The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  Tribal divisions on the island were numerous and they were strong. The passive group on the beach that day were coastal people whose beliefs were tied to the sea. The other tribe were the Enkahi who lived inland and were fierce warriors and cannibals who ran a hot trade in human bodies. Paowang warned Cook not to venture away from the relative safety of the beach. The volcano, in particular, was out of bounds, which to an inquisitive soul like Cook must have been almost unbearable.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  These people are yet in a rude state; and, if we may judge from circumstances and appearances, are frequently at war, not only with their neighbours, but among themselves; consequently must be jealous of every new face. I will allow there are some exceptions to this rule to be found in this sea; but there are few nations who would willingly suffer visitors like us to advance far into their country.

  *

  During the two weeks they stayed on Tanna, Cook and his men were impressed by the fertility and beauty of the island. The naturalist Forster wrote that: ‘Quiros had great reason to extol the beauty and fertility of this country, it is indeed in appearance one of the finest in the world.’ Forster was also responsible for the misnomer that stuck: Tanna. Pointing at the ground, he asked a villager what its name was. A helpful islander gave him the word tanna, meaning ‘earth’ or ‘ground’ in one of the local languages. If it had a name at all it was Ipari, which it was called by the residents of the neighbouring islands. But the people living on Tanna itself had no sense of the island having a separate identity that required a name.

  A relationship of sorts developed between Cook, his men and the locals. As would happen at other times on Cook’s voyages, music was the one language the two groups of people had in common. The villagers called upon the crew to sing for them, enjoying the German and English ditties but transported to ecstasy by naturalist Anders Sparrman’s Swedish songs. For their part, the men on board were transfixed by the beauty of the local songs and the melodious playing of reed flutes. When they left Tanna, Forster wrote of the bonds he believed had been formed: ‘In a few days they began to feel pleasure in our conversation, and a new disinterested sentiment of more than earthly mould, even friendship, filled their heart.’

  In a moment of quiet contemplation, Cook expressed a more rational view of the nature of the relationships they were building with the people of the Pacific and the imbalance of power inherent in their encounters. It’s a telling insight into the thinking of a fair-minded and circumspect man. Cook was beginning to see the Pacific and its people through different eyes.

  CAPTAIN JAMES COOK

  We found these people hospitable, civil, and good-natured, when not prompted to a contrary conduct by jealousy; a conduct I cannot tell how to blame them for, especially when I considered the light in which they must view us. It was impossible for them to know our real design; we enter their ports without their daring to oppose; we endeavour to land in their country as friends, and it is well if this succeeds; we land, nevertheless, and maintain the footing we have got, by the superiority of our firearms. Under such circumstances, what opinion are they to form of us? Is it not as reasonable for them to think that we are come to invade their country, as to pay them a friendly visit? Time, and some acquaintance with us, can only convince them of the latter.

  As for the locals, the restrictions they imposed on trade tell us much more about their attitude to the uninvited guests than a German naturalist’s sentimental reflections.

  Early on in the piece, Paowang presented Cook with a small pig. The men would have been thrilled because there was only so much salted meat and hard tack they could stomach. Imagine their horror, then, when they realised that in Melanesia the sacred status of the pig meant it was shared with an ally in anticipation of a gift of equal or greater value. But all Cook brought to the table were mirrors and ‘trinkets’. Aside from the novelty value of these bits and bobs, which was slim at best, the locals had no interest in them. And so that would be the last pig Cook and his men would see on Tanna. In desperation, Forster attempted to trade an axe for one, but as he put it: ‘they were deaf to this proposal, and never sold us a single hog during our stay’.

  When the white-skinned creatures had first arrived, the locals had treated them with superstitious awe because of their belief that these creatures were ancestor spirits.

  JOHNNY KOANAPO

  When Captain Cook landed here, people looked at him – obviously he looked different, and he came in with a much bigger boat than the canoes people were using at that time. They were amazed but they also wanted to chase him out. But Captain Cook eventually came into the bay and came ashore. It’s the way people talk about it here – the arrival of a white man who was different from the way they look. So they began to imagine that there were people in other parts of the ocean who looked different from us.

  Paowang and those of his brethren who welcomed Cook to their shores nonetheless avoided touching the strangers, and if they accepted an object from them, they received it between two leaves and refused to touch it with bare skin. But as time passed, the islanders realised the men on board had very human failings – they got hot, they got tired and they got hungry, and they didn’t understand the local language. The Tannanese then knew they were mere mortals. It must have been quite a disappointment. They had been expecting that these spirit beings would respond to their meagre offerings with vastly superior and sacred gifts.

  *

  In the Pacific, Cook had become accustomed to a ritual of exchange that was far more complicated in Vanuatu. Paowang gave Cook’s men permission to cut down wood and fill two casks of water, but he warned them off the coconut trees. Territoriality was a powerful motivator for the indigenous people of Vanuatu – and that was a problem for Cook. Obtaining fresh supplies was an absolute necessity, whether by trade or by force.

  By 1774 Cook figured he had the process down pat, as did his men. And the barter system extended to more than just daily necessities. The crew worked out very quickly that what they needed to accumulate were the red feathers that were sacred in Polynesia. There was nothing more enticing to a Tahitian woman – even the high-born ladies who had scorned iron nails were happy to exchange their affections for red feathers. The crew knew this all too well. And when the Resolution sailed into Tahitian waters again on Cook’s second voyage, the men were hanging from the rigging as they waved bunches of red feathers to the women who came out in canoes to greet them. The men on board all deserted their posts as the ship was swamped by a tidal wave of women clambering on board. With no hands on deck, the Resolution smashed into the coral reef that ringed the lagoon.

  Cook was livid. He did so much jumping up and down and stamping that the crew memorialised it with a name. Heiva – the ceremonial Tahitian dance.

  JAMES TREVENEN (1760–1790), Midshipman, Cook’s third voyage

  Heiva the name of the dances of the Southern Islanders, which bore so great a resemblance to the violent motions and stampings on the deck of Capt Cook in the paroxysms of passion, into which he often threw himself upon the slightest occasion that they were universally known by the same name, & it was a common saying among both officers & people ‘The old boy has been tipping a heiva.’

  Besides satisfying their mundane needs and earthly appetites, Cook’s crew members were also desperate to acquire cultural artefacts. It would be nice to think they had developed an affection for the remarkable people they were meeting across the Pacific and wanted to collect some souvenirs to remember them by. No such luck – it all came down to cold, hard cash. After Cook’s first voyage, London had been aflame with an insatiable appetite for South Seas treasures, and the men on Cook’s ships knew they could turn a tidy profit if they fed that hunger.

  SAM NEILL

  An enduring commodity in Tonga and other Pacific islands is tapa cloth. It’s as significant now as it was in Cook’s time. We do know that tapa worked its charms on Cook.

  Amongst the things they brought back home wer
e lengths of the ubiquitous tapa cloth. The crafting of the cloth is a deeply symbolic pastime on the part of Polynesian women. They use the paper mulberry tree that the early navigators carried with them on their journeys and transplanted in their new island homes.

  PRINCESS KALANIUVALU – LADY FOTOFILI

  Every day we get together and make tapa cloths. It takes half a year to produce these. Tapa is important because it signifies the work of women and portrays their strength, their skills, and their pride. Most importantly, it shows the value of women in Tongan society. In our society tasks are divided, so men work outside and women produce the tapa. Tapa has a cultural and social significance. It’s used for all occasions: for weddings; to make the bedding of a newly wedded couple; it is used as an offering; it is a carpet for royalty; it is used as a reciprocated exchange between families. In recent times it’s become important because we use it to help with our economy – people sell it as a form of income.

  Cook himself gave a gift of tapa to his wife, Elizabeth. It would become a tragic postscript to his life story.

  However, the people living on Tanna were not interested in engaging in the system of exchange Cook had initiated across the Pacific, no matter how much he and his men tried to force the issue. Their sense of territoriality was new to him. ‘[Never] did we touch any part of their property, not even wood and water without first having obtained their consent,’ Cook wrote. This mutual respect gave birth to a warm accord that was unique amongst his Pacific encounters.

  *

  As in a remarkable number of other places across the Pacific, the arrival of Captain Cook on Vanuatu had been foretold in prophecy. Uea – the bay Cook renamed ‘Port Resolution’ – has special significance on Tanna. It means, quite literally, ‘small door to the world’. From this place, the sea merged with the world. And it’s believed that the ancestors departed through this gate and will one day return to Tanna, bringing with them harmony and peace. That’s why Cook’s arrival in Uea was so significant – he was seen as one of the gifts that returned. Westerners dream about taking off to see the world. In Vanuatu, the world comes to you.

  In Vanuatu today, formal ritual exchanges still take place, and the belief in ancestors bringing gifts and blessings from the spirit world is alive and well.

  SAM NEILL

  The people, their culture and their view of these strangers were starkly different from anything Cook had encountered before. Centuries since Cook’s incursion have passed this place by, and yet today people live here as they did then. They have a continuous connection to the sea and their past. They remember Cook’s visit as if it was yesterday.

  Islanders in remote regions await the return of an American god bringing with him refrigerators, jeeps, televisions and crates of Coca-Cola. These are the ‘cargo cults’ known across Melanesia. They evolved as a way of defending kastom – the Pidgin expression for traditional values – against the determined incursions of Christianity and Western culture.

  JOHNNY KOANAPO

  This is a very interesting island, where people talk about kastom and they want to live in kastom … they want to do things in kastom – in the kastom manner. It’s different from what modern civilisation is teaching. Kastom, according to the people here, is the established ways of doing things, whether it’s marriage, whether it’s development of young people, the way the tribes are structured in the villages, the way these villages are connected together, and the way we interact with each other. Kastom is the established protocols of how things were in the past.

  Imagine how American troops and the Western military machine were received when they arrived in Vanuatu during the Second World War. The locals had never seen anything like it: aeroplanes, radios, individually wrapped sweets – without any understanding of mass production and modern technology, the islanders logically assumed these were the work of the gods. When the troops disappeared at the end of the war, so did their ‘cargo’. In desperation, the islanders cut mock landing strips into the jungle and built timber lookout towers in the hope they could bring the cargo back. On Tanna, the most persistent cargo cult is the ‘John Frum’ movement.

  JOHNNY KOANAPO

  You know, here in Tanna, this is where the south-easterly wind comes from. Its name in our language here describes it as a very good wind. It brings a lot of opportunities with it – in terms of the potential for development coming from outside the island. So we believe very strongly that many more good things will come with this wind, from the southeast. A lot of old people here, particularly those in the John Frum cult, believed that something good was going to come from the east. So here in Tanna, Cook’s ship came from the east, and it’s so significant to the history and modern development of the island.

  Why the name? He would have been an American soldier who brought cargo to Vanuatu. ‘John from America’ – abbreviated to John Frum.

  Tanna is also home to the truly extraordinary ‘Prince Philip Cult’. Yes, that Prince Philip. For centuries, villagers recounted an ancient tale about the son of Tanna’s mountain god crossing the seas in search of a powerful woman to wed. Unlike the islanders, the spirit had pale skin. When villagers visited the local post office or police station and saw the official portrait of Queen Elizabeth with her consort, they were certain they’d found their man. Or spirit, as the case may be.

  SAM NEILL

  The most vivid day of all for me was when I spent time with some people who live in the kastom way, as they call it – they live as they have always lived, eschewing T-shirts and jeans . . . The way they live is a reminder of how material possessions are absolutely of no consequence when it comes to the index of happiness. A group of these blokes were taken to England as part of a BBC program on the Prince Philip movement a few years ago. When I asked them their main impressions of England, they told me two stories. The first once was about standing on a bridge over the Thames where they watched people go to work. As they put it, ‘We watched people going to work for two hours’ . . . they said for two hours they watched people cross that bridge to go to work and not one person looked happy. They couldn’t believe it. I thought it was a fantastic observation. The second thing they told me was that during their stay in England they stayed in a lot of old-money houses. What struck them the most in these manors was how many things people owned. Now these people from Vanuatu own virtually nothing at all. And they were so worried about these people who owned so many things because it was so much work looking after the things that they owned. They believed they were enslaved by the objects they owned.

  Recruitment for the movement went through the roof in 1974 when Prince Philip and the Queen visited Vanuatu aboard the royal yacht Britannia. As foretold, their ancestral spirit had returned to them to show off his bride. The movement’s elders sent Philip a ceremonial club, and he sent them a signed photograph in return. In 2007, five Tannanese flew to England to meet him in person at Windsor Castle.

  SAM NEILL

  The beauty here is obvious. What impresses me more is how the Tannanese insist on being themselves. They’ve wrenched the past back into the present. They’ve taken back everything the West took away from them. And they believe they’ve done this by magic . . . the magic inherent in this, their land.

  James Cook has also left his mark on the island. He was the first white man to land on Tanna, and although the locals didn’t rate him at first, after a Russian navigator visited the island thirty years later and asked its inhabitants about Cook’s visit, they began to re-evaluate their relationship with him. Although centuries have passed since he landed there, Kapan Cook is now a common kastom name on Tanna.

  CHIEF SAM USUA ESKAR

  Cook’s memory on Tanna remains in the things he named – Port Resolution and Tanna itself. This is the first time my people have ever been contacted about the story of Captain Cook on Tanna.

  TWELVE

  ON THE EDGE

  Wherever the white man went in this world they were always treated with some trepidation. A
fter all, only dead people – cadavers – are white. I get the sense that Cook was walking a fine line in his Pacific encounters. The grand narrative had its dark side.

  SAM NEILL

  One of the most enduring themes in the grand narrative of the Pacific is that of control – both winning it and losing it.

  Tonga, which claims to be home to the oldest monarchy on earth, is not a place where losing control is an option. The first Tu'i Tonga was appointed in 900AD. That was a hundred and sixty-six years before William the Conqueror, also known rather deliciously as William the Bastard, crossed the Channel and set the Norman conquest rolling across England. There are more than a hundred and fifty islands in Tonga, and although the political machinations that shaped the archipelago’s history haven’t always been straight forward, by virtue of the language they share and the religious beliefs they hold, the people of Tonga have been culturally unified for over 1000 years.

  And this is one thing that distinguishes Tonga from its Polynesian neighbours. It is the only island group in the Pacific that has never been colonised by a foreign power.

  PRINCESS 'OFEINA-'E-HE-LANGI, Tongan Royal Family

  Tonga is the only kingdom here to survive that long. It’s quite unique in itself. And as I say, it’s mostly to do with our structure of the way we live. I think we survive because we depend on each other for most things.

  Legend has it that the first Tu'i Tonga, who went by the name 'Aho'eitu, clambered down a casuarina tree from heaven along with his five brothers. 'Aho'eitu was appointed paramount chief.