Land diving on Pentecost Island

The woman in the tree

In 1959 a chief and famous jumper told David Attenborough the story behind the dive. A woman fled from her husband and climbed a tree; he climbed after her, and when she challenged him to jump, they both leapt — but she had secretly tied vines to her ankles. She survived and he died, and the men, humiliated that one of them had been tricked, built a tower higher than the tree to prove their courage. Other versions of the story are told on the island.

Land diving is tied to the yam harvest: a good dive is believed to help ensure a bountiful crop, to strengthen the divers’ health and to drive out the ailments of the wet season, and it is a proof of courage. In the mid-19th century missionaries persuaded islanders to give it up, but after Vanuatu’s independence in 1980 it was revived. Timing matters: in 1974, when a dive was staged for Queen Elizabeth II in the middle of the wet season, the vines were not elastic enough, and a diver fell and later died of his injuries.

Tower and vines

The tower is best built in the dry season and takes two to five weeks, with twenty to thirty men cutting trees, clearing the site, removing stones and tilling the soil to soften the ground. A lopped tree forms the core, with scaffolding lashed together with vines; platforms jut out about two metres from the front, the lowest around 10 metres up and the highest near the top. They are built so that their supports snap during the dive, letting the platform swing down and absorb some of the force. A village elder chooses the vines and matches them to each diver’s weight without any calculations: too long and the diver hits the ground, too short and he swings back into the tower. During the preparations the men keep apart from the women, and on the night before the dive they sleep beneath the tower to ward off evil spirits.

The dive

Before dawn the divers wash, rub themselves with coconut oil and decorate their bodies, and the women dance to support them. Ten to twenty men from a village may jump, beginning with the least experienced on the lowest platforms and ending with the most experienced near the top. Before diving a man may give a speech or sing; then he crosses his arms over his chest, tucks in his head and falls at up to about 72 kilometres an hour, aiming to brush the ground with his shoulders. Villagers rush in to help him as soon as he lands. For boys the dive is a rite of passage: when a boy makes his first dive in front of his elders, his mother holds an item from his childhood, which is thrown away afterwards as a sign that he has become a man.