South Pacific

If the water’s edge has always been significant to indigenous Americans, it has been central to indigenous Pacific and Australian peoples. Pacific Islanders associate their seafaring ways with the very essence of their history.

Unlike many Native Americans, however, most indigenous Oceanians had few dealings with Europeans until they faced three waves of renewed intrusion from the 1760s. Even before the American Revolution, Britain and France began planning ventures in search of ever more promising New Worlds. The first wave of intrusion included official British voyages by John Byron in 1764, Samuel Wallis in 1766 and James Cook in 1768, 1772 and 1776; and slightly less formally sanctioned voyages by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in 1766, Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne in 1771 and Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen in 1772. Each of these initial voyages aimed to chart and understand more about this last great unknown in European cartography, and with new knowledge gain the potential to make new claims for trade or settlement.

Like Native Americans, indigenous Oceanians met the intrusions with a mixture of vio­lence, manipulation and accommodation. The first major encounter occurred between Tahitians and the crew of Wallis in Matavai Bay in 1767. It began peaceably enough, but Wallis fatefully did not comprehend the Tahitian expectation to exchange goods with newcomers.

The Tahitians learned their lesson about Europeans rather more quickly than Europeans seemed to learn about indigenous customs in their transition from America to Oceania. When Bougainville arrived in Matavai Bay just ten short months after Wallis (only the second European to do so), the indigenous response was studiously welcoming. Bougainville went on famously to declare Tahitians to be the living embodiment of the Enlightenment’s fantasy for free-loving noble savagery. He never stopped to consider whether their behaviour was instead the result of recently acquired wariness about men in tall ships. It is possible to see the Tahitian response to Bougainville as one of the first instances of indigenous influence, however inadvertent, on the crafting of dominant European philosophical ideals.¹⁹

More obvious indigenous influence was apparent in the later Cook voyages around the Pacific Ocean. In each of his three endeavours to explore the region for British advantage, Cook benefited from the skills of indigenous guides. The first key guide was Tupaia of Raiatea, who came on board Cook’s Endeavour in 1769, providing invaluable navigational and linguistic assistance to the captain. He helped Cook sail south from Tahiti to New Zealand, explaining along the way how to accommodate the seasonal westerly wind shifts that had confounded previous European voyages.

Another crucial indigenous guide was Mai (also from Raiatea). Mai was and remains best known for visiting Britain between 1774 and 1776, where he became a cultural celebrity. He is less well remembered for providing critical interpretive and diplomatic services to Cook’s third voyage in New Holland (as Australia was then called), New Zealand, the Cook Islands and Tonga. Both Tupaia and Mai had undertaken their roles for personal political reasons: as both were refugees from aggression on their Raiatean homeland from Islanders from neighbouring Bora Bora, they had both been similarly motivated to gain foreign arms and skills to advance plans of vengeance.²⁰ Europeans (and some later historians) did not always fully understand the ulterior motives of Polynesians (as they neither had with Native Americans).

Nothing underscored the local rather than somehow ‘naturally’ altruistic rationale for Pacific Islander assistance to European voyages better than the fact that Cook was killed by indigenes the moment he was seen to stray outside acceptable social norms. When Cook first arrived in Kealakekua Bay in Hawaii in January 1779 his crew received a more than usually warm welcome. As many scholars have explained, he had arrived unwittingly in the middle of makihiki celebrations, during which local people acknowledged Lono, the god of fertility. No one mistook Cook to be in fact the supernatural Lono, but, as Matsuda puts it, ‘his landfall coincided with the sacred observances, and his treatment fortuitously gave practical shape to the celebrations, as well as the authority of the chiefs and [priests]’.²¹ Sent off after a couple of weeks with huge gifts of food, Cook fell into a Bougainvillean-like delusion about the peculiar humility of Pacific Islanders.

Another example of cross-cultural breakdown had occurred earlier, in June 1772, when the French explorer Marion du Fresne had wandered into a Maori tapu (or social taboo). Although he had enjoyed nearly two months of Maori hospitality since arriving in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands, Marion du Fresne had failed to heed warnings against fishing in one particular cove. The fish in this cove were tapu, since they were believed to have fed on some men recently drowned there, but Marion du Fresne and his men refused to indulge such seeming irrationality and continued to cast nets. One day several chiefs took him to the cove, and butchered him and many of the sailors with symbolic rage.²² The surviving French men fled home, noting the tragic irony in the demise of a man who had been one of the most fervent believers in the Enlightened ideal of ‘noble savagery’.²³ The Enligh­tened philosophe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, upon hearing of the captain’s fate, was said to have cried: ‘is it possible that the good Children of Nature can really be so wicked?’²⁴ Historian John Gascoigne has commented that ‘Marion’s experiences complicated the way in which Europeans viewed their fellow human beings in the distant Pacific’.²⁵ But it could perhaps more pertinently be concluded that it was once more Pacific Islanders who had complicated this perspective.

The deaths of Cook and Marion du Fresne in the 1770s saw the rise of a more cautious approach by Britain and France to Pacific peoples by the next key wave of intruders, Arthur Phillip and the Comte de La Perouse.

La Perouse’s caution turned out to be more justified. He had witnessed the revenge kill­ing of twelve of his crew when his ships had docked at Samoa in the south-central Pacific in December 1787. La Perouse at least understood that while indigenes may have been the agents in the bursting of a European myth, it was the European philosophes who were to blame for the creation of the myth in the first place: ‘I am a hundred times angrier at the philosophers’, he wrote, ‘than at the savages themselves’.²⁹ His distrust made La Perouse particularly defensive when he arrived later at Botany Bay, just a few days after Phillip’s fleet had anchored in January 1788.

Looking back, the failure of fellow-Frenchman Marion du Fresne to make claims on New Holland sixteen years before La Perouse might also be explained by feelings of intimidation by Australian Aborigines. Marion du Fresne had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in March 1772. His crew were showered with stones by Aboriginals on the beach, forcing them to retreat not once but altogether three times, before he decided to leave the island for good.³² French inability or unwillingness to make good their initial claims on New Holland left indigenous peoples facing the British alone. France’s greatest revolutionary leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, was not prepared to accept this situation without a fight. In 1800 Napoleon commissioned Nicolas Baudin to conduct a scientific exploration of the remaining uncharted coasts of New Holland. Though no explicit mention of territorial claim was made in his instruction, Napoleon knew full well that supposedly scientific missions had led recently to conquest for his British rivals.³³

Baudin’s expedition immediately prompted the British to co-ordinate a simultaneous third wave of intrusion, comprehending Napoleon’s motives all too clearly. Matthew Flinders’ expedition started out a few months after Baudin’s, though ended by being the more successful, and not coincidentally, the final move in Britain’s claim for all of Australia. In more ways than has been acknowledged, indigenous people helped determine the outcome of this contest. Flinders, following Cook, had made sure to recruit a couple of loyal indigenous guides on his venture. He told Philip Gidley King, then governor of New South Wales, that he had previously observed how ‘much advantage’ had been provided by such people ‘in bringing about a friendly intercourse’ with indigenes elsewhere.³⁴ His friend Bungaree, in particular, worked to soothe potential misunderstandings, attempt lin­guistic translation, acquire native foods and demonstrate alternative fishing methods using spear rather than line. Not the least of his contributions was also in serving as a confidant to the high-ranking Flinders, when British social mores of the time forbade intimate friendship between Britons of differing classes. Bungaree’s very indigeneity, that is, helped Flinders sidestep his own culture’s dictates.³⁵

Baudin was less lucky than Flinders, no doubt largely because he lacked as secure access to indigenous guides. Baudin also seemed to have a less successful relationship with the indigenes whom he encountered: on the western coast of the Australian mainland and also in Van Diemen’s Land, Baudin’s ships faced either terrified fleeing Aborigines or angry spear-throwers. Rarely did they witness moments of exchange or promise. This hurt all the more because the French knew they were on the back foot in Australia and felt the only option left for them in order to make inroads against Britain’s advantage was to appear to the indigenous population ‘more philanthropic than their colonial rivals’.³⁶ Baudin’s failure to make up for both Marion Du Fresne’s and La Perouse’s earlier failures meant that, into the nineteenth century, the new world of Australia did not witness the same kind of European rivalries as had occurred in America.

Oddly, Baudin himself bucked the familiar story by now of Europeans losing their rose- tinted glasses about Austral-Pacific peoples through interaction with native populations. Rather, upon further experience, he came to question the entire enterprise of seeking advantage in their lands, because of their increasingly obvious claim, to him, on ownership in the first place. After two years of witnessing the respective lives of Aboriginals and British settlers, Baudin wrote to Governor King:

To my thinking, I have never been able to conceive that there was justice and equity on the part of the Europeans in seizing, in the name of their Governments, a land seen for the first time, when it is inhabited by men who have not always deserved the title of savages or cannibals which has been given them, whilst they were children of nature just as little civilised as are now your Scottish Highlanders or our peasants of Brittany... It follows therefore that not only have you to reproach yourselves with an injustice in seizing their land, but also in transporting on to a soil where the crimes and diseases of Europeans were unknown all that could retard the progress of civilization, which has served as a pretext to your Government.³⁷

In other areas of Oceania, European seizure was not on the cards. In places such as Hawaii, well into the nineteenth century, indigenous action, demography and geography counted against the possibility of installing European ‘government’ at all. A preternaturally clear comprehension of European designs allowed one would-be Hawaiian ruler, Kame- hameha, to forestall any contest for his archipelago. As an aspiring chief, Kamehameha first encountered European imperialism during Cook’s last voyage to the Pacific in 1779. During that encounter, he learned much about some of the advantages of European shipbuilding as well as the desperation the newcomers always seemed to evince for obtaining certain trading goods, such as sandalwood and fur. Kamehameha forced the seizure of several European trading vessels that landed in Hawaii during the 1780s and 1790s, as well as the seizure of several Europeans themselves off these trading vessels—sailors-turned-beachcombers-turned-captives who were forced to teach him how to manoeuvre their ships and arms. By 1810 Kamehameha had crowned himself king, unified the disparate islands of the archipelago and established Hawaii as a key port for all sorts of European traders. Offering sandalwood, otter furs and eventually pineapple and coffee, while at the same time forbidding the ownership of land by any foreigner, Kamehameha laid the foundations for one of the most virulent defences against empire anywhere in Oceania. Other than a brief incursion in 1843, Hawaii remained relatively independent until its takeover by the United States in 1898.