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have made idols of almost everything; trees and groves, rocks and stones, springs and streams, insects and other beasts, men and departed spirits, relics such as hair and finger nails, the heavenly bodies and the volcanoes…
    â€”J OHN G. P ATON, Missionary to the New Hebrides: An Autobiography
    When you read the accounts of Victorian adventurers, it is easy to be convinced that life at sea is exhilarating and romantic. The open horizon, the salt spray, the implied danger and possibility of all that heaving ocean. What could be more inspiring?
    My great-grandfather wrote affectionately about his three-month tour of the Diocese of Melanesia aboard the mission’s flagship, the Southern Cross . The three-hundred-ton schooner, the second to bear the name since Patteson’s death, was built in 1891. She was fitted with an auxiliary engine, but generally relied on the sails of her three masts, the foremost of which was square-rigged. The ship cut languidly through the waves as it zigzagged from island to island. There were cabins on deck for the white clergy; the Melanesians ate and slept in the hold, so were apt to spend their free time dangling from the rigging or stretched asleep on the ship’s dolphin striker. The passages across rough open ocean were trying for the bishop, but he preferred to remember the moments of prayer, the singing of canticles and hymns, the daily Evensong, and the delightful transformation he saw in the natives: “The boys come on board decorated with all sorts of earrings and nose rings, but by degrees these disappear. Before they reach Norfolk Island they have to put on shirts and trousers, and appropriate garments of English pattern are served out to the girls.”
    There was no sweeter moment for the bishop than dusk, when the Southern Cross had anchored in a quiet bay and a sense of peace settled on his mind. “At such times,” he wrote, “it was permissible even to sit on deck in those suits, light and not elegant, which men find useful as ‘garments of the night’ in the tropics.” Now and then, from some village hidden among the coconut palms, he would hear the tinkling of a bell, the whistle of a conch-shell horn or the bang of a drum, and he would know that the converts were being called to prayer, and he would be touched.
    There was a certain deception in his focus on the bucolic.
    This I know: The ocean is not romantic. Not when you have left the calm of the harbor and the swell is up and the vomiting has begun. The ocean is not a gentle mother, not a bucking stallion, not an adversary you can grapple with. The ocean is a great rotting blanket that won’t be still. It is a pool of rancid milk. A gurgling toilet. Something to be endured. This is what I learned on my first sea passage.
    The MV Havanna had been making the three-hundred-mile run from Port Vila southwest to the island nation of New Caledonia—with a stop at Tanna—for three months, and was said to be the finest ship in the archipelago. She created a stir wherever she went. She had seats, the agent who sold me my passage told me excitedly. But the Havanna was more a floating warehouse than the ferry I expected. She had an enclosed main deck with room for a dozen shipping containers, and a passenger compartment welded on top, like an afterthought. Her bow fell open like a broken jaw onto the government wharf.
    Scots Presbyterians had laid claim to Tanna Island long before my great-grandfather’s journey. He had sailed right past. So technically, Tanna was off-route for me. But I was hooked by the Rudds’ story about the mysterious John Frum. I wanted to know why the Tannese had given up on their prophet. And so, the moment the Havanna ’s crew let their guard down, I charged with two hundred others across the loading deck into the maw.
    We sailed at dusk. Once we left the harbor, there was nothing to see. There was no squall. There was no lightning. But the spray