Omai was not only the first Polynesian to reach England, he was the first to be exhaustively described by a wide range of observers, including several women, who took a keen interest in the exotic young man. Pacific Islanders had been depicted before by seamen in the course of their voyages, but even the best of these accounts are comparatively superficial. Omai, on the other hand, remained in England for two full years. He was described by Cook and Banks and Lord Sandwich, who was his host for much of that time, as well as by Dr. Johnson, James Boswell, and Mrs. Thrale. One of his most enthusiastic chroniclers was the diarist Fanny Burney, whose brother had sailed with Omai in the Adventure. He was presented at court and discussed by members of the Royal Society. His likes and dislikes, his habits and manners, the way he moved and ate and laughed—all were recorded for the benefit of posterity. And although these accounts are by no means objective—they are not even particularly consistent—taken together, they constitute an extraordinary portrait of an eighteenth-century Polynesian face-to-face with the eighteenth-century European world.
Omai was probably about twenty-one when he arrived in England. He was tall by European standards and muscular, with broad flat shoulders and strong, well-shaped legs. He had a flattish nose, a full mouth, a dark complexion (even by Raiatean standards, apparently), and long black hair. By some he was considered “very good looking,” while others argued that his features “conveyed no idea” of Polynesian beauty. He was tattooed on the hands and buttocks and dressed, depending upon the occasion, in flowing white tapa-cloth robes or the waistcoat, breeches, and stockings of an eighteenth-century gent.
He was described, especially at first, as having an active and restless temper. “When he desired to sit, he threw himself at full length on a sofa and only with difficulty learned the use of a chair,” and it was suggested that he might want exercise. He enjoyed all kinds of sports and athletic activity, including shooting, horseback riding, and ice-skating, and showed a marked aptitude for dancing, making, according to Fanny Burney, “remarkably good bows.” A man of “uncommon spirits,” he reportedly took the liveliest interest in everything around him, exhibiting, as one wit put it, “that enthusiastic zeal which Britons talk of [and] Otaheitans feel.” But while this led some to depict him as a man of “quick parts”—Johann Forster cited as a mark of Omai’s intellectual ability “his knowledge of the game of chess in which he had made an amazing proficiency”—to others it merely proved him “a Sensationalist of the first kind.”
Omai, it was often said, had a penchant for “immediate corporeal gratifications.” He delighted in toys and “trifling amusements” and was intensely interested in anything new. According to one observer, he once entertained himself with a magnifying glass—the first he’d ever encountered—throughout the course of an entire Royal Society dinner. He liked wine, especially Madeira, and all types of animal food, and was said to partake “promiscuously” of soups and vegetables. He had a passion for the theater, which he attended as often as he could, and enjoyed the outings, games, and parties with which his patrons filled their days. It was said that he was openly bored when he had nothing amusing to do.
This absence of gravitas—Cook noted that he had “a tolerable share of understanding” but that he “wanted application and perseverance to exert it”—was frequently ascribed to Omai’s childlike nature. And here one detects the conventions of an age in which natives were first beginning to be viewed as people at an earlier stage of historical development, children, as it were, in the family of man. “His judgement,” wrote Forster, “was in its infant state, and therefore, like a child, he coveted almost every thing he saw, and particularly that which had amused him by some unexpected effect.” It was a charge that Cook and others often laid at the feet of Polynesians, arguing that “this kind of indifferency is the true character of [their] nation.”
But for all his apparent lack of diligence, there was one respect in which Omai excelled almost beyond measure. “Indeed,” wrote Fanny Burney, “his manners are so extremely graceful, & he is so polite, attentive & easy, that you would have thought he came from some foreign court.” Good-natured, agreeable, and charming, he managed in all sorts of situations to seem entirely at home—whether bowing “with the address of a well bred European” to a new acquaintance or “gallantly handing about cake and bread-and-butter” to the ladies at tea. Either because of some quality in himself—“openness of countenance,” “natural good behaviour,” “native politeness”—or because of the society in which he had been raised, or perhaps because he so quickly absorbed the manners of those around him, Omai was considered by all who encountered him to be perfectly “genteel.”
This is, of course, precisely the sort of thing that preoccupied the upper classes of England, but it was also an observation very commonly made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about Polynesians in general. Even Melville’s cannibal harpooner Queequeg, who is described in the opening scenes of Moby-Dick as a most terrifying barbarian, is revealed to have a great deal of the “natural gentleman” about him. “The truth is,” writes Melville, “these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are.”
What is really marvelous, however, is the staying power of these conceits. The idea of a Noble Savage may sound condescending to modern ears, but by eighteenth-century standards it was the highest kind of praise. Nobility was a quality that every European aspired to; natural nobility was something even they could not achieve. Reynolds’ portrait, Fanny’s zeal, even Forster’s grudging comments, reflect a broad and general enthusiasm not just for Omai in particular, but for Polynesians as a whole.
Perhaps I should hardly have been surprised, then, to find that when Seven arrived in Boston, he attracted a similar sort of admiration. Far from being snubbed or patronized, everywhere we went he was the belle of the ball. People peppered him with questions about who he was and where he’d come from, what he did for a living, where he’d grown up, what kind of foods they ate in New Zealand, what languages they spoke. Women, especially, gravitated to him, though he was also popular with men. And while they sometimes seemed to be at cross-purposes in their conversation—it was often hard for people in Boston to tell what Seven was thinking and equally difficult for him to decode them—they appeared delighted with one another.
I had worried that, in some way, Seven would be unacceptable, or that someone would be rude to him, or that they would all be so baffled by one another that everyone would just give up. He, after all, had little idea how things were done among people like my parents and could no more have been expected to know what passed for good manners among them than they would have known the protocol for being invited onto a Ngati Rehia marae. But I gave them all too little credit. My family was genuinely interested in him and he acquitted himself admirably. Whether by temperament, training, or tradition, or some happy combination of all three, he appeared, as Fanny Burney once put it, “in a new world like a man [who] had all his life studied the Graces … politely easy & thoroughly well bred!”
“A natural gentleman,” said my mother.
“Errghh!” said my brother, rolling his eyes.
“Oh, dear. Well, you know what I mean.”
8
A Dangerous People
Many years later, just after my father died, I came across a letter when I was clearing out his desk. It was, by then, almost fifteen years old and was dated to a period not long after Seven and I were first married. It had been sent to him by one of his cousins in California and most of it had to do with family news. The final paragraph, however, referred to an article from a New Zealand magazine, a copy of which was still attached.
You may recall meeting at Harvard our friend J—of New Zealand, the same age as our Tom. He much appreciated your receiving him—at lunch, I believe. The enclosed article tells the appalling story of his murder—tragic from every point of view, as he was a gentle man and his father and grandfather had done a l
ot for the Maoris.
It was, indeed, a tragic story. The victim, a white, middle-age New Zealander, unprepossessing though actually very rich, was murdered at his beach house in the course of a bungled burglary by a group of Maori youths. The perpetrator was a fifteen-year-old half-Tongan, half-Maori boy from a large, dysfunctional family. Both his parents were described as alcoholics and the children had been removed from their custody multiple times. “It was like Once Were Warriors,” said a relative, “If you’ve seen that film, that was it.”
The killing was entirely senseless. The four young men had entered the house while the victim, his wife, and their children were sleeping. They had started to grab things apparently at random—some golf shoes, bizarrely, and a cotton bag—but they made too much noise and the victim woke and rushed out to see what was happening. Two of the intruders bolted as soon as the lights came on, but one remained long enough to get caught, at which point the fourth and youngest grabbed a knife off the kitchen counter and drove it into the victim’s chest.
The Pakeha bled to death on the way to the hospital and the four youths ran off through the dunes. They buried the shoes and the bag on the beach and then headed for a friend’s, where the fifteen-year-old reportedly told the others that he had stabbed the man in the house. “I used a butter knife,” he said later to the police. “I used a butter knife,” and “I pricked him.”
The article was subtitled “Good New Zealand Meets Bad New Zealand” and, as if that were not bald enough, the final paragraph suggested that the root of the crime could be traced not to the perpetrator’s social milieu, or any emotional or psychological damage he might have suffered, or even to the effect of both of these combined with the terrible recklessness of youth, but rather to something the writer referred to as “innate evil.”
My father never mentioned this letter to me, but he did keep it for a very long time—and that despite the fact that there was a note on it from his cousin asking for the article to be returned. What, I wondered, had he thought about it? What had it meant to him? And why had he kept it all those years? It was too late for me to ask him by the time I found it, but I wondered if I’d have had the courage even if I’d had the chance.
My father was politically liberal. He had supported the civil rights movement and spoken out against the Vietnam War. But he had also grown up in a world when no one married out of either his ethnic group or his class. Seven had no money and hardly any education. He had no prospects, at least as these might be reckoned by someone like my father. He did not bring anything in the way of wealth or assets to our marriage and, although I was oblivious to this at the time, I’m sure my father worried about the burden this would ultimately place on me. What I did know was that my marriage to someone so very different challenged many of my father’s most basic assumptions, and I appreciated the fact that he was gracious enough to keep his misgivings to himself. I was less sure about the motives of his cousin, who must have known that my father’s son-in-law was Maori. What message, subtle or not so subtle, had he been hoping to convey?
If you pulled back from the details, you could see that this was a story about ethnic and socioeconomic conflict presented as a moral tale. The Pakehas were cool and well educated. They appeared at the trial fashionably dressed and acted with admirable restraint. The Maoris and Tongans were scruffy and unmotivated. They came to court in gum boots and woolly hats, bringing hordes of children with them who ought to have been in school. Though profoundly loyal to their family, they seemed hopelessly disordered. In the terms of the story it was “Good” versus “Bad,” but it was also obviously White versus Black and Rich versus Poor.
In one respect, the tragedy was no different from things that happened all the time in places like England and the United States, and there was something rather quaint about the journalist’s shock that such things could happen in New Zealand: “It seemed a violation of the trust and good faith that tied the New Zealand that we knew together, and left in its place a country we didn’t recognise.” But this, it seemed to me, was disingenuous, for there were elements of this story that would have been familiar to any New Zealander. Both the rift and the roles assigned to the respective parties had been part of the story of New Zealand from the moment Abel Tasman sailed out of Murderers’ Bay.
When they first sailed into the Pacific, Europeans came armed with various ideas that helped them make sense of what they found. They had abstract ideas about balance and symmetry, as well as ways of ordering the world, frequently structured in pairs of opposites: noble/ignoble; sacred/profane; civilized and savage. Among these many organizing principles was a notion, originally derived from the ancient Greeks, that there were two kinds of primitivism, a “soft” and a “hard.”
The soft, or Arcadian, model was a perfect fit for tropical islands like Tahiti, which Europeans routinely likened to “the garden of Eden,” “the Elysian Fields,” and “the true Utopia.” But it was not the only model available to eighteenth-century Europeans. There was also a hard, or Spartan, version, which, in antiquity, sprang from accounts of barbarians living at the edges of the civilized world. Hard primitivism was associated with cool or rugged regions and described an austere, active people, often warlike, sometimes cruel, who valued bravery, strength, endurance, and loyalty to the tribe. To the neoclassically minded Europeans, New Zealand, with its temperate climate and combative natives, seemed the perfect embodiment of this type.
Like other Polynesians, the Maoris were tall and physically imposing. They had a clan-based society with a hereditary nobility and a culture marked by oratory and elaborate decorative arts. They were hunters and farmers who combined a certain degree of geographic mobility with settled agricultural habits. But the land they inhabited was not, like the rest of Polynesia, tropical; there were no coconut trees or spreading breadfruits, but heavily wooded hills, broad plains, and permanently snowcapped mountains. Stretching across the fortieth parallel of the southern hemisphere, New Zealand was closer to Antarctica than any other inhabited region of the world, save only Tierra del Fuego. In climate and topography it was more like Scotland than Tahiti, and Highlander and Viking analogies sprang readily to the European mind.
The emblematic figure of this culture was not the Noble Savage, as it was for much of tropical Polynesia. Maoris were not often painted as Omai had been, posed like some princeling of a foreign court. When Maoris were painted, it was often in action, performing a haka, or war dance, leaping with weapons in arms. Or they might be depicted outdoors in groups, huddled under their capes around a fire or near a rude hut or barbarous carving. Early portraits typically focus on their facial tattoos, which were seen by Europeans as marks of savagery, and present their subjects not in flowing white robes but in woven flax cloaks with dogskin tassels, sporting bone or greenstone pendants and feathers in their hair. Where a European sitter might be posed with a map or a globe (in the case of an explorer), or a lap dog, or an open book, a Maori was generally depicted with a weapon: a greenstone club, or patu; or a carved wooden taiaha, the long ceremonial spear.
Not the Noble Savage but the Warlike Maori. As a character, he crops up all over the historical record—now as a brave and fearless combatant, now as a cruel and savage eater of men. He is, in many ways, more interesting than the Noble Savage, who is always pleasing and admirable and never causes any trouble or does anyone any harm. The moral character of the Warlike Maori, on the other hand, is ambiguous and varies depending on who is telling the tale. To Cook, the Maoris were a “brave, open, warlike people.” To Surville, they were “ferocious and bloodthirsty.” According to Marion du Fresne, they were “fine” and “courageous,” though he might have changed his tune if he had lived.
But what is really remarkable is not so much the variation in the way this image is inflected—positively in one place, negatively in another—as its ubiquitousness. Maoris, in early European accounts, are always warlike. They seem to live in a state of perpetual preparedness for battle, to see enemies
on every quarter, to value heroism above all. They are said to be exceedingly sensitive to slights and obsessed with avenging real or imagined affronts to their honor. They are reputed to be impervious to pain, fearless of punishment, and impassive in the face of death. Their dances, their legends, their customs, their language—all are thought to express an overriding preoccupation with war. Even their material culture is said to reach its highest level of artistry in the design of fortifications, war canoes, weaponry, and other martial objects.
Historians argue that over the course of the nineteenth century there was a gradual hardening of this view. The image of the Warlike Maori became increasingly negative and less complex as what had begun in the late eighteenth century as an attempt at cultural description devolved into a stereotype and a cliché. The fact that similar shifts occurred in other places, for instance Africa and the American West, suggests that this was part and parcel of the colonial process. As more and more Europeans arrived to settle in New Zealand, the opportunities for conflict between the two sides increased, peaking in the 1860s and ’70s in all-out colonial war. The fact that the Maoris were feared and admired by Europeans may have stood them in good stead during the dark days of the colonial period, by making them hard to intimidate and control. But this image also served their colonial masters by dignifying the conquest of New Zealand as a heroic struggle waged against a savage foe.
Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All Page 10