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The Signature of All Things
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Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “The Consequence of Missions”
Part 4, Chapter 21 Summary
Alma sails on a whaling ship bound for Tahiti in November 1851, the year of the Crystal Palace in London, the year a white man sees Yosemite Valley, and the year the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania will graduate its first class of women doctors. Alma travels alone, taking practical clothing, useful items, paper and ink, her microscope, and Ambrose’s valise. She means to search for the subject of Ambrose’s drawings, whom she has come to think of as The Boy.
Alma enjoys the voyage and respects the sailors, who lead hard lives. They travel to New Orleans and then Rio de Janeiro. Alma is enthralled by nearly everything she sees, except for the manacled humans in chains, bound for slave markets. They round Cape Horn and pause at Valparaiso. They see waterspouts but no whales. Alma lands in Tahiti in June 1852.
Part 4, Chapter 22 Summary
Alma is unnerved by how mountainous and green Tahiti is. She lands at Papeete and takes a carriage to Matavai Bay, where the mission led by Reverend Francis Welles is located. She finds a small, whitewashed mission church and a cluster of cottages located along a river that runs into the sea. Thinking of the explorers who have been to Tahiti (Wallis, Vancouver, Bougainville, Bligh, Cook, and then her father), Alma waits beneath a banana tree with her pyramid of luggage for Reverend Welles. When they meet, Alma identifies herself as Henry Whittaker’s daughter, and the reverend welcomes Alma and speaks glowingly of Ambrose Pike. He takes her to the chapel, where a Tahitian woman leads a short and emphatic service. Alma returns to find that her belongings have disappeared. Reverend Welles tells her she may get some of them back eventually. Alma frets most over her microscope.
Reverend Welles shows Alma to the cottage that Ambrose lived in, and Sister Manu, who gave the sermon, brings Alma food and water. Alma searches for some sense of Ambrose but can find nothing of him in the cottage, which is one small room with a bed, a table, a thatched roof, and a floor of dried grass. Alma wakes in the night to find a dog barking at her. The next morning, she finds a boy on the floor of her cottage. He leaves behind the eyepiece to her microscope.
Part 4, Chapter 23 Summary
Slowly, Alma adjusts to her new world. She takes care of her house and accepts “that her belongings would either show up eventually or they would not, and that there was nothing—absolutely nothing—that could be done about it” (361). There are crabs, snakes, a beach, and children everywhere. She observes the place and its people, learns some of the language, and learns the names of others in the community. The boy in her house is called Hiro. She names the dog Roger. Her possessions come and go, “a tide ebbing and flowing in and out of her house” (367), but Ambrose’s valise is returned to her, unopened, and never disappears again. Alma thinks of Ambrose often and looks for The Boy everywhere.
One day, when she is walking with Reverend Welles, he mentions the theory Ambrose raised to her—the signature of all things. The reverend calls Ambrose the best of men. He shows Alma the graves of his five daughters. (His sixth daughter lives with his wife in Cornwall.) Alma is astonished that Reverend Welles seems to have no home and no needs, not even for food. He tells her of his conversion and how he came to establish the mission at Matavai Bay. The reverend does not insist too much upon strict interpretation of Scripture; instead, his mantra is rather than he cannot see the harm. He tells Alma how the Tahitians resisted Christianity until disease decimated the population and the king converted. Though his wife is away, Reverend Welles has adopted sons, and Alma marvels at his dedication to the surrounding community, his serenity, and his good cheer.
Part 4, Chapter 24 Summary
As Alma grows fond of the settlement at Matavai Bay and learns the seasons, the plants, and the food, she wonders how Ambrose experienced the place and asks herself why she could not meet him as he wished and simply listen. She continues to search for The Boy and asks Hiro and his friends to help, but they search the island with no success. Alma looks inside Ambrose’s valise and finds that the sketches have been devoured by weather and insects. She feels she cannot remain in Tahiti and has lost her life’s purpose. She has nothing more to learn here and decides to leave.
Part 4, Chapter 25 Summary
Alma awakens to the sound of Hiro shouting that tomorrow morning is here. A crowd has gathered on the beach, and Alma watches a flotilla of canoes approaching. Reverend Welles tearfully greets the man leading them, and Alma recognizes The Boy. The phrase on the bottom of Ambrose’s drawings had been a name: Tomorrow Morning.
The young man gives a stirring sermon in the church, and in the festivities that follow, Alma learns that Tomorrow Morning is one of Reverend Welles’s adopted sons. His Tahitian name is Tamatoa Mare, and he has been running a mission on the nearby island of Raiatea. He has been successful in his mission and has a family on the island. He is beautiful, commanding, and adored, and during his stay, people from all over the island come to see him.
When they are finally able to speak alone, Tomorrow Morning says he knows who Alma is. She asks him to tell her about his relationship with Ambrose, and he answers that he wants to show her something. The next day, they take a canoe to a sea cave, and Tomorrow Morning relates that he was an orphan raised in the mission by Reverend Welles. He tells her also of a Tahitian custom whereby women cut themselves to lance their grief. Alma is shocked when Tomorrow Morning compares them and concludes they were both the favorite of their fathers; he is the favorite of Reverend Welles, and Alma was the favorite of her father, Henry.
Tomorrow Morning says he was entranced by Ambrose; he thought him an emissary from the gods. But Ambrose was lonely, too, he says, “for nobody was similar to him. He could find no home” (420). When Alma presses to know more about their relationship, Tomorrow Morning tells her that he desired Ambrose and he is a conqueror. It is the nature of conquerors to obtain what they want. Tomorrow Morning explains that Ambrose cut himself in the manner of the island women, but he did not know how to treat the wounds and died of them. Alma sorrows for Ambrose all over again, realizing that “all he had wanted was purity, and all she had wanted was pleasure. She had banished him to this lonely place, and he had died here, horribly” (422). She is grateful, though not surprised, that Reverend Welles gave Ambrose a Christian burial, which is not the accepted custom for people who died of suicide.
Tomorrow Morning leads Alma up a mountain to a waterfall, and behind it is a cave covered in moss—the most luxuriant moss Alma has ever seen. The place is so beautiful that she feels pained by it. Tomorrow Morning tells her Ambrose thought she would like the place, and Alma sobs with grief. They weep for Ambrose together. She touches Tomorrow Morning, as she wished to touch Ambrose, and he permits it. She performs fellatio on him, thinking of the act as the one thing in her life she had ever really wanted to do. They sleep that night in the cave, and the next morning, Tomorrow Morning rows them back to Matavai Bay.
Part 4, Chapter 26 Summary
The day before Tomorrow Morning is due to leave, there is a day-long celebration in his honor. The women play a rough game called haru raa puu, which involves two teams competing to move a ball made of plantain fronds across a goal. Alma gets drawn into the play, and when the game moves to the water, Alma is pushed underwater by an aggressive Sister Manu. For a moment, Alma considers giving up and letting herself drown, but then she realizes that “she, the daughter of Henry and Beatrix Whittaker, had not been put on this earth to drown in five feet of water” (434). She realizes then that the driving mechanism of nature is the will to live; there is nothing else. Alma pushes Sister Manu away and comes “striding out of the sea like she was born from it” (435).
Part 4 Analysis
The botanical print for this section is of Artocarpus incisa, commonly known as breadfruit, an important food source throughout the tropics. Polynesian explorers brought seeds and cuttings with them when they set out for new islands across the South Pacific. William Bligh of the HMS Bounty was in Tahiti to gather breadfruit at the command of Sir Joseph Banks when his crew mutinied. Bligh later managed to convey breadfruit to the Caribbean, where it was introduced as a cheap way to feed the enslaved persons on British plantations.
Part of the richness of Alma’s voyage is that she observes like a scientist; she makes no value judgments about what she sees but looks instead for the reasons behind specific behaviors. She respects the sailors, most of whom would be considered lower class in their native countries, and she watches and learns to understand and appreciate the culture of Tahiti, even though she initially encounters a conflict when her Western notions of private property aren’t shared by the Tahitians. Alma’s favorite tool is still her microscope, one of her chief losses among her possessions, as it was the way in which she learned about the world around her. But in Tahiti, Western notions of privacy, ownership, and Protestant Christianity simply don’t apply. Alma has to give up her tools and technology and exist as part of the community, in rhythm with the weather, the wildlife, and the local resources, and must come to accept a very different set of beliefs about the nature of the world than those taught by scientific method.
Alma’s study in Tahiti is not of plants but of people, and her search for The Boy is another quest for knowledge, a way to connect with Ambrose and learn more about him. That The Boy turns out to be named Tomorrow Morning is a sly poke at the language of the colonizer—Tomorrow Morning translated his Tahitian name into this phrase—but it is also a potent irony in that her encounter with him causes Alma to look toward the future and finally set aside her quest for the past.
Most crucially, the knowledge that Alma seeks is about the precise relationship that Tomorrow Morning had with Ambrose; she wants to know how her relationship with Ambrose compares to the unconventional one he discovered for himself in Tahiti, and when she realizes that Tomorrow Morning engaged in sexual intercourse with Ambrose, she feels a sense of defeat, but also a more visceral grief and devastation at the thought that Ambrose’s sense of shame ultimately led him to self-harm. Alma’s physical exchange with Tomorrow Morning is a way to reconnect with Ambrose, as if Tomorrow Morning were a medium or an emissary himself. It is also the achievement of a desire that Alma has harbored since her first discovery of the erotic book at the bottom of the trunk in the White Acre library. With this consummation—and with the drawings Ambrose made dissolved by tropical weather and insects—Alma can finally make peace with her grief and guilt.
In Tahiti, Alma is knocked out of Moss Time and also out of Human Time, in a sense, because she is out of touch with the developments going on in the Western world. Life in Tahiti follows the rhythms of seasons and cultural tradition, even if those traditions have haphazardly synthesized some elements from European culture. Alma recognizes how Europeans have tried to exploit the place and its resources, but she also recognizes that the Tahitians have kept her alive; she is not a conqueror or an explorer, but instead holds the status of a guest. Tahitian belief accommodates a closeness of the spiritual world that is unlike what Alma is accustomed to in her Christian observance, and the magical cave of mosses represents not only a sacred place for her interaction with Tomorrow Morning but also a moment of recognition that paves the way for the realization she will shortly have about evolutionary theory.
This realization surfaces during the ball game, an antagonistic form of play that forces Alma to a decision. She can give up and subside—as Ambrose did—or she can fight to the last breath, as did her mother and Henry. Coming out of the water, Alma is reborn with a new purpose and direction for her life.
Reverend Welles, with his story of dedication, sacrifice, and loss, embodies the essence of both Ambrose and Prudence, for he has dedicated his life to a cause at the cost of enormous personal sacrifice. Reverend Welles always says he can see no harm in how the Tahitians embrace Christianity or continue to pursue their centuries-old traditions and customs. In this he shows an alliance to spiritual truth, not religious dogma. Reverend Welles’s commitment to his faith is a type of deep, unquestioned knowledge that proves a contrast to Alma’s methods of scientific inquiry, but it nevertheless holds true.
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