'Aho'eitu’s brothers drew the short straws and became his attendants. What grew from this was a hierarchical society that was labyrinthine in its complexity. No two Tongans held the same rank, and the Tu'i Tonga presided over them all. He had at his disposal an enormous navy stocked with canoes over thirty metres in length and packed to the gills with fierce warriors. Paulaho, who was the paramount chief Cook encountered, might well have cast a covetous eye across the British weaponry, but he was unimpressed by the paltry scale of Cook’s ‘fleet’, comprising just two ships. If a man’s power was to be judged by the number of boats and warriors under his command, then Cook was sadly lacking. And the Englishman’s reputation was not boosted when he spurned the amorous advances of Tongan women. He was most likely motivated by fidelity to Elizabeth waiting back in London – but as far as the Tongans were concerned, his behaviour reflected poorly on his manhood. And they weren’t afraid to let him know it.
This was a peculiar state of affairs for Cook. During his travels he had become accustomed to being treated with reverence and awe at best, and fear at worst. But he enjoyed no such elevated status on Tonga. His standing on the island was dealt another body blow when, just prior to his departure from the islands, the Tongans learnt that Cook was not a nobleman, as they had imagined, but just a commoner who had risen through the ranks to reach a position of authority. Something that might be an admirable achievement in European circles counted for nothing in Tongan society. If Cook was a commoner and answerable to a king and higher authorities, he was consigned to the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Worse, this status meant he had no soul. As if they didn’t have enough to worry about on earth, commoners and slaves in Tonga didn’t have much to look forward to after death either. Only chieftains and the nobility ascended to the afterlife: everyone else just turned to dust.
Although Cook had no idea of his standing on the Tongan social ladder or what that meant for his eternal soul – or lack of one – he was comfortable with the rigid stratification of islander society. It mirrored the British hierarchy he had grown up with and in this aspect of life, if no other, Cook and the Tongans were speaking the same language.
SAM NEILL
Cook related to the Pacific societies that were hierarchical. He was from Britain, and he understood that. In Tonga, you know, they still talk about the ‘aristocracy’ and the ‘commoners’. Cook got that. It was familiar.
In both civilisations, the ruling class could exert control over the populace because everyone knew their place and was content to occupy the position assigned to them at birth.
When it came time for the Tongans to modernise their islands in the mid-nineteenth century, it wasn’t at all surprising that they looked to Great Britain as a template for reforming Tongan high society. In 1845, after the tribal wars that ripped through the archipelago in the early nineteenth century, Tāufa'āhau I unified the islands and established a constitutional monarchy with himself as king. Tāufa'āhau adopted the name ‘Siaosi’ – a phonetic interpretation of the name ‘George’ – and became King Tupou I.
PRINCESS 'OFEINA-'E-HE-LANGI
The founding father of modern Tonga was His Majesty Tupou I. He conquered and bought all of the other factions together. There’s a saying here in Tonga that everybody’s related to the King somehow, and it’s because of the structure of our society – we have His Majesty the King, obviously his family, then we have the nobles, and then we have the commoners, or the people.
Tonga’s nobility were given brand-new, Western-style titles.
But King Tupou wasn’t finished with his reforms. Paganism was out; Christianity was in. He consigned his subjects’ immortal souls to the stewardship of the Wesleyan Church. For those Tongans who, until that point, had no soul, it must have been a relief to learn there was a heaven waiting for them after death. To complete his universal reforms, Tupou commissioned the two things a fledgling nation can’t do without – a flag and a national anthem. He then warned all foreign governments to keep their sticky noses out of Tongan business.
Today, Tonga remains the most rigidly stratified Polynesian society. The royal family still exerts enormous control over the islands, and Christianity is a cornerstone of the community, so much so that it’s enshrined in the Constitution. Sunday is God’s day, and His alone.
SAM NEILL
Tonga prides itself on never being colonised by the West. However, it enthusiastically adopted one of its instruments – Christianity. So much so that it is enshrined in the constitution. On Sundays it’s illegal to work, shop, do chores, play sport and even swim. So what’s to do? . . . Go to church.
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Another Pacific archipelago that proved difficult for the Europeans to control was Vanuatu.
When Cook visited the islands on his second voyage, he butted up against some of the obstacles that stood in the way of would-be settlers. But where Tonga’s strength came from unity, Vanuatu’s saving grace was its disunity. Even today, the population of a quarter of a million people speak 130 languages, and tribal beliefs differ from village to village. Try governing that as an outsider. The place is – and was – like quicksilver, and controlling it was next to impossible. No single warlord or chieftain ever managed to unite the tribes.
JOHNNY KOANAPO, Vanuatu Politician
Before Captain Cook came in, people organised themselves in tribes, and those tribes are all connected to other tribes through marriage and other ways. So as a Tannese, I have a different tribe, and I feel that and nobody is going to take it away from me. So even if we are Nui Vanuatu, I still think and act like a Tannese. And that’s something that will not easily change for many more years to come.
Not that Europe wasn’t going to try. In the 1800s in a rare attempt at cooperation, France and England declared Vanuatu a neutral territory. This meant the two countries initially did little to stop the horrendous private ‘blackbirding’ trade that was decimating the islands. In a fine early example of a weasel word, ‘blackbirding’ was coined as a more palatable term – to nineteenth-century sensibilities, anyway – than ‘slavery’. At a time when the African slave trade had been abolished, up to half the adult men on many islands in Vanuatu were kidnapped and forced to work on plantations in Australia and other European Pacific colonies. French and British interests in the archipelago continued to expand, but neither power wanted to take on the responsibility of governing an ungovernable territory. And so they came up with a novel, and completely unworkable, solution. The ‘Condominium’. It had nothing to do with timeshares in Miami Beach. It was derived from the Latin com-, meaning ‘together’, and dominium meaning ‘domain’. Unfortunately for Vanuatu, it didn’t result in much togetherness.
JOHNNY KOANAPO
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Captain Cook for the process of colonisation, because Captain Cook didn’t come to colonise . . . he came because he was exploring. Colonisation followed Cook. Then we had the French and the British. We were the only country in the Pacific that was colonised by two superpowers. We had two systems for everything. This led to the marginalisation of a lot of people because the French were focused on the French-speaking citizens, and the English focused on the English-speaking people. But we were neither French, nor were we British. If you tried to travel to the UK at that time, you would be arrested because there was no passport. We were stateless in our own land.
The French and the English working in accord . . . What on earth were they thinking? The chaos that ensued was so terrible, the locals dubbed it the ‘Pandemonium’. All administrative functions – law courts, police forces, currencies, health and education systems – were duplicated. Because government bureaucracy is so much fun, why have just one when you can have two?
Things didn’t improve in the twentieth century, and a push for independence led to self-governance in 1980. Thanks to European mismanagement, the newly hatched country of Vanuatu inherited no universal infrastructure to speak of. The one upside of this was that nothing much had changed
over the intervening centuries since Cook’s arrival, and grassroots governance remained intact. Today it forms an integral part of the government, and the locals like it that way.
JOHNNY KOANAPO
When we got our independence our government thought it would be good to have a common sense of identity as Nui Vanuatu, not as the French-speaking and English-speaking populations, but as a Nui Vanuatu. Now we have a council of chiefs on each of the islands, which isn’t common across the Pacific. Our chiefly system is intact and informs and engages with the government.
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Vanuatu’s political domain proved itself to be fairly uncontrollable from a European perspective. But its unruliness doesn’t stop there – it has also cornered the market in fractious natural phenomena.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
During the night the volcano, which was about four miles to the west of us, vomited up vast quantities of fire and smoke . . . the flames were seen to rise above the hill which lay between us and it. At every eruption it made a long rumbling noise like that of thunder, or the blowing up of large mines . . . the air was loaded with its ashes, which fell so thick that everything was covered with the dust. It was a kind of fine sand, or stone, ground or burnt to powder, and was exceedingly troublesome to the eyes.
Mount Yasur is the rumbling 361-metre-high summit on Tanna that so transfixed Cook when he arrived in the archipelago. It is also an apt metaphor for the magnitude and irrepressibility of the Pacific itself.
SAM NEILL
I’ve always been fascinated by volcanoes. They’re elemental and beautiful and completely terrifying.
Because the Pacific has the dubious honour of housing half the earth’s tectonic boundaries, and tectonic boundaries equal earthquakes and volcanoes, we find in its basin the appropriately named ‘Ring of Fire’.
SAM NEILL
Everywhere I go in the Pacific I’ve seen pumice drifts from some underwater volcano in the middle of the ocean . . . I’ve seen it in Alaska, seen it in Australia, and here I can see it on Norfolk Island. It’s just a reminder of how connected the Pacific Ocean really is.
The Pacific hosts 75 per cent of the earth’s active and dormant volcanoes, and it is responsible for kicking off 90 per cent of the planet’s earthquakes. It certainly makes a lie of Magellan’s designation ‘Pacific’ (Peaceful Sea). In the past twelve thousand years, all but three of the world’s twenty-five largest volcanic eruptions occurred there. And unfortunately for the residents of Japan, New Zealand and California, their countries straddle the Ring of Fire – which, as their history of destructive earthquakes proves, is at least as painful as it sounds.
The Pacific doesn’t do things in half-measures. Everything about it is super-sized, including some of its most impressive permanent residents. Human beings have been zipping across its surface for three and a half thousand years or so. But we’re a mere flash in the pan, relatively speaking. The gargantuan beasts that travel these waters have the strongest claim on their briny depths. While the earliest hominids were still hanging about in the African savannah, picking lice out of each other’s pelts, whales ruled the seas. Today, humpbacks follow the same migratory paths in the Pacific that they have been using for countless generations.
JEFF LAURIE, Dive tour operator
Anywhere between six to eight thousand kilometres each way – that’s the migration path. From Tonga they head due south to the top of New Zealand – Cape Reinga – and then they travel down into Antarctic waters. Tonga and the other South Pacific countries are their breeding grounds. The cold Antarctic waters are their feeding ground.
The ‘family’ of humpbacks that winter in Tonga’s balmy waters have to travel there from their summer feeding grounds in Antarctica – a journey of more than six thousand kilometres that takes them up the east coast of New Zealand and along the subsurface volcanic arch leading to Tonga.
As Cook tacked to and fro across the Pacific, he was crossing paths with these beautiful creatures.
Although he had no idea, as he travelled along Australia’s east coast past K’gari – Fraser Island – on his first voyage in the Endeavour, Cook was following another humpback whale migration route. Many indigenous cosmological beliefs link whales to the creation and settlement of the Pacific islands, and they are worshipped across the region.
Traditional Māori beliefs assert that whales communicate messages from the gods and that the future can be divined by reading their body language. Scientific testing has shown that whale song can be heard over thousands of kilometres, and it’s thought that before the cacophony of modern mechanical sounds made the Pacific noisier than a shopping centre on Christmas Eve, whale calls might well have bounced from one side of the ocean to the other in an endless loop.
If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to see whales in the wild, you’ll appreciate their majesty and awe-inspiring presence. But to the covetous gaze of eighteenth-century Europe, whales were just another – very large and very valuable – asset to add to the ever-growing list of exploitable resources in the Pacific. Cook’s charts opened the region to a tidal wave of arrivals bent on milking every last drop out of the place, with terrible consequences for the indigenous people of the Pacific and the marine mammals with whom they shared their world. Unfortunately for the locals, their vast territory was ripe for the picking. Little thought was given to the consequences of the ensuing environmental depredation.
JEFF LAURIE
There’s clear evidence now from the scientific community that climate change is real, that it’s happening. That’s going to affect everybody on this planet, in one shape or another, particularly in terms of Pacific island communities. You’ve seen how flat Tongatapu is – it’s only a couple of metres above sea level, so the impact on an island like this is significant.
From the European perspective, natural resources were what the Pacific was for. It was a God-given treasure house to plunder.
And, as we’ve seen in Australia, for the British the Pacific had another purpose that was to shape its future. It was a great place to dump people.
Which brings us to a tiny fist of volcanic rock in the South Pacific.
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SAM NEILL
Cook was only here for a day, but the consequences still reverberate, and by a quirk of fate they’ve rattled my own family history.
When Cook sailed to Norfolk Island on his second voyage in 1774, it was unsettled. Given the efficiency with which the Polynesians had set up shop on most of the major island groups in the Pacific, that might come as something of a surprise. But this was not an easy place to live. For one thing the main island is completely surrounded by cliffs – there is no safe harbour. And in an era when the only way to cross the waves was by boat, that was a problem. Although archaeological evidence shows that Polynesian navigators did establish a settlement on Norfolk Island sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries AD, it wasn’t what you’d call a success. After a few generations, they disappeared. Whether they died out or relocated to another Pacific island, we may never know. They left behind stone tools, banana trees, the Polynesian rat and, most importantly, one of the things that would make this otherwise unremarkable place irresistible to the British government – flax. More specifically, New Zealand flax.
Cook arrived on Norfolk Island on 10 October 1774 and took a party to shore in order to explore the area now known as Duncombe Bay on the north side of the tiny island. True to form, he planted a flag and claimed it for the Crown, then gave it a name.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
I took possession of this isle as I had done of all the others we had discovered, and named it Norfolk Isle, in honour of that noble family.
By comparison with the other Pacific territories Cook had encountered, Norfolk Island’s appeal seemed limited until he spotted two things – the flax, and the towering pine trees covering the island that appeared, at first glance, to be perfect for crafting masts and spars. To draw a contemporary parallel, it was the equivalent of s
triking oil. With global transport and trade utterly reliant upon sailing vessels, a place that seemed to have an abundance of raw materials for ship-building and repairs was quite the find.
Chuffed as you like, Cook and his men gathered cabbages from local cabbage trees, pulled fish from the rock pools, and cooked it all up for tea. That night, they ‘ate fish & cabbage made into salad & were happy as possible’.
Cook knew his masters at the Admiralty would be thrilled. The flax, in particular, was invaluable as a substitute for the hemp used by the British Navy for making sails. This hemp came from Russia, and Anglo–Russian relations had begun the downward spiral that would ultimately lead to the Crimean War in the mid-nineteenth century. The navy was painfully aware of this threat, so the powers that be breathed a sigh of relief when Cook told them about the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific that looked as though it might be the answer to their prayers.
In advance of the first British settlement in Australia, the government made sure that establishing a permanent presence on Norfolk Island was a high priority for the fledgling colony.
The first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, was given instructions that he was: ‘as soon as circumstances will admit of it, to send a small establishment’ to Norfolk Island to stake the Crown’s claim. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King was dispatched there and given command of twenty-two men and women. Fifteen of the first arrivals were convicts tasked with felling pines, crafting them into masts and harvesting flax for canvas. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for the group to realise that neither raw material would suit their intended purpose. Although the pine could be used for many other things, it didn’t cut it as a mast. And despite their best efforts, the weavers had no idea how to fashion the flax into canvas.
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