Sea of Glory

by Nathaniel Philbrick

  If the landscape was reminiscent of many of the islands they had already seen, the inhabitants were something altogether different. It wasn’t just that the Fijians were bigger and more muscular, with darker skin and curlier hair than the Polynesians; it was the way they presented themselves to this already nervous group of Papalangi, the Fijian word for white people. With a huge club resting on his shoulder, a Fijian warrior made a most intimidating sight. “[T]hey were fine specimens of men . . . ,” Reynolds wrote, “begrimed with dirt, daubed with red paint & soot, the ear slit, & hanging down to the shoulder, with a bone or shell thrust in the hole, hair frizzled out to a most grotesque extent from the head, dyed of various hues & teeming with life; naked, save a girdle of Tappa around the loins, they presented a spectacle of mingled hideous-ness & ferocity that well becomes the character they have earned for themselves.”

  Reynolds and his fellow officers began to notice that there were few old people in the village. They later learned that there was a simple reason for this. When it became clear that a man or woman was getting along in years, his or her son dug a grave and strangled the aged parent to death. It was not judged to be an act of cruelty; it was simply the way things were done in Fiji, a place where the value of a human life was said to equal a single sperm whale’s tooth. When a chief died, his many wives were put to death. Prior to the launching of a chief’s war canoe, the vessel’s deck was washed in human blood while the victims’ bodies were used as rollers to help launch the canoe into the sea.

  If tales such as these had a chilling effect on the officers and men of the Expedition, Reynolds soon discovered that as far as the Fijian children were concerned, he was the terrifying one. At one point he approached several youngsters, who ran away screaming to their parents. “And we, who can easily conjure up fright at the sight of a Savage,” he wrote, “do not so readily understand why a Savage (even if it be a Baby) should be terrified of us.”

  Fiji is part of Melanesia, or “the dark islands,” a term first coined by Dumont d’Urville to describe the skin color of the inhabitants of the islands stretching from Fiji to New Guinea to the west. The group appears to have been first settled by the same band of proto-Polynesian voyagers who would push on to Tonga and Samoa sometime around 800 B.C. About A.D. 1100, Fiji seems to have undergone a radical change. Whether it was due to the arrival of a new, more aggressive people or the result of a rise in population that led to increasing competition for natural resources, life on Fiji became decidedly more violent. In fact, warfare appears to have become a way of life. Circular forts were built just about everywhere, and cannibalism became one of the fundamental institutions of the islands. In the words of one archeologist, “man was the most popular of the vertebrate animals used for food.”

  In 1808, Fiji underwent another radical change with the arrival of a Swedish sailor appropriately named Charlie Savage. Along with some shipwrecked pals and a large supply of firearms, Savage and his cohorts introduced a more technologically advanced kind of killing to the islands, eventually hiring themselves out to Naulivou, the chief of the tiny island of Bau, just off the southeastern shore of Viti Levu. Naulivou used his newfound advantage to consolidate his position as the most powerful ruler in Fiji. In just five years, Savage’s brutal arrogance caught up with him, and he was killed and eaten at Vanua Levu. But his disturbing legacy lived on, with a succession of sailors serving as what became known as the chiefs’ “tame white men.”

  When Wilkes arrived in Fiji, the most prominent of these white men was a former Nantucketer named David Whippy. Whippy had been living in Fiji for eighteen years and had several native wives. When he paddled up to the Vincennes soon after the squadron’s arrival at Ovalau, Whippy was accompanied by one of his many children. Despite having begun his career in Fiji as a musket-toting mercenary, Whippy had gained a well-deserved reputation for reliability—not a common trait among the beachcombers of the Pacific. Attaching himself to the chief of Levuka, Whippy had earned the title of “Mata-ki-Bau” or Royal Messenger to Bau, and his close connection to this native power center would enable him to offer Wilkes essential advice during the squadron’s stay in Fiji. Wilkes decided to send a message to the current chief of Bau, Naulivou’s brother Tanoa, asking that he visit him at Levuka. He then hastily organized a climb up the nearby peak of Nadelaiovalau, so as to introduce the officers and scientists to the geography of the island group.

  At 7:30 A.M. the party of twenty-five officers and naturalists, along with Whippy and a large group of natives, began the more than two-thousand-foot climb. Almost two years at sea had left them ill prepared for such a demanding hike. “I have seldom witnessed a party so helpless as ourselves appeared,” Wilkes wrote, “in comparison with the natives and white residents, who ran over the rocks like goats.” Before long, both Hudson and Passed Midshipman Henry Eld, two of the larger officers in the squadron, were too winded to continue.

  As they scrambled up the perpendicular cliffs, Wilkes noticed that the natives would occasionally pull a leaf from a tree and throw it to the ground. Whippy explained that this was done as an act of propitiation wherever a man had been clubbed to death. “Judging from the number of places in which these atonements were made,” Wilkes wrote, “many victims have suffered in this way.”

  By noon they had reached the summit. To the west the interior valleys of Ovalau were dotted with villages and patches of cultivated land, along with groves of coconut and breadfruit trees. In the distance to the north, they could see the “fantastic needle-shaped peaks” of Vanua Levu, almost sixty miles away. Directly below them to the east, the Vincennes and the Peacock sat quietly at anchor. Wilkes and his officers turned their attention to the sea surrounding the island, where they could easily identify the pattern of reefs extending for miles in every direction. The officers went to work with their instruments, creating a group of preliminary sketches that would prove invaluable in the weeks ahead. Darkness was already approaching when they began the descent, and the natives created torches made of dried coconut leaves to light the way.

  Wilkes spent much of the next day organizing two surveying parties, each comprising two boats. The first, led by James Alden, would follow the north shore of Viti Levu, while the second, led by George Emmons, would take the south shore, with the two parties eventually meeting at the island of Malolo to the west of Viti Levu. Word had just reached the squadron that a crewmember aboard the Salem bêche-de-mer vessel Leonidas had recently been killed by natives. Adding to Wilkes’s concerns for his men’s safety was the Fijian custom of taking any vessel that had been driven on shore and killing all on board. Wilkes issued written orders prohibiting the survey crews from landing and requiring that the two boat-crews always remain within signaling distance.

  Much to Wilkes’s relief, the Flying Fish finally arrived at Levuka. The schooner had grounded on a reef and lost part of her false keel but sustained no serious damage. Given that Wilkes had virtually abandoned the vessel in the middle of a gale in the middle of the Fijis, it was remarkable that her commander, George Sinclair, had managed to find his way to Ovalau. This did not prevent Wilkes from giving him “a severe rebuke.” Sinclair could only shake his head. “[V]erily I do not know what to make of the man,” he wrote; “he can’t be pleased.”

  The next day, Wilkes learned that his diplomatic gamble had paid off. Even though Whippy had doubted that Tanoa, “King of Bau,” would accept Wilkes’s invitation to call upon him, it was reported that the chief’s magnificent, hundred-foot outrigger canoe had been sighted rounding the southern point of Ovalau. With a huge sail made of white mats, the canoe traveled at speeds that were, according to Wilkes, “almost inconceivable.” The two hulls were ornamented with thousands of white shells; pennants streamed from the tips of the masts as Tanoa’s crew of forty Tongans, renowned for their sailing abilities, maneuvered the canoe through the harbor and landed on the beach.

  In becoming Fiji’s most powerful leader, Tanoa had gained a reputation for violence and b
rutality that was matched only by his ambitious son Seru. Several years after a coup temporarily forced his father into exile, Seru had orchestrated the bloody uprising that brought Tanoa back to power in 1837. Just a few months before, Tanoa and Seru had led an attack on the rival town of Verata, killing an estimated 260 men, women, and children. During their return to Bau, the chiefs had ordered that thirty captured children (all of them still alive) be placed in baskets and hoisted to the mastheads of their fleet of war canoes to serve as grim victory pennants. As the canoes tossed in the lumpy seas, the children were slammed repeatedly against the vessels’ masts. By the time the fleet reached Bau, the children were dead.

  But it wasn’t just the acts of violence that had established Tanoa’s and Seru’s reputations; there were also the inevitable claims of cannibalism. Several of the white residents insisted that they had witnessed these terrifying rituals. Some of the more graphic accounts of cannibalism came from the handful of missionaries who had recently established themselves in Fiji. One of them told how Seru had lopped off and roasted the arms and legs of two captive warriors, then forced them to eat their own body parts.

  Many of the Expedition’s officers and scientists remained skeptical of these accounts. Then, as now, there were those who insisted that rumors of cannibalism were nothing more than the white man’s worst nightmare projected onto an innocent native people. Having heard Captain Pollard’s firsthand account of the Essex disaster, Wilkes knew better than most that a mariner’s obsessive fear of cannibalism began not with the natives of the South Pacific but with the sensational yarns told in the forecastle of a ship. To their credit, the officers and scientists of the Ex. Ex. would delay judgment until they were presented with incontrovertible proof of the practice.

  When Tanoa, dressed only in a large turban of white tapa and a small maro tied around his loins, appeared on the deck of the Vincennes, he hardly seemed capable of the many disturbing acts that had been attributed to him. Thin, with a long gray beard and a high-pitched voice, the king was so unsettled by the gigantic size of the sloop-of-war that he insisted on hugging the ship’s taffrail as he made his way to Wilkes on the quarterdeck. With Whippy serving as an interpreter, Wilkes was able to persuade Tanoa to sign a trade agreement similar to one that had been adopted at Samoa. Afterward, several of the Vincennes’s cannons were fired for the chief’s benefit, followed by a demonstration of the marines’ marching skills—performed to the tune of “The King of the Cannibal Islands.”

  Just a few days later, Wilkes was in the midst of his observations and experiments at Levuka when he was interrupted by a man whom he at first took to be a Fijian, but who turned out to be a deeply tanned former sailor named Paddy O’Connell. Originally from County Clare, Ireland, Paddy had been living in Fiji for more than forty years. He proudly told Wilkes that he had fathered forty-eight children and hoped to reach an even fifty before he died. For reasons Paddy did not want to go into, he had been banished from the community of white residents at Levuka, but was now offering his services to Wilkes and the Expedition.

  Upon hearing Paddy’s account of some of his adventures, Wilkes informed him that he “did not believe a word of it.” But when Paddy claimed he had been an eyewitness to the massacre of the mate and crewmembers of the American bêche-de-mer trader Charles Doggett in 1834, the beachcomber soon had Wilkes’s attention. It was an incident that had been documented in petitions to the U.S. government, and even though the murders had occurred six years before, Wilkes resolved to bring the perpetrator, a chief named Veidovi, to justice. Veidovi lived at Rewa, a region in Viti Levu to which Wilkes had already dispatched the Peacock, and Wilkes instructed O’Connell to set out immediately with a packet of sealed orders for Captain Hudson.

  It wasn’t long before Hudson had laid his trap. On May 21, he invited the current king of Rewa, along with his three brothers (one of whom was Veidovi), to a special reception aboard the Peacock. More than a hundred natives were crowded aboard the warship, but Veidovi was not one of them. Hudson ushered the three chiefs into his cabin for a feast. The natives were in high spirits until Hudson ordered the drum beat to quarters. Sentries suddenly appeared at the cabin door, and the members of the royal party were separated from their attendants. Hudson explained that he had no quarrel with any of them, but that he had been ordered to secure Veidovi for the murder of the white men aboard the Charles Doggett.

  The king was outraged. “His blood was up,” Reynolds wrote, “and it was as much as he could do to keep his passions from breaking out.” “Why had he been thus trapped like a bird?” the king asked. “Why had not the Captain asked him for his Brother, when he was free?” Hudson firmly insisted that they would all be released once Veidovi had been delivered to the Peacock. Reluctantly the king ordered one of his brothers “to go to the Town & take Veidovi, alive if he could, but if he resisted, to kill him & bring the body.”

  Early the next morning a canoe was sighted sailing toward the Peacock. Realizing that it was the only way to free his brothers and their wives, Veidovi had agreed to accompany his brother back to the Peacock. As soon as he stepped aboard, Veidovi impressed everyone with his regal and solemn bearing. “[H]e was very much dejected,” Reynolds wrote, “and this additional gloom threw a more mournful cast over his countenance.” Hudson conducted a council in his cabin, where he questioned Veidovi about his role in the killings. The chief freely admitted to the murders, recounting how in hopes of securing some firearms, he had pretended to greet the unsuspecting mate of the Charles Doggett in friendship, then grabbed and held him while his warriors clubbed him to death. “All that he had to say,” Reynolds wrote, “was ‘that he had only followed the Fegee customs & done what his people had often done before.’”

  Hudson announced Veidovi’s punishment: instead of being executed, he would be taken back to the United States; after several years in America, he would be returned to Fiji, having become “a better man, and with the Knowledge, that to kill a white person was the very worst thing a Feegee man could do.” Reynolds had his doubts about the efficacy of the sentence, especially when one of Veidovi’s brothers said that “he supposed all he would have to do was to kill white men and then the Men of War would come, carry him to America & bring him back, richer than when they had taken him away.”

  But for Veidovi, who only a few hours before had been a great chief with fifty-five wives and dozens of children, the sentence was a terrible blow. His brothers were also deeply affected, weeping and kissing him on the forehead. One of Veidovi’s attendants asked to remain with his master, but Hudson steadfastly refused. Only after Veidovi had placed both his manacled hands on the young man’s head did the attendant finally leave the ship.

  The capture of Veidovi had almost immediate repercussions. Word traveled fast in Fiji, and before the end of the day, natives arrived in Levuka with the news. Whippy, whom Wilkes had failed to consult about his decision to take Veidovi, was deeply disturbed. He explained that the chiefs of Rewa and Bau were related through intermarriage, and he thought it likely that Tanoa and Seru might launch a surprise attack and attempt to take Wilkes prisoner, “as it was their custom to retaliate by procuring the capture of the highest chief.” In less than a day, he warned, a fleet of canoes with more than a thousand warriors might arrive at Levuka.

  Wilkes, the Stormy Petrel, had impulsively, and needlessly, acted to heighten tensions in an island group where even in its most halcyon days the threat of violence was omnipresent. For the duration of their stay in Fiji, the officers and men of the Ex. Ex. would have to be doubly wary of attack.

  Wilkes thought it prudent to reposition the Vincennes so that the observatory at Levuka might be more easily defended with her guns. Once it had become clear that a strike by Tanoa was not imminent, Wilkes set out on a surveying trip aboard the Flying Fish.

  In addition to an armory’s worth of pistols, muskets, blunderbusses, and cutlasses, Wilkes brought along his own personal deterrent to native violence: his dog, Sydney.
Everywhere Wilkes went, whether afloat or ashore, Sydney was never far away. The Newfoundland liked to stand at the gig’s bow, and as soon as the boat touched the beach, the dog leaped onto the sand and chased away any nearby natives. As Wilkes conducted his observations surrounded by an armed guard, Sydney prowled about the area, growling menacingly if anyone dared approach. “I think I owe my life to him . . . ,” Wilkes later recalled. “The natives were all very much afraid of him, and a word from me would have caused him to seize any of them. . . . It may easily be conceived the attachment I had for him and his love for his master.”

  In the middle of June, Wilkes received word that they were not the only exploring expedition in Fiji. A British squadron led by Captain Edward Belcher had recently arrived at Rewa. One of Belcher’s vessels had lost its rudder on a reef, and Wilkes offered to provide some spare gudgeons. The British had spent the previous summer in the Pacific Northwest, and since this was one of the intended destinations of the U.S. Ex. Ex., Wilkes was eager to learn as much as he could about the region. But when Wilkes arrived at Rewa, Belcher appeared less than pleased to see him.

  Belcher had just been forced to pay the port charges required by Wilkes’s newly instituted trade regulations, and he wasn’t happy about it. He was also reluctant to reveal anything about his experience on the west coast of North America. He did say, however, that summer was the only suitable time to visit the region. As it was now already the middle of June, Wilkes realized that he would have to add another full year to the Expedition if he was to survey the Columbia River.