Majestic Marquesas

In 1846 Wiley & Putnam published “Typee,” the debut novel by young whaler Herman Melville, who had jumped ship at the island of Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas and lived among the “cannibals” of Taipivai, where he found: “Perpetual hilarity reign(ed). … There seemed to be no cares, griefs, troubles, or vexations … none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity … no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts.” In fact, money, “that root of all evil, was not to be found in the valley.”

Last year, 170 years after Melville’s book debuted, I embarked on my seventh voyage to the Marquesas — located between Tahiti and Hawaii — to see what the islands he immortalized were now like. To reach French Polynesia’s northernmost archipelago, I sailed aboard the passenger freighter Aranui 5. Our first Marquesan landfall was at Taipivai, on the very black-sand beach where Melville, fearing the Taipis were fattening him up for the kill, escaped to a whaling ship with the help of “Karakoee, an Oahu Kannaka.”

“Warriors rushed into the sea and hurled their javelins at us,” Melville wrote.

Our arrival aboard a flotilla of pickup trucks was much more tranquil, as our Taipi chauffeurs drove us over a partially paved road where, as Melville rhapsodized, “a glimpse of the gardens of Paradise” was revealed.

“I could scarcely have been more ravished,” he wrote, “the bosom of a valley … swept away in long wavy undulations to the blue waters in the distance. … The vale was more than (9 miles) in length, and about a mile across. … On each side it appeared hemmed in by steep and green acclivities … over which flowed numberless small cascades. But the crowning beauty of the prospect was its universal verdure.”

Modern homes have replaced the palmetto-thatched houses Melville observed, but little else has changed. As our convoy progressed, I actually strained my neck observing the splendor. No high-rise apartments or hotels blight Taipi­vai’s landscape, skyline or Hatiheu Bay, which another 19th-century writer, Robert Louis Stevenson, described as “a bowl of mountains enclose(d) … upon three sides. On the fourth this rampart has been bombarded into ruins, runs down to seaward in … shattered crags, and presents the one practicable breach of the blue bay. The interior is crowded with lovely and valuable trees — orange, breadfruit … apple, cocoa … chestnut … pine … banana.”

The Marquesans remain culturally rich. Our expedition ­explored an excavated archaeological site, filled with paepaes (raised stone platforms), temples, tikis, huts and petroglyphs of turtles, fish and human genitalia. Melville called Kamuihei a “taboo grove” where evidence of pagan worship “brood[ed] in silence.” He wrote, “Here and there, rose the idolatrous altars … surmounted by a rustic open temple. … In the midst was … the hallowed ‘Hoolah Hoolah’ ground — set apart for the celebration of the fantastical religious ritual … guarded by ranks of hideous wooden idols.”

Kamuihei’s tikis are both wood and stone. At the restored ruins’ entrance, a Nuku Hivan troupe launched into a thrilling “Hoolah Hoolah” performance. Accompanied by drummers pounding shark skins, tattooed dancers with painted faces, clad in leafy skirts and anklets, performed traditional pig and bird dances. While ancient Marquesans had interred skulls and skeletons in banyans, several contemporary male dancers enthusiastically climbed the tree’s roots as part of the extravaganza.

Aranui’s convoy returned to Taipivai, where an alluring chant welcomed passengers to Chez Simon at a “tohua” (ceremonial site) for an aboriginal banquet. We dined beneath thatched roofs supported by posts carved with tikis, surrounded by contemporary stone statues of the gods. From the earthen oven came roasted pork, goat, fish and breadfruit, served along with tangy poisson cru (raw fish), octopus salad and more, as ukulele strummers serenaded us.

Our driving tour crossed the mountains that Melville climbed in 1842, rendezvousing with Aranui 5 at Nuku Hiva’s capital, Taiohae, which remains much as the author depicted it: “No description can do justice to its beauty. … An expanse of water not unlike … the space included within the limits of a horseshoe. … From the verge of the water the land rises uniformly on all sides, with green and sloping acclivities, until from gently rolling hill-sides and moderate elevations it insensibly swells into lofty and majestic heights.” Today a seaside tohua full of contemporary stone tikis enhances Taiohae.

Aranui 5 shoved off from Taiohae for five other Marquesan isles.

French painter Paul Gauguin and Belgian singer Jacques Brel are buried in the village of Atuona on the Marquesas’ second-largest island, Hiva Oa, where museums remember both artists. Polynesia’s largest ancient stone statues beyond Rapa Nui stand at the island’s village of Puamau.

On the island of Fatu Hiva — where Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl lived during the 1930s and developed his controversial Kon Tiki raft migration theories — native islanders demonstrated traditional tapa- making.

En route back to Tahiti, Aranui 5 sailed to the scuba mecca of Rangiroa in the Tuamotu atolls and storied Bora Bora, where I disembarked to stay at the Four Seasons.

Being in French Polynesia, I went on to the Tahiti and Moorea InterContinental resorts, plus the deluxe Brando at the late actor Marlon Brando’s private atoll, Tetiaroa.

Since the 1970s various versions of the Aranui have sailed the high seas. The 10-level, 413-foot Aranui 5, launched in December, has more creature comforts than its forerunners, with cabins featuring phones and flat-screen TVs, four bars, a spa and more.

Certainly, the Marquesas have changed since Melville’s day. Yet the best parts of Aranui voyages are still the unspoiled isles and the people, who perpetuate the Polynesian way at Te Henua ’Enana — the “Land of Men.”

Travel writer and former Makaha resident Ed Rampell co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.”