? Did they have cattle here? If so, Alma could neither see nor smell any sign of them. What could the woman have meant?
    Over the next hours, a few more Tahitians wandered past Alma and her pile of crates and trunks. All of them were friendly,