The Shark God Read Free Page A

pain and sorrow. And then he took their children away.
    In New Zealand, then later at the mission’s new base, six hundred miles north on Norfolk Island, the boys were instructed in the dignified rituals of the Anglo-Catholic liturgy, not to mention the social graces that came with an Eton education. While the students learned how to button shirts and tie shoelaces, how to use knives and forks, how to read, pray, sing hymns, and play cricket, they whispered about the world they had left behind. Robert Henry Codrington, the third hero of The Light of Melanesia and headmaster of the mission school, listened to their stories. Codrington was a scholar, a fellow of Oxford, erudite yet remarkably unassuming. The students trusted him, and he collected their secrets with the hunger of an exiled academic. He passed some of those secrets on to my great-grandfather. The rest he consigned to paper, and many of those jottings and sketches languished for years in the attic of Rhodes House. I found them, and they drew me into a world positively vibrating with supernatural power, where ghosts and spirits moved among men and miracles happened constantly.
    The boys told Codrington about mana, an invisible force that flowed through the atmosphere of life, through objects, people, and actions. It appeared without warning. It helped the ancestor spirits to speak. It could be concentrated and directed for good or evil. Everyone had a little mana in him. In New Georgia, islanders were sure it was concentrated in people’s heads. That’s why the New Georgians chopped off the heads of their enemies and carried them home. Head-hunting was quite logical, if you thought about it: a head full of mana was the most useful treasure of all.
    The Melanesians had no supreme being, but their islands were thick with spirits who attached themselves to stones, places, animals, or even words. Sometimes the spirits screamed and howled throughdark nights. Sometimes, amid hidden groves of tangled banyan, they revealed their mysteries to the members of secret societies who asked for their help. The boys told Codrington about Qat, the ancestor-spirit hero of a dozen islands, who was always ready to come to the aid of seafarers. “Qat!” men shouted from their canoes. “May it be. Let the canoe of you and me turn into a whale, a flying fish, an eagle; let it leap on and on over the waves, let it go, let it pass out to my land.” And Qat would calm the sea, speeding the travelers home.
    The ghosts of other ancestors inhabited the bodies of sharks, alligators, octopuses, snakes, and birds. With secret knowledge, a man could win the favor of a shark ancestor, and that shark would come when called; it would herd schools of fish into his net. It would also devour his enemies. The ancestors rewarded allegiance with the same fierce loyalty as the Lord of the Old Testament. Just as God had smashed the enemies of Moses, so the ancestor spirits helped Melanesians sink their enemies’ canoes.
    There wasn’t just one holy ghost in Melanesia; there were thousands of them. And Melanesian spirituality was egalitarian. With the right technique, anyone could harness the power of curses, magic cures, and helpful spirits. Anyone could collect and direct mana. The ethereal realm wasn’t in heaven. It was all around you. It was in you.
    But those spirits, as powerful and plentiful as they were, began their retreat even as Codrington’s anthropological opus, The Melanesians , made their names familiar to academics around the world. Codrington’s Melanesian converts grew ashamed of their dances, their secret societies, and their ghosts. In the pidgin English picked up from traders, they began to call their ancestors by the name white men had given them: devil-devils . When the students returned home with the new teaching, they destroyed shrines and cast the devil-devil stones into the sea.
    One by one, the islands of Melanesia were claimed by the