by Robert Booth
As the names of Burrows, Lawrence, Hull, Bainbridge, and Decatur passed gloriously into history, the name of David Porter faded away, vanished from the theater of war and the pantheon of heroes, evidently lost at sea.
Porter’s fleet made an impressive parade of vessels crossing the broad ocean. In battle formation, with no enemy in sight, they surged through the gorgeous days under a dome “of the most delicate blue, except along the skirts of the horizon, where you might see a thin drapery of pale clouds which never varied their form or color. The long, measured, dirge-like swell of the Pacific came rolling along, with its surface broken by little tiny waves, sparkling in the sunshine. Every now and then a shoal of flying fish, scared from the water under the bows, would leap into the air and fall the next moment like a shower of silver into the sea.” Tuna, whales, and sharks would appear, and “at times, some shapeless monster of the deep, floating on the surface, would, as we approached, sink slowly into the blue waters and fade away from sight. But the most impressive feature of the scene was the almost unbroken silence that reigned over sky and water.”
For the men, with enlistments expired and enduring the longest cruise in American naval history, the beauty of the Pacific was the backdrop to daily military drills at the great guns, at small arms, and at the game of single stick—swordplay done with wood, not steel, to hone their skills in boarding. As usual, they did not know their exact destination, although their captain had told them why they were disappearing into Polynesia: “Firstly, that we may put the ship in a suitable condition to enable us to take advantage of the most favorable season for our return home; Secondly, I am desirous that you should have some relaxation and amusement after being so long at sea, as from your late good conduct you deserve it.”
He warned them about the dangerous, faithless beings they would soon encounter, whose smiles and friendliness masked a ruthless blood-lust but whose women were fair game. His men perked up instantly at this message; all of them, from fuzzy midshipmen to grizzled tars, had heard tales—or were they legends?—about the naked ladies of the tropical islands, so free with their favors. Now, as they closed in on the summer isles, their endless cruise was charged with excitement. The party had almost started; the girls were nearly real. “Everyone imagined them Venuses and amply indulged themselves in fancied bliss, impatient of our arrival at that Cytherean Paradise where all their wishes were to be gratified.” Presumably Porter did not interview them about their imaginings; he was projecting his own.
In his journal, Porter indulged in other, more extensive fantasies. He was careful to shape his saga as an epic triumph, full of great victories over man and nature—and over the ghost of Lord George Anson. He was the first U.S. Navy captain to enter the Pacific, the eclipser of Anson in the annals of oceanic glory, and the rival of Captain Cook himself. He was a conqueror and the object of the enemy’s obsessions, with a British squadron on its way. In the unwinding narrative of the cruise that he was creating, he, the author, suspected that the best part—the moment of truth, the chance for abounding glory—was yet to come, however it would happen, however it might end.
In the catalog of his achievements, foremost was the break-up of the British whale fishery, by which he claimed to have “deprived the enemy of property in the amount of two and a half millions of dollars, and of the services of 360 seamen” who were “not to serve against the United States until regularly exchanged.” He had also protected American whalers. The Essex Junior had convoyed four of them, along with “my prize the Policy,” from Valparaiso out to sea “a sufficient distance beyond the usual cruising grounds of British armed ships” so as to “take advantage of the winter season for getting into a port of the United States.” Charleston, South Carolina, the nearest such port, was eight thousand miles away and heavily blockaded.
He had hurt the enemy in several ways, including the expense and diversion of the squadron that had been sent after him, if they were still afloat. “Whether the said ships will succeed in doubling Cape Horn, or meet the fate of Lord Anson’s squadron, time alone will show,” wrote Porter, as if rounding the Horn were not a regular event for hundreds of smaller vessels in recent years. He went so far as to deny that these reportedly “dull sailers” from the Royal Navy could ever pose a threat to the Essex, “even if they should all keep together and fall in with her; and if they should cruise separately they will have more to fear from our enterprise than we have to apprehend from theirs.”
In toting up the value of his Pacific cruise, Porter dealt in sensational figures: $2.5 million in prizes and cargoes taken; $2.5 million in American vessels “which would in all probability have been captured had we not arrived”; and $250,000 in British squadron costs for “equipping and employing in one year one frigate, two sloops of war, and a store-ship”—all told, $5.17 million, having deducted the one-year expenses of the Essex at $80,000, or about the cost of outfitting the voyage of a whaleship. Porter’s exaggerated numbers were also completely hypothetical;* not one penny had yet been realized in exchange for the prizes and their cargoes.
During this peaceful Pacific crossing, he wrote about himself as a patriot, motivated by damaging the enemy, but he could not restrain his Anson-mania and his money-lust, in which he asserted the rights of the predator, himself, versus the interests of his country.† It was too tantalizing, too close to being real, not to think obsessively about the value of the British whalers and their oil, of which his share as captain was 8.5 percent, or a cool $227,500, at a time that a first-rate full-rigged ship sold for $20,000. The problem—the great problem—was the lack of useful markets in the Pacific; but such markets might be found in Asia and perhaps Europe, and surely in the United States.
On a sunny day in late October 1813, the Essex made landfall in the outermost islands of the Washington Group of the Marquesas. The Marquesas were not an accidental destination: a Polynesian orgy was a major goal of this cruise, as had been made explicit in the Atlantic.* Porter’s men had not clamored for such an opportunity; rather, Porter had offered it out of the pent-up desires inspired by accounts of European visitors to Oceania. He was determined to live out the fantasy, however awkward the circumstances. Also it galled him terribly that the French and English had ignored the primacy of the American “discovery” of these singular Pacific islands. It was true that the southern part of the Marquesas had first been visited by Spaniards in the 1500s and then again by Captain Cook in the 1760s, but the northern group of islands was first reached by outsiders in May 1791 with the arrival of Captain Joseph Ingraham and the crew of the Hope, of Boston. A year later, Captain Josiah Roberts, also of Boston, looking to trade for sandalwood, had sailed into the same group, which he had explored, described, named, and dubbed collectively the Washington Islands. With no one to dissuade him, Porter could imagine that the Marquesas were a strategic asset for whichever great power wanted an expansive presence in the Pacific. He told himself that Congress would wish for him to “do justice to the discovery of Mr. Ingraham” so that “posterity will know them only as Washington’s Group.” Natives, even those with two thousand years of occupancy, had no standing in this; it was a Western competition, and Porter knew that winning the war of words was a key to successful imperialism, ratified by treaties and books yet only secured by conquest.
Porter assumed that the British squadron sailing in pursuit of him had arrived at Valparaiso in late July, and that he was safe hiding out in paradise, trying to decide if he wanted to flee west into the Orient. But now that he had arrived, the Marquesas gambit was complicated by the Marquesans themselves, who were not fantasies. Though lusting for orgies, Porter feared these people; his habitual low-grade paranoia struggled with his swollen libido. With “savages” abounding, a Marquesan island was not a good site for refitting vessels; it introduced a specter of bloodshed that did not exist on uninhabited islands such as the Galápagos, where, since he had cleaned out the whaling fleet, he would have been free, months before, to smoke out rats and make repair
s. But the Galápagos had iguanas, and Porter wanted girls.
Next day, Porter dropped down to steep-sided Ua Huka (“Ruahuga, called by us Adams’ Island,” he wrote), which was a summit, like all the Marquesas, of an immense volcanic mountain range at the northeastern edge of Polynesia. Only Easter Island, with its staring stone heads, stands farther to the east. It seemed “barren and desolate” at first, but then the mariners were thrilled at the sight of “fertile valleys, whose beauties were heightened by the pleasant streams and clusters of houses, and intervened by groups of natives on the hills inviting us to land.” As the Essex rounded a point, a canoe came off toward them “with eight of the natives, one of whom was seated in the bow with his head ornamented with some yellow leaves.” A Tahitian on board the Essex, Tamaha, spoke a tongue similar to theirs, and eventually he communicated Porter’s invitation to trade. Positioning the canoe under the frigate’s high stern, they received a bucket full of metal items and sent up a few fish and “a belt made of the fibers of the cocoanut, garnished with the small teeth of a hog.” They smiled and kept urging, Taya, taya, friends, friends, and invited the strangers to the shore, “where,” Porter was quick to notice, “they assured us, by the most expressive gesticulations, that the vahienas, or women, were entirely at our service.”
Porter had brought along a box of sperm-whale teeth that, he understood, were irresistible to these men, who “were entirely naked, and their chief ornament consisted in the dark and fanciful lines formed by tattooing, which covered them.” Looking much closer, Porter saw that “the foreskin of their privates was drawn so close over and tied with a strip of bark as to force that member entirely into their bodies, and gave them a strange and unnatural appearance.” When he flashed a couple of whale’s teeth, the boaters “promised to return to the shore and bring us in exchange for them fruit and vahienas; not, however, before I had assured them that, as an additional compensation, I would cause their heads and privates to be shaved,” for this, Porter had somehow discerned, “was what they seemed most to desire.”
He finished at Ua Huka with a visit to another cove and a beachfront gathering of three women and about fifty tattooed men. From the shallows, standing in his longboat, Porter could observe these tall, handsome, smiling people, who “made altogether no inelegant appearance.” Some were “highly ornamented” with plumes of black feathers, large gorgets, white fans, and a kind of cloak formed of white paper-like cloth. Tattooing, he would find, was pervasive, inscribed by sharks-teeth needles. Women were lightly marked, with some dots or fine lines and a tree-form or plant on a hip; men, starting with a few swirls and ovals in boyhood, were adorned until they wore an entire suit of beautiful skin designs. Geometric and also representational, these traditional symbolic patterns and colors varied with each individual, and the skin of an older man might be entirely blackened from the density of his tattoos.
Porter cheerfully “gave to each a small present; but they had no article to offer in return but their women: and as two of them were not more than sixteen years of age, and both handsome, they no doubt considered them the most acceptable present they could offer us.” The girls, thought Porter, “showed no disinclination to grant every favor we might be disposed to ask; and to render themselves the more attractive, they retired and soon appeared clad in clean and, no doubt, their best attire, which consisted of a white and thin paper cloth, which enveloped their whole persons, with the exception of one arm and breast: and this simple drapery, when contrasted with the nakedness of the men, gave them an appearance of grace and modesty that we had little expected to find among savages.”* After a lifetime of fantasies, Porter now came face-to-face with the reality: two sweet sixteen-year-old “savages” offered up as objects for his sexual gratification. For once, however, something like conscience overtook him, and he decided that he did not need to degrade himself and his men, that maybe he had misjudged these friendly people and that there was more to them than he had understood.
The girls warily entered the strangers’ boat, but soon relaxed. The men were greatly amused by their innocent cavorting, and returned them to the beach to their own people. Porter grasped that “their modesty was more evident than that of the women of any place we have visited since leaving our own country; and if they suffered themselves (although with apparent timidity and reluctance) to be presented naked to strangers, may it not be in compliance with a custom which teached them to sacrifice to hospitality all that is most estimable?”
A night of heavy squalls ensued, and then Porter departed for Madison’s Island, the largest in the group—Nukuhiva, or Nooaheevah, as it was pronounced—a gray-green mass rising from the sea not far to the west.† Twelve miles wide at most points, Nukuhiva presented a spectacular appearance, all steep mountains and valleys, with seaside cliffs. On first encounter, “the land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in the scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of the clouds were confounded with the articulations of the mountain; and the isle and its insubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass.” Approaching on the south side, Porter looked in at Comptroller’s Bay—large but open to the sea—and decided to enter the next one, about nine miles in circumference, approached “by a narrow entrance flanked on either side by two small twin islets”—the Sentinels—“which soar conically to the height of some five hundred feet.” The view from the inside was spectacular: “a vast natural ampitheatre in decay, and overgrown with vines, [with] deep glens that furrowed its sides appearing like enormous fissures caused by the ravages of time.”
Shortly after anchoring near the entrance, Porter was amazed to see three white men in a whaleboat, one of them “perfectly naked” except for a loincloth, and “his body was all over tattooed.” Deciding that they were reprobate “seamen who had deserted from some vessels here,” he ignored their shouts of joy, which, after a while, trailed off in abject despair. At last, the three pulled away toward the beach in doomed silence, followed by several native canoes. Porter sent some marines in boats to save them, just in time; and all were astonished when one of the bushy-bearded brown beachcombers spoke up and identified himself as John M. Maury, a midshipman of the U.S. Navy. The near-fatal incident was an indication that the islands were a different world, to be understood in their own terms and not judged by assumptions. Maury explained that he had been marooned for nearly two years after a botched sandalwood voyage. He introduced the others as an American seaman, Baker, and a veteran islander named Wilson, an Englishman who had gone native.
Porter took an immediate shine to Wilson, whom he thought “an inoffensive, honest, good-hearted fellow.” On the spot, Porter made this rum-soaked Briton his translator and advisor for dealing with the islanders.* Translation, in all its meanings, was essential to the cooperation of the two peoples, but Porter came to Nukuhiva as a western conquistador among savages, while to the Enana, as they called themselves, he was an unwelcome stranger, the leader of a tribe of wandering white men with unknown intentions, whom they believed had come from the moon. Porter, typically, had misjudged Wilson, who would prove to be his equal in talent for misrepresentation.
Wanting to socialize, Porter walked up to a group of natives, and “all their apprehensions seemed to cease: the women, who had retired at a distance, came down to join the male natives; and even the landing of the marines, as well as the rest of the party, did not seem to occasion any uneasiness among them.” These people were of the Teii tribe, and this was their valley and their bay, which was rapidly filling up with ships from Porter’s fleet. Noticing that the steep hills were “covered with numerous groups of natives,” Porter learned from Wilson that they were the “warlike” Hapa’a, “residing beyond the mountains, [who] had been for several weeks at war with the natives of the valley.”
Porter decided that he, the new lord of the isles, was
the protector of the Teii and the enemy of the Hapa’a. War being his business, he sent an incendiary message to the cliffs: “I have come with a force sufficiently strong to drive you from the island: and if you presume to enter the valley while I remain there, I shall send a body of men to chastise you; you must cease all hostilities so long as I remain among you; and, if you have hogs or fruit to dispose of, you might come and trade freely with us, as I shall not permit the natives of the valley to injure or molest you.”
Porter, through Wilson, and backed by his phalanx of marines, turned to address his naked Teii allies, urging them to “look on us as brethren: and I shall protect you against the Happahs should they again venture to descend from the mountains.” Leave your spears, slings, and clubs at home, he told them, “so that we might know [you] from the Happahs.” With a little more oratorical persuasion, they dropped their weapons. Porter was ecstatic at their compliance; he had achieved a coup without one shot fired in anger, and he now thought it possible to create a permanent American outpost in the Pacific.
Porter found that his speechmaking had proved a lot more interesting to his new friends than to his marines, who had “formed with the female part of the community an intimacy” in the houses and the bushes. Although Porter’s horny stalwarts had defied his orders, he did not blame them, for “if an allowance can be made for a departure from prudential measures,” he wrote, “it is when a handsome and sprightly girl of sixteen, whose almost every charm [is] exposed to view, invites to follow her.”