Saturday, 25 March 2023 // The Frenchmen
5:54 AM
79° Rain, off and on
If you are I-Matang, it doesn’t take long to learn of the other I-Matang on the island. [Matang: a land of white-skinned spirits. I-Matang: people inhabiting or coming from the land of Matang, the ~white~ race, ~Caucasian~, ~European~. Others are quick to tell you there are more of your kind out there. “They are your people,” is the implication. It doesn’t take long to think, “maybe they are correct,” to a degree.
The place of honor, the I-Matang mentioned first, is John Bryden, and with good reason. A sharp, bold Scotsman, John arrived in the Pacific at 23, and within a couple of years is the copra manager on this island. Other islands, wives, children, jobs, came between 1969 and when we met. This is his story, but not yet.
So there is talk of the Scotsman, and of the “French-Canadian.” This is his story.
But before I meet the French-Canadian I am told of the two Australians and meet them first.
Jake and Arlene have built a beautiful 2-story home that will serve them the three years Jake spends here, working on a municipal water project. The land upon where they’ve built their home, at the southwestern point of London, is a dream location. Large curling waves break right on the shore, a beach of pristine white coral sand. The couple have had water surge right under their house at times. As surfers, they are used to the vagaries of the ocean. This is not their story either.
I meet the French-Canadian on the second or third day I am here. My new host, Timei, who owns the Lagoon View Lodge, has wrangled up Peter Edwards (whom I will get to know better later), as Peter has four wheels, and can offer a tour of the northern part of the island. Our fourth on this trip is my ship-mate, Chuck Stilphen, the only guest on the Sea Dragon smart enough to book time on the yacht’s layover at Kiritimati, in the passage from Honolulu to Tahiti. The other guests stay on board. Why stay in a narrow berth, in which you’ve spent close to two weeks, when you can discover and explore a new scenario?
That’s what Chuck and I are doing, exploring, as Timei and Peter have agreed to serve as guides, proud to share their native land. We head north on the A1, the longest road on the island which starts in London, and loops around to the far south-eastern point of the south-eastern peninsula. The road was paved 70 years ago by the British, and has not been paved since. The road is lousy with potholes.
Timei knows I am here to learn about my grandfather’s presence, and Peter is only just beginning to understand, but he has a sense and it may dovetail with his own ideas, as I learn as I get to know him. Chuck is happy to be off the boat and explore.
We wind north, and then east, our guides point out the higher ground, where the aquifers provide drinking water for London. Peter takes us off the paved road, a sharp 90° left on sand, through low scrub, heading to the north shore, right up to a heliotrope tree and the beach. I’m eager to get my foot in the water, and do so. The others stay back, up in the shade of the trees.
Soon we are back on the road. We drive through what I later learn is Main Camp, through the village of Banana, with carefully maintained homes and bright gardens on the main road, a sharp contrast to the homes on coconut timber platforms covered with coconut thatch roofs and walls.
We make it as far as the airport, before we head back to London. The airport is small and it reminds me of the airport in Austin when I first moved to Texas. Back in 1995, you could literally drive right to the front door of the Austin airport to pick someone up or get dropped off. These days, there are ever-expanding parking lots and new concourses added all the time.
The Kiritimati airport is a puzzle. Modern glass and steel greet the guest, but the parking area is all coral and sand. I suppose it’s a bit unfair to look at this desolate airfield and airport and judge by current standards. I learned the Cassidy International Airport was recently built and opened just as the pandemic forced the island – and the world – to close down in March, 2020, three years ago from this very moment.
Which means it’s been three years of weeds and inactivity. Press your face to the glass and you are greeted with a graphic display of panels touting Fiji Air, the only airline that flies in or out of Kiritimati. Or at least, did.
Theoretically, I have the first flight off the island, on 3 May, but yesterday, in conversation with John Bryden, he made clear even that flight is uncertain, as a team is supposed to be arriving from Fiji to teach local staff how to handle guests, learn the systems. A commercial aircraft has not landed here in three years.
We leave the airport, visit the now derelict Captain Cook Hotel, once the best going concern on the island, and now inhabited by ghosts. Peter had once managed this hotel. I can’t imagine how he feels walking over the grounds, with better years behind them.
Christian’s name comes up in conversation, not for the first time, and we pull behind the large metal building that houses the JMB (John Murdock Bryden) store at Main Camp, which had once been one of the many structures built by the British when they occupied the island for atomic bomb and other testing in the late 1950s. Peter says Christian may be in the freight container out back.
Christian is the I-Matang French-Canadian.
The sound of our vehicle pulling up brings Christian out of what looks like a hobo camp, a rat hole with found stuff everywhere. A handsome man emerges, his whitened beard maybe an inch long, a ball cap on his head, wearing a T-shirt, shorts. He eyeballs the lone I-Matang in the vehicle.
I eyeball him right back and laugh to myself, because he mentions having lived in Calgary, Canada, and I realize he is not French-Canadian, but French, and that he had lived in Canada. I quickly realize information is being lost in translation on this island.
There is something about Christian’s manor, his quick conversation, that alerts me to his intelligence. I want to take his photograph, because he looks like a man out of place, and out of time, a little bit as I imagined Colonel Kurtz looked, up the Belgian Congo, or up the Mekong River, depending on whether you prefer Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” or Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now!”.
His sidelong glance is wary, cagey, I can tell he is keeping an eye on me, as Peter mentions my grandfather. It seems that Christian, a Frenchman, is very much aware of fellow Frenchman, Fr. Emmanuel Rougier, and has even been in contact with padre’s family.
Our party doesn’t get out of the car or stay long, but I tell him I will reach out to him.
I see him twice more the following week. The first time, in the morning, as I head out to explore on my new motorcycle, and find the site marked Joe’s Hill. The site is not only on my grandfather’s map, but on other maps too. I don’t linger, just making a quick, courtesy call, that he knows I have not forgotten him. All this time I know he is a Trump fan. Like myself, none of the others on this island are. Yet on that very first day when he and I are alone, and I mention Canada, he starts to tear into prime minister Trudeau and I realize I have not heard talk of politics in weeks, and find that I can go a long time without hearing any more such talk.
Five hours later, I stop again, on my way back from my tour along the Bay of Wrecks, and down to find Joe’s Hill. It’s been a long, hot day, my first day alone, on the bike, outside of London. The roads have been jolting. I’m tired. But first I stop in to the JMB store, and buy two Cokes and two ice creams on sticks. Then I go and look for the Frenchman.
He declines the Coke, but takes the ice cream, telling me he has been eating chocolate all day and doesn’t need the sugar. The store does sell American chocolate, so maybe he is telling the truth, but I doubt it. Because I am, I've already realized that he is a shit-talker, and likes to spar verbally.
I use the term shit-talker in a positive light, because my girlfriend, too, is a shit-talker, ready to give as good as she gets, and like the Frenchman, full of intelligence and wit.
Somehow it comes up that I have brought a very large jar of peanut butter with me, unaware when I leave the States of what may be available, but knowing I can get some protein by sticking my finger in the jar, if it comes to that. He breaks my balls about having crushed up peanuts, and from his freight container pull a squarish plastic container housing maybe a handful of party nuts. For some reason, I imagine these nuts have lasted him the pandemic, three years, but only now realize that no, cargo ships have been coming to the island, and while maybe not as frequently as pre-pandemic, they have been delivering goods.
We finish our ice cream and he does not discard the trash by tossing it on the ground, where it would blend with other trash, but finds a waste bin. I depart, eager to get back after my first long excursion. Later, I get an email from Christian noting how I am always in a “F—- hurry.” I guess he wants to sit and chat, but I explain to him that my time is limited, and I had an agenda that day.
When I offered him the ice cream, I saw a copy of the Rougier biography atop other things. I mention again that I am interested in going to Paris, on the other side of the island, to see what remains, if anything, of when Rougier lived there. I tell him I have arranged to take a boat there in two days, if he would like to join us. He does not commit.
I get an email from him two days later, saying he is more interested in bushwhacking and finding “Ground Zero.“ I don’t know exactly, but I have a rough idea, of what he means, referring to the American military atomic-bomb’s testing here from 1957 through 1962. I’m not much up on that aspect of the island history, and it’s only now, having met him, and knowing there are so many times I have liked to follow the path of least resistance, that I will be happy to accompany him on his exploration.
Since I have seen Christian last, I have learned from John about the ARROW, an enormous graphic arrow bulldozed out of the brushy coral landscape, on the north-east corner of the island, pointing to the south-east. This was for bomber planes thousands of feet overhead, that they know the direction in which to fly and drop their payloads.
John Bryden tells me Christian has spent time, clearing the land, making the arrow more visible, which can clearly be seen from Google earth.
So I brace myself for what I imagine will be our adventure. I’m guessing politics will come up. I am happy to talk politics with Christian, not because I’m a proud Liberal, born and bred in the heart of American patriotism, in Lexington and Boston, Massachusetts, steeped in the Transcendentalism of Concord and Emerson and Thoreau, but because I have just learned the Rougier family did not lose control of this island due to their “absence” in France, during WWII, as mentioned in the biography.
John has loaned me his copy of an amazing document, the 1968 British Land Resource Study: An Investigation of the Coconut Growing Potential of Christmas Island volume 1 The Environment and Plantations. A summary of history, records, and maps detailing exactly what the title describes, the document reveals a dirty little secret. It seems the British took possession of Christmas Island, not because Fr. Rougier’s nephew, who’d inherited the island, had vacated the island during WWII, as the bio suggests, but as “Custodian of Enemy Territory” when the nephew aligned himself with Vichy France. Fucking Nazis.
Christian has been living here 25 years, and is threatening to move to the Philippines. He is 75. He will never move.
Twenty-five years. That’s how long the Rougier regime had control of the island, the former priest willing it to his nephew, who had already been managing operations, by the time of Uncle Manny’s death.
But the priest died in the 1920s, and he never saw the end of that 25 year run. Not only that, but during the padre’s tenure he spent much of his time in Tahiti, or traveling back to France, or to San Francisco or New York or Honolulu. Christian, on the other hand, has been here 25 solid years, regardless of time away from the island.
________//////|________//////|_//////|_____//////|_
1914 – 1939: Fr. Emmanuel Rougier. From France to Fiji (1884) to Fanning to Christmas (1914) to Papeete and high society, living next door to the last queen of Tahiti. A talent for business. Nephew inherits the island in 1932.
1998 – 2023: Christian Duratete France to Canada to other islands and to Kiritimati, and living in a wired, disheveled freight container behind the JMB Store at Main Camp. A talent for electronics and connectivity.
Duratete. “Hard-headed.”
John Bryden, circa 1972, Manager Christmas Island Coconut Plantation, in front of saplings, in (London? Main Camp?). Hundreds of saplings would be grown in plastic bags, filled with sand. Between three and six months, they would then be planed in rows of 27’ feet apart. In times past, the groves were always planted in a square grid, but some smart British gent figured out it made more sense, in terms of real estate, to plant on a triangular grid, allowing more trees per acre. One can tell both time of day, and direction by looking at the sun on John’s face, and the direction the trees are blowing. As the trade winds are almost 100% from the east, John faces south, as the sun sets to the west.
When I took this photo, I had no idea what I was looking at, other than snapping several photos of the leeward coast of London, on my first venture on local waters, Peter Edwards at the helm. On the left, the home of Jake and Arlene, which they built themselves, importing all materials. The home, a simple, contemporary structure is in sharp contrast to most every home on the island, as compared to the home to the right, a combination of freight container (not tricked out in any way), and a traditional kia-kia. AND it’s 2-story, unlike every other home on the island, but for that of John Bryden. Between Jake, Arlene, and John, they constitute three of the five I-Matang living on the island. Most homes on the island do NOT face the ocean or lagoon, a puzzlement to myself. Are these symptoms of the utilitarian structures left behind by the British and Americans, or is this a facet specific to a culture of which I am unaware? Here, the veranda and all the windows face the sea. Surfers, Jake and Arlene take to the water as often as their schedules — and the surf — permits.
Jake whips up vegetarian pizzas, his adopted daughter playing in the background. Note the 2-story opening behind which bedrooms are in the loft space. I’m sitting outside, as the kitchen counter opens onto the porch.
Peter Edwards, 70, originally of Chuck Stilphen, fellow passenger on the Sea Dragon, was ready to disembark at Kiritimati, instead of sailing on to Tahiti, as he was fed up with the way the ship was being run. A sailor himself, he was a few years behind me when we were both in the Boston rock scene in the early 1980s. Then he was playing guitar with Gang Green. He’s currently in the Los Angeles area, and runs real estate ventures that include music rehearsal venues.
Heliotrope trees are sparse, but offer a bit of shade, where the salt bush runs out, and the sandy soil — no actual dirt, just coral ground down over millennia — tapers down to the coral-laden waters.
A few of the homes in Banana take pride in their appearance. While the homes themselves have seen little improvement — or paint — since they were put in place decades ago, attention has been paid to the symmetry of fences, as well as adding bursts of color with flowers and decorative planters, which, like so many aspects of island life, have been repurposed from materials usually discarded.
As in England, they drive on the left side of the road on Kiritimati. Here, Peter Edwards stops in front of Cassidy International Airport. The parking lot of sand and coral outside the essentially brand new terminal offers the same kind of disparate contrast as does the auto itself and the hand-cut and hand-painted license plates. Note the lack of hubcaps, which are impractical on unpaved roads.
Fiji Air was the only airline servicing Kiritimati in 2020 when the Covid 19 pandemic hit the world, shutting down almost all airports across the Pacific. The new terminal, completed just before the pandemic struck, has been vacant for three years.
In 1975 the National Space Development Agency of Japan leased property on the island for their aerospace program, building a radar station on the island, on the north coast of the island. Once the Japanese crews left the island, these buildings — minus the large native structure seen in the middle — were left behind. They were then leased to an outfit that started the Captain Cook Hotel, the first of its kind on the island, catering to the odd traveler, bird watcher, or fisherman that came in from the US. The pandemic of 2020 — Covid 19 — caused air travel to be shut down in much of the Pacific. Which meant no tourists. Additional bungalows built on the property as recently as 2005 were ransacked for building materials once there were no longer guests, staff — or security.
I’ve been told there are five I-Matang on the island. The first i’ve met is John Bryden. Then I meet the two Aussies, Jake and Arlene. Number four is the “French-Canadian” Christian Duratete. His sidelong glance, and lack of inquisitiveness about the foreign passengers — meaning myself and Chuck — should have tipped me off as to his character: untrusting of any sort of government, foreign aid or local governance, dubious of any venture, rarely willing to participate or offer up information known only to himself.
My photo archives list this image as “Duratete’s hovel.” I don’t mean to disparage, but the freight container/s he calls home match the definition of the word “hovel”: small, squalid, unpleasant, or simply constructed dwelling.” I have found myself in many settings in impoverished circumstances, in homes, villages, huts, and yet in this case I could not bear to even peak inside, as I did not want to have a visual memory of the conditions he chose to live in. Christian is an intelligent — and when he chooses to be — articulate man, with a penchant for technologies of all sorts. That he chooses to live in such disorder makes me wonder of what’s really going on behind those veiled eyes.
The Bay of Wrecks has been taking down vessels since the 1800s. Whalers and cargo vessels from around the world have found their end here. When my grandfather walked this beach of thick, platter-sized coral, there were the remains of several ships, including the Aeon, for which an airfield would late be named. Here, a fishing boat has rested since 2012.
A photo by Fr. Rougier, circa 1916, shows the lumber strewn on the the beach of the Bay of Wrecks. Flotsam from several wrecks, the lumber stretched for miles, and was used by his crews, as well as the Allied military during WWII. A small figure can be seen in the top left, walking away from the camera.
As part of our weekly chats, John Bryden pulls up Google Maps on the monitor in his living room, to show me the enormous arrow gouged from the earth by bulldozers, a detail of the Cold War atomic bomb tests. The clock shows 1423, meaning it’s 2:23 as I read time.
The arrow in the northeast corner of the island, as seen on a Google Earth screen-grab.
The line indicates the direction the arrow is pointing, that aircraft stay on course.
Screen-grabs from Google Earth 12/2013; a decade later 1/2022; another year and a half, essentially when I was there, 6/2023; and 10/23.
The 1968 British Land Resource Study - An Investigation of the Coconut Growing Potential of Christmas Island Volume 1 The Environment and Plantations. As seen under a hot sun at my place in London.
Nephew of Fr. Rougier, Paul-Emmanuel Rougier -Vichy supporter, Nazi sympathizer. He’s got that look, doesn’t he?\
Rougier, back in the Isles of Auvergne, France. The Frenchman, often called Santa Claus, may have still performed Catholic mass, even though he was de-frocked, but it seems his sympathies were more worldly. He have up a life in the priesthood to become a businessman, who by the 1930s was renting his yacht to smugglers bring booze the the United States, via Mexico, during Prohibition. In a letter from the priest, he wrote: “The Good Lord hears it and protects the smugglers.”