If you followed my blog last year, you know that I spent 5 months in the Marshall Islands establishing the Marshall Islands Story Project. This scattered island nation lies 7,500 miles west of Baltimore and covers 750, 000 square miles of the mid-Pacific. I’m now writing a book about my experience there. To be thorough, I feel obliged to research the life of Captain John Marshall, whose name identifies these islands. But it hasn’t been easy getting close to this man’s life–he died in 1819. Next week I’ll go to London to see if I can get closer.

Marshall is an obscure figure in history and, though he apparently had a respectable career as a merchant marine in the 1700’s, there was no reason to name the islands after him. The first Westerner to “discover”the islands was actually Alvaro de Saavedra Ceron in 1527, when the Spanish were sailing all over the globe–an especially crazy thing to do because their boats were small and clumsy and nobody knew how to fend off scurvy and they had no way to gauge longitude, which meant they were lost half the time. (And they still believed in sea monsters.) Saavedra stayed with these islanders for several days and was treated as an honored guest. Their tattoos so impressed them, he named the natives “Los Pintados,”The Painted.

260 years later, when Marshall stumbled onto these islands, his chronicler reported that the natives “appeared . . .to have some ideas of civilization: all of them had decent coverings around the waist, and necklaces made of beads, to which a cross was suspended in the catholic style.”Was this “cross”a remnant of the long-departed Spanish?

You should know that Marshall did not
name the islands after himself. Upon his “discovery” in 1788, he named them after Lord Mulgrave (aka Sir Henry Phipps), a member of Parliament. Marshall knew who buttered his bread. One mystery I’m trying to solve is why Lord Mulgrave lost the name game. For a time the islands were called “Mulgrave’s Achipelago.” But by 1850, they were known as the Marshalls. Our long-dead Captain Marshall might have been pleased by this, but then again he might have been embarrassed too. I’d like to think of the Captain as a modest man.

In 1788, the year of his discovery, Marshall was sailing from New South Wales (aka New Holland)–which would be called “Australia” about forty years later—to China, where he was to pick up tea for the East India Trading Company. He had just emptied his cargo of 208 English prisoners at NSW’s Botany Bay. There were 10 other ships of prisoners in the convoy, unloading a total of 735 male and female convicts (plus 13 convict children). This was the first shipment of “transported” criminals to hitherto uncolonized Australia. It was a very controversial attempt at crime control in Britain, precipitated by the loss of the American colonies, which had absorbed 50,000 British criminals by 1775. We share this in common with Australia: ours was a country of rogues

The New South Wales’s “natives” (later called “aborigines”) were not friendly, by the way. Here’s how they were described by an 1837 children’s geography text: “The natives are small, ill-shaped, and among the most degraded of the human species. They have no regular religion and but a faint idea of a future state.”

Marshall and all the other captains were simply sub-contractors put in charge of the convict transport ships. They were under the command of a Royal Navy Captain, Arthur Phillip, and in the company of 197 Royal Naval Marines (with their wives). Nonetheless, it was a messy job–attempted mutinies, officers consorting with women prisoners, bouts of scurvy, all manner of disease and vermin. But by this time, navigators could determine longitude (with charts for measuring the travel of the moon) and the Pacific wasn’t nearly as wild as it used to be, thanks to the three voyages of Captain Cook, who was murdered by the Hawaiians just ten years previous.

In 1790, Marshall made the voyage again with the Second Fleet but had such a bad time of it (another mutiny and lots of disease), he didn’t do it again. The only reference you’ll find to Captain John Marshall on the internet is a Wikipedia article that claims he saw duty in both the American War for Independence (it’s possible) and the Napoleonic War (unlikely, given his age–it was a different John Marshall). It also claims he wrote a journal of his adventures, but no library in the world shows evidence of this. If anybody has the answer, it will be the British Library. That’s where I’ll be on Monday.

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• London, Part II (0)

Night and day I’ve been editing video and audio clips for the Marshall Islands Story Project. Two weeks ago the Historic Preservation Office in Majuro told me they are expecting the Project to be finished by the end of September. I thought I had until January. The Preservation Officer said, “Look at the contract.” I wanted to laugh because it’s not like anybody has been looking at the contract throughout the project (see previous blogs for details).

Be that as it may, I’m trying to finish the website by the end of month. But here’s the problem: editing. Audio editing is pretty straight forward. You load the sound onto the editing board, you move the markers to highlight where you want to cut, then you cut. I’ve never had a problem with my audio editing software.

But video editing, oh, my god. Video editing programs are buggy! I’ve tried three now. I may have to try more. They work okay for a while but then they start getting irritable, like a mentally-ill friend who’s gone off his medication and starts making irrational comments and gestures. This goes on for a while — I try to be patient, I try to work around the gaffs and interruptions. But then, suddenly, the program crashes.

I reload it. I start the editing project over — it may take me an hour just to trim the start and end of a video because the program quickly gets temperamental. And then, then, I make a final cut, and, yes, the program freezes or suddenly loads in fragments of a different clip. I burn up hours and hours like this.

Here’s the added complication. A lot of this video — done in the field — needs improved sound (mostly the wind ruins it). So I have to overdub the audio clip onto the video clip. You might think this would be easy (I did.) Video runs faster than audio. So I have to trim the audio, sometimes every two minutes, cutting where there is the speaker’s pause.. Some of these tapes are over an hour long. Oh my god.

I’ve got interviews with two kings and all kinds of other important people. It won’t do to have them mouth a sentence silently, only to hear their words follow several seconds later. Still, I can’t be too fastidious. One clip today took me four hours to complete. The sound syncs in for a minute, then cycles out for a minute, then comes close to syncing for a minute, then cycles out for a minute, then syncs in for a minute. On my god. I’ve got 31 videos to edit.

Here’s yet another problem. Even after I save the edited clips, sometimes the file gets corrupted. I don’t know how. It has something to do with file transfers from computer to computer. In making the transfer at my office computer, I now have 18 finished audio clips I can’t access because the folder is “corrupted.” I do have back-ups. Always make back-ups.

The video-editing program I’m working with now, Corel’s Video Studio, costs $100 and I’m not asking it to do much. Really, the stuff I’m doing is very simple. I’d pay more for a better program, but I have yet to read a review of a video-editing program that does not crash or act out (unless I’m willing to spend $1,000 or more). At this point, I don’t have TIME to buy another program and work through its bugs.

It’s an imperfect world, we all know. It seems video-editing programs capture that fact better than anything else they try to do. No doubt years from now our successors will look back and shake their heads in wonder at our crude technology and ask. How did they manage? . By fits and starts, I’d answer But we did, we do, prevail.

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I woke at four this morning to the hyperbolic chorus of birdsong. Since our return on Monday, I’ve been getting up at 4:00 AM, no matter what time I go to bed. A sinus infection has complicated my re-acclimation to stateside time-zones. But today, at last, I can smell again. I’m startled how early it gets light. In the Marshall Islands, equatorial sunrise and sunset never alter: 7:00 AM, 7:00 PM. Here, the sun starts insinuating itself at 4:30 AM. I’m startled, too, how early the birds go to work. And how noisy they are about it. I like their company when I’m up at that hour, staring out at the brightening blue over the Baltimore rooftops. Their energetic singing suggests that I should be about my business too.

Right now, I hear a man calling “Ice cold!” outside. He’s one of the enterprising urbanites who bring coolers packed with bottled water to busy intersections. Today’s salesman is a skinny fellow wearing a white canvas sunhat, long denim shorts, and a t-shirt. A plastic bottle of iced water in each hand, he strides into the street and calls, “Ice cold! Ice cold here!” Yesterday it was a different guy. It’s surprising how many Baltimoreans drive with the windows down, no matter how hot it gets. I’m convinced it’s part of the city’s Southern heritage. We get really hot here in summer and many seem to flaunt it. Whereas temperatures in the Marshall Islands rarely top 90, Baltimore will broil in the nineties for weeks. Last week’s heat spell killed our maple sapling in the sidewalk treewell.

The Marshall Islands is all sky and ocean—wide open and very blue. Here on the East coast, it’s green and cluttered. Trees press in and crowd the view. I like that. It’s what I’m used to. Speaking of trees, we’ve discovered a pair of mocking birds building a nest in the tree nearest our back porch. We consider this a big deal because it means our back yard plantings are getting mature, entering their third year. Jill announced this morning that our pond has at least one new goldfish. She sighted fish eggs a few weeks back but couldn’t be sure. Now we know. Though hundreds spring from the hatching, very few survive the attention of the forever hungry tadpoles and adult fish. Last year only one fry made it. Jill worries about them but understands that we have to let the ecosystem take care of itself.

I still haven’t gone through my mail—there’s a big box of it. Nor have I fired up the vacuum and gone after the cat and dog hair that mosses the carpet in every room. It’s going to take a while for us to get the house back in order. But there’s no rush. We’ve been doing laundry all week. Piles of it. I forgot to cancel my New Yorker subscription before I left, so now the magazines are scattered all over the house as I read them in snatches. I won’t even try to catch up. There is no catching up with anything, I’ve decided—not with your old body weight or the backlog of magazines you think will make you a better person if only you could read every one of them cover to cover. Still, tomorrow I return to the gym and start again with good intentions.

Generally, my return to States has elated me. Our nation is so much like an amusement park, everything geared to entertainment and immediate gratification. I delight in filling up our refrigerator after a day of grocery shopping and blasting music from my computer while I surf the internet and fire off emails at the speed of light. I smile when the electric garage-door rises over me as I back into 28th street. Jill managed to get the city to install a NO PARKING sign in front of our driveway, so now we no longer have the headache of rogue city parkers blocking the garage. Our flowers are opening in the back yard, the butterfly plant as big as a giant squid. I’ve been napping all over the house like a lazy cat, first settling into the library couch, then padding down the hall to the guest room—wherever it’s coolest. Our big house seems such a novelty, there’s so much of it to play in. It’s terrible and wondrous to be an American. “This is Rome,” an Irish friend once told me with a smile. Rome towards the end, I was tempted to add. Nothing this good can last.

On the news recently I saw a story about the growth of the middle-class in India. Observers worry that this huge influx of consumers (350 million) will overburden world resources. The suggestion is that the Indians, like the Chinese, should cool their capitalistic jets. But how realistic is that? Just because Americans got the goodies first doesn’t mean that the rest of the world should go wanting. Our problems are global and, in the end, all of us will have less because it’s too small a world to accommodate everything we want.

I knew this before I went to the Republic of the Marshall Islands, so I can’t say my visit made me feel any guiltier for my privilege. But my stay did calm me down, putting into perspective what is and isn’t important. American history, much of it an embarrassing chronicle of overreaching and exploitation, has led too many of us to believe that what’s happened here in the U.S.A. has been inevitable. It’s a sense of entitlement that much of the world can’t fathom. When you live among those who don’t have such expectations, you begin to see personal and global limits in new ways. We Americans have all we have, in great part, because we got lucky. Much of it had to do with being in the right place at the right time, like a gambler sitting at a hot slot machine. Luck is hardly a firm basis on which to found national pride, much less personal ambition. This is not to say that I will now tamp down my own ambitions and adopt an “island” mentality. Rather, it’s to say that when the next disappointment visits me, I’ll be a gracious host and remember that I’ve been very lucky.

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When I saw Jill again, she looked like a farm girl, her face freckled and without makeup. We hadn’t seen each other in four months. Newton and I presented her with a traditional crown of flowers and a lei, both of which Newton’s wife made. Then I bought her a Marshallese sunhat at the handicraft store–because you really need a hat out here, especially if you’re going to walk the reef. To my surprise, Jill wore it right away. I thought she’d find Majuro disturbing because many do. Too dirty and crowded. But Jill likes things more complicated than not. Majuro is plenty complicated. She said, “Don’t some parts of Florida look like this?”

We got several orders of take-out, including stir-fried octopus, then drove a rented car the length of the island to Laura, where it’s green and less populated. We ate at the Peace Park, built by the Japanese government in 1986 to commemorate the war (II) dead. We had the place to ourselves. On weekends, the Peace Park and much of Laura are crowded with the thoroughly sociable Marshallese, who picnic and cook-out with family and friends as much as possible.

The next day, Newton took us to a small island, which we had almost wholly to ourselves. While he fished with rod and reel (casting into deep water), Jill and I snorkeled. Jill had never snorkeled before, but took to it easily. And she wasn’t freaked by the rain of jelly fish we swam through. They were about the size of quarters, tiny nearly-transparent bells, and they were everywhere. But they didn’t sting. Still, they freaked me out. As we swam through them, and they bounced off my dive-mask–and my forehead–I was sure we’d feel the stinging later. But later Newton told us that these were dead jelly fish. This particular kind sheds its skin at certain times, he explained. That’s all we were seeing, the sloughed-off skin.

I made Jill tramp through the jungle a while. I love picking through a jungle. It was tough going and Jill wasn’t happy about it but she humored me for a while. That’s how I run my life, it seems: I push into weeds, then go too far to turn back. “I see light through the trees,” I kept calling to Jill. “Almost there!” We also walked the reef, checking out the tide pools and lifting rocks to see what’s there (always return the rock to its original position b/c every rock is an ecosystem, with lots of stuff living on its underside). We came across a healthy looking moray eel, about a foot long. Also, while wading in the tide, Jill came across a black tip shark. A baby, hardly two feet long. It was mighty fast, zipping past us once, then twice, then it was gone–before I could get my camera ready. Black tips are fairly common on the oceanside.

Exactly forty-eight hours after Jill’s arrival, I came down with a sinus infection. No doubt she introduced me to a handful of Stateside microbes, an exposure exacerbated by two days of snorkeling. I’d spent over four months in the Marshall Islands without getting pink eye, without getting the flu, without getting a cold, and here at last I got sick. Maybe my body simply gave in now that the pressure was off. Not that the job is done. Newton and I have pushed the Project deadline to September 1. There’s simply too much data to process. I have to finish editing the videos, then compress them and upload them to the website. Same with the audio. Newton has piles of translation and voice-overs to do. But the website is up and operational and it’s looking pretty good. I’ve decided Newton must come to Baltimore to review our final work. On Majuro he won’t be able to view the video–their internet connection is so slow, it’ll take all night to download a single one-hour clip.

Jill’s not sure what to make of my tattoo. Her first response was “it’s so big!” She also had mixed feelings about my haircut. Only Jill cuts my hair. But I couldn’t wait for her this time and had a local cut it several weeks ago–someone Newton recommended. The stylist, a Filipino hoping to get to the States, did a great job and ended the session by giving me a back massage. How different would we be if haircuts in the States ended with a back massage?

Jill and I stopped in Honolulu on the way back. I had to visit the Bishop Museum to see what Marshall Islands artifacts it displays. Not enough, I thought. The museum was founded in 1893, shortly after the Hawaiian royal family was dethroned. Though the museum took possession of many royal family belongings, a larger number were auctioned off. The story of the Hawaiian monarchy is a sad one and implicates the U.S. in the worst way. By many accounts, the monarchy was enlightened and beloved by the people. In fact, the last king, David Kalakaua (the “merry monarch”), reinstated the hula dance and other elements of native culture that the missionaries had attempted to eradicate. But outside forces–mostly American and European business interests (among them some recognizable names)–controlled his cabinet and revised the constitution to their benefit, infamously dubbed the “bayonet constitution.” In the end, the powerbrokers got their way and the island nation was soon annexed by the U.S. in 1898.

We’re now on our way home on a 767, Jill trying to sleep beside me. It didn’t take long for us to re-acclimate to each other–we’re back to our usual, teasing selves. At bottom, I didn’t expect this separation to affect us adversely. But it’s going to take me a while to sort out how my time here has affected me in other ways. The night before we left Majuro, Newton made us a traditional meal: the reef fish he’d caught that day, a coconut stew, baked breadfruit, and fried breadfruit. It was glorious. The next day, he and several of my student–Obet, Jefferson, Benson, Ayson, Decency, and James–saw us off at the airport. I don’t know if these young people know how much hope is riding on their shoulders. I’ll continue to be on call as their technical advisor. (Check out their website at http://rmitdt.org.) They’re in good hands with Newton. He’s gentle and wise and they respect him tremendously. But, obviously, none of us oldsters can protect them from all the world will bring their way. This worry for them is something that, as a teacher, I should have gotten used to long ago but, apparently, I never will.

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Ron Tanner, chair of the Writing Department at Loyola College-Maryland, won a grant from the National Parks Service to help Marshallese college students preserve the oral culture of the Marshall Islands. He’s spending the 2008 spring semester (5 months) on Majuro to direct this pilot program, called the Marshall Islands Story Project. To get the full story of his personal experiences, be sure to check the archives to your left.

Jill didn’t believe me when I told her I got a tattoo My generation, the baby boomers, were taught to associate tattoos with decrepit sailors and outlaw bikers. “Why would you want to do that to your body?” Mom often told us. The campaign against tattoos was remarkably successful and grew in direct relation to the ascent of good hygiene and the reverence for clinical cleanliness–hospital-white kitchens and bathrooms tiled like swimming pools. But disapproval was also surprisingly short-lived, lasting only about 100 years. Tattoos have been around since 3000 B.C. Start with Jesus and count backwards one-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand.
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The Marshallese had elaborate tattoos, which were semi-sacred. Men and women had distinctly different kinds. You had to make an offering to see if the signs were propitious–and you were worthy–of having a tattoo. When the Spanish first arrived here in the late 1500s, the found the natives so heavily tattooed, they called them “los pintados” or “the painted.” Their tattoos rivaled those of New Zealand’s Maoris, whose intricate decorations are world famous. The missionaries got rid of all that. Ironically, so did the Japanese, whose own culture is rich with tattooing. The last of the Marshallese traditional tattoos died with their bearers in the 1950s. The national cultural museum published a book of traditional Marshallese tattoo designs. John, my tattoo artist, has the book in his office.

When tattoos started appearing on youngsters in the 1990s, I shook my head in wonder, mostly because it seemed kids weren’t putting much thought into marking themselves for life. Flowers, hearts, thunderbolts, dragons. Of course there’s a long tradition of that. You can’t go wrong with a bannered heart blazoned with “MOM.” But, alas, many a romantic has felt compelled to etch the name of his squeeze across his bicep. Much of John’s work involves covering up tattoo mistakes. He does a good job. John’s from Fiji. As far as I know, he’s the only tattoo artist on Majuro. I came to him because I heard he does traditional designs. I chose a sea turtle with Marshallese motifs on its shell. He wanted to do it with the head aimed up but I requested the head down, as if the turtle were swimming down my arm.

Jill said, “But you’ve got such a thing about protecting your body!” It seems I give the wrong impression sometimes. I admit that I didn’t like the idea of a guy needling at my arm. It made me queasy. And there was a time, I admit, when a tattoo would have been out of the question. But, then, I wasn’t in Micronesia. Jill arrives on Tuesday. She says she can’t believe she’s going to be here. She’s never left the country. The first thing we’ll do after she arrives is buy her a sunhat at the handicrafts shop, then we’ll get some take-out and go watch the waves.

As you see, I’ve included some photos of Majuro dogs. Though they are often loved, they have a hard time. It’s not the life Americans would want for dogs. Most live on scraps and handouts. But they roam freely and none are neutered, so they are abundant. Some complain that they are dangerous or, at least, surly. Some days a few would chase my bike. Other days the same dogs would ignore me.

Tomorrow Newton, a few students, and I visit the other high chief of the nation. It’s taken Newton a month to set this up. He’s exhausted. Me too. I put in twelve hours today. Our website’s much bigger than I expected. But it’s going to be cool. This time next week Jill and I will be in Honolulu and I’ll be in a daze. Here are some things I’ve missed (people are a separate category): broadband internet, brick-oven pizza, salads, organic produce, cool drizzly days, home cooking (e.g., Jill’s carrot cake), satellite radio, cheese, Sunday New York Times, a cat on my lap, mail, watermelon, fresh peaches, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, Italian food, thunderstorms, and hot water.

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