Trip 40 — Niue and Dogojima Walks
Prologue
Monday, 12 February 2024
If you're going to the Polynesian island of Niue this month, you're leaving New Zealand on a Saturday and arriving three and a half hours later, on Friday, having crossed the International Date Line. At this time of year, there's just one flight a week to Niue from anywhere, and it's from Auckland.
Niue is a terraced coral saucer about 1200 kilometers east of Fiji and west of the Cook Islands, with which it has often and sometimes unfairly been grouped. James Cook came upon it in 1774 in an expedition to map the archipelago of Tonga, and its steep, rocky terrain made a direct landing almost impossible by any boat larger than the vaka (canoes) used by the islanders.
The population at that time comprised distinct settlements that were hostile to each other and none too happy about the arrival of the Europeans; the clumsy initial interactions led to Cook's calling the place Savage Island. The village rivalry continues to this day in a friendlier spirit: When Niue's status as a self-governing state in free association with New Zealand was established in 1974, the villages competed to see who could provide the most food for the ceremony.
Those two intervening centuries are covered in Margaret Pointer's "Niue 1774-1974: 200 Years of Contact and Change," whose sole Amazon reviewer gave it four stars and said "I have yet to read it but it is the only book on this interesting little island." The population's discord, the lack of a landing spot, and the island's poor resources kept Niue from getting much attention at first, but general curiosity and an increase in trade inevitably led to increased contact and the arrival of European settlers.
The London Missionary Society established a base of Christianity on Niue and, to some extent, unified the communities. The problem was that Niue was remote and boring, and with few exceptions, it was hard to find people who wanted to stay there for the long term to work in administration or trade. The region's major industries were copra (coconut meat used for oil) and guano (used as fertilizer), with Niueans taking contracts on nearby islands and some of the coconuts grown on Niue itself. Eventually bananas were introduced — whose finicky ripening and shipping schedule led to bitter feuds between the LMS and the resident commissioner regarding Sunday work.
Finding a book in English on Dogojima, part of the Oki archipelago in Japan, was almost impossible. The only book related to the region seemed to be a 32-page children's story called "The Tale of the Oki Islands." There's also poetry written by Emperor Go-Toba, who was exiled to nearby Nakanoshima island in the 1200s. But there was no guarantee that either would mention Dogo specifically.
I eventually found the existence of a work by Toru Tomita called "Geology of Dogo, Oki Islands, in the Japan Sea," published by the Journal of the Shanghai Science Institute in 1936. There were, allegedly, three copies at antique-book stores in Europe, two in Germany and one in the Netherlands. I picked one of the German places and wrote to them to confirm that the text was in English. They answered affirmatively and quickly. They did not, however, send me the book. When I inquired after a month with no tracking information, they said they'd check the warehouse again but then issued a refund, implying that they found no sign of it.
I tried the Dutch seller. They confirmed immediately, but when the tracking information came in, the first two digits of my building's address were left off. It had the correct street and ZIP Code, but with a building number of zero. I wrote to the seller, who apologized and said that the automatically generated shipping label sometimes distorts the address he types in. "I'll watch the progress of the transit and hope it will turn out well," he wrote.
I put some faith in the United States Postal Service, inspired largely by Bill Bryson's retelling of an apocryphal story in which a letter addressed simply to...
HILL
JOHN
MASS
...had been properly delivered to John Underhill, Andover, Mass. And the author himself once received fan mail sent to "Mr. Bill Bryson, Author of 'A Walk in the Woods,' Lives Somewhere in New Hampshire, America." But I knew I should also do my part to intercept the parcel.
When the package reached my post office with an "Out for Delivery" tag, I phoned as soon as they opened, but the person who answered couldn't find anything under the Dutch tracking number. Perhaps I hadn't said it clearly, and I didn't have confidence that the American and Dutch numbers would be the same, but it turned out they were. I didn't make any progress with that call, however.
Three hours later I saw that the package was back at the post office. I called again, but no one answered, and because I was then on a plane heading back to New York from a performance in Florida, I couldn't keep trying. By the time I landed, of course, they had already marked the package as missent and hurled it back to the giant Morgan sorting facility in Manhattan.
The people at my Radio City USPS station were from this point astoundingly helpful. I went straight from the airport to the station and gave them the details, and the person said they'd keep an eye on it if I wrote down the proper address and provided my phone number. She said it was likely that the package would get re-sorted to the station and I'd have another chance before it got sent back to the Netherlands.
I was especially grateful that they would even go so far as to leave a note tacked up somewhere or shout into the sorting cavern, "Hey, if you see something for Seth Weinstein with a missing building number, this is where it goes. Just, you know, if you happen to think of it." It wasn't as if they knew me. If I'd lived in some rural place with a couple hundred homes — Hoople, North Dakota, to pull an example out of thin air — maybe they'd recognize the name. But I'm one of 42,766 people in my ZIP Code (or I was two years ago, as far as I can tell), and I didn't expect anyone to do a mental match of my name and address.
Six days later the package was "Out for Delivery" again, and I went to check on it. The mail carriers hadn't yet left for their routes, and someone went up to search for it. She came back down ten minutes later and said she didn't find the parcel but the carrier would deliver it. I was encouraged but not yet relieved.
Two hours after that, it was marked as back at the post office, so I went over there again. A different person spent another ten minutes checking and gave me the same news: that the carrier would bring it that day.
And she did. When the alert came in, she was still distributing the mail in my building, and I was able to thank her personally.
Then there was the matter of reading the book. To anyone without a geology degree, the text is mostly incomprehensible. A paragraph in the section "Albitophyres" under the heading "Pre-T4 Tertiary Igneous Rocks" begins:
"A specimen (No. 1019) taken from the river-bed (8h) about 1 km. up the southernmost left branch-valley of the Tikaisi valley, is megascopically porphyritic with abundant phenocrysts of plagioclase. Under the microscope, the phenocrystic plagioclase is albitic and highly kaolinised, the coloured minerals being completely altered to an aggregate of chlorite and carbonate. The groundmass consists of kaolinised euhedral albitic plagioclase laths and chlorite, together with abundant earthy matter. The intense kaolinisation shown in the plagioclases of both phenocrysts and groundmass indicates that these feldspars were originally of the potash-rich variety."
And it slogs on like that for almost 100 pages, with discussions of the eight types of Tertiary deposits (from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago) and the makeup of the igneous rocks. About all I could get out of it was that what I'll experience will largely be gneiss, but some of it could be tuff.
It wasn't until the last ten pages that there was a heading called "Origin of the Island" with an explanation in basic English, more or less, about the copious fault lines and the underwater causeway connecting Dogo and Dozen. The two islands constitute a horst, a raised block between two faults that have subsided.
The book came with the author's beautiful color map of the island. I didn't understand much of the map either (the legend includes items such as "2nd Trachybasalt," "Liparite," and "Trachyandesite"), but it will look good on my wall, and the whole experience has done wonders for my Scrabble vocabulary.
To get to New Zealand, I'll take a flight that departs Los Angeles on February 13 and arrives in Auckland on February 15. Perhaps it's fitting that I spend Valentine's Day in the air.
Go on to Niue day 1
