Rifled Sanctuaries: Some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature to 1900
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Rifled Sanctuaries: Some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature to 1900
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| ISBN-13: | 9781775581437 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Rifled Sanctuaries
Some Views of the Pacific Islands in Western Literature to 1900 The Macmillan Brown Lectures 1982
By Bill Pearson
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 1984 Bill PearsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-143-7
CHAPTER 1
FALL FROM GRACE
It is an honour to contribute to this series of annual lectures to commemorate the first professor of English at my alma mater, the old Canterbury University College. John Macmillan Brown has several claims on our interest. He was the father of Millicent Baxter, father-in-law of Archibald Baxter, both of whose memoirs have enriched our literature. And he was grandfather to the poet James K. Baxter who once gave the Macmillan Brown lectures himself, and was a friend of and formative influence on the contemporary Pacific writer, Albert Wendt.
Macmillan Brown was professor of English, history, and political economy, and after his retirement in 1895 took an increasing interest in the Pacific. Among his several Pacific works there are two novels, a utopia called Limanora and a satirical account of an imaginary island called Riallaro. But the genre of the imaginary voyage is one I am excluding from my talks because I am concerned with the reactions of Europeans to the actual people of the Pacific islands, to their behaviour and their cultures, which were so often misunderstood by the early visitors, or treated as illustrations of European preoccupations.
Macmillan Brown's wide-ranging example is appropriate because though I am concerned with literary responses to the Pacific islands, and have read far more imaginative writing than I can mention, I have to recognize that much of it is of slight literary value, and that it has to be considered in its historical context, and that its meaning relates more to the history of European ideas and attitudes than to literature. Because we have to understand these ideas and attitudes as they were actually stated, I hope that Pacific islands people who are present will not be offended at some of the things that have been said. If I feel that I have to quote them, I don't share them.
The period that is seminal is from 1767, when Europe and Tahiti made first reported contact, to the mid-nineteenth century, and much of my first two lectures will be concerned with this time. Much of that literature is mediated and vicarious. In my third lecture I will discuss the writing of those who drew on their own experience of the Pacific, and though I will not be able to discuss it fully or closely I will touch on the recent vigorous literature in English by Pacific island-born writers, whose view of their experience has been a measure of lifelikeness throughout the writing of the lectures.
I begin with one cultural institution whose licentiousness shocked Europe, not because, to many, it seemed to demand the vengeance of Heaven; I do so because it involved dramatic performances. This was the privileged sect in Tahiti called the arioi, ostensibly a set of strolling players, to which so many predominantly upper class young men and a smaller number of women belonged, whose main public activity when they went on circuit was dramatic performance and dancing. There were troupes of players in the Leeward group when Cook made two visits in 1773 and 1774, on his second voyage to the Pacific. They gave a number of performances and we have impressions of them from several of the ship's company.
There was one piece recorded by the German botanist Johann Reinhold Forster. This is its plot. A father won't let his daughter marry but her lover persuades her to run away with him. She is seen on the acting area in labour and gives birth to a son so vigorous that he is played by an adult. He runs about the area with placenta and cord still attached while the midwife tries to catch him. The father, impressed with his grandson's cleverness, is reconciled to his son-in-law.
Another plot must have been popular: it was acted in Huahine, Taha'a and Ra'iatea, as well as Tahiti. It showed some thieves dexterously stealing property in the keeping of sleeping servants. There were variants of this plot; sometimes the thieves were detected, sometimes not. In the version that Cook saw at Ra'iatea, the thieves were discovered but put up a fight and got away. Cook, troubled by repeated thefts wherever he went, watched this play very closely. 'I was very attentive to the whole of this part in expectation that it would have had a quite different end, for I had ... understood that the Theift was to be punished with death or with a good ... (beating) but I found my self misstaken in both.'
There is a topical piece on which we have several comments. William Wales, the astronomer, describes it and Johann Reinhold Forster moralizes on it. It was performed at Huahine and concerned a girl who in actuality was in the audience. She came from Porapora and had eloped from there to Tahiti with a young chief, an arioi, who then neglected her. She had joined Cook's ship at Tahiti to get a passage back home to Porapora. Cook describes it: 'The Piece concluded with the reception she was supposed to meet with from her friends at her return which was not a favourable one.' Throughout the performance the girl was in tears and the midshipmen in whose company she was had difficulty persuading her to sit through it. Wales thought it was 'Very Cruel', though he speculated that the local people saw it as 'a very wholsome and even Necessary piece of Satire' and noted that it caused a change of mind in two local girls who had agreed to sleep on board. Johann Reinhold Forster drew a number of comforting lessons from the whole performance, both on the acting area and in the audience. The poor girl, he said, had been 'the object of indelicate, but sharp and salutary satire' and the actors had exposed immorality for the instruction of the rising generation even though she was protected by powerful foreigners. The audience had laughed at the actors' sarcasms, but the girl's tears were proof of her repentance; the audience noted that, and came to comfort her and assure her of their friendship; and 'in a manner to thank her for having contributed to the innocent mirth, as well as to the instruction and the warning of her country women'. Forster senior continues: 'We must give the palm to the O-Taheiteans, who, like true children of nature, have a sympathizing tear, and unrestrained feelings, the tribute and glory of humanity, in readiness on all proper occasions.'
I opened with these samples of drama of Polynesians about themselves, partly because the zest and the ridicule look forward to recent Polynesian writing in English, and because I don't find it difficult to visualize similar skits being extemporized and enjoyed by Polynesians I know — it is an aspect of Polynesian behaviour that came to be forgotten by Europeans who concerned themselves with their welfare. But I raised them also because the incident reveals the European compulsion to look for a moral, and in Johann Reinhold Forster's case to expound a complex pattern of moralizing which illustrates, in his mind, a commendable and fashionable sensibility in the islanders. If one were to draw his meaning out a little more finely, they were people with minds rather like his own, and the portrait is to some extent a self-portrait.
It was Tahiti — or the Society Islands as a whole — that made the first benign impact on Europe. If at first it is Tahiti I concentrate on, it is because that was what Europe was most interested in. Reading the accounts of the early visitors, even sceptically, it is fairly plain that Tahitian life at the time of European contact was pleasant in time of peace, and had many satisfactions and delights for most of the people. It is difficult not to agree with the finding of Johann Reinhold's son Georg Forster, that 'allowing for the imperfect state of sublunary happiness, which is comparative at best, there are not, I believe, many nations existing whose situation is so desirable.' At the same time it is apparent, in the light of what has been learned subsequently about ancient Tahi-tian society, that the terms in which Europe judged it, and by which it came to destroy it, were inadequate to understanding it in the way that Tahitians must have understood themselves.
Let us briefly rehearse these early visits and reports. It was the English captain Samuel Wallis who first visited Tahiti, in 1767. There was resistance to English attempts to land, and Wallis's ship was attacked; eventually the English destroyed the Tahitian fleet and the people were shocked at the unfamiliar destructive power of English weapons. Thereafter for several weeks there were amicable relations in which sailors took pleasure in the sexual freedom allowed to girls between puberty and marriage, and Tahitians on their side sought the new material iron. A district chiefs wife, Purea, for purposes not apparent, cultivated the friendship of the English and wept copiously at their departure. Such weeping can be seen from other instances to be a ceremonial honour awarded to guests who were welcome. Nine months later the French captain Louis Antoine de Bougainville called, unaware of the English visit, and, though he found his welcome uncertain, since he was not allowed to land except by day or to stay as long as he first asked, his crew were generously entertained by the young girls, and he was intrigued and moved to rhapsodic prose by the absence of shame or secrecy in their embraces. He composed a pastoral idyll, using the metaphor of the isle of Cythera, home of Venus, every inhabitant a servant of love; and saw Tahitians as living in the Golden Age, without war, or private property. Their bread grew on trees; they lived an enviably simple life on a frugal diet of fruit and fish and coconut milk. It was an attractive portrait, one that flattered its readers, as well as its author.
It is not, as has been often loosely said, identical with the happy stage of human development that Rousseau hypothesized in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, the stage before humankind had metals and agriculture, from which developed private property and its attendant passions of luxury, greed, envy, and ambition. A feature of Rousseau's happy stage — which, of course, was irrecoverable for those societies that had passed it — was an active life and a frugal diet. Bougainville's picture emphasizes the indolence of a people whose bread grew on trees, whose fruit grew without cultivation, and indolence is an obvious source of luxury and loss of happiness. Cook was to object in the journal of his second voyage that there was in fact private property in Tahiti, that all fruits require labour, and even breadfruit and coconuts, let alone plantains and bananas, need proper cultivation. But that was not published until six years later and in any case had to compete with a statement attributed to Cook in Hawkesworth's account of his first voyage, a statement that in fact had been made by Banks (but, as Cook's journal shows, broadly accepted by Cook at that time). This calculated that, in contrast with the repeated and laborious sowings and reapings required for European crops, no more than an hour's labour in planting ten breadfruit trees will supply the needs of a family through several generations. The view of bountiful nature and indolent inhabitants prevailed. Even before Bougainville had published, there was talk in Paris about the Tahitian that he had brought with him, Ahutoru, and one writer used the happiness of Tahitians to confute Rousseau.
But Bougainville's picture was no more sincere than most gallant compliments are. It has to be measured against the historical actuality of Bougainville's instructions to his crew that thieves were to be shot at, and the four Tahitian casualties that followed trading disputes in the nine days of the French stay. And there are flaws in the portrait; the attitudes of settlers and traders of a century later are incipient. The Tahitians are alert but fickle; they can't keep their minds on anything for two minutes on end; they are lazy-minded, and if their wants are few so are their ideas. If that is not enough to undermine Bougainville's credit as the primitivist he has been represented to be, there are his remarks to his friend Gudin de la Brenellerie that the happiest people were in fact Europeans, that South Sea Islanders were not to be envied because they had no metals, were constantly at war, were bold and greedy thieves, and because of the uncertainty of their subsistence relied on cannibalism. (It is not clear if he excepted Tahitians from this judgement, but of them he said that their easy life had hindered their development.)
If these remarks on South Sea islanders did represent a change of view rather than the confession of a previously withheld one, it was a change that many people can be seen to make in the late eighteenth century, gradually or rapidly: the earlier benignity was no more profound than a passing mood. Bougainville's experience of Melanesia was not so enchanting — there was bloodshed off Choiseul — but that had not been sufficient to cause him to revise his euphoric view of Tahiti. Nor did he go back to the Pacific. The change (if it was a change) could only have been brought about by reading, and the only report to appear between the publication of Bougainville's own book and that of his friend, was John Hawkesworths edition of the four voyages of Wallis, John Byron, Carteret and Cook. Cook's visit in 1769 is well known; he found the Tahitians very co-operative and attributed it to Wallis's bombardment. It used to be said that Hawkesworth sentimentalized the journals he edited, idealizing the Polynesians. In fact, a collation of his book with the texts of the logs and journals he used shows the reverse to be true. He is the first implanter of the malign attitudes that dominated the nineteenth century. I have written about Hawkesworth's editorial strategies before, but it is necessary to repeat one or two of their features. He overvalued himself as a philosopher, and he felt a challenge to improve on his sources with suitable moral conclusions not apparent to sea-captains. He wrote the four voyages as a first-person narrative as if it were the same commander — or four commanders of like outlook — reflecting on all this experience, and he incorporated observations from supplementary journals, notably those of George Robertson the master of Wallis's ship the Dolphin, and Joseph Banks the botanist on Cook's first voyage. He ignored the ship's master's humane and commonsense judgements that the Tahitians were a 'Smart Sensable people' with 'Tine Young Girls' and 'fine brisk-spirited women', and preferred to see them in terms of the philosophical question of whether or not their way of life was a matter for European envy. He invents a number of comic incidents for which the journals give no authority, all turning on the technological superiority of the English: he presents the Tahitians as children, fickle in mood and attention, with little reflection or forethought. There are recurring tilts at those who advocate primitivist simplicity, and he concludes that if we admit that Tahitians are happier than we, then we have to admit that the child is happier than the man, and the adult a loser by his education — which for Hawkesworth in 1773 was self-evidently nonsense.
There is an incident where Hawkesworth uses Banks to criticize Cook. In retaliation for some thefts, Cook had impounded some canoes filled with catches of fish; and at a certain point Banks expressed, in his journal, doubts as to the wisdom of his policy. Cook's policy in fact did not achieve the results he looked for. So Hawkesworth, wishing to underline the failure, turns Banks's doubts into Cook's reflections after the event. On another occasion where an inhabitant was shot for making off with a musket, Cook was uneasy about the shooting, but Hawkesworth leaves the reader confident that the local people have accepted the explanation that Banks gave them. When Cook arrested the high chiefs as hostages against the return of two deserters, they were justifiably resentful since he was indebted to them for assistance and hospitality. When they were released, they presented him with four hogs for which they would take no payment. Cook recognized the gesture as a reproach and was embarrassed; he didn't accept the gift. But Hawkesworth turns the incident into an expression of gratitude for Cook's leniency, and on Cook's part a moral firmness about fair payment: an incident that seals an increased mutual respect, and leaves Cook in a position of moral advantage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rifled Sanctuaries by Bill Pearson. Copyright © 1984 Bill Pearson. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,1 Fall from Grace,
2 Rescue and Captivity,
3 Views from the Beach,
References,
Index,