by Robert Booth
The U.S. Navy frigate Essex, anchored just off the beach of the village, had been sealed tight and thoroughly smoked with cauldrons of char coal in every part of every deck and hold, resulting in great piles of dead rodents. With the rats gone, the men spent days caulking the seams and making various repairs such as scraping clean the bottom of her hull and refastening her copper sheathing to ensure maximum speed for any conditions in the Pacific. “Among other defects,” reported Porter, “we found her main-top-mast in a very decayed state.” This mast, fitted into the top of the mainmast, carried the uppermost sails and enabled her to reach full speed even in light winds. In storms and in battles, the loss of the main topmast was often a fatal blow, for it might crash through the rigging and bring down the mainsails and mainmast with it. The Essex carried a spare.
The refitting of the Essex went on “with order and regularity,” wrote Porter. “Every person was employed to the best advantage, and yet all were allowed sufficient time for amusement and relaxation.” The men engaged in sports like wrestling, spear throwing, long jumping, and quoit pitching. This they did in preference to certain other activities, of which they had had enough, according to their captain.
“The girls, who had formerly engrossed the whole of their leisure time, were now less attended to, and indeed were frequently reduced to the necessity of suing, in vain.”
*Most commentators consider Porter’s numbers to have been inflated by a factor of two or three.
†Porter expressed greed as a first principle in his journal: “The object of the government is to injure the enemy; it derives no advantage from captures, however valuable they may prove; by our captures we have effected the object of government, and whether we sell or destroy them is of importance only to ourselves.” In fact, the government had a large financial stake in all of this, for it claimed half the value of any captured vessel and cargo at the time of sale.
*In Porter’s journal, the Marquesas are first mentioned during his Galápagos sojourn as the getaway place of his quasi alter ego, the infamous island hermit Red Patrick, sailing off in the imaginary Black Prince.
*Porter was so taken with this first view of a beautiful island girl that he drew a picture, which appeared as an engraving in the first edition of his published journal.
†Today the island’s name is spelled Nukuhiva or Nuku Hiva, but the internal “k” sound was evolving in the dialect, and in 1813 was usually pronounced with a vestigial “ng” sound, as in Nu’ahiva or Nooaheevah, as Porter and other English speakers invariably spelled it. The author uses the standard spelling except when referring to the American sailors.
*Enana was the name for “the people” in the northern Marquesas; in the southern islands they were Enata.
*This was the first time in his journal that Porter mentioned the name of the Tayee (Teii).
Chapter Ten
Taipi
Captain David Porter, the godlike Opotee, had a brand-new village full of fruit and hogs sent to him by the interior tribes. Amid all the activity, however, he had not missed an insult. Temaa Tipee, chief of the Shoueme clan, could not get his caravan past blockades in the Taipi Valley. Having demanded fealty from all, Porter could not allow the Taipi to oppose him, since, he wrote, “their example might change the conduct of others.” Porter commanded a force of 200 on an island of perhaps 20,000 native men. It would not take much, he thought, for them to turn against him. Mouina, thinking of plunder, urged immediate reprisals; Gattenewa, pensive, finally pronounced that the Taipi were not aware of the effects of Opotee’s weapons “and must not suffer in consequence of their ignorance.”
Porter allowed Gattanewa’s son to warn the Taipi of their peril. Two days later he returned with the message that the Teii and the Hapa’a were cowards and that Opotee and his men were “white lizards, mere dirt,” the butts and balls of the Teii, contemptible othouah boasting about “chastising” a people who, “as their gods informed them, were never to be beaten.” The Taipi leaders dared Opotee to find out how much they feared his guns.
Gattanewa himself now called for war, and Mouina stomped into the American village “boiling with rage” and spoiling for action. Porter took his time, slowly marshaling his forces and commissioning a fleet of twenty war canoes and construction of a fort on the hill by his village. As the natives labored, he lectured them—through his English interpreter Wilson—about the evil empire of Great Britain, and why it was their enemy as well as his. Overseen by a few of Porter’s officers, the native workers leveled the top of a hill and made a breastwork out of dirt-filled casks, leaving embrasures for sixteen guns. “All worked with zeal, and, as the friendly tribes were coming in with presents, all joined in the labor,” while their “chiefs requested that they might be admitted on the same footing as the Tayees.” Opotee responded with a civics lesson about “the nature of our government,” after which Gattanewa “requested that they might not only be our friends and brothers, but our countrymen.”
Porter had taken on and resolved many problems at Nukuhiva: the resistance of friendly tribes, an escape plot by his British prisoners, a budding mutiny, and neglect of duty by marine sentries, a problem he solved by shooting a sleeping man through the meat of his thigh. He had not, however, imagined how the weeks might change his understanding of the islanders. The Enana, he concluded, were entirely admirable; in many ways, they had an ideal society, and he was proud, on this American-discovered island, to be the first to see how they might fit into the larger scheme. American commerce would be expanding in the Pacific, with great possibilities for development, colonization, and exploitation. From the Albatros, for example, traders George Ross and William Brudenell had come ashore with their stock, prepared to spend years there as sandalwood agents for their Philadelphia merchant house. Many others, on many other islands, would follow. Someday the Pacific would become a major battleground, economic and perhaps military, in which the United States ought to prevail. With flags flying and guns bristling, Porter’s new fortress bade defiance to all comers and dominated—and defended—the Teii in their seaside town. But Fort Madison was something bigger than that, he realized; it was an outpost of his nation, an American beacon in the Pacific.
Porter had come many thousands of miles to exploit the Enana women sexually, and now he was prepared to stay for a while, amusing himself by meddling in tribal matters and using force if he thought it necessary. Porter the sexual predator had become Porter the conqueror, the possessor. It was strange, this turn toward imperialism, but he had no conscience about such matters and no orders to guide him. He was the law wherever he went, thanks to his guns, and he saw no need to try to understand “the Indians,” although he liked and admired them. He and his men, with their prejudices and diseases, were bringing civilization to these people so long cut off from the world. He could, he believed, offer them a great future.
On November 19, Porter staged an impressive piece of theater. At the new fort, drawn up in colorful uniforms, his sailors and marines—the naked revelers of the night before—stood under the tropical sun. The Teii and the Hapa’a audience gathered by the hundreds and then by the thousands. Opotee, in his captain’s regalia, came forward to the flagpole and raised the Stars and Stripes over the earthworks of Fort Madison. As the flag caught the breeze, he gave the order for a salute of seventeen guns from the fort’s artillery. Their mighty reports were answered by his ships in the harbor, and the thunder rolled around the bay and echoed off the high peaks, and the smoke drifted across the waters.
Porter waited for the excited crowd to grow quiet. Then he proceeded to read, in a language unintelligible to his audience, a formal declaration of annexation by which he claimed sovereignty over “Nooaheevah, generally known by the name of Sir Henry Martin’s Island, but now called Madison’s Island.” He proclaimed that “our rights to this island, being founded on priority of discovery, conquest, and possession, cannot be disputed.” Nor were these the only means by which Madison’s Island had been annexed to
the United States, for the people themselves, he affirmed, fervently desired “to be admitted into the great American family, whose pure republican policy approaches so near their own.”
Reading on, Porter stated that the thirty-one clans of the six tribes—Teii, Hapa’a, Maamatwuah, Attatoka, Nieekee, and Taipi—had sworn hostility to Great Britain and loyalty to the United States, and that “all have been willing to purchase, on any terms, a friendship which promises to them so many advantages.” He closed by stating that he had acted to secure “to my country a fruitful and populous island” and to bring “civilization to a race of men who enjoy every mental and bodily endowment which nature can bestow, and which requires only art to perfect.” As governor and ruler, he signed the instrument of annexation with his amazing embellished signature, and then he bestowed new names on the features of his domain: Madison’s Island, Fort Madison, and Madisonville, all overlooking the dancing blue waters of the ludicrously rechristened Massachusetts Bay.
Porter believed his own propaganda and assumed that his audience sincerely accepted his terms; his astounding narcissism and his late-blooming admiration of the Enana left him unable to appreciate the degree to which they were simply enjoying a day of pageantry. “The object of this ceremony,” he proudly recounted, “had been previously and was again explained to the natives. They were all much pleased at being Melleekees, as they called themselves, and wanted to know if their new chief was as great a man as Gattanewa.”
In their valley the proud Taipi seethed with battle fever, playing their drums, singing their songs, sounding the war conch. Still nothing happened; no great vessels arrived at their high coast, no army appeared on their mountains or in the shallows of their beach. The people of the twelve clans sharpened new spears and added to the piles of polished stones, and kept vigil from the ridges.
Porter thought he knew what he was doing. By delaying, he had allowed the Taipi to consider peace and made the others desperate enough to join him in battle, for his demands for tribute had seriously depleted their resources and all were eager for a share of Taipi plunder. Whipped up by Opotee, they stood on the brink of intervalley war.
On November 28, at three in the morning, Porter slipped out of the bay at the head of a flotilla of five of his own boats and ten war canoes, sounding their conch horns eerily in the thick darkness. He had not reconnoitered the terrain of the Taipi nor assessed their strength or positions, and he had no battle plan. Consciously or not, he expected them to fold before the armed might of the moon men and the power of Opotee.
At sunrise, Porter and his men landed on the quarter-mile black-sand beach of the Taipi valley. One of the boats had disappeared, and Downes in the Essex Junior had lost his way and was just arriving, but the canoes landed safely with several hundred natives. On this perfect Pacific morning, Porter was pleased to see the nearby hillsides covered with Teii and Hapa’a tribesmen, his allies, painted for a fight and armed with clubs and spears. A few descended to the beach to join those who had come by canoe—Hapa’a on the left, Teii on the right, and Porter in the center, heading up a total force of 5,000 men, at least as many as the Taipi, and unprecedented in the two-thousand-year history of Nukuhiva.
Beyond the beach was the first obstacle, an “almost impenetrable swampy thicket” extending across the three-mile floor of the valley. Downes came ashore with Gattenewa, two ambassadors, the interpreter Wilson, and fifteen sailors and marines. These, added to Porter’s twenty, were, he imagined, “fully sufficient” to over-awe his new enemies and “to incline them to terms.” Porter kept forgetting that the proud Taipi had showed no fear of whites and no interest in compromise. They had the faith and strength of an independent people, safe in their valley and assured by their gods that they would always remain so.
As Taipi warriors began popping up from the bushes and raining stones down on the beachhead, Porter sent one of the tabooed ambassadors into the brush with a white flag held high. Very soon the man returned, “the picture of terror”—the Taipi had beaten him and chased him back under threat of death; tapu meant nothing in the face of war. A shower of Taipi rocks came flying, and a volley of American musket fire ripped into the bushes. The battle had commenced. A Taipi man cried out as he took a bullet in the leg. With Downes in front and Mouina leading a few braves, Porter gave the order to march. “Assailed by spears and stones,” they entered the morass and heard “the snapping of the slings, the whistling of the stones,” and spears that “came quivering by.” Glancing back, Porter saw that the great mass of his native army stood at the beach, immobile. He was not their leader; this little strike force, he realized, was all he had.
Several hours later, Porter emerged from the thicket onto the beach, exhausted and all but defeated. Downes had been carried out early with a broken leg, while others had been bruised and wounded by stones and spears. However, late in the fight, while blocked by a huge stonewall, Porter had flushed out two Taipi warriors and killed them, and he had their corpses in his possession. “We returned to the beach,” he wrote, “much fatigued and harassed with marching and fighting, and with no contemptible opinion of the enemy.” There he found the men of the missing boat. All of his company, therefore, had survived the invasion.
Assuming “the air and language of a conqueror,” Porter put on a show for the hillside spectators. To one of Gattanewa’s ambassadors he made a loud speech: Go to the Taipi, he declaimed, and tell them that a handful of men had driven them into their fortifications, “that we had killed two and wounded several of them, and had now a force sufficient to drive them out of the valley; that I did not wish to do them further injury and still offered the terms I had first proposed.”
Porter had fought like a tiger, but his hubris had led him deep in the direction of disaster. He resented the inactivity of the painted onlookers. They were not his allies; they were opportunists and they were Enana, like the Taipi against whom he had brought this war. And after all, he thought, no true conquistador ever counted on the locals. The fight had been his to lose or win, and they had witnessed his victory, however narrow.
The Taipi messenger told Opotee that they had many men and could afford to lose a few, as he could not. They had killed (they thought) his best fighter, wounded several others, and compelled a retreat. They derided the power of his muskets and “dared us to renew the contest and assured us that they would not retreat beyond where we had left them.” At the beach, Porter found that Lieutenant Downes would recover, but the wounded were in agony and the rest were “disheartened.” It was time to go. As he boarded the boats for the Essex Junior, the hillside Hapa’a and Shoueme came down from the ridges. Opotee was anxious, as “we were still but a handful, and were surrounded by several thousand Indians, and although they professed friendship I did not feel safe.”
Suddenly the bushes came alive above the beach and Taipi warriors rushed out. Many of the other tribesmen fled in their canoes, but Porter and his men returned intrepidly in their boats, guns blazing, and the Hapa’a and Teii rallied and drove back the Taipi in a hail of stones. They captured a Taipi man, clubbed him to death, and carried away his body—a crucial turn of events enabling the would-be allies to share in the victory.
At Fort Madison, Porter reviewed his mistakes and moved fast to save his mission. By neutralizing the Taipi, he had bought time in which he could have finished repairing the Essex and departed, but his blood was up, and he did not stop to consider a strategic retreat. Porter’s entire Pacific adventure was now at stake. He might never cash in his whale-oil fortune, or defeat a British battleship, or receive the laurels of a grateful nation. Instead he might die in a war with Stone Age men who ate their opponents.
Next day he organized a strike force of 200 sailors and marines, minus Lieutenant John Downes, hors de combat, and without the “noise and confusion of either of the tribes of Indians, whom we had always found useless to us.” Porter hoped—but had no actual plan—to “take several prisoners, the possession of which would probably bring
them to terms and save the necessity of bloodshed.” That night he mustered his troops and told them that this time it would be just them, Americans, marching by starlight, over ridges and down into the enemy stronghold.
Ten hours later, Porter’s weary men reached the ridge overlooking the scattered fires of villages far below. The Taipi were singing and drumming ecstatically, “celebrating the victory,” said Wilson, “and calling on their gods to give them rain” to soak the white men and their guns. Porter decided to bivouac for the night, which brought a cold wind and heavy rains. Unable to sleep, fearful of falling, the Americans huddled in misery, awaiting the dawn. When it came, they were “as perfectly wet as though we had been under water the whole time,” and half the ammunition was useless. A large body of Teii and Hapa’a had joined them, but they could not make a descent in the rain, so Porter ordered his men to form on the ridge and prepare to salute the Taipi valley. When the volley was fired—Porter said “it went off better than I expected”—the Taipi looked to the mountaintop in shock. Recovering, “they shouted, beat their drums, and blew their war conchs from one end of the valley to the other,” but Porter heard the terror of a people facing annihilation.