Solzhenitsyn’s Advice

c. 1992

    Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that we do not spend enough time in cemeteries.  Only a Russian would think that eternity is not long enough.

    Still I have tried to follow his advice, without making an obsession of it. As a sailor, I am interested in seaport cemeteries; as a writer, my imagination is captured by the stories and lives suggested by the brief inscriptions on the stones.

    So when fogbound for several days in The Great Salt Pond at Block Island, off Newport, Rhode Island, I rowed ashore and found a small windswept cemetery, filled with sea captains going back so far that the writing on many of the tombstones was effaced.

    There was one indignant poem about a captain who had survived everything the sea could throw at him only to die of an illness at home.  I assume that the Balls had been an important family in Block Island’s seafaring history because their monuments dominate the hillside, each capped with the family’s emblem: a round ball.

    On the other side of the world in Macao, the Portuguese enclave 40 miles west of Hong Kong, I once visited the Anglican cemetery, which is essentially a 19th century sailor’s cemetery.  More specifically, it is a young sailor’s cemetery, for few survived the trails of the sea and the diseases of the land, including war, to reach the age of 40.

     The character of the cemetery comes not just from the dates on the tombstones but from the succession of people who have maintained the graves faithfully and kept the memories alive for more than a century, and from the openly expressed sentiments on the stones.  None of these is elaborate, not even that of Lord Churchill, forbear of Winston, who died in 1840, while serving as captain of H.M.S. DRUID.  But the inscriptions  are vivid.  Wives were “deeply mourned” and “sorely missed.”  Men died “after a lingering and painful illness” or “fell from the rigging” or were killed while “Storming the heights of Canton.”  Children were “lamented for a lifetime.”   One sailor’s “sails were furled and he has reached that world where storms are felt no more”; and another, “poor wanderers  of a stormy day, from wave to wave we’re driven; there’s nothing calm but Heaven.”

    I visited Macau with Suzanne while CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE was moored in Singapore, and I felt, as I had with the gujung  fishermen of Bali, a kinship with these men, whose white tombstones were surrounded by neatly trimmed grass in a tiny cemetery far from their homelands. This was one end to the experience of the sea.  They seemed to speak to me with a single voice, and that voice said, “Live passionately, even if it kills you, because something is going to kill you anyway.”

    On Huahine, about 100 miles northwest of Tahiti, I stumbled, literally, onto an abandoned cemetery hidden by palm trees just a few steps back from the beach.  One of the headstones was marked, “Andrew Keller, 1814-1858; born White Plains, New York; conchologist.”  And two others:  “Elma Wright Brown, died March 15, 1872; wife of The Reverend Roger L. Brown, London Missionary Society”; and “Their son William, who died on March 21, 1872, aged six days.”

    Andrew Keller might have sailed to the South Pacific on his doomed voyage with one of those captains buried on Block Island.  I imagined him picking up shells along the New York shore as a boy; avidly devouring accounts of the recent voyages of Cook and Bligh and the novels of his contemporary, Melville; dreaming of making the difficult voyage to the far side of the Earth; setting out full of hope and expectation.

    A less somber grave is found along the roadside near Raki Raki on the north coast of Viti Levu, Fiji.  Here a stone marks the burial place of Udre Udre, said to be the greatest cannibal of them all.  Reportedly, though with some assistance from friends and neighbors, assuming he had any friends and neighbors left, Udre Udre devoured 900 people.   When Udre Udre said, “There goes the neighborhood.” he meant it.

    The two most famous graves in the South Pacific belong to a painter and a writer.

    The legend of how Paul Gauguin deserted his family in France to escape to Tahiti to paint is well known, and as PR probably helped him become immortal by lifting him from the crowd. 

    In reality, Tahiti was not Gauguin’s first choice as a refuge from decadent Europe.  It was a distant third, behind Indochina and Madagascar.  That he ended up in the Pacific was largely due to the influence of THE MARRIAGE OF LOTI, a  sentimental bestselling novel set there.

    On his arrival in Papeete in 1891, Gauguin discovered that the noble savage of his imagination had been corrupted by colonial bureaucracy and missionaries.   He choose to ignore that Tahitians had always been as warlike and quarrelsome as Europeans, they had just been so while wearing fewer clothes.

    Gauguin’s work was unappreciated in Tahiti.  Unless they have managed to buy one recently, the Gauguin Museum there has no originals, only photographs and reproductions.  After a few years, Gauguin returned to France, where he staged an unsuccessful exhibition.   But upon his return to the islands, he received a letter from a young art dealer in Paris offering him 350 francs a month as an advance against the purchase of 25 paintings a year.  Having at last obtained what every artist wants--enough money to continue his work--Gauguin moved from Tahiti to the more remote Marquesas Islands, seven hundred miles northeast, where he settled on Hiva Oa and soon died.  A large rock inscribed simply, “Gauguin.  1848-1903,” marks his grave in the cemetery on a hill behind the village of Atuona.

    Two thousand miles to the west, up a much steeper hill, lies the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson.

    While Gauguin was a robust man who ruined his health, Stevenson was ill all his life, mostly with “weak lungs” exacerbated by the climate of his native Scotland.  Nevertheless, he was an inveterate traveler in an era when travel was far more physically demanding than it is today.  TREASURE ISLAND established his reputation and DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE and KIDNAPPED provided him with enough money in 1888 to charter the yacht CASCO in San Francisco and cruise the South Seas.

    Two years later he settled in Apia, Samoa, and bought a large house, which he named Vailima, a word meaning ‘five waters’.  He was an early advocate of the rights of native peoples, and supported the extended family of his American wife, ten years his elder.  Some say he worked himself to death doing so.

    The Samoans called him Tusitala, “The Teller of Tales.”  When he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1894, they cleared the bush and made a path so he could be buried on Mount Vaea, overlooking Vailima and the harbor.

    Jill and I climbed up that path a few days after we were married in Pago-Pago, American Samoa, sixty miles to the east, in 1985.  We passed a stream.  On the way up, it seemed cold, but when we returned, hot and sweaty, it was more inviting and we stopped to swim.

    The climb is steep, through damp ferns and trees; but the view from the grave out over the town and the lagoon makes it worthwhile.  I have read that  a recent cyclone blew away much of the vegetation, and an easier path may be built.  I hope not.  Some things should be earned.

    Stevenson is buried in a lovely, quiet clearing.  A bronze plaque is inscribed with his own words:  “Home is the sailor, home from the sea; And the hunter home from the hill.”

    In circling the world repeatedly in a sailboat I have experienced distances as men knew them before the age of the airplane.  All sailboats, even fast ones, are slow, and I am struck by how nations and peoples exploded over the world when they believed in their myths.  In the West, we don’t much believe in our myths any longer.  Epic ages are too exhausting to last long.  But  when men do believe and try to live up to their myths, they can, for a while, be heroes.

    In the hundred years after Mohammed, Moslems covered half the globe.  In a sailboat you reach the eastern limits of their expansion at the first islands north of Australia and if you go up the Red Sea you don’t pass the western limit until beyond Gibraltar.

    Any sailor will be impressed by how in the single generation after Diaz reached the Cape Of Good Hope, little Portugal, with a population of only one million, exploded over the world, claiming, rightly, to be “the first in all oceans.”  And  by the early Dutch following and supplanting them.  Captain Cook was a great man, but Able Tasman reached New Zealand a hundred years before he did.

    Along with the achievement of Portugal, I have perhaps been most impressed by the extent of the British Empire.  Much of a traditional trade wind circumnavigation is made in what was once that empire.  Nerve and arrogance and the Royal Navy did great things.   Many of the islands you sail among in the South Pacific were British.  New Zealand.  Australia.  Go north to Singapore or Hong Kong.  West to Sri Lanka.  India.  Aden.  Suez.  Malta,  Gibraltar.  Across to the Caribbean.  Or due west from Australia, where the British held most of the islands in the Indian Ocean.  South Africa.  Walvis’ Bay, the main port  in what was German Southwest Africa, which the British held simply to keep it from the Germans.  Much of the African continent.  Out to St. Helena in the South Atlantic.  No place was too remote for the  British to reach and,  at their height, to keep if they choose.

    And that empire, along with France’s lesser one, and late-coming Germany wanting one for itself, was a cause of the graves that have most caught and troubled my imagination.

    I came across the first near the Gendarmerie on tree lined Avenue Bruat in Papeete.  It is the memorial to the Tahitian war dead of World War I, and stands well back from the sidewalk.

    Each name on an unexpectedly long list is neatly inscribed.  I read some of the names there on the quiet street with its view of the ocean through the trees and Mount Orohena’s peak, lost in the clouds.  From this, to the mud of Flanders fields?  From swimming in a lagoon, to freezing to death in the winter of 1917?  Or dying of measles?  Or being gassed?  Or shelled at Verdun?--which is  specifically mentioned on the monument. 

    I tried to imagine the fervor that must have swept over the island.                                       France was more than just twenty hours away by jet.  It was another world, another planet, months away by ship:  boys saying their good-byes to families in hundreds of thatched huts; a great celebration as the troop carrier steamed out the pass; expectation, excitement, dreams of glory; and then reality--shocking, incredible, incomprehensible, horrifying reality.  What must they have thought when they first disembarked, first saw the front trenches, first heard a machine gun or an artillery barrage, when they were hit, as they died?

    When you become aware of the memorials to the war dead--and, although they were built to honor the dead of “The Great War”, they have all had additions for World War II and some for Korea and, for the French, Indochina, and, for the Australians, Vietnam--you see them almost everywhere.  Even tiny Lord Howe Island in the Tasman, with a population of only 200, has its memorial.  As I recall, one Lord Howe family lost someone in every generation this century.

    For all of them, Tahitians and Tongans and Fijians and Australians and New Zealanders, it was a long way to go to die.  But I suppose I understand.  I too have created my own myth and tried to live up to it.  I am trying still.