Island Of The Damned

“Millions upon millions of years ago,” goes some of the most profitable prose of the 1970s, “when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others.” This is the portentous opener to a James Michener book that boasts perhaps the largest protagonist ever.

“It was a mighty ocean,” Michener decrees, “a restless, ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as pacific.” This essential drama (restless yet pacific) drives page after geologic page. “Over its brooding surface immense winds swept back and forth.” Reading this writing, one suspects that Michener wanted to give his readers a sense of tectonic formation by letting them experience it (“immense tides ripped across this tremendous ocean”) in real time. “In its dark bosom, strange life was beginning to form.” Pages of inanimate drama occur before the first coral polyp appears, which livens up the action, at least for the invertebrates.

Deep into chapter one, Michener exhausts several pages of typing on a description of the geological formation of a Pacific island. He takes you down below, where volcanoes explode and cool into deep-sea mountains on which corals coalesce over millions of years to form the underwater scaffolding that will one day support on the surface, like a cake on a stand, an island. In one watching-the-paint-dry riff, Michener actually describes how sand gets made. At last, his coral atoll gets filled in with this very sand, later is fertilized by the droppings of wind-blown birds, and eventually bursts into a tropical island paradise. Just in case we don’t get the deeper significance of it all, Michener ends his inaugural pomposities with a scriptural flourish: “Master of life, guardian of the shorelines, regulator of temperatures and heaving sculptor of mountains, the great ocean existed.”

In the decades since I was required to read it for a class, that book has stayed in my memory just like the author’s ocean. Huge, immense, boring: the novel Hawaii . . . existed. But recently I returned from one of those tiny places conjured out of the ancient chaos of the sea. There I witnessed something rare and mysterious, even terrifying: the people have dug up and sold off the interior of their homeland in order to compete in the new global economy. What’s left is so strange to see and elemental to visit that it’s grudgingly led me back to the encyclopedist’s eonic prose.

Called Nauru, the island is one of those tiny nations scattered like crumbs across the belly of the Pacific. It’s just twenty-six miles south of the equator, twelve hundred miles northeast of Papua New Guinea — in the center of an expanse of the world named, as if by Michener himself, Oceania.

This island may be as far away from everywhere as you can get and still be somewhere. In the months after the turn of the millennium, I was sent there to look into accusations of money laundering. International-finance experts charged that in the late 1990s Nauru, only one-third the size of Manhattan, was literally responsible for bankrupting the former Soviet Union, which once occupied half of Asia. Cleaning dirty money in the new global economy, by the by, is quite easy. Banks of any standing are required to keep a record of each transaction, but banks registered in Nauru were not burdened by a demand for such paperwork. So money could come in and then go out to another bank with no paper trail. Any international syndicate could pay Nauru thousands of dollars to register its very own bank, and in return the island nation gained a steady income without the fuss of building a factory or putting its citizens to work.

Since that article came out, I’ve continued to check in on my little Pacific island as if it were an old acquaintance whose self-destructive ways have made me perversely eager for fresh gossip. Nauru was my introduction to the harsh reality of the Pacific: As with Tonga (plagued with the world’s worst obesity) or Tuvalu (international purveyor of porn) or Tahiti (wracked by poverty), Nauru was once a lovely place. Whalers in the nineteenth century referred to it on charts as “Pleasant Island.” But like a runaway innocent, she has spent her beauty too easily, and now she’s lost her only asset. The options are grim. The end is coming quickly, and it’s impossible not to watch.

Between the rock of ecology and the hard marketplace of the global economy, Nauru is not merely being squeezed, but is coming undone. Nauru is like that opening of Hawaii, only sped up and in reverse.

When I was first given the assignment to write about Nauru, I called the Nauruan Mission to the United Nations in New York to make arrangements to visit the island. I was told to call Nauru’s publicity agent. How’s that? An entire nation has a PR flack? This was my first encounter with the formidable Helen Bogdan, spokesperson for nations, headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. She answers the phone by declaring her name as if it were a single sound, or one of those long German philosophical terms: “Helenbogdan.” I told her I just wanted to visit the island.

Helenbogdan didn’t buy a word of it. Helenbogdan told me the seventh Nauruan president in three years had been forced out, and though she would ask the new one, Bernard Dowiyogo, about my request, Helenbogdan was fairly certain it wouldn’t work out. On a subsequent transplanetary phone call, Helenbogdan told me that Helenbogdan was sad because Helenbogdan would not be able to help me in my quest to look into the face of the new global economy and that — Helenbogdan’s voice deepened suddenly — under no circumstances would I be permitted on the island.

I booked a flight at once.

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