The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  Gauguin arrived in Papeete in 1891, having left France to live ‘in a primitive and savage state’. But when he arrived there, he was shattered. What he found was not the pristine Arcadia he was seeking, but, as he put it, ‘the Europe which I thought to shake off . . . It was the Tahiti of former times which I loved . . . That of the present filled me with horror.’ To voice a preference for the Tahiti of ‘former times’ was, in itself, something of an achievement, given he had never been there. It does show the power of the myth of the South Pacific being peddled about Europe at the time – the impressions Gauguin had formed were vivid enough to encourage him to abandon his life in France, yet they were based solely upon the written and spoken word.

  Oh, the injustice. Gauguin mourned the loss of Tahiti’s ‘innocence’ at the hands of corrupting Western influences, as he did the very same thing himself, sending fantastical visions of a tropical paradise back to Europe and inadvertently fuelling others’ wanderlust. In his portraits of scantily clad Tahitian girls, their glossy black hair knotted into loose buns at the napes of their necks, he was perpetuating the very things he was railing against. How lacking in self-awareness must he have been as he bemoaned Tahiti’s degradation, while bedding girls at the wrong end of their teens and contracting then spreading the syphilis that would eventually kill him in 1903?

  There’s no doubt that Tahiti is a place that has always encouraged people to jump ship. James Cook found that out to his detriment. When he announced on 8 July 1769 that their time in paradise had come to an end, two lovesick sailors, Samuel Gibson and Clement Webb, took to the hills with their newfound paramours. The two men were tempted by more than just a congenial climate and promise of amorous adventure; they were also promised land and status by the Tahitians – a great deal more than they could aspire to in the rigid social hierarchy of Georgian England.

  To force them back on board, Cook initiated what was to become his go-to response when confronted by uncooperative locals. He held hostage a group of noblemen and women, including Cook’s own taio, Tutaha, until the two absconders returned. This was a high-handed and myopic reaction that showed complete disregard for Tahitian social conventions. It also gives us some insight into the lapses of judgement that would ultimately lead to Cook’s demise.

  Cook wasn’t unaware of the adverse effect his ill-chosen response had upon the relationship he had been nurturing with the locals. But he placed the blame squarely in the laps of the two lovesick deserters. He wrote, ‘We are likely to leave these people in disgust with our behaviour towards them, owing wholly to the folly of two of our own people.’ After their release, the Tahitian captives didn’t attempt to hide their displeasure. As Banks described it: ‘I met them from the boat but no sign of forgiveness could I see in their faces, they looked sulky and affronted.’

  But the tactic accomplished what Cook had intended. Gibson and Webb returned to the ship and were greeted by a hearty flogging: twenty-four lashes each. For his part, Samuel Gibson – who was described as a ‘wild young man’ by the Endeavour’s master – responded well to Cook’s tough love. And he acquired proficiency in something more than the language of love. He turned his amorous adventure to good use by employing his knowledge of the Tahitian language to become a translator, and he went on to accompany Cook on all three of his voyages. Gibson was certainly keen to marry an islander in a hurry – when inclement weather forced the Resolution to seek shelter in Scotland’s Orkney Islands on Cook’s third and final voyage, Gibson met a local girl and wed her after just two weeks of courtship.

  Gibson and Webb weren’t alone in their desire to remain on Tahiti. It was later revealed by one of the midshipmen that many men aboard the Endeavour had planned to abscond as Cook prepared to weigh anchor. It was only fear of ‘the Pox – the disease being there, their getting it certain & dying rotten most probable’ that kept them on the straight and narrow.

  It certainly wasn’t the last time European sailors deserted their posts. The most infamous of these cases was a mutiny that occurred in 1789. William Bligh, who had served on Cook’s third voyage, was unceremoniously divested of his command of HMS Bounty and set adrift in an open launch by his crew, led by the notorious Fletcher Christian. Bligh believed that it was the ‘allurements of dissipation’ on Tahiti that so addled his sailors’ reason that they couldn’t bear the thought of returning home.

  It was only a matter of time before the missionaries arrived, intent on putting a dampener on all the so-called depravity and debauchery.

  MOANA’URA WALKER, Priest, Te Hivarereata Cult

  Christianity only has one god. So they went all around the world colonising people, telling them their idols were pagan . . . Because at the time there were a lot of diseases, the missionaries said, ‘Well, you’re dying because you’re worshipping false gods’ . . . The French missionaries put into people’s minds if they go to their traditional places of worship they’ll be visited and haunted by ghosts . . . Once we started worshipping just one god, everybody forgot the rest of them . . . And every god had a purpose that was linked to a specific cultural practice.

  Emissaries from the London Missionary Society landed at Tahiti in the Duff on 5 March 1797, still celebrated in Tahiti as Missionary Day. When they arrived on the island and began to attempt to promote Christian values, one of the first missionaries observed that the locals ‘in general treated our message with a great deal of levity and disregard’ – not altogether surprising given they were trying to enforce a ban on all songs, games and entertainment deemed ‘lascivious’. But succeed the missionaries did.

  MOETAI BROTHERSON

  The missionaries realised very quickly that if they wanted their god to be the one and only god, they had to show the Polynesians that he was the most powerful one of all. All the bullets and the guns were to support that theory. For the Polynesians, the god to be followed was the one who was the most powerful. The Polynesians realised that their ancient gods were powerless. They couldn’t prevent their troops from losing battles or succumbing to disease. So they turned to Christianity within one generation.

  To commemorate this moment, the Tahitians erected a monument at the appropriately named Point Venus. An inscription on this monument reads: ‘After years of resistance and indifference the people of Tahiti embraced the gospel and, following the path of the setting sun, bore its words to the uttermost islands of the Pacific Ocean.’ Tahitian women succumbed to the Christian exhortation to cover their shame and submitted to the restrictive yoke of the high-necked, full-length, loose-fitting gowns known as ‘Mother Hubbards’.

  Regardless of how good their intentions were, the destructive impact the missionaries had upon indigenous societies across the Pacific is beyond measure. What’s important to remember is that this happened in communities where ancient spiritual beliefs and rituals, culture, history and ancestral knowledge were generally transmitted through oral means, and although culture was codified everywhere in symbolic representations, once the means of translating the message was lost, so too was the information recorded there. Once the chain was broken at the urging of the missionaries, the knowledge that had been passed from generation to generation was lost. There was no great book of knowledge from which it could be revived. It simply disappeared.

  Now, an exercise. Shut your eyes. Conjure up a vision of paradise. Odds are your imagination has carried you to a place that looks remarkably like Tahiti, whether you’ve been there or not. Because that’s the funny thing – its allure remains unchallenged even today. It has weathered some fierce criticism; Robert Louis Stevenson of Treasure Island fame was scathing when he wrote, ‘I don’t much like Tahiti. It seems to me a sort of halfway house between savage life and civilisation, with the drawbacks of both and the advantages of neither.’ That’s the problem with fantasies – they’re ephemeral and need to be kept locked up in the imagination. If permitted to enter the real world, they can never live up to expectations. To impose an imported vision of paradise upon a people and a p
lace is unfair and reckless.

  So while Westerners mourned the demise of a world that never really existed, the Tahitians were forced to navigate rapidly changing circumstances they’d neither asked for nor desired.

  TWO

  WE WEREN’T DISCOVERED

  This is my own personal view, but the missionaries – these men with the best of intentions – did the most to destroy Tahitian culture. Everything that was sacred became profane. They built their churches on the top of old sacred Marae sites, they banned tattoo, they banned dancing, they banned any kind of nudity of course. It was cultural vandalism.

  SAM NEILL

  Sometime early in the first millennium AD, a convoy of intrepid souls set sail across the deep, blue waters of the Pacific and arrived in Tahiti. They knew the minute they arrived they’d found the perfect place to call home. No immediate neighbours to bother them, a perfect climate, and an environment blessed with an embarrassment of natural riches. Little wonder they decided to stay put.

  They hadn’t just stumbled on these islands by chance. They knew exactly what they were doing and where they were going. We know this because they brought with them all the comforts of home: pigs, taro, bananas, yams and dogs. Most notably, in the context of our story, their arrival predated the European ‘discovery’ of the archipelago by many, many hundreds of years.

  During the intervening years, a complex and sophisticated culture evolved in Tahiti, and with it all the things you’d expect to see in a high-functioning society. Politics. Commerce. Religion. Art. Law. The only catch for the Tahitians? When the first European visitors arrived, they barely recognised anything they saw for what it was. This was less of an issue for the locals when the interlopers were just coming and going and making vaguely anthropological observations about the islanders’ way of life. But things were bound to get more complicated once the British, French and Spanish began to cast more covetous eyes across the Tahitians’ tropical home.

  As far as Western traditions are concerned, there’s no better way to lay claim to a person or a place than to name it. Why else do you think in Anglo-Saxon society women have traditionally taken their husbands’ surnames? The word ‘Polynesia’ is itself a European construct. Derived from Ancient Greek, it means ‘many islands’ and was confected by the nineteenth-century French navigator Jules Dumont d’Urville. He also gave us ‘Micronesia’ (‘small islands’) and ‘Melanesia’ (‘dark islands’) named for the darkness of the inhabitants’ skins and based on the same Greek root that gives us ‘melanoma’, the cancerous blight that has bedevilled the fair-skinned Europeans who unwisely chose to settle in this, one of the sunniest regions on the planet.

  A Tahitian priest in a religious trance foresaw the arrival of the pallid and cancer-prone invaders. When Wallis appeared over the horizon in the Dolphin, many islanders recalled the priest’s vision, which predicted the arrival of visitors in a ‘canoe without an outrigger’.

  When the European ‘outrigger-less canoes’ arrived in Tahiti in the eighteenth century, the men on board didn’t know what to make of the community they found on the Society Islands, as Cook was to call them – not in honour of the Royal Society that sponsored his voyage, but by virtue of the close proximity of the islands to one another.

  The world James Cook found in the Pacific was extraordinary. He would confront many things on his voyages that would have made a less composed man break a sweat, but there was one thing that pushed him to breaking point. Theft. On Tahiti, its ubiquity would drive him to distraction.

  Working against Cook was the Tahitian god, Hiro. Precociously clever, Hiro wasn’t interested in petty thievery. He set his eyes on bigger prizes. Planets. Stars. That kind of thing. He was also renowned as a navigator. Hiro would arrive on islands by stealth and attack at night.

  It was one of the many distinctions between Tahitian and British society. The Tahitians admired the attributes of cunning and guile so much that their pantheon included a god who would have been deemed a scoundrel by British standards. Of course, one of the cornerstones of British jurisprudence is the inviolability of property, a principle that would see men, women and children marooned on the far side of the world for thievery. But before a regime of crime and punishment can be enforced, all parties must share the same ideas about what constitutes ‘property’ and ‘possession’.

  The Tahitian word, hōro’a, means both ‘to give’ and ‘to loan’. If you loan something you might not expect to see it again, and the borrower does not necessarily intend to return it to you. The nature of taio relationships complicated this further for Cook and his men. By exchanging gifts with Tahitians and formally accepting their ceremonial friendships, the crew were giving their tacit approval to share their possessions and wives with their taio. The Endeavour didn’t have any women on board to share, but it had no dearth of material goods. It set sail from Plymouth with the equivalent of 34,000 chunks of ship’s biscuit, 9000 pounds of flour, 4600 litres of beer, and 4000 pieces of beef and 6000 slabs of pork in casks, in addition to trinkets described as ‘trifles’ to gift indigenous people encountered on the voyage. The ship was also well stocked with weapons, ammunition, clothing, rope, sailcloth in addition to countless objects wrought in the material the Tahitians wanted more than anything. Iron. If Cook decided to give any of this away, he would do so only in what he deemed fair exchange for something offered up by the locals.

  How must this have appeared to the Tahitians?

  JOSIANE TEAMOTUAITAU PhD, Historian

  It was quite easy to understand what the visitors wanted. The English learnt two Tahitian words: pua’a and vahine. Pua’a means ‘pigs’. And vahine means ‘women’. That was all they wanted. Pua’a, and vahine. Pigs and women.

  Yet the crew on the Endeavour were unwilling to share the bounty on board, even as they helped themselves to whatever they pleased from the air, land and sea. The natural resources on the island belonged to its chieftains. Gathering breadfruit, shooting birds and scooping fish from the sea was the equivalent of poaching deer from the royal forests in Britain.

  In the Tahitian worldview, if you had surplus, you shared it. Only the most contemptible person would attempt to short-change his or her fellows by accumulating a stockpile. One of the Bounty mutineers would describe it this way: ‘It is no disgrace for a man to be poor, and he is no less regarded on that account, but to be rich and covetous is a disgrace to human nature . . . a man of such a description would be accounted a hateful person.’

  When visitors arrived in the Society Islands, they would be honoured with a feast of monumental proportions. But it was understood that they would bring with them provisions to support themselves after the initial welcome. With their existence reliant upon a predictable and unyielding annual cycle of feast and famine, the Polynesians knew exactly when and what to harvest and how to build up stores to make it through the lean times. It was all very straightforward to the locals. Messages from the gods were found in the flight of birds, and certain coconut groves were reserved for the use of chieftains. When times were lean, fishing and agriculture were restricted, and a summer ceremony heralded the return of the season of abundance.

  Tahiti provided for its people. But provisioning a shipload of almost one hundred hungry men for months on end would not have figured in the islanders’ calculations. By stripping their resources, the British were threatening their very existence.

  As for the behaviour of the islanders that Cook classified as outright thievery, the Endeavour’s botanist and resident bon vivant, Joseph Banks, observed that the local attitude to theft was anathema to British standards.

  SIR JOSEPH BANKS (1743–1820) 1st Baronet, English Naturalist and Botanist on Cook’s first voyage

  Great and small chiefs and common men are firmly of opinion that if they can once get possession of a thing it immediately becomes their own . . . the chiefs employed in stealing what they could in the cabin while their dependents too everything that was loose about the ship.

 
An astronomical quadrant, 1760. A fantastic instrument, essential to Cook’s measuring of the Transit of Venus and an object of desire for Tahitians.

  Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo, G38AWY

  It seems a pretty straightforward rule: take it, and it’s yours. But lacking the scaffolding required to acquire an understanding of these cultural niceties, the endemic pilfering Cook experienced in Polynesia and his increasingly despotic and brutal response to it would eventually contribute to his demise.

  Cook was fighting an uphill battle. From the Tahitian point of view, stealing something without detection was quite an achievement. But being caught red-handed was deeply shameful – not because you were taking something that wasn’t yours; because you were caught.

  Stealing another’s treasured possession allowed the thief to capture that person’s mana. In the traditional Polynesian belief system, it is mana that gave a person authority to lead and hold sway over a community. The more prestigious the person, the greater their mana. And that mana is transferred to those objects a powerful person holds close.

  What would the Tahitians have made, then, of an object so venerated by Cook and his men that they stored it in a custom-made box, hidden from sight? This prize was so cherished, the British constructed a specially built fortress to house it, surrounded by a ditch, a palisade and a steep bank. The Tahitians rightly assumed that such a treasured article was most likely sacred and a powerful reservoir of mana.

  The object under guard in the fortress – Fort Venus – was supremely important to Cook, though not in the way the Tahitians imagined. Its value was not spiritual; it was scientific, although one could argue that in the eighteenth century, the two concepts were one and the same. The quadrant represented the pinnacle of eighteenth-century maritime technology. By using it to measure the sun’s angle over the horizon at noon, a navigator could calculate the line of latitude upon which their ship lay. But on Cook’s first voyage, the quadrant played an even more crucial role. Without it, he’d have been unable to fulfil the primary purpose of his voyage: to track the planet Venus’s passage across the face of the sun.