It's The Little Things You Remember

Lines were suddenly cast away. The 400 ton copra ship, began to shudder but soon inched across an inky sea, bound for the Lau Group, half-way to Tonga. The last thing I remembered the lights of Suva winked out. The next thing I knew, our steward-cook, was softly awakening me with tea, made just the way I had come to like it, with canned milk and Fiji sugar.

Dawn was breaking as fellow passenger, Robert Beneveds, and I met on deck. The wind drenched, 4,000-foot ridge of Taveuni, captivated us. A glistening waterfall danced and sparkled down a green cliff as it plunged into the sea.

"See that hazy lump off to starboard?" Bob asked.

I nodded.

"That's Naitauba. / nai-tom-ba / I'm the plantation manager. When we land, come ashore with me for a half-hour or so. I'm afraid that's all the time you'll have unless of course you like it so much you decide to stay for a month."

His invitation didn't seem frivolous. After all, we were fast friends of five-minutes duration.

"Why are we turning away from Naitauba?" I asked.

"We've just cleared the northern tip of Taveuni and will soon be visiting Qamea and Laucala," Bob said.

"This is Qamea coming up," I said consulting my map.

"Look to port," he said. "That's Matangi. This area is scuba paradise."

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"Wonderful," I replied.

"And that's Laucala in the distance."

It was noon before we got to Naitauba. We stumbled and scrambled into a lumbering twenty-foot whaleboat bobbing impatiently in the swell. We were barely seated before we charged through surging surf into a glassy turquoise lagoon. I wasn't prepared for the scrunch.

"That's vakua-viti for you," Bob said. "The Fiji way. The higher up the beach the better."

As we stepped into knee-deep water, he added, "Allow me to introduce you to our cherished repository of Naitauba history."

It was a privilege to meet Mrs. Hennings, who had arrived on Naitauba in 1902, as a bride of sixteen. The widow had recently sold her 3,000-acre island to Raymond Burr, better known as Perry Mason, with the proviso that she would remain on Naitauba for the remainder of her days. I was to learn later that the Hennings family were one of the original copra traders in the South Pacific in Samoa as well as Fiji.

Reluctantly, I said good-bye. I sat on sacks of copra. Once we had scrambled aboard, and the whale boat had been lifted onto its deck cradle, we were bound for the double-reefed island of Vanua Blavu, /mbalavu/(crooked stick in Fijian) arriving early in the wee hours of Sunday morning. At daylight we began to weave our way through two sets of reefs. Although we were only about a mile from the island, which wasn't all that big it took several hours hours to make our way to a safe anchorage. Dave, the ship's engineer, made me a promise. It was, I guessed, fit payment for all the work that he had allowed me to do in the engine room over the past couple of days.

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