by Jan Morris
We love our rude and rocky shore
And here we stand.
Let foreign names hasten o’er
And on our heads their furies pour
And peal their cannons’ loudest roar
And storm our land.
They still shall find our lives are given
To die for home‚ and leant on Heaven
Our hand.
Time and again since Victoria’s accession the two Powers had quarrelled. They had quarrelled over the sovereignty of Oregon, over British naval supremacy during the American Civil War, repeatedly over Newfoundland fishing rights, incessantly over Canadian frontier issues—Canada sometimes seemed to be nothing but frontier, as the Duke of Wellington had expostulated long before. Twice Irish dissidents had invaded Canada from American territory, and often the U.S. cavalry crossed the Canadian line in pursuit of warlike Indians, who knew they were safe on the northern side of the frontier, and called it ‘the medicine line’. At the inaugural dinner of the Royal Colonial Society, in London in 1869, the American Ambassador made a distinctly improper joke about Canada’s future within the United States, and in Washington the Secretary of State himself, W. H. Seward, declared that ‘Nature designs this whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union’.
The magnetic pull of the United States, too, perpetually disturbed the imperial rotations. Most British emigrants to Canada presently moved on to the States, and even British capital tended to prefer American to colonial investment—the risks might be greater, but so were the profits. Before the abolition of American slavery, the dispossessed slave owners of the Empire looked to the southern States as last exemplars of a crippled civilization, and the American Civil War had drastic effects upon the Empire. Cotton was first planted in Fiji because of it, refugees emigrated to several imperial possessions, and more than once Great Britain came precariously near involvement herself. Lord Palmerston hoped the Confederates would win, so that the united republic would no longer be a threat to the Empire: Gladstone was glad they lost, because he thought a defeated North might grab Canada instead.
Several colonies seemed half-American anyway. The Bahamas, for instance, which lay less than 100 miles from Florida, were very dose in spirit to the southern States—easy-going, stylish, corrupt. Any Southern planter would feel at home there still, and the colony’s Assembly buildings were actually modelled upon the public buildings at New Bern, in North Carolina—small shuttered buildings of coral limestone, grouped around lawns and palm trees on Bay Street in the centre of Nassau. Down by the shore the Nassau merchants in their wide straws, smoking Havanas and tilting their kitchen chairs outside their office doorways, talked island politics with the authentic rasp of Charleston or Newport News, and the most exciting thing that ever happened to the colony was the Civil War, when the blockade-runners slipped dashingly in and out of harbour, when Lancashire cotton men outbid each other for the Carolina cotton crop, and in the Royal Victoria Hotel, whose buffet was open night and day, Union and Confederate officers eyed each other warily across the lobby, or engaged in enjoyable skull-duggeries of espionage and peculation.
Bermuda, too, which had once been a dependency of Virginia, was strongly American still. Many of its colonists had supported the American Revolution, and their loyalties had been shaken again during the War of 1812. The colony’s colour-washed houses had wrought iron lattice-work, like New Orleans, and white jalousies like Charleston, and scattered around the island all the paraphernalia of Puritanism reminded one constantly of the Old Thirteen—the stocks, the pillory, the ducking-stool enclosure at Hamilton.1 New York was the principal market for Bermuda’s spring vegetables, and Americans provided most of the island’s tourist trade, the Britishness of the place being a principal attraction—travel brochures assured intending visitors that ‘British officers, in all finery, frequently attended Social Functions from their Barracks’.
But it was in the Pacific that American power pressed most insistently upon the British Empire. The American West had been won by the later 1860s, the Pacific shore from Oregon to southern California was ruled and settled by the Americans: but stolidly sence stood, and the two expanding Powers, each with its own style, ethos and method, constantly bumped and circumvented each other in Pacific climes. Let us recreate two episodes, as representative of many more: the reluctant British acquisition of Fiji, the perilous farce of a long-forgotten Anglo-American imbroglio, the Pig War of San Juan.
3
The Pacific was, in imperialist terms, almost virgin territory. It was littered with a thousand islands, many of them rich in copra, breadfruit or potential labour, many more admirably suited for imperial purposes like sugar plantations, naval bases or penal settlements, and nearly all governed only by picturesque local chiefs of distasteful custom. The British had been sailing these waters for a century and more, and the further shorts of the Pacific, Hong Kong to New Zealand, had long been familiar with British power. The ocean as a whole, however, seemed destined to become an American preserve. As Dilke wrote in 1868, ‘the power of America is now predominant in the Pacific: the Sandwich Islands are all but annexed, Japan is all but ruled by her, while the occupation of British Columbia is but a matter of time, and a Mormon descent upon the Marquesas is already planned’.
To the British the island groups had seemed irrelevant, for they were utterly detached from the great imperial trade routes, and seemed to offer neither threat nor promise to the imperial aspirations. Successive British Governments had declined to assume new responsibilities there, though urged to do so by Australians and New Zealanders, and repeatedly supplicated by island kings and queens. In many parts British missionaries had converted the islanders to Christianity and western civilization, more or less; in many others British traders had been active and influential for generations; but to provide administrations for these remote and infinitesimal communities, to be saddled with the cost of garrisons or the bore of moral responsibility, to take on yet another rivalry with the Americans, was the last thing British Governments had desired. It wa3 not until the late 1860s that a kind of despairing conscience compelled the British Empire towards its first possessions in the American ocean.
The most important island group of Melanesia, and one of the most beautiful, was the archipelago called collectively Fiji. There were at least 300 Fijian islands, about 100 of them inhabited—islands majestic and islands insubstantial, islands deep in forest or bare of all foliage, mountainous islands, flat islands, shimmering half-submerged coral reef islands, islands palm-fringed, surf-washed or soggy with mangrove swamp. A full-blooded sensual beauty was splashed across these scenes, in the evening especially, when the island outlines blurred and melted, when the sea looked an unguent blue and the sun sank in a diffusion of pinks and crimsons; but the rainfall was heavy, too, and Fiji was often steamy and puddly, water dripping from its thatched roofs, gleaming tropical insects crawling through its grasses, and a mouldy fibrous smell emanating, when the sun came out again, from the drying undergrowth of its woods.
Until recently the Fijians had been polygamous cannibals, and fearfully bloodthirsty. They had no central authority, and recognized no sovereign higher than their own tribal leaders. They fought each other constantly, tribe against tribe, island against island, and they sailed about the archipelago in terrible war canoes, and brandished huge clubs, and danced terrifying war dances, and cooked each other with a more than symbolic pleasure—one mid-century chief claimed to have eaten 999 human beings. Their pagan faith was inextricably enmeshed with sorcery, and expressed itself frightfully: unwanted old people might be buried alive, human sacrifice was common, shipwrecked sailors were assumed to have been discarded by the gods, and were accordingly eaten as a matter of course.
Other Pacific islanders stood understandably in awe of this alarming people, and among Europeans too their reputation was horrific—‘Feejee, or The Cannibal Islands’ is how early n
avigators habitually described the group. Even so, by the middle of the century a fair number of Europeans had drifted to Fiji. There were peripatetic traders of many nationalities, liberated convicts from Australia, adventurers like the Swede Charles Savage, mercenary commander to the Chief of Mbau, who introduced the Fijians to firearms, or the Irishman Paddy Connell, who was a favourite of the Chief of Rewa, and claimed to have a hundred wives. The first Christian missionaries had arrived in the 1830s (‘Ah well,’ said one eminent cannibal laconically when they told him about hell-fire, ‘it’s a fine thing to have a fire when the weather’s chilly.’) It was they who first put the Fijian language into writing,1 and in a remarkably short time they had converted almost the entire population to the Christian faith, some of them suffering in the task the most absolute form of martyrdom.2
All this made for a rag-bag, cosmopolitan society of aliens: a rakish, under-the-counter, no-questions-asked society, a haven for the beachcomber with the forgotten past, the remittance man, the easy-profit trader, the ‘blackbirder’ supplying plantation labour by methods not very different from slaving—the whole ironically completed by settlements of permanently horrified missionaries, and the by no means incorruptible representatives of the Powers.
Unredeemed squalor characterized the developing conflict between this gallimaufry of foreigners and the confused indigenes. Every kind of venality flourished. Consuls spent half the time making their own fortunes in land speculation, and the other half summoning warships for retributive visits. We read of the American consul drawing up his own land title deeds and officially registering them with himself of Australians acquiring 200,000 acres of land for £10,000, of kidnapped natives shipped in from the New Hebrides to work European-owned forms, of claims and counter-claims, swindles and double-crosses—all against the habitual Fijian background of inter-tribal conflict and intrigue. One loses count of the punitive expeditions by which the Powers vainly tried to protect their subjects, or more pertinently their stakes, in these tumultuous islands: events obscure enough even in their time, and now to be dimly recalled only by the sub-headings of old history books—Americans storm the stronghold of the Waya murderers—French corvette seizes prisoner at Levuka—HMS ‘Challenger’ burns a hostile village up the Rewa river—HMS ‘Dodo’ restores order at Mbau.
But in 1867 there arose a Fijian king who claimed authority over most of the 300 islands. Off the coast of Vita Levu, the largest of the group, there lay a for smaller but much more holy islet, Mbau. This was the ancestral home of Cakobau, who had raised himself by war and conspiracy to be the most powerful of the Fijian chiefs, and who now claimed suzerainty over them all. It was a very queer place. No more than two miles round, and densely foliaged, it rose abruptly to a central hill, and was a kind of shrine or ark of Fijiness. The thatched temples of Fiji paganism still towered above its crowded houses and narrow muddy lanes, the great Fiji war-canoes lay ominously upon its beaches, and in the centre of the island stood the ancient killing stone of Mbau, upon which captive enemies of the tribe had traditionally been slaughtered.1 In this sinister and congested place, abetted by American adventurers and encouraged by dim visions of monarchies far away, Cakobau was proclaimed king. They made a crown for him, tin with gold paper and imitation jewels, and they designed a flag, and they encouraged him to sign his proclamations Cakobau R, and issue his own currencies in the royal name. One may still see in the stamp catalogues the postage stamps issued by his authority, with a big CR on them and a crown, in carmine rose and deep yellow-green.
Cakobau was a Christian, and knew white men very well, but even he could not cope with the complexities of the European incursion—which had brought with it, besides drunkenness, disease, Methodism and gunpowder, an infinity of legal disputes. Among these jostling foreigners Cakobau never knew where he stood. Now the British Consul steps in with a decree, now an American Note demands immediate payment of compensation for an outrage; one day the European community decides to establish its own Assembly, the next a body called the Planters’ Protection Society declares itself ready to resist Cakobau’s authority by force. While the Fijians clung to their traditional tribal ways, the Europeans arrogantly ruled themselves, refusing to pay taxes. Cakobau was soon in despair. ‘If matters remain as they are,’ he presciently said, ‘Fiji will become like a piece of drift-wood on the sea, and be picked up by the first passer-by.’
The only solution, he was quick to realize, was annexation, or at least protection, by one of the Powers. The question was, which? The Americans were the obvious choice Not only were they the most active in raising Cakobau to his regal eminence, but they had already succeeded in reconciling the monarchical traditions of Hawaii with their own republican ideals. Besides, for years they had been hounding Cakobau for compensation for the burning of their Consulate building, once threatening him with transportation to America, and once claiming three of his islands as collateral for the debt. Who more suitable, then, as protectors? But when Cakobau offered to cede Fiji to the United States in toto, the State Department did not even bother to reply.
So the king turned, after a half-hearted attempt to interest Bismarck, to the British. It was in fact the British Consul in Fiji, William Pritchard, who first drew up a petition for cession to the Crown, but at first he got only dusty answers. The British were still deeply reluctant to embroil themselves, particularly as an alternative to the Americans. They were not yet in their imperialist mood, while the chance of Christian duty no longer seemed compelling enough to lure them into new colonial adventures—‘the hope of the conversion of a people to Christianity’, austerely noted the Duke of Newcastle, Colonial Secretary in Gladstone’s first Liberal Government, ‘must not be made a reason for an increase in the British dominions’.
But the pressure grew. The Americans on Fiji petitioned Washington for annexation, the Australians, alarmed by the thought that islands so close to home might come under a foreign flag, hinted that they might seize Fiji for themselves. Still the British hesitated. Mr Gladstone had little fellow-feeling for South Sea settlers, and even when, in 1874, the Liberal Government fell and Disraeli came into power, nobody wanted to take the plunge. Commissioners were cautiously sent to Fiji, to inquire further on the spot; and it was only when they reported that British annexation would cause ‘general rejoicing among all classes, Black and White’, and when the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Hercules Robinson, cabled that Fiji was in ‘a state bordering on anarchy’, that the British at last agreed to incorporate Fiji within their Empire.
Robinson himself sailed up from Sydney to accept the transfer of power, and Cakobau and all his most powerful chiefs assembled for the ceremony at Levuka, on the island of Ovalau. This was a suitable venue, for Levuka had been the centre of everything most unsavoury and bewildering in the long awakening of Fiji. The town was squeezed on the foreshore facing west, with hills running so abruptly down behind that some of its streets were no more than steep flights of steps, dropping disconcertingly out of the bush. All around the harbour were the artifacts of the foreigners who had so drastically changed the life of the Fijians: the taverns and the wooden warehouses, the stores, the sailmakers, while from its eminence up Mission Hill the Methodist church looked warily down, in figurative pince-nez, upon the skull-duggeries below.
Here it was, on October 10, 1874, that Fiji voluntarily entered the imperial bond, and Great Britain embarked upon an Empire in the central Pacific—presently to include the Cook Islands, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Ocean Island, and a thousand lesser reefs, atolls and archipelagos. Nobody could call this aggressive empire-building, but even so it eventually made of the southern Pacific not an American preserve, as might have been foreseen, but preeminently a ward of the Raj. To the salute of guns from British warships in the harbour Cakobau’s flag was lowered that day, and the Union Jack hoisted in its stead. Sir Hercules, whom we shall briefly meet again in very different imperial circumstances, ceremonially saluted it, and Cakob
au, dressed in all the flowered and wreathed magnificence of Fiji chieftainship, handed him his royal warclub with a message to Queen Victoria.
‘Before finally ceding his country’ (said this declaration, at least in a contemporary British translation) ‘the King desires to give Her Majesty the only thing he possesses that may interest her. The King gives Her Majesty his old and favourite war-club, the former, and until lately the only, known law of Fiji…. With this emblem of the past he sends his love to Her Majesty, saying that he fully confides in her and in her children, who, succeeding her shall become kings of Fiji, to exercise a watchful control over the welfare of his children and people; and who, having survived the barbaric law and age, are now submitting themselves under Her Majesty’s rule, to civilization.’1
4
On the eastern shore of the Pacific the British and the Americans confronted each other more sternly. There they had resented each other’s presence for years. Ever since the discovery of the Columbia River, entering the Pacific magnificently from its great gorge through the Cascade Mountains, the western end of the U.S.Canadian frontier had been a cause of bitter contention. It was a rich place—rich in furs and fish, in the prospects of minerals, in farmland and forest. It was also one of the most handsome parts of the temperate globe. The white volcanic peaks of the Cascades provided a stupendous background to the scene, extending like tremendous vertebrae from horizon to horizon, so celestial that the Indians worshipped them, so terrific in their isolation that the first overland immigrants estimated Mount Hood (altitude 11,245 feet) to be at least 18,000 feet high. An American had been the first to glimpse the mouth of the Columbia, but a Briton had been the first to sail up it, and to realize that it provided a highway into the grand interior of America.