Whatever his exaggerations (sailors tend to tall tales, and some scholars regard him as a mythomaniac), O’Connell had another side, as a curious and careful observer. He was the first European to call Pohnpei, or Ponape, by its native name (in his orthography, ‘Bonabee’); the first to give accurate descriptions of many Pohnpeian customs and rites; the first to provide a glossary of the Pohnpeian language; and the first to see the ruins of Nan Madol, the remnant of a monumental culture going back more than a thousand years, to the mythological keilahn aio, ‘the other side of yesterday.’
His exploration of Nan Madol formed the climax and the consummation of his Pohnpeian adventure; he described the ‘stupendous ruins’ in meticulous detail – their uncanny desertion, their investment with taboo. Their size, their muteness, frightened him, and at one point, overwhelmed by their alien-ness, he suddenly ‘longed for home.’ He did not refer to, and probably did not know of, the other megalithic cultures which dot Micronesia – the giant basalt ruins in Kosrae, the immense taga stones in Tinian, the ancient terraces in Palau, the five-ton stones of Babeldaop bearing Easter Island-like faces. But he realized what neither Cook nor Bougainville nor any of the great explorers had – that these primitive oceanic islands, with their apparently simple, palm-tree cultures, were once the seat of monumental civilizations.
We set out for Nan Madol on our first full day in Pohnpei. Located off the far side of Pohnpei, it was easiest to approach by boat. Not sure exactly what we would encounter, we took gear of every kind – storm gear, scuba gear, sun gear. Moving slowly – we had an open boat with a powerful outboard – we left the harbor at Kolonia and passed the mangrove swamps which fringe the main island; I could pick out their aerial roots with my binoculars, and Robin, our boatman, told us about the mangrove crabs which scuttle among them and are considered a delicacy on the island. As we moved into open water, we picked up speed, our boat throwing a huge foaming wake behind it, a great scythe of water which glittered in the sun. A sense of exhilaration seized us as we sped along, almost on the surface, like a giant water ski. Bob, who has a catamaran and a windsurfer, was excited by seeing canoes with brilliantly colored sails here and there, tacking sharply in the wind, but absolutely stable with their outriggers. ‘You could cross an ocean,’ he said, ‘with a proa like that.’
Rather suddenly, about half an hour out, the weather changed. We saw a grey funnel of cloud barrelling rapidly toward us – another few seconds, and we were in the thick of it, being tossed to and fro. (Bob, with great self-possession, managed to get a superb photo of the cloud before it hit us.) Our visibility down to a few yards, we could no longer get our bearings. Then, just as abruptly, we were out of the cloud and wind, but in the midst of torrential and absolutely vertical rain – at this point, absurdly, we unfurled the bright red umbrellas our hotel had provided, no longer heroes in the eye of the storm, but parasoled picnickers in a Seurat painting. Though the rain still poured down, the sun came out once again, and a spectacular rainbow appeared between sky and sea. Knut saw this as a luminous arc in the sky, and started to tell us of other rainbows he had seen: double rainbows, inverted rainbows, and, once, a complete rainbow circle. Listening to him now, as so often before, we had the sense that his vision, his visual world, if impoverished in some ways, was in others quite as rich as our own.
There is nothing on the planet quite like Nan Madol, this ancient deserted megalithic construct of nearly a hundred artificial islands, connected by innumerable canals. As we approached – going very slowly now, because the water was shallow, and the waterways narrow – we started to see the details of the walls, huge hexagonal columns of black basalt, so finely interlocking and adjusted to each other as to have largely survived the storms and seas, the depredations of many centuries. We glided silently between the islets, and finally landed on the fortress island of Nan Douwas, which still has its immense basalt walls, twenty-five feet in height, its great central burial vault, and its nooks and places for meditation and prayer.
Stiff from the boat, eager to explore, we scrambled out and stood beneath the giant wall, marvelling how the great prismatic blocks – some, surely, weighing many tons – had been quarried and brought from Sokehs on the other side of Pohnpei (the only place on the island where such columnar basalt is naturally extruded) and levered so precisely into place. The sense of might, of solemnity, was very strong – we felt puny, overwhelmed, standing next to the silent wall. But we had a sense too of the folly, the megalomania, which goes with the monumental – the ‘wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity’ – and all its attendant cruelties and sufferings; our boatman, Robin, had told us about the vicious overlords, the Saudeleurs, who had conquered Pohnpei and reigned in Nan Madol for many centuries, exacting an ever more murderous tribute of food and labor. When one looked at the walls with this knowledge, they took on a different aspect, and seemed to sweat with the blood and pain of generations. And yet, like the Pyramids or the Colosseum, they were noble as well.
Nan Madol is still virtually unknown to the outside, almost as unknown as when O’Connell stumbled upon it 160 years ago. It was surveyed by German archaeologists at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is only in the past few years that a detailed knowledge of the site and its history has been achieved, with radiocarbon dating human habitation to 200 b.c. The Pohnpeians, of course, have always known about Nan Madol, a knowledge embedded in myth and oral history, but because the place itself is still invested with a sense of sacredness and taboo, they hesitate to approach it – their tradition is full of tales of those who met untimely deaths after offending the spirits of the place.
It was an uncanny feeling, as Robin gave us vivid details of life as it once was in the city around us – I began to feel the place breathing, coming to life. Here are the old canoe docks, Robin said, gesturing at Pahnwi; there is the boulder where pregnant women went to rub their stomachs to ensure an easy birth; there (he pointed to the island of Idehd) is where an annual ceremony of atonement was held, culminating in the offering of a turtle to Nan Samwohl, the great saltwater eel who served as a medium between the people and their god. There, on Peikapw, the magical pool where the ruling Saudeleurs could see all that was taking place on Pohnpei. There, the great hero Isohkelekel, who had finally vanquished the Saudeleurs, shocked at seeing his aged face reflected in the waters, threw himself into the pool and drowned, a Narcissus in reverse.
It is the emptiness, the desertedness, finally, of Nan Madol which makes it so uncanny. No one now knows when it was deserted, or why. Did the bureaucracy collapse under its own weight? Did the coming of Isohkelekel put an end to the old order? Were the last inhabitants wiped out by disease, or plague, or climatic change, or starvation? Did the sea rise, inexorably, and engulf the low islands? (Many of them, now, are under water.) Was there a feeling of some ancient curse, a panicked and superstitious flight from this place of the old gods? When O’Connell visited 160 years ago, it had already been deserted for a century or more. The sense of this mystery, the rise and fall of cultures, the unpredictable twists of fate, made us contemplative, silent, as we returned to the mainland.[25]