Pacific Romanticism: Tahiti and the European Imagination

Pacific Romanticism

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Pacific Romanticism Tahiti and the European Imagination

Alexander H. Bolyanatz

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bolyanatz, Alexander H., 1956Pacific romanticism : Tahiti and the European imagination / Alexander H. Bolyanatz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-89789-787-0 (alk. paper) 1. Tahitians—Social life and customs. 2. Tahitians—Sexual behavior. 3. Tahitians—Public opinion. 4. Romanticism—Tahiti. 5. Enlightenment—Europe. 6. Public opinion—Europe. 7. Tahiti—Description and travel. 8. Tahiti—Relations—Europe. 9. Europe—Relations—French Polynesia—Tahiti, 10. Europe—Intellectual life—18th century. 11. Europe—Civilization—Foreign influences. I. Title. DU870.B65 2004 996.2,1 1-K1C22 2004054662 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2004 by Alexander H. Bolyanatz All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004054662 ISBN: 0-89789-787-0 First published in 2004 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

@r The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Copyright Acknowledgments The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from the following: Excerpts from Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas in His Majesty's Ship The Endeavor (London: Caliban Books, 1984), reprinted with the permission of Caliban Books. Excerpts from Douglas L. Oliver, Ancient Tahitian Society (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1974), reprinted with the permission of University of Hawaii Press and Douglas L. Oliver. Excerpts from Greg Dening, "Possessing Tahiti," in R. Borofsky, ed., In Remembrance of Pacific Pasts: An Invitation to Remake History (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), reprinted with the permission of University of Hawaii Press. Excerpts from Edward L. Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden, Like People You See in a Dream: First Contact in Six Papuan Societies (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Used with the permission of Stanford Univsersity Press, www.sup.org. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgments in subsequent printings of the book, and in the meantime extend their apologies for any omissions.

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Contents Preface 1. Introduction 2. 1767 3. The French 4. Interpreting Tahiti 5. Pacific Romanticism in Anthropology 6. The British 7. Other Voyages 8. Conclusion References Index

ix 1 11 25 43 63 77 95 109 121 131

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Preface This is not the book I originally intended to write. What I had in mind a few years ago was a simple study on the history of anthropology. I abandoned that goal for two reasons. The first reason is that in order to produce the book I originally intended, I needed data that I was simply unable to put my hands on. Anyone who has ever done research knows the quandary: do I not have these data because I just haven't looked hard enough, or do I not have them because they do not exist? The data that I was looking for were a clear set of references to Tahiti—specifically French accounts of Tahiti—from around 1770 until the early days of the twentieth century. I was hoping to find a rich corpus of material that addressed Tahiti by those early anthropologists and ethnologists of the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the trail is not replete with such references. Playwrights and poets did offer their commentary on Tahiti, but by 1800, little explicit attention was given to the accounts of Polynesian promiscuity that titillated European audiences in the 1770s, and when there was mention of "freedom," it was typically presented in terms of aggregated references to the "South Sea." And while I have a strong hunch that Tahiti was an important part of that construct, I could not prove it, and I decided that I was unwilling to try to make the case on what was, in essence, circumstantial evidence. Strong circumstantial evidence, perhaps. Convincing circumstantial evidence, even. But circumstantial evidence, nonetheless. Perhaps I will find the datum I need tomorrow. The second, and in some ways even more compelling, reason for my shift in orientation from a history-of-anthropology monograph to a more general book about intellectual trends in the Enlightenment was that I began to teach a Western/World (it is not exclusively "Western" but is largely so) Civilization course at Benedictine University in the fall of 2001—a course that covered the period 1492-1914. I found that my interest in the Enlightenment and its intellectual effects grew and that my interest in this project expanded beyond anthropology.

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This is not to say that anthropology has been stripped from the book; by the third sentence, I weigh in as an anthropologist. Let me be clear, however, that the book is not only for anthropologists. I wrote it with my 1492-1914 students in mind, and it is primarily students in like circumstances who are the intended readers. Naturally, I would be delighted if my colleagues and students in anthropology also read it by the droves, but anthropologists are no longer the only audience. I should also note here that this book is not intended as a complete intellectual history of Europeans coming to grips with people very much unlike them. Such histories exist, and I do not try to duplicate what they have done. I isolate one strand—the use of early French treatments of Tahiti—and in so doing, inevitably do not attend to others. Different scholars have attended to other strands, some of the notable examples being Marshall and Williams (1982), Smith (1985, 1992), Calder, Lamb, and Orr (1999), Thomas and Losche (1999), Borofsky (2000, ed.), and Ellingson (2001). My effort here is therefore quite modest; I take that one strand and see where it leads us to in contemporary anthropology. The format of the book is a bit unusual; there is something of a "the-rest-ofthe-story" structure to it. For readers who do not want to spoil that aspect of the book, stop reading here, and resume reading again at the Acknowledgements section. The focus of the book is visits to Tahiti by Samuel Wallis and Louis Bougainville in 1767 and 1768, respectively. I show that as a result of Wallis's visit, the Tahitian behavior toward Bougainville's men is much better seen as defense rather than as friendliness (as the French preferred to see it). The thesis of the book is that a misunderstanding of the overtly promiscuous behavior of Tahitian women toward French sailors in 1768 has resulted in a particular romanticist strand of thought in Western European thought—a strand that is in evidence to this day. Fitting into Enlightenment ideas about "Natural Man," the conviction that there are very different sorts of humans out there in other parts of the world was bolstered by behavior that the French took to be Pacific hospitality. Indeed, anthropology and other disciplines within the Western intellectual tradition emerged within this Zeitgeist of profound difference between Europeans and non-Europeans. The book concludes by claiming that contemporary anthropology is still struggling to emerge from a paradigm of particularist romanticism, in which radical differences between people are stressed so much that they can screen profoundly important similarities. This argument1 can be made because eight months prior (and unknown) to Bougainville, a British vessel commanded by Samuel Wallis had landed at Ta1. The thesis that there was more than South Pacific hospitality to the Tahitian sexual offerings to the French is not original with me. Howe 1984: 83-89, Pearson 1969, and Brooks 1990: 58-59 have all previously articulated the notion that the sexual aspect of the Tahitian response to Bougainville's landing at Tahiti was more a protective stratagem than a warm welcome. My claim is merely that this history has had certain outcomes in Western thought, including, of special interest to me, anthropology.

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hiti and had subjected the Tahitians to a lethal display of ordnance. The Tahitians quickly discovered that they could placate the English with young women. When the French arrived, the Tahitians offered the young women early on, rather than waiting to be shelled. I will make the case for this interpretation by showing that the English under Wallis had demonstrated to the Tahitians that sex was the surest way to secure trade and peace (by "peace" here, I do not necessarily mean an amicable relationship, but simply the avoidance of being targeted by lethal gunpowder weapons) with Europeans. I argue that a romanticized view of Polynesians (a view consistent with, but not the same as, the idea of a "Noble Savage") that emerged out of reports of unrestrained sexual liaisons between Tahitian women and French sailors has been a chimera. My presentation of this information in the book is not chronological; I provide the 1768 case prior to the 1767 case; hence the "rest-of-thestory" aspect. Rather than a South Pacific welcome for the French, the differences in behavior were in fact a protective and economic stratagem on the part of Tahitians who had been subjected to withering displays of British firepower some eight months before the French arrived. Analysis of both the British and French accounts generates the inference that Tahitian behavior in 1767 and 1768 was calculatingly defensive rather than warmly hospitable. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I was greatly aided in this project by the Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages at the University of California, San Diego, and especially Kathy Creeiy. I also wish to acknowledge support from Wheaton College in pursuing research for this study. Many other people contributed their help in this project. Those who read earlier versions of part or all of this manuscript, or who provided extremely helpful insights, include Peter Brooks, Patrick Dowd, John Kloos, Lisa McMinn, Alvaro Nieves, Mark Noll, Robert Priest, Robert Schwartz, Richard Sher, and Elizabeth Throop. Axel Aubrun, Paschal Honner, O.S.B., and Joan Hopkins were more than liberal in giving of their time in helping with translations. Benedictine University was, as an institution, the source of substantial support and help: Ann Hector of the Library and Lois Strong from the Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies assisted me tremendously. John Mickus, the Dean of Arts and Sciences, made every effort to help me finish this book. Also at Benedictine, Jon Lewis, Al Martin, and Jack Thornburg provided camaraderie and good cheer. My friends Vince Gaddis and Tim Sieges kept me from becoming overly focused on this project by distracting me with all-too-frequent reminders that their teams—the Yankees and Braves, respectively—were consistently beating my teams. To Wayne Baisley, John Dragstrem, Ron Nyberg, and Dave Petersen: Thanks for breakfast. Hank Allen, the late Ivan Fahs, Zondra Lindblade, Lisa McMinn, Jim Mathisen, and Alvaro Nieves were more helpful and supportive than they can possibly imagine.

xii Preface My wife Pam and our children—Lexi, Mari, and Zander—continue to be the strongest supporters I have. I hope they recognize their names in this book as at least a small demonstration of my appreciation and love.

1 Introduction The Pacific historian C. Hartley Grattan refers to the romantic influence of reports of Polynesia on the West as one of humanity's "charming follies" (1963: 188). I think he is quite correct in saying so, and as an anthropologist, I also feel some light sense of obligation to remedy things by working to "unpack" this particular folly. I say this because the enduring "romantic influence of reports of Polynesia" is, more than any other field, a product of anthropology. My effort to remedy things is twofold. One of my objectives is to address perhaps the single most influential set of reports of Polynesia: those of the French discovery of Tahiti in 1768. Much of the book is a look back on that event and what people made of it. My other objective is to render a critique of romanticism in anthropology, a critique in which "anthropology" can also be seen as a metonym representing a much larger range of disciplines. Put much more bluntly, in this book I try to debunk what Tahiti meant to people in the eighteenth century as well as those meanings as they evolve into the early twenty-first century. Let us begin with a look at those meanings, a collection of ideas that can be called "romanticism." ROMANTICISM "Romanticism" means any number of things depending on whether one is referring to music, art, philosophy, or almost any other human enterprise. Its common denominator is difficult to define with great precision, but certainly a "feeling-trumps-thinking" conviction that somebody somewhere (but not here) is profoundly satisfied with life lies very near the center of the romanticist ethos, and while not particularly precise or complete, it seems that seeing romanticism in these terms would not be too far wrong. For various reasons, I believe that romanticism has done anthropology more harm than good. In that regard, this book is something of a polemic—it might,

2 Pacific Romanticism in some respects, even be considered a lengthy tract. My goal is to show that what I consider to be a more-harmful-than-beneficial intellectual strand is, in part, a house built upon sand. In so arguing, I do not wish to imply that I think every last aspect of contemporary anthropology that has the romanticist chromosome in its intellectual DNA is without merit. Nor do I wish to imply that I think that romanticism is a nicely circumscribed and identifiable phenomenon that has a finite number of nicely circumscribed and identifiable sources. The effort here is actually quite modest: it is an attempt to set things straight along the lines of Toto pulling back the curtain and exposing the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz as just a guy pulling some levers. No one can deny the Wizard's beneficence and that life in Oz seemed pretty good, but isn't it better to know what's really going on? Whether one deems oneself a romanticist or not, whether one cheers my polemical position or not, it seems to me that intellectual integrity requires careful consideration of the claims herein. My approach is not particularly original: I see something that troubles me, explore it in some depth with an eye to "deconstruction," and show that in fact, the troubling idea is at least in part a misguided one. Why should it matter? It matters, I think, because as long as we have a romanticist way of seeing them, we do not see other people as fully human, and as a result, we fail to regard them with the dignity that they deserve. Consider the following incident from one of my fieldtrips to New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The annual vartabar ("Thanksgiving") celebration is generally one of the year's highlights, with hundreds of people coming together, mixing, mingling, laughing, and enjoying themselves. The vartabar consists each year of a handful of villages coming together for a day under the auspices of the Methodist/United Church, which was first established in the area in the 1920s. Because a vartabar includes—in addition to choral competitions, all the food you can eat, speeches, and a chance to see people you haven't seen in a while—traditional dancing, it is not uncommon for expatriates to come to watch. At this year's gathering, a young man from the United States happened to be present. He was part of a small group of expatriates who had been in the area for a number of months. They were not tourists, just passing through; they were, in fact, fairly sophisticated when it came to understanding local ways. This young man was looking forward to the dancing, and watched as the groups of (mostly, but not exclusively, young and single) men and then women performed. The male dancers especially caught his attention because of their attire, and their dress prompted a conversation between us. Dancers spend quite some time adorning themselves with flowers and brightly colored leaves prior to performing. They "spruce up" in an effort to look good, and I have lost track of the number of times young men have told me that they make every effort to impress girls and young women not only with their dancing precision and competence, but also with their physical appearance. On this vartabar day (as in others my young American friend did not witness), leaves and flowers were supplemented by sunglasses and watches by a number of dancers. At the end of the day, the visitor expressed his sadness at the sight of the sunglasses and watches, lamenting the contaminating element that they

Introduction 3 brought to the dance and the dancers. Now, one might claim that this fellow was experiencing a "dystopian epiphany" (Brunt 1999: 261) in the spirit of LeviStrauss in Tristes Tropiques, and a longing for a world that has vanished. But Utopias exist only in peoples' minds, and Utopian images are activated when experience evokes preexisting schemata. His was a romanticist perception of this event, and I believe that his romanticism caused him to miss the point. This young man was not able to move beyond his own categories when it came to understanding the sartorial manner of the dancers. He seems to have had, in his head, a category that can be called "traditional" and another called "Western," and when he imposed this framework on real people's behavior (behavior that did not correspond neatly to his categories), he found their behavior difficult to reconcile. If, on the other hand, he had taken the emic, local view, he might have adopted the categories that the dancers themselves use: something along the lines of "things that help me look good to women" and "things that do not help me look good." He was unwilling or unable to make that shift, and as a result, departed the village that day disappointed and mildly distressed. His romanticism had caused him to be disappointed in the dancers. Perhaps even worse, he failed to understand "the Other" because he wanted or needed "the Other" to be different from him. He could understand a motivation such as looking good for women, and was bothered with me when I told him that he could not ignore this as an important part of the young men's reasons for dressing and dancing as they did. He was, in short, troubled that motivations he could claim as recognizably cognate to his own were also theirs. I would be baffled by why this was so troubling to him except for the fact that I have seen this again and again: I see it in some of my students. And I see it among professional anthropologists. For reasons that would make a very interesting study, even some professional anthropologists are dissatisfied with explanations of people's behavior that rely on motivations or reasons that are experienceproximate. I think I understand at least some of the reasons for this. In a simplified sociology-of-knowledge way of seeing things, I recognize that for much of the twentieth century, "progress" in anthropology meant probing for the outer limits of human behavior and thought. There was a need to return from the field in the 1920s-1970s with reports of never-before-seen things that people do and think. The focus was on the particular and the exotic. Whether this kind of selective pressure caused or was caused by romanticism might be a matter of debate. What is indisputable, however, is that a feedback loop was set up such that a romanticist predisposition rejected, a priori, any explanation that made, say, Samoans seem just like, say, Americans. And of what interest would be, for much of the twentieth century, a person with a claim that "they" are pretty much like "us"? Put more bluntly, who would publish a book making such a claim, or hire such a person to a university position in anthropology, given the alternatives? Happily (at least to my way of thinking), the last generation has seen something of a rebound from this romanticist domination, and we see the (re)emergence of an emphasis on human universals in which explanations for

4 Pacific Romanticism human behavior are not rejected simply on the basis that they are recognizable and familiar. But romanticist ideology still exists, as I will show. Sidebar: The "Noble Savage" If the notion of "Noble Savage" has not yet crept into the mind of the reader, let me deal with it directly. By "Noble Savage," I mean a typically European sense that non-Europeans are qualitatively different from, and in many ways better than, Europeans. Although romanticism is present in the "Noble Savage" construct, the two are not the same. That the two are related is quite obvious, but since the "Noble Savage" predated the sort of romanticism that interests me here, it is best to see romanticism as emerging out of "Noble Savage" mythology. The "Noble Savage" has been a part of European intellectual history since at least 1609 (Ellingson 2001: 21-34), l influencing Western conceptions of the Other since before the Enlightenment.2 Ellingson argues persuasively that the 1609 version of the notion of the "Noble Savage"—the brainchild of a Canadavisiting Frenchman named Marc Lescarbot—resembles our contemporary idea only in the vaguest of ways (viz., the Mi'kmaq—all Mi'kmaq—hunt; hunting was generally limited to European nobility; therefore, the Mi'kmaq—all Mi'kmaq—are nobility). He argues further that after the well-known use of the phrase by Dryden two generations later,3 the idea underwent a latency period of nearly 200 years, during which no evidence exists for the idea of a "Noble Savage"—that is, a New World denizen of good character—and certainly not within the writings of Rousseau, with whom the concept is often associated (Ellingson 2001: 1-4). Even in the absence of a recognizable use of the phrase "Noble Savage," throughout the eighteenth century, there certainly was some "baggage" (Ellingson 2001: 6) when it came to European conceptualizations of the people that they encountered, either face to face, or in the accounts of those who were

1. Horigan (1988: 51-64), relying on Boas and Lovejoy, et al. (1935) convincingly argues that the concept of the "Noble Savage" has been a part of the Western imagination since the ancient Greeks. 2. See Edgerton 1992: 1-15 for a discussion of some of the ways in which anthropologists have perpetuated this concept. 3. From the play The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, the words are No man has more contempt than I, of breath; But whence hast thou the right to give me death? Obey'd as Soveraign by the Subjects be; But know, that 1 alone am King of me. I am as free as Nature first made man, 'Ere the base Laws of Servitude began, When wild in woods the noble Savage ran. (Dryden 1672: 34; cited in Ellingson 2001: 35-36)

Introduction 5 there.4 A piece of that baggage is the idea of "romantic naturalism," a phrase that serves as the subtitle for an important study of the "Noble Savage" (Fairchild 1928). Unfortunately, Fairchild's definition of "romantic naturalism" is short on precision: "[Romantic naturalism is a] peculiar form of naturalism which arises from a desire to find the supernatural within the natural, or, in other words, to achieve an emotionally satisfying fusion of the real and the unreal, the obvious and the mysterious" (1928: l). 5 We get a bit closer to what he may be up to by looking at his definition of a "Noble Savage": "[A]ny free and wild being who draws directly from nature virtues which raise doubts as to the value of civilization" (1928: 2). "Free," "wild," "draws directly from," and "nature" pose far too many problems to attend to here in a thoroughgoing fashion (but see below). Still, if "civilization" is cognate to "the West," as I believe Fairchild intends, then we can settle on the idea that at least part of the notion of "romantic naturalism" is a frustration or dissatisfaction with the status quo of one's own social and cultural systems. Here we have the outline of an idea analogous to antliropology as cultural critique (cf. Marcus and Fischer 1986) and the use of information about other societies as a basis for effecting change within one's own. There is also the emotionally charged matter of "defending] the coequality of fundamentally differing 'frames' of understanding" (Shweder 1984: 48). Now, an affect-laden concern with seeking social and cultural change (and one rarely sees such interest stripped of affect) and a "defense" of the Other are not exactly Fairchild's "unreal" and "mysterious," but it is certainly consistent with the "feeling-trumps-thinking" adage offered earlier. Whether "romantic naturalism" is the best way to describe eighteenth century dissatisfaction with social and cultural norms might be argued. What seems unarguable, however, is that this well-worn element of thought is an important part of contemporary antliropology—or rotating the concept just a bit to let the light shine on it another way, an important part of the driving force behind many anthropologists, past and present. We can gain some insight into the components of this "romantic naturalism" by returning to Fairchild's ideas of "free" and "wild." These terms tip us off to the centrality of Rousseau's idea of the "state of nature": "that which is original. . . in man's present nature" (Rousseau 1984: 68), which is, fundamentally, the question of what humans would be like without the strictures imposed by European mores. The question, in short (and in a twenty-first century idiom), was (and is), "What is a default human being like?" 4. Ellingson includes a number of examples of uses of the "Noble Savage" phrase or idea in treatments of Enlightenment thought. One that directly links the concept with Tahitian sexuality is: "The early navigators to the South Pacific wrote glowing accounts of Tahitian society. Their writings were used by the Europeans to support their romantic concept of the "noble savage," just coming into fashion" (de Bovis 1980: i). Edmond de Bovis was a French naval officer who spent 1843-1848 and 1849-1854 in Tahiti. 5. Shweder is of the same mind as Fairchild in his equating of nonrationality and romanticism: "A central tenet of the romanticist view holds that ideas and practices have their foundation in neither logic nor empirical science, . . . fall beyond the scope of deductive and inductive reason, [and] are neither rational nor irrational" 1984: 28).

6 Pacific Romanticism While the idea of a "Noble Savage" may have been not quite what Europeans had in mind when they thought of people in other parts of the world, the comparative data certainly did have their implications. As philosophers contemplated the idea of natural man and the default human condition, the accounts of indigenous peoples could be used in different ways. A common way—indeed, in some circles the most common way—of seeing accounts of Pacific peoples and others was to focus on their goodness, since "the belief in the natural goodness of savages was, at bottom, a belief in the natural goodness of man" (Smith 1985: 123), a view that, in itself, could be intrinsically satisfying. BACK TO ROMANTICISM Another of the components of "romantic naturalism" that found itself at least one home among the philosophes was a recreational or diversionary sexuality that was both unrestrained and knew no shame: "Sexual liberation—the physical enjoyment of natural pleasures, to be sure, but no less mankind's emancipation from the mental bugbears and phobias of 'eros denied'—was a keynote of the philosophes' programme" (Porter 1990: 118). A significant development in the "free sex" component of Enlightenment thinking was built upon the descriptions by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (and those who accompanied him) of edenic conditions and leisurely sex on Tahiti. These reports, bolstered by the writings of philosophe Denis Diderot, provided ample support for those who preferred to believe that the default condition of human beings was a freedom from (European) sexual mores. In more evocative terms, Bougainville's account "detonated the greatest intellectual Shockwaves in Europe" (Porter 1990: 119), with the result that "sexual radicals were so excited when they found a culture whose sexuality was 'natural,' flourishing within a polity which was not only nondespotic, but was suffused with the aura of innocence and primitive simplicity" (Porter 1990: 118). Before we encounter Bougainville's account in Chapter 3, let us imagine what Bougainville and other French authors might have been thinking with, thinking about; seeing with, seeing about; representing with, and representing about (Douglas 1999: 68ff.) when they experienced Tahiti. In other words, in order to assess the accounts of Tahiti, we need to take into consideration the "agenda, interests, capabilities and personality" (Douglas 1999: 68) with which an author views the world—the mental accompaniment of (in this case) his percepts. But there is also the matter of what gets talked about, what, of all possible things to address, actually gets recorded—in one fashion or another. There are, of necessity, a series of "filters" by which events are "mediated, distorted and often amplified by . . . experience, fantasies and phobias" (Douglas 1999: 68). I discuss these variables later and show how perception and conception influence each other. To give one example here, Bougainville's education predisposed him to perceive the Tahitians in terms of the classic Greeks, and his ensuing rendering of his and his crew's experiences on Tahiti is replete with Arcadian imagery. In many respects, he could only see the Tahitians in such terms, which means he could only represent them in such terms. And by so rep-

Introduction 7 resenting them, he affected subsequent readings of Tahitian behavior. This does not mean that Bougainville's account is utterly untrustworthy, it means only that if we wish to have a more complete understanding of the European response to Tahiti, then we cannot read his account uncritically. It is quite clear that Bougainville's crew did enjoy friendly and sexual overtures on the part of Tahitians in 1768. What also seems clear is that while the French assumed that this sort of behavior was South Pacific "hospitality," an extremely strong case can be made that the French misinterpreted the Tahitians' behavior, and that instead of "hospitality," the Tahitians were employing a strategy that was intended to keep from being fired upon on one hand, and to obtain iron on the other. Much of this book describes early European landings on the shores of Tahiti. The claim is that the accounts of the Tahitian experience—especially those from French pens—profoundly affected the ways in which Europeans construed the "state of nature," and, by extension, cultural variability, and, by extension of this, the discipline that has, over the past century and a half, the most to do with cultural variability: anthropology. In making this argument, I take a number of things for granted. I assume, for example, that my reading audience will stipulate that the Enlightenment was a period of intellectual foment in Europe. Furthermore, I assume that the idea of the eighteenth-century romanticism (and, not unimportantly, Ellingson's reminder about that chimera known as the "Noble Savage"6) is not entirely unfamiliar to readers. I assume that the outlines of European intellectual history between, say, 1765 and 1795 are reasonably familiar (including the way in which romanticism was bolstered due to the influence of Denis Diderot), and I assume that this familiarity allows one to recognize that a natural romanticism was at or near the core of many Enlightenment concerns, including, but not limited to, human nature (including the elusive Natural Man), sexual mores, colonialism, private property, and religion. The thesis here is that Bougainville profoundly misconstrued the Tahitian behavior that he saw and that Diderot compounded the error by adducing Tahitians as evidence for a Natural Man. In making the argument that Bougainville erred, the corollary follows that Diderot and anyone else—including thinkers into the twenty-first century—who depends upon a romanticist paradigm also errs because the natural man—the default human being—at least the South Pacific highly sexualized version of that construct—is more fantasy than reality. In order to make my argument, I will show that rather than "hospitality," Bougainville was treated to a peculiar defensive stratagem that exploited the sexuality of (some) Tahitian women. 6. The imagined "Noble Savage" and romanticism were importantly formed by encounters with North American Indians as well (see Kiernan 1990.) The Last of the Mohicans and Hiawatha serve as exemplars of the North American version of the romanticized Natural Man. I am, however, concerned here only with the open sexual character that romanticism brought to the construction of the "Noble Savage" as a result of reports and accounts of Tahiti. (See Marshall and Williams 1982 for a discussion of the romanticized construction of the "Noble Savage.")

8 Pacific Romanticism Sidebar: A Word About Qualifications Much of this book is about Tahiti. I have never been there. This book is about events that took place well over 200 years ago. I am not a historian. By what sense of entitlement, then, do I imagine I can produce a historical monograph centered on Tahiti? The answer is that I am also anthropologist, and because the book looks at human understandings of the world, the book is resolutely about anthropology and anthropologists. It is also for anthropologists, although not exclusively for them. I am also a Euro-American in the ways I see the world. This means, among other things, that I am a distant product of that historical moment known as the Enlightenment. For better or for worse, if you are reading this, you probably are as well. We share the components of the Enlightenment as part of our intellectual pedigree, and one of the components of this pedigree is the romanticist counterrevolution to rationalism that I ascribe to my young expatriate interlocutor on New Ireland. He didn't quite see it, folding a romanticist conviction into his set of understandings about how the world is, or should be. I see romanticist counteragenda and reject it. For both of us, however, romanticism's presence, and indeed the presence of the Enlightenment in general, shapes our thought, especially our thought about people who are not like us, and who live in places that, as we grew up, we scarcely imagined existed. It is, by my lights, imperative that we do not let feelings trump thinking, especially when it comes to understanding people who seem to be very different from us. And while I recognize that a thinking/feeling distinction is, in part, a North American cultural construction, I also believe that it is also a useful metacognitive heuristic—a helpful way of thinking about thinking. This book is, in the final analysis, an effort to make a contribution to the way we think—about others, about ourselves, and about the commonalities between others and ourselves. OUTLINE OF THE BOOK Chapter 2 sets the stage by providing brief descriptions of Europe and Tahiti in the year 1767. These descriptions are intended to be short and to attend primarily to subject matter of interest when it comes to reading other parts of the book. Chapters 3, 6, and 7 are primarily historical and ethnographic in nature, in that they focus on European voyages to and accounts of Tahiti. The remaining chapters—4, 5, and 8—are where I address the intellectual outcomes of Europe's discovery of Tahiti. In the intellectual underpinnings of my overall argument, I utilize the work of Bernard Smith, Edward Said, and others who remind us that we remake the Other according to our own needs. If this is so—and I believe that it is—then it is important to explore what European needs were and the ways that these needs affected the construction of the Other. Put more elegantly by Smith, Europeans brought a "varied bundle of mental luggage" to their perceptions of Pacific peoples (Smith 1992: 213), including those of the inhabitants of Tahiti, a fact that drives much of the emphasis of the book. We still drag this "luggage" along

Introduction 9 with us, but my hope is that in the course of this study, we unpack some of that luggage, and find some things that we can throw out, making our next trip— actual or imagined—a bit less burdened by the unfortunate intellectual consequences of a fantasy.

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2 1767 This chapter is an ethnographic snapshot of two quite different places in 1767: Tahiti and Europe. Given Europe's much greater population and size, along with its linguistic and cultural heterogeneity, one must be careful in treating it as a monolith. One advantage that offsets these difficulties is, of course, that many Europeans wrote down their ideas. So although we do not have the thoughts of every segment of European society, something is better than nothing, and if we keep in mind that our image of Europe is skewed in favor of those who were literate and relatively educated, we can keep ourselves from making the mistake of imagining that all Europeans thought the same way at the same time regardless of where in the continent they were located. In short, even with these caveats, it is nonetheless reasonable to believe that we can have a fairly precise idea of what some influential Europeans were thinking. The opposite circumstances obtain with regard to Tahiti in 1767. The convenience of Tahiti's relative homogeneity is balanced by the fact that there are no Tahitian writings from precontact days. In general then, we can expect that all we can muster is a rather relatively indistinct idea of what most Tahitians were thinking. Given these limitations, it means that when I say "Europe," I mean those Europeans who were literate, and influenced by (and sometimes contributing to) what we have come to call Enlightenment thinking. By "Tahiti," I refer to the indigenous people of the island of Tahiti Nui in particular, knowing that it is a fiction to imagine that they are cookie-cutter culture-bearers, all with precisely the same set of understandings and values. EUROPE My effort to capture the thoughts and feelings of Enlightenment Europe in 1767 will necessarily be rather compact, relying on specialists. One such specialist is Peter Gay, from whom I have taken the example of using somewhat

12 Pacific Romanticism expansive terms with little apology. Gay writes of his willingness to speak "of the Philosophes, and [to] call the totality of their ideas the Enlightenment . . . a family of intellectuals united by a single style of thinking" (Gay 1973: x; emphases in original). Gay goes on to note that While the Enlightenment was a family of philosophes, it was something more as well: it was a cultural climate, a world in which the philosophes acted, from which they noisily rebelled and quietly drew many of their ideas, and on which they attempt to impose their program. (Gay 1773: x) The "program" to which Gay refers can be described as a set of salient ideas or values that served as foundations for much that was thought and said: 1. Reason—the philosophes stressed the primacy of reason and rationality as ways of organizing knowledge, tempered by experience and experiment, in this they took over the "rationalist" concept of reason as the process of rational thought, based upon clear, innate ideas independent of experience, which can be demonstrated to any thinking person, and which had been set out by Descartes and Pascal in the seventeenth century. However, the philosophes allied their version of rationalism with empiricism. 2. Empiricism—the idea that all thought and knowledge about the natural and social world is based on empirical facts, things that all human beings can apprehend through their sense organs. 3. Science—the notion that scientific knowledge, based on the experimental method as developed in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, was the key to expanding all human knowledge. 4. Universalism—the concept that reason and science could be applied to any and every situation, and that their principles were the same in every situation. Science in particular produces general laws that govern the entire universe, without exception. 5. Progress—the idea that the natural and social condition of human beings could be improved, by the application of science and reason, and would result in an everincreasing level of happiness and well-being. 6. Individualism—the concept that the individual is the starting point for all knowledge and action, and that individual reason cannot be subjected to a higher authority. Society is thus the sum or product of the thought and action of a large number of individuals. 7. Toleration—the notion that all human beings are essentially the same, despite their religious or moral convictions, and that the beliefs of other races or civilizations are not inherently inferior to those of European Christianity. 8. Freedom—an opposition to feudal and traditional constrains on beliefs, trade, communication, social interaction, sexuality, and ownership of property. 9. Uniformity of human nature—the belief that the principal characteristics of human nature were always and everywhere the same. 10. Secularism—an ethic most frequently seen in the form of virulent anti-clericalism. The philosophes' opposition to traditional religious authority stressed the need for secular knowledge free of religious orthodoxies. (Hamilton 1996: 23-24) The Enlightenment had its different "flavors," depending on its locus. The Scottish Enlightenment was different from the French, and that was different

1767 13 from the German (which emerged a bit later than, and is seen in part as derivative of, the other two). The French and Scottish Enlightenments shared many of the characteristics noted above. To the degree that they varied, it was in their attitudes toward their respective social orders. The French had the more jaded view, perhaps best expressed by Voltaire's ecrasez Vinfame ("crush the damned thing") attitude toward the church, and Rousseau's longing for "natural man." By way of contrast, Adam Ferguson in Edinburgh begins his 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society with an image of human history as being something akin to a shoot that grows into a plant: the growth from "rudeness to civilization" (Ferguson 1980: 1). The Scottish rationalist expectation of an inexorable progress stands out against the French romanticist exasperated longings for something better. The intellectual differences that bounded the Channel were not the only areas of strife between Britain and France. Having just completed the Seven Years' War in 1763 (in which France lost virtually all of its North American claims), the two rivals were at odds, and searching for ways to outdo each other. The war over, and within this context of contentious enmity, the Pacific Ocean emerged as the stage upon which a wounded (French) national pride might be salved, or an exclamation point put on (British) global maritime supremacy. EUROPEAN INTEREST(S) IN THE PACIFIC Considering the amount of European traffic across the Pacific since Magellan, it seems remarkable that no European had encountered Tahiti—to name but one place—until the second half of the eighteenth century. Then again, when one considers the vastness of the expansive Pacific, coupled with crude European navigational, cartographic, and communication technologies, one understands that it is quite possible for a number of Pacific islands to have remained undisclosed to European awareness for quite some time. And of course, this is precisely what happened. In fact, when we look at European exploration of the Pacific Ocean for much of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, it is clear that Europeans suffered both from what logicians and statisticians refer to as Type I and Type II errors: failing to find the lands that were there, as well as assuming the existence of lands that were not there. Many mid-eighteenth-century European geographers worked under the assumption that the great landmasses north of the Equator should be balanced by a large antipodal continent. As late as 1767, voyages were being commissioned to find that continent (Howe 1984: 81), but the idea finally died of lack of evidence around 1780. These European ideas about a Great Southern Continent—Terra Australis—were well over a millennium in the making. Beaglehole cites Pomponius Mela (c. A.D. 50) and Ptolemy (d. A.D. 145) as responsible for the notion that the great Eurasian landmass must have a balancing, complementary landmass to the south (1974: 107-127). The existence of such a landmass was not merely an esoteric conjecture; during that era of exploration and new discoveries, the expectation of such a continent was a powerful variable in the equation of motivations and hunches. Given the renowned difficulties of going

14 Pacific Romanticism much further south than Cape Horn (first rounded in 1616 [see Bolyanatz 1998]), extreme southern exploration was not undertaken easily or often. This only served to make the idea of the discovery of the presumed Southern Continent all the more captivating. The existence of Terra Australis was almost assumed to be the case in some instances—certainly it seems to have been so among the French. Indeed, "if historical scholarship and scientific speculation could have produced a continent, the French would have produced it" (Beaglehole 1974: 117-118). The French were not alone in their seemingly rash wish that there be a Terra Australis. Alexander Dalrymple, a Scot, argued forcefully in Britain for the presence of such a continent throughout the second half of the eighteenth century.1 Dalrymple's reputation as a hydrographer and cartographer lent credibility to his belief in the existence of a vast Southern Continent, and eventually, that credibility, along with the end of the Seven Years' War, convinced Lord Egmont, First Lord of the Admiralty, that it was worth dispatching a pair of ships in search of "Land or Islands of Great extent, hitherto unvisited by any European Power . . . between Cape Horn and New Zeeland" (Public Record Office; cited in Beaglehole 1974: 123). Egmont selected the Dolphin, under the command of Captain Samuel Wallis, and the Swallow, under Captain Philip Carteret, to carry out the mission. We return to this mission in Chapter 6. French interest in an antipodal continent seems to have been strongly motivated by their status as latecomers to Pacific exploration. A two-century-late start could be overcome quite nicely by staking a claim to a landmass such as a great Southern Continent—especially after losing their holdings in North America. The exploratory voyage of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville included a mandate to seek new lands in the Pacific before Britain got to them (Ross 1978: 85). This voyage is described in the next chapter. In the second half of the eighteenth century, Europe was experiencing a sense that time was mnning out when it came to new discoveries. The world was, after all, finite, and sooner or later all claims were going to be staked, and those nations that failed to stake them would be worse off.2 It was a matter of political and economic expediency to get out there. After all, who was to say that another discovery of Columbian import did not await the next ship to sail from Europe? This latter possibility fueled romanticist interests as well as political and economic ones, with the result that accounts of Pacific voyages were extremely popular with the literate public: Hawkesworth's An Account of the voyages undertaken by the order of His Present Majesty for making discoveries in the southern hemisphere (1773) . . . [which included an 1. Dalrymple was tenacious in his belief in the presence of such a landmass, still arguing in 1773 that it existed, "even as Cook was proving that it did not exist" (Frost 1976: 792). 2. 1 cannot leave uncommented-upon the European conceit that the rest of the world was turf to be claimed. It is not an overstatement to say that France and England (and they were not alone) assumed that other people and places were commodities to be acquired, used, and bartered.

1767 15 account of Wallis's voyage] was one of the most popular works of the century. The first edition sold out quickly, and a second appeared in the same year (with a third in 1785, and a fourth in 1789). . . . It was the work most frequently borrowed from the Bristol Library between 1770 and 1784 (115 times between 1773 and 1775, and 201 times altogether). Bougainville's A Voyage round the world (translated J.R. Forster, 1772) was borrowed 48 times from the same library between 1773 and 1784. (Frost 1976: 784) Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century was a place of expectation of—or, perhaps better said, a hunger for—reports of places and peoples unknown. Wallis, Bougainville, and others obliged, and one of the most pleasing places and peoples to have ever fed this European hunger was the island of Tahiti and its inhabitants. TAHITI The following analysis of Tahitian culture and society prior to European contact relies heavily on the outstanding work of the anthropologist Douglas Oliver. The most thoroughgoing study of pre-contact Tahiti to be found is Oliver's three-volume masterpiece Ancient Tahitian Society (1974). It is the basis for much of my treatment of Tahitian society and culture, and provides a helpful understanding of the cultural status quo ante encountered by Europeans. Oliver's efforts, along with those of others, provide insight into Tahitian culture and society on the eve of European contact. Belligerent, religious, competitive, and heavily stratified, Tahitian society in 1767 was dominated by a nobility that wielded considerable power. The following ethnographic images attend to aspects of Tahitian society—social stratification; religion; and sex, gender, and sexuality (admittedly convenient and fictitious distinctions used for heuristic puiposes)—that are most relevant for the following chapters. I will also discuss traditional Tahitian warfare before concluding this description of traditional Tahitian culture and society with a brief discussion about behaviors and attitudes, and the implications of the incongruence between the two. (I should note that in this description, I eschew the use of the term Maohi, which is the correct name for the people who lived on Tahiti at the time that concerns us. For the sake of convenience and consistency, however, I refer to them as "Tahitians," which is not unlike referring to the people who populated the old U.S.S.R. as "Soviets," in which the shorthand name for the people comes from the name of the place. Since this is not a monograph on Tahitian culture or history, I judge that the impropriety of using "Tahitian" rather than "Maohi" is warranted in the interest of readability. I do, however, use "Maohi" when citing others who use the term.) Traditional Tahiti: Social Stratification The Society Islands were home to approximately 45,000 people in the mideighteenth century. Roughly two-thirds of that figure probably lived on the

16 Pacific Romanticism large island of Tahiti—Tahiti Nui (Kirch 1984: 98). That Tahitian society was stratified is essentially beyond question. The number of strata and the permeability of their boundaries are, however, not quite as clear. Most of the European visitors in the early days of contact seemed to discriminate three groups, which might be called ari'i ("nobility" or "chiefs"), ra'atira ("landowners"), and manahune "(commoners"). There were distinctions within these groups, and no doubt some of the nuances escaped the European observers. But roughly speaking, it would not be inaccurate to refer to Tahitian society as having three distinct, to use Oliver's term, classes (1974: 754). These classes were, in principle, endogamous, which means marriages were expected to take place only within the class. This is not the same as saying that sexual relations did not take place across class lines. But the offspring of these latter unions did not always survive, and when they did, certainly had fewer rights than children of endogamously married parents (Oliver 1974: 771-773). Oliver also notes that in some respects, the nobility are not just another class, and that the distinction between, say, the ari 7 and the ra 'atira was not analogous to that between the ra 'atira and the manahune, the boundary between the latter two being much more permeable. In this regard, Oliver notes the "castelike boundary between the category of people labeled ari'i (chiefs) and all other persons" (1974: 758-759). There is, of course, always the chance that Tahitian stratification existed only in the minds of European observers, who mistakenly attributed stratification to a set of social relations that otherwise seemed alien to them. Oliver considers this possibility in noting that social relations involving governance, property ownership, and occupation "were evidently based on European visitors' notions of how all proper societies were stratified (the feudal model having been especially favored), with only minimum attention given to the opinions of the Maohis or the facts of Maohi life" (Oliver 1974: 751). Having made this observation, one must ask: Is it possible for over a dozen observers (Oliver 1974: 752-753) to have made the same mistake, and projected stratification where there was none? That is unlikely; a much more parsimonious explanation is that, even though there may have been some skewing going on in the minds of the European observers, social stratification was a fact of Tahitian life in 1767. This stratification seems not to have been overly burdensome for the lower classes: "The checks and balances of inherited power in the ruling class and the productive, economic strength among the lower order of people made for an equilibrium in lifestyles in which excesses affecting the society as a whole were difficult, if not impossible, to maintain" (Feradon 1981: 49). Another consequence of this social stratification would have been a social integration not possible if the island of Tahiti Nui had been populated by a set of atomistic villages or village clusters. For my purposes, this is important because while the two European expeditions noted above—that is, Wallis's and Bougainville's— landed approximately twelve miles away from each other (Bouginville at Taipahia Bay and Wallis at Matavai Bay; see Map 2.1), the existence of a single monarch, the woman Purea (referred to as "Oborea"), strongly suggests that the news of the first European landing would have been known at the time of the second.

Map 2.1 Map of Tahiti

18 Pacific Romanticism One final note is worth making. The ari 'i did not have absolute power over the behavior of commoners; this is one corollary of the light-handedness of ari'i leadership. As we will see later, the nobility sometimes had difficulty controlling others' interactions with Europeans, and more than once had to repair breaches that were not of their own making. Traditional Tahiti: Religion "Religion was the keystone of ancient Tahitian society"; "the whole idea of political authority in old Tahiti rested on a divine sanction as symbolized by the marae [open courtyards where ceremonies were held]" (Hanson 1973: 2). There is no mistaking the fact that Tahitian social structure was supported by a religious system that consistently endorsed the status quo. A lengthy articulation of Tahitian cosmology is not possible here; I can, however, provide a description of key Tahitian institutions in which supernatural beings and forces play important roles. I list these alphabetically rather than in terms of salience or any particular organizing principle. Arioi. The arioi were a sect of "specially selected and ceremonially initiated individuals who devoted themselves in large measure to activities connected with 'Oro [see below] worship" (Oliver 1974: 913). Their numbers "probably reached into the thousands" and were mostly male, although some were female (Oliver 1974: 914). The arioi were not a class as described above. They did, however, enjoy substantial prestige, and their proximity to supernatural beings and forces gave them some privileges that were otherwise restricted to the nobility. Some of these privileges were sexual, and the arioi seem to have enjoyed wide latitude in this aspect, although they were expected to remain childless, using infanticide as a means to that end (Oliver 1974: 938-944). The arioi traveled to different parts of the archipelago, performing rituals and sacrifices in the name of the god 'Oro. Entertainment was almost certainly one of their functions, and their dramas, singing, and dancing were fundamentally religious (recognizing the shortcomings of that etic category) in nature. The public nature of acts of copulation that were often a part of arioi "shows" certainly was "religious," but Oliver makes it clear that "the emphasis on sexuality in public performances . . . is to be distinguished from the sexual promiscuity" of their offstage lives (Oliver 1974: 923). Aro tarai. The aro tarai are referred to as "battle shapers . . . [who] were called upon to plan broad strategies and even some detailed tactics" (Oliver 1974: 989). While it may seem incongruous to include a military position in a listing of religious statuses, battle without supernatural endorsement was hardly thinkable: "Judging from the amount of religious activity that accompanies warfare, and the rewards earned by the victorious side's war-supporting priests and deities, one would be justified in believing that the latters' roles in warfare were important indeed" (Oliver 1974: 990). These "battle shapers" were not "generals" in that they did not have overall command (this is consistent with the relative autonomy of commoners noted at the end of the previous section). They

1767 19 were much more like choreographers in that a battle plan was laid out, and the performers/combatants followed it as best they could. 'Oro. 'Oro was one of the "most widely revered" gods in the Society Islands (Oliver 1974: 882), and, as "the god of sacrifice, had always been part of the Polynesian pantheon, but in the eighteenth century 'Oro had begun to play a special part in Tahitian politics" (Dening 2000: 113). The "special part" was a role of conquest: There was an element of mission or colony in 'Oro's expansion. His priests would establish a new sacred place with some stone transported from an original temple. These places sacred to 'Oro all shared a common name: Taputapuatea, "Sacrifices from Abroad." They were all close to the sea and stood opposite some passage through the reef to the open sea. The rituals at Taputapuatea always focused on canoes and their arrival with sacrificial victims. Tahitians, like all Polynesian peoples, had some preoccupation with the origins and voyages of their ancestors and with strangers who came from beyond the sky. 'Oro himself was incarnated in a log or a clublike basket of sennit covered in feathers, more abstract in his representation than anthropomorphic. He himself was a voyager around their island in an ark or feather basket coffer set on a canoe called Rainbow. He had first come to the Tahitian islands on a rainbow that joined sky and land. As the Maohi—the native islanders of the whole Society group—saw it, the great celebration of 'Oro at his birthplace of Opoa on Raiatea was a time of commitment to alliances that stretched beyond the bounds of their individual islands. (Dening 2000: 113-114) The abodes of 'Oro known as taputapuatea are called "god houses" by Oliver (1974: 905), and can refer both to temples that were the loci of sacrifice as well as to the basket coffers that Dening mentions above, being situated atop double canoes. 'Oro is attracted to the color red, and maro ura—"red feathers"— decorate the girdle/breechclout (maro) worn by those ari'i entitled to wear it (Oliver 1974: 763; Dening 2000: 112-114). That 'Oro was central to almost any Tahitian endeavor or experience of consequence—agriculture, animal husbandry, warfare, politics, and sexuality to name a few—is undisputed. Traditional Tahiti: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Demographically, Tahitian males outnumbered females. Female infanticide was almost certainly the single largest cause of this disparity (Oliver 1974: 424426, 606). In a crude supply-demand sort of way, one of the effects of the malefemale ratio was that male interest in the pursuit of sexual relations—which would presumably not be absent even in the event of demographic parity—was intense. Another effect seems to have been something of a relaxed approach toward sexual relations between men and women: "The Maohis in general may have been quite casual about sexual intercourse" (Oliver 1974: 617). Indeed, it would be counter-intuitive to expect that strong cultural proscriptions would be needed in circumstances where demography had created substantial limitations on its own. Oliver addresses the demographic disparity and it outcomes:

20 Pacific Romanticism Despite the many reports of Maohis' "free love," sexually desirable young women were relatively scarce. Males of suitable class seem to have had little difficulty obtaining sexual favors on a temporary basis, either through mutual attraction or in exchange for something more tangible, but longer and more exclusive enjoyment of such pleasures must have been highly competitive and costly. (Oliver 1974: 1099) Sydney Parkinson, who visited Tahiti in 1769, concurs, almost parenthetically noting: Polygamy is not allowed amongst [the Tahitians]; but the married women have not a very delicate sense of modesty: their husbands will allow you any liberty with their wives, except the last, which they do not approve. Most of our ship's company procured temporary wives amongst the natives, with whom they occasionally cohabited; an indulgence which even many reputed virtuous Europeans allow themselves, in uncivilized parts of the world; with impunity; as if a change of place altered the moral turpitude of fornication: and what is a sin in Europe, is only a simple innocent gratification in America [i.e., the New World, including the Pacific Islands]; which is to suppose, that the obligation to chastity is local, and restricted only to particular parts of the globe. (Parkinson 1984: 2526) Social stratification therefore crosscut the male-female disparity in that male conmioners felt the shortage of women more acutely. But the shortage of women was trumped by the relative lack of fussiness about promiscuity, and extra- and premarital sexual relationships abounded: Among the several activities engaged in by the Maohis, one that ranked near the top of their list of goals was sexual intercourse—not mainly as a necessary release of tension, but rather as an activity as highly pleasurable, in its way, as the eating of good food. Also, although sexual services of most Maohi women may not have been valued very highly relative to certain other goods, the very frequency of their circulation stamped sexual intercourse as a most popular and recurrent social goal. (Oliver 1974: 1075-1076) Here, we see that women's sexuality was treated by men very much as a commodity—indeed perhaps a quite scarce commodity. Along such lines, Oliver notes that "[women], or their sexual, reproductive, and domestic services, were deliberately 'circulated' more often than males" (1974: 607). And given the vicissitudes of social stratification, one conclusion to be drawn is that women and their services (sexual and otherwise) of lower classes would have been utilized as a kind of currency among males of higher classes. Certainly by the time of Captain James Cook's visits to Tahiti (the first was in 1769), it was clear that it was the women of lower classes who engaged in sexual relations with Cook's crew: In characterizing the "women of the lowest rank" who consorted with the European sailors, G. Forster wrote: "It was remarkable that they were not without some degree of vanity, as they never gave themselves any other name than that of tediia [tetua], (lady), which is the title of their female nobility, and which, by way of eminence, is particularly applied to the princesses of these islands. ([G. Forster 1771: I, 403]; cited in Oliver 1974: 751)

1767 21 Lower-class female sexuality-as-commodity (at least in the eyes of upperclass men) among eighteenth-century Tahitians is evidenced in other contexts as well. Ferndon (1981: 105-107) notes in this regard that gifts of tapa were often presented with nude or nearly nude women (see also Cook 1961: 207-208). Perhaps the quintessential example of males utilizing lower-class female sexuality were the pseudonoble arioi, who combined social prestige and religious privilege to provide public entertainment with themes of ribald sexuality. Oliver provides the following translation of the missionary John Orsmond's original Tahitian texts (1849) that describe the two kinds of women who engaged in sexual relations with male arioi: Bed-mates for the players. These were the women who followed along after them in their travels. They were clothe-starchers, one and all, and gift distributors for the arioi. Those women would just leave them. A different person would come and come and sleep, and bear gifts for the arioi. Whores. The lecher bed. The beautiful hand-maidens would go in as friends for the arioi, daughters of the local adult population; it was they who acted as whores. During the nighttime, they warmed the players, and during the daytime there were prostitutes. But the fleet was strange and different. Should the arioi decide to circumscribe the land, the shores would go along too. And when they came to a stopping over place, a place where they would be fed, they would stay in the house, the arioi of the place whereat they stayed, and the honorable group of whores of that very place would call out "Fornication, our wares are copulation. And right into the homes. Where are the whores?" (Oliver 1974: 925) Oliver acknowledges the roughness of these translations but prefers them as they retain more of the flavor of the original texts. And in spite of their being somewhat opaque, the nexus of sexuality and class seems clear enough. But part of the second paragraph poses something of a riddle to pursue: to what does "the fleet" refer? The most obvious answer is that it refers to the traveling troupes of arioi. And if this is the case, then a follow-up question is suggested: Are all prestigious (male) visitors accorded an arioi-likz welcome in which women call out, "Fornication, our wares are copulation!"? Or, to put the question more directly, are prestigious male visitors hospitably accorded arioi treatment by default? As we will see in subsequent chapters, this is a claim made as a means of explaining the relatively free and easy sexual relationships between Tahitian women and European men in the eighteenth century. I will discuss this possibility in more detail later, but it is worth noting that in the translated text above, the arioi were provided with, in addition to women, "a place where they would be fed," and "they would stay in the house." Food and lodging are clearly a form of hospitality, and this hospitality does include women. But it does not logically follow that any presentation of women is intended to be hospitality, nor does Oliver's description of Tahitian "hospitality" in general involve women (1974: 1008-1011). I will return to this subject in Chapter 6.

22

Pacific Romanticism Traditional Tahiti: War (and Peace)

Military action in the Society Islands is described as having been "especially brutal and merciless" (Keeley 1996: 146). Parkinson makes the following observation in 1769: These people go to war in large canoes, at one end of which there is a kind of stage erected, supported by four carved pillars, and is called tootee. Their weapons are a kind of clubs, and long wooden lances. They have also bows and arrows. The former are made of a strong elastic weed. The arrows are a small species of reed, or bamboes, pointed with hard wood, or with the sting of the rayfish, which is a sharp-bearded bone. They also make use of slings, made of the fibres of the bark of some tree, of which, in general, they make their cordage too: some of them, as well as their slings, are neatly plaited. Their hatchets, or rather adzes, which they call towa, are made by tying a hard black stone, of the kind of which they make their paste-beaters, to the end of a wooden handle; and they look very much like a small garden hoe: and the stone part is ground or worn to an edge. The making of these stone instruments must be a work of time, and laborious, as the stone of which they are made is very hard. The natives have maws, or pieces of cloth, which reach up from the waist, to defend them from the lances, or bunches of hair curiously plaited. . . . When they fight in their boats, they generally throw a string to one another to fasten the canoes together; and the men who are employed in doing this are never struck at. (Parkinson 1984: 24-25) I invoke Keeley and Parkinson here not to address the relative viciousness of Tahitian warfare; rather, I am concerned only to establish the existence of war. Furthermore, I am more interested in the aftermath of military conflict, and especially the demeanor toward and treatment of vanquished by victor. It seems as if there did not exist a universal policy toward defeated enemies: "The various arrangements made by victors for dealing with conquered but still resident tribes differed widely in punishment and in the degree to which the conquered people and their territory were integrated into the victor's tribal domain" (Oliver 1974: 991). Defeated groups were, presumably, highly motivated to be "integrate-able" into the victor's group, although that would likely have manifested itself according to local circumstances; docile, friendly, and helpful attitudes and behaviors must have been key elements of the comportment of individuals and groups who wished to survive in the wake of their military defeat. Such accomodating behavior may seem so counterintuitive that it may be difficult to imagine. But as we will see in subsequent chapters, this type of behavior is not at all uncommon. Furthermore, the incongruence of treating military enemies well in the aftermath of war has its parallels in other seeming inconsistencies, as the following discussion indicates. Traditional Tahiti: Behaviors and Attitudes When a new chief was named in traditional Tahitian society, much pomp and circumstance surrounded the event. One strikingly earthy component of the ritual moment was the following:

1767 23 The chief or king, while reclining on a mat near the god's image, received what was termed the populace's ultimate mark of respect. This consisted of dances and gestures of shocking filthiness, of the grossest kind of obsenity [sic], wherein stark naked men and women surrounded the king and attempted to touch him with various parts of their bodies—even including their urine and excrement. (Moerenhout 1837: II, 27; cited in Oliver 1974: 1022n; emphasis in original.) Oliver expresses his "perplexity" about such behavior, but offers the following as an educated guess as to the reasons behind it: The only explanation I can offer for subjecting the newly vested chief to so gross an indignity, in a context otherwise characterized by such heights of dignification, is to regard the behavior as a caveat: that is, "Eminent as you are, and powerful as you seem to be, you remain vulnerable to the moods of spirits and consequences of your actions with humans." (Oliver 1974: 1023) I am struck by the parallels with an analogous—at least by my lights— behavior among the Sursurunga of New Ireland. This is a contemporary practice known as bokur, which I have described elsewhere (Bolyanatz 2000: 76, 113). Bokur is the practice of wiping infants' buttocks (and/or putrid matter such as food garbage) on the backs and shoulders of others in ceremonial contexts. The explanation given is that, within a social order structured by matrilineal descent and matrimoiety exogamy, a person has a right to wipe filth on one's father's enate (i.e., matrilineal kinsperson) as a reminder to all that even though the perpetrator of bokur owes her (or his) life to her father (and, by extension, her father's kin), the "victim's" father is also moiety-mate of the perpetrator. The lesson is that no one group or person outdoes another when it comes to paternal nurture. Bokur is a vivid reminder that says, in effect, "Yes, your kinsman nurtures me and gives me ongoing life; but do not forget that one of mine has done the same for you." This leveling performance is all the more interesting in that filth is wiped on the backs and shoulders of those with whom one is on friendly terms. That this should be so is not entirely surprising; in our own society, it is not our enemy that we mock and insult for her or his aging on, say, a fiftieth birthday, but our friend. To be sure, one must be careful about drawing parallels between ethnographic data from Melanesia today and from Polynesia over 200 years ago. But Oliver's best-guess explication and local Sursurunga exegeses are similar enough that at the very least, one can draw the cautious conclusion that people can be treated in ways that are entirely unrelated to the attitude that one has toward them. Bokur is generally conducted with good cheer on the part of all. We do not know whether those Tahitian chiefs of old had to steel themselves during those moments, or whether it was the comic climax of the ceremony, with laughter and gaiety as the backdrop. Either way, the incongruence remains on the part of the perpetrators: people who are to be respected—and may even be liked—are in at least some contexts treated abominably. And this is worth noting because, as we will see later, Europeans described Tahitians as being "friendly" toward them, and for the most part assumed that "friendly" behavior

24 Pacific Romanticism accurately mirrored attitudes held by Tahitians toward Europeans. The examples here demonstrate that those Europeans may have been in error to make that assumption of congruence. Indeed, it was conflict—armed and otherwise— between Europeans and Tahitians that was the antecedent of this "friendly" behavior, but I am getting ahead of things. BACK TO EUROPEAN INTEREST(S) IN THE PACIFIC As I noted earlier in this chapter, even in the second half of the eighteenth century, Europeans were still in search of a Great Southern Continent. The Spanish and Dutch Pacific heydays were over, and Britain and France were Europe's most wealthy and powerful states, making them the most likely to succeed in any such endeavor. France was new to Pacific exploration, however, and was significantly behind England. The next chapter chronicles France's first real foray into Pacific Ocean exploration under the leadership of Bougainville. For all of France's lateness on the scene, the French landing at Tahiti has had ramifications that go well beyond France's otherwise rather thin inventory of Pacific voyages of exploration. In the reverse irony, Britain's landing at Tahiti, part of a vast and energetic effort of Pacific exploration, has gone relatively unnoticed. Chapter 6 describes the voyage of the Dolphin and the English first encounter with the people of Tahiti. The chapters between the accounts of the French and English, Chapters 4 and 5, address some of the ramifications of the French voyage.

3 The French This chapter recounts French first contact with the people of Tahiti. Under the command of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, two French vessels landed at Tahiti in 1768. Accounts of the French encounter with the people of Tahiti are renowned for their elicitation of idyllic images of a paradise in which work is minimal, while friendship, food, and sex are delights to be had simply for the asking. These accounts, furthermore, were the constructions of relatively educated and freethinking men, who knew of the profound questions and issues of their day, and knew of the ways in which those questions and issues were informed by (and in part, driven by) constructs such as Natural Man and Natural Law. In the two chapters after this one, I address the way that the accounts of Bougainville and those with him were received by a literate public eagerly awaiting something very much along the lines of what Bougainville provided. Here I focus on the events of April 1768 and the French encounter with the people of Tahiti.. As I noted at the end of the previous chapter, the French were relative latecomers to Pacific Island exploration and settlement. Pacific exploration was dominated by the Spanish and Portuguese early (through the sixteenth century), by the Dutch a bit later (roughly the seventeenth century), and then by the English commencing with the first of William Dampier's three voyages of exploration and buccaneering in 1699. As I noted in the previous chapter, the French were defeated by the British in the midcentury Seven Years' War/French and Indian War. As a result of the treaty ending the war in 1763, France lost most of its American possessions, which prompted it to shift attention to the last unexplored frontier: the lands dotting the Pacific Ocean, including what would be the biggest prize of all: Terra Australis. For the French, the possibility of one final, grand colonial coup would go a long way toward healing the wounds over the loss of Canada and other New World holdings. It was largely this final hope that prompted France's late entry into the Pacific.

26 Pacific Romanticism LOUIS-ANTOINE DE BOUGAINVILLE (1729-1811) Until his circumnavigation of the globe (the first by a Frenchman), Bougainville 's interests, like those of his country, had been in the Atlantic and its shores. A well-educated gentleman from a well-to-do family, Bougainville served in London as a diplomat (during which time he was elected as a fellow to the Royal Society) and later as an aide-de-camp to General Montcalm in Canada. He was convinced of the strategic importance of the newly discovered Falkland Islands, especially given the maritime competition with England. In 1763, Bougainville was given permission to establish a French outpost there, which he did on 31 January 1764 with family money. Later that year, the English discovered the colony and began something of a diplomatic brouhaha, claiming that since it was they who had explored the entire group, they were entitled to colonial primacy. In addition to France's claim that an established colony could not simply be ignored, and England's claim that they had discovered and explored the entire island group, Spain made it a three-headed problem by claiming that the archipelago was part of its New World holdings by virtue of the islands' geographic proximity to the South American landmass. The French government, in order to thwart England (recently victorious over France) sided with Spain's version and, as part of the acquiescence to the Spanish claim, told Bougainville to dissolve his colony. To compensate Bougainville for his losses, French King Louis XV agreed to subsidize a circumglobal voyage (Hammond 1970: 11-15). When Bougainville sailed from France in 1766 aboard the Boudeuse (along with the supply ship L 'Etoile, captained by Francois Chenard de la Giraudais), it was, in part, to hand over formal control of Les Isles Malouines (as the group was known, named after the fact that many of the French colonists came from St. Malo) to Spain. Bougainville was himself a philosophe. He regularly participated in various Paris salons, including some of those frequented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. Diderot later provided this description of Bougainville: Bougainville has a taste for the pleasures of civilization. He likes women, theatricals, fine foods. He lends himself to the whirlwind of society with as easy a grace as to the fickleness of the elements on which he has been tossed about. He's friendly and cheerful. He's a true Frenchman, ballasted to starboard by a treatise on differential and integral calculus, and to port by a voyage around the world. (Diderot 1955a: 4, cited in Kimbrough 1990:27)' Diderot alludes to the fact that, at the age of twenty-five, Bougainville wrote a thesis on integral calculus for which he was granted membership in the Royal Society in England (Howarth 1984: 45). He was "well-read in Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Buffon" (Marshall and Williams 1982: 265). He was a "classicist, a mathematician, and a diplomat" (Howarth 1984: 45); he was, in short, a man of the Enlightenment and its romantic element when he arrived at Tahiti. Summarizing the era and the man, a biographer of Bougainville writes 1. Elsewhere, the references to port and starboard are reversed (Diderot 1964: 180).

The French 27 The intellectual ferment of this time [the early 1760s] was everywhere in the milieux where Bougainville found himself, the academic circles and the raging rationalism of the salons submitting all of man's actions, institutions, modes of life and ideals to empirical scrutiny. This social life surpassed in many respects that of the grand siecle under Louis XIV: conversation spanned a much wider range of topics; the best minds met more on terms of equality with the best born; French cuisine was becoming more of an art form; mathematics and the natural sciences were adding to man's knowledge of his universe at an especially rapid rate; the plastic arts revealed new values, techniques and styles; music became a passion; literature which had long been a passion, was now invading all these areas for its subject matter; theatrical entertainments enjoyed new prestige and the stars of spectacle became the darlings of the rich and famous. French society beamed its light forth from Paris to all of Europe. To be a part of this ebullience was to have arrived socially. Bougainville had arrived. (Kimbrough 1990: 27-28) Beyond whatever intellectual predispositions Bougainville may have had, there was also the fact that he was part of a much larger movement back in Europe, which was the fascination with the accounts coming back from Pacific explorers. To imagine that Bougainville's account of Tahiti hit a Europe without any expectations would be profoundly wrong. Indeed, the expectations were marked: "Between the ending of the Seven Years War in 1763 and the outbreak of the French revolutionary wars thirty years later, Britain and France in particular experienced a 'Pacific craze,' in which a new type of national hero emerged in the shape of naval explorers and itinerant scientists" (Marshall and Williams 1982: 258). We have then, in Bougainville, a man prone to a romantic naturalism, and in Europe, an audience that waits longingly for new and exotic accounts. Bougainville's account of his landing among the Tahitians went beyond the expectations of both. Bougainville was accompanied by two individuals who quite probably contributed to the nature of his account. One was Philibert de Commercon (17271773), who served as Bougainville's surgeon. Commercon was a naturalist and part of France's intellectual elite (he was an ardent devotee of Rousseau), and sailed aboard the Etoile, from which he and Bougainville enjoyed frequent discussions (Hammond 1970: 53-54; Ross 1978: 118). Commercon was idealistic and arrogant, although a "decidedly odd sort" (Kimbrough 1990: 55), claiming that he had outdone Linnaeus in botanical cataloguing. Ross, however, believes that this conceit was not entirely unwarranted, quoting Cuvier who rued Commercon's early death by saying, "If Commercon had published his own observations, he would have been in the first rank of naturalists" (Ross 1978: 118). On the other hand, "disorganization" and "slipshod work habits" (Kimbrough 1990: 55) may also have contributed to the dearth of published works by the seemingly meteoric young man. Commercon was more of a romantic than Bougainville (as we will see later from his account of Tahiti), and to the degree that he influenced the latter's thought, it would have been in the direction of a predisposition to see Tahiti through an extraordinarily idyllic viewfinder. Commercon was quite taken with what he took to be sexual freedom on Tahiti. Indeed, Commercon's libertine inclinations were not limited to his intellectual interests. He was accompanied

28 Pacific Romanticism aboard L 'Etoile by a "cabin boy" who turns out to have been a twenty-eightyear-old woman named Jeanne Bare (Alexander 1977: 31). The other passenger of some interest in terms of possible influences on Bougainville was the young, brash, philandering dandy, the Prince of NassauSiegen, Charles Henri Nicholas Othan (1745-1808), who was twenty-one when he sailed from France with Bougainville. The Prince is described as "impetuous" (d'Aragon 1893: l l 2 ) , "handsome as a god, witty, well-bred, haughty, daring, courageous, intrepid and reckless" (Thiery 1932: 144), and as a "spendthrift" whose uncle Jean-Frederic Maurepas thought "a protracted absence would offer a splendid opportunity to get the young man out of the clutches of his creditors" (Kimbrough 1990: 54). Little else is known about him at that age, and in trying to avoid overstatement, it may be enough to say that Bougainville cannot have been unaffected by the Prince's enchantment with and delight in what transpired on Tahiti, along with his quick-wittedness and ability to provide "good companionship" (Kimbrough 1990: 54). Bougainville and the Enlightenment When I claim that Bougainville was "something of a philosophe" and "a man of the Enlightenment," I mean that Bougainville was a person who would have, in large part, been aware of the intellectual tension of his era. The new perspective of Enlightenment rationalism thinking that had such great promise—the notion that all questions could, in principle, be answered—carried with it the curse of a mechanistic approach that generated something of a romantic counterrevolution. While rationalism appeared first, and remained regnant, within the Scottish Enlightenment of Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, the romanticists were most prominent in France. Given Bougainville's predilection for the writings of social thinkers of his day, including Rousseau (Thiery 1932: 185), he was no doubt well informed of the stiengths and weaknesses of both rationalism and romanticism, and one can easily imagine Bougainville and Commercon engaging in many evening discussions along just these lines. Although Bougainville had read Rousseau, he was certainly not an ardent devotee of all of the latter's ideas about Natural Man. His experiences and observations among the people at the southern tip of the New World, to whom he gave the name Pecharais, set him against any notion that non-Europeans might have had any advantage over Europeans. After his voyage, he wrote: The members of this tribe are small, thin, and ugly, and smell abominably. They go practically naked, their only garments consisting of imperfectly cured sealskins, which are generally too small to cover them. These skins serve a multiplicity of purposes, in addition to providing the savages with the entire wardrobe, they furnish roofs for their huts and sails for their canoes. The women are ill-favoured and the men apparently pay them scant courtesy. It is they who row or sail the canoes, and who look to their upkeep and repair. . . . The savages live a higgledy-piggledy sort of life, men, women and children 2. 1 am indebted to Joan Hopkins for her translation of part of Nassau-Siegen's biography.

The French

29

huddling together in the huts, in the center of which a fire is kept burning. (Thiery 1932: 185-186) Of all the savages whom 1 have seen in my life, the Pecharais are the most destitute: they are exactly in what one can call the state of nature; and in truth if one were to pity the fate of a man free and master of himself, without obligations and without affairs, happy with what he has because he knows no better, I would pity these men who, deprived of everything which makes life agreeable, still have to suffer the harshness of the most frightful climate in the universe. These Pecharais also form the least numerous human group which I have ever met in any part of he world; however, as proof will later be seen, there are charlatans among them. That is, as soon as there is a group larger than a family, and I mean by family, father, mother, and children, interests become complicated; individuals want to dominate by force or by deception. The name of family is changed into that of society, and even if it were established in the middle of the woods and made up only of cousins german [i.e., consanguine], a sharp observer would discover there the seed of all the vices to which men assembled in uncivilized nations have given names, vices which give rise to, motivate and destroy the greatest empires, it follows for the same principle that in civilized societies arise virtues to which men, still close to the state of nature, are insensitive. (Kimbrough 1990: 83) Bougainville was also put off by Rousseau's claim that men of his (that is, Bougainville's) ilk—laymen, by which he meant nonphilosophers—were incapable of providing accurate, objective accounts of what they saw beyond Europe, and especially in the New World. The claim comes from Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality: "There are mainly four kinds of men who make long term voyages, sailors, merchants, soldiers and missionaries. One can hardly expect the first three groups to furnish good observers" (Rousseau 1984: 111). As this was originally published in 1755, Bougainville must certainly have been acquainted with it prior to his voyages. There can be no other explanation for Bougainville's fuming self-defense in the introduction to the account of his voyage: "I am a voyager and a mariner, that is, a liar and an imbecile in the eyes of that group of lazy and haughty writers who, in the shade of their study, philosophize endlessly about the world and its inhabitants, and majestically subjugate nature to their imagination" (cited in Kimbrough 1990: 129). Bougainville's account, as a result, seems to be written with an eye toward demonstrating the attentiveness and perception of men like him. Given his background, Bougainville cannot have been unaware of the implications of what he was to observe, and given his need to prove something to Rousseau, we must assume that he made it a point to be as accurate as possible, given the limitations of his era. At the other extreme, one scholar suggests that "the gentlemanly and cultured Bougainville" may have lost track of the difference between what he saw and what he wanted to see and that he "enjoyed spinning nostalgic myths out of his classical learning" (Porter 1990: 122). These two opposing perspectives—the competent anti-Rousseau and the well-educated romantic—capture the tension of the era. Bougainville seems to have forged a usable alloy in which he wrote much and often, but framed his observations in language that evoked mythic themes, as we will see below. Of course, for all of their differences, the men and women of the Enlightenment had a number of things in common, not the least of which was secularism,

30

Pacific Romanticism

which has already been described as being characterized by "an ethic . . . of virulent anti-clericalism" and a search for "secular knowledge free of religious orthodoxies" (Hamilton 1996: 24). As we will see later, Commercon was especially hostile to religion, and his use of Tahiti and Tahitians as part of an anticlerical agenda is easy to see. But Commercon was only the first; others followed making the same kinds of uses of Tahiti and Tahitians for their own purposes, including Denis Diderot, as we will also see. In addition to secularism, rationalism and romantic naturalism found common ground in the pursuit of greater insight into entities such as Natural Man; that is, they both sought to grasp the default human being. For those Europeans so inclined (and privileged), the pursuit of the default human being was conducted in salons by means of reasoned discussion. But not for Bougainville; he actually stumbled upon some. THE VOYAGE OF THE BOUDEUSE AND L 'ETOILE Sailing from Brest in 1766, the two ships got as far as Rio de Janeiro before splitting up. The Boudeuse proceeded to Montevideo before dealing with the Spanish over the Malouines/Malvinas/Falklands. Bougainville returned to Rio de Janeiro, where the leaky Etoile benefited from some repairs, and the two ships sailed through the Strait of Magellan, a very difficult passage requiring more than seven weeks. Heading roughly west by northwest, the two ships stopped at various islands before the crew again sighted land toward the west on 2 April 1768. 2-5 April 1768 It was late in the day on the 2nd when Bougainville's expedition sighted the easternmost part of the Tahiti group, the island of Meetia, approximately 75 miles east of the main island, Tahiti Nui. The next day was spent sailing toward the island and searching for good anchorage. On 4 April 1768, the first interaction between French and Society Islander took place off Meetia. From Bougainville's journal: [W]e perceived a periaqua [canoe] coming from the offing, and standing for the land, and making use of her sail and paddles. She passed athwart us, and joined a number of others, which sailed ahead of us, from all parts of the island. One of them went before all the rest; it was manned by twelve naked men, who presented us with branches of bananas; and their demonstrations signified that this was their olive-branch. We answered them with all the signs of friendship we could imagine; they then came along side our ship; and one of them, remarkable for his prodigious growth of hair, which stood like bristles divergent on his head, offered us, together with his branch of peace, a little pig and a cluster of bananas. We accepted his present, which he fastened to a rope that was thrown over to him; we gave him caps and handkershiefs; and these first presents were the pledges of our alliance with these people. (Bougainville 1772a: 213) One can imagine the sense of hospitality and welcome that Bougainville must

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have sensed at such a scene. His notion of bananas as "olive-branch," and his conclusion that he had managed to form an "alliance" with the men in these canoes (simply by showing up), is of interest, and reveals his conceit, but also his education and his analogical abilities. The "olive-branch" could, of course, have represented a desire to sue for peace immediately. Or it could have been a welcoming indication that they would not be harmed. Clearly, Bougainville had no reason to infer the former, and so concluded the latter. Note also that the Islanders did not come immediately on board, but rather used a rope as a means to exchange bananas and a pig for hats and handkerchiefs. Bougainville's report continues as about 100 canoes appear later in the day: They were laden with cocoa-nuts, bananas, and other fruits of the country. The exchange of these fruits, which were delicious to us, was made very honestly for all sorts of trifles, but without any of the islanders venturing to come aboard. (Bougainville 1772a: 213) One is struck by the fact that the inhabitants of Meetia did not leave their canoes. Their efforts to trade from a distance seem to have been interpreted by Bougainville as a well-mannered reserve, especially in light of his recent difficult experience among the Tuamotu island group, which Bougainville called the "Dangerous Archipelago." While the menace of the islands was partly nautical (problematic reefs), the hostile response to his vessels also contributed to his perception (Thiery 1932: 193). But whence the reserve on the part of those Society Islanders who first encountered the French? It seems somewhat at odds with the assertive and confident Tahitians described by Oliver (1974: 1084), and which is, as we will see later, an aggressive, even pushy, demeanor in trade. The following day, 5 April, Bougainville made for the main island of Tahiti, where there was an increased amount of trade offerings, and women appear in the canoes: The periaquas returned to the ship at sun-rising, and continued to make exchanges all the day. We likewise opened new branches of commerce; for, besides the fruits which they had brought the day before, and other refreshments such as fowls and pigeons, the islanders brought with them several instruments for fishing; stone chisels, strange kinds of cloth, shells, &c. They wanted iron and ear-rings in exchange. This bartering trade was carried on very honestly, as the day before: this time some pretty and almost naked women came in the periaguas. (Bougainville 1772a: 216) Bougainville, who seems to attend well to details, notes that iron is desired by the islanders this day. The co-occurrence of the display of women and the revelation of the wish for iron is not a coincidence, and is a point of considerable importance—but the association escaped Bougainville. He interpreted the reserve in the Tahitians' bartering behavior as quite expected and that an orderly exchange, conducted with all decorum, was perfectly appropriate for "Noble Savages" 3 (Hammond 1970: 51), and, given his Enlightenment predisposition to 3. Ellingson argues that the concept of "Noble Savage" would not, in fact, have been in the mind of Bougainville. I have already addressed this claim. Even if Bougainville

32 Pacific Romanticism construe the behavior of the islanders in positive terms, does not seem to question how the Tahitians might know of iron well enough to ask for it. His matterof-fact mention of the new "branch of commerce" does little to connote the import of the transition for the Tahitians. A very reasonable view of the Tahitians' behavior as recorded above—and one that seems not to occur to Bougainville— is that the Tahitians were in fact quite shrewd in their utilization of female sexuality in that once the possibility of safe trade was established, they moved rapidly from trading trinkets for foodstuffs to the principal (Tahitian) purpose of trade: the acquisition of iron. 6-14 April 1768 By the end of the day on 5 April, Bougainville was confident that robust trading experiences with the inhabitants of the main island of Tahiti were to be the order of the day. There could have been no reason for Bougainville to question the compliance he encountered; indeed, he seems utterly charmed by it. Bougainville describes the events of 6 April, his first full day at Taipahia Bay, at length: As we came nearer the shore, the number of islanders surrounding our ships increased. The periaquas were so numerous all about the ships, that we had much to do to warp in amidst the crowd of boats and the noise. All these people came crying out tayo,4 which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us. The periaquas were full of females; who for agreeable features, are not inferior to most European women; and who in point of beauty of the body might, with much reason, vie with them all. Most of these fair females were naked; for the men and the old women that accompanied them, had stripped them of their garments which they generally dress themselves in. The glances which they gave us from their periaquas seemed to discover some degree of uneasiness, notwithstanding the innocent manner in which they were given; perhaps, because nature has every where embellished their sex with a natural timidity; or because even in those countries, where the ease of the golden age is still in use, women seem least to desire what they most wish for. The men, who were more plain, or rather more free, soon explained their meaning very clearly. They pressed us to choose a woman, and to come on shore with her; and their gestures, which were nothing less than equivocal, denoted in what manner we should form an acquaintance with her. it was very difficult, amidst such a sight, to keep at their work four hundred young French sailors, who had seen no woman for six months. In spite of all our precautions, a young girl came on board, and placed herself upon the quarter-deck, near one of the hatchways, which was open, in order to give air to those who were heaving at the capstern below it. The girl carelessly dropt a cloth, which covered her, and appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such as Venus shewed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having, indeed, the celestial form of that goddess. Both sailors and soldiers endeavored to come to the hatchwas not thinking in piecisely "Noble Savage" terms, it is clear that his romanticist perspective affects his positive predisposition toward the Tahitians in these first—and to some degree, subsequent—days. 4. Taiato means "copulation," according to one source (Oliver 1974: 925). One wonders whether the French mistook this for tayo or even if the two words, as then used, had significant semantic overlap.

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way; and the capstern was never hove with more alacrity than on this occasion.5 (Bougainville 1772a: 217-219) Where were the shouts of tayo and the women at Meetia on 4 April? Where were the traders climbing aboard on the 4th? The difference between reserve and reticence on the 4th to a cautious testing of the French on the 5th at Taipahia Bay, to an unabashed carnival-like festival of exchange on the 6th is almost certainly not a random outcome. Is the difference simply the difference between the people of Meetia and those of Tahiti Nui? This seems quite unlikely. At Tahiti we can see a pattern of behavior that seems to reflect a people more confident, more familiar. What presumptions did they have? I will return to these questions later; for now, let us get back to the narrative of April, 1768. Bougainville's ships are overwhelmed—both in terms of numbers as well as in terms of the sights to be seen. Bougainville did not miss the seductive intent of the display of the young women; indeed, he seems to be somewhat ambivalent about how to render the event, as reflected by both a high-minded—and overtly romanticist—reference to Greek mythology as well as a more salacious, rib-nudging, tongue-in-cheek understatement about the capstern. Clearly, Bougainville did not know quite what to make of the events of the morning of 6 April, and just as clearly, he was positively predisposed to his new acquaintances. Analytic Sidebar: Who Were These Young Women? If we take Bougainville's description as generally accurate—and there seems no reason not to—we are confronted with the question of what was going on with the display of women. These women are disrobed and put on view by men and older women, quite obviously with the intention of communicating the readiness of these young women to engage in sex with the French. As part of an answer to why this was happening, it is worth considering who these women might have been. We gain some insight from Oliver's description of traditional Tahitian gender-and-power ideology: Maohi norms undoubtedly placed authority—that is, effective decision making—mainly in the hands of males, but a careful reading of the sources leaves one with the impression that many Maohi women were in actuality ("historically," in Western terms) anything but a passive, deferential, submissive lot. . . . One practice that may have led some observers to infer that females were generally disdained was the control some fathers (or other male guardians) exercised over their daughters' sexual services (or husbands over those of their wives), proffering them to the Western visitors in return for tangible goods. Episodes of this nature undoubtedly occurred, but one cannot rule out the possibility that the females in question were themselves eager parties to the exchange. (Oliver 1974: 604) 5. it may be this woman about whom the Prince of Nassau-Siegen wrote, "One of the islanders, full of confidence inspired by innocence, came on board with his wife and asked for our friendship. His wife, showing willingly all the perfections of a beautiful body, displayed all that was most enticing to win over the hearts of the newcomers" (quoted in Ross 1978: 116).

34 Pacific Romanticism So, it seems quite possible that these women were the wives and the daughters of the men displaying them. Oliver does not mention, but one must consider the possibility, that something analogous (even if remotely) to bridewealth may have been in the minds of the Tahitians, as it was with New Guinea highlanders in their interactions with Australian gold prospectors in the 1930s (Connolly and Anderson 1987: 238-240). This is not inconsistent with the cries of tayo ("friend'V'brother") noted by Bougainville on 6 April. 6 Men in tayo relationships did allow each other sexual access to their wives (although not daughters) (Ferndon 1981: 150). (Not exchanging daughters makes sense in terms of kin and kin-like relationships in general: given the "equivalence of brothers" axiom, exchanging daughters with one's tayo would have been incest.) The possibility of a windfall may also at least partly explain the presence and behavior of the older women, who could easily be imagined to be the mothers-in-law of the young women. Perhaps some were also some of the girls' mothers: a young woman's sexual relationship with a wealthy stranger helps all of her extended kin, not just those who are male. Whatever the case, we must then ask ourselves how it was that the Tahitians knew that the strangers had wealth. This readiness, on the first day at Taipahia Bay, on the part of men and older women to offer younger females has to have had some basis. The most plausible conclusion is that they knew what sorts of riches the strangers had aboard. By Bougainville's account above, the question of whether these young women were coerced or bullied into sex with the French is difficult to answer. Oliver notes that, "For many females, especially, youth was a prime period of life: their sexual services were in lively demand, and without the encumbrance of offspring many of them appear to have been relatively free to indulge their wishes for diversion and courtship" (1974: 1113). So it seems that it might be the case that for some of these women, at least, the French offered the possibility of novel sexual experiences.7 What, then, was the "degree of uneasiness" that Bougainville mentions? The first consideration is to ask what it was that Bougainville saw. Unfortunately, we can never know the answer with any precision. The next consideration is whether he saw "uneasiness" at all. The possibility certainly exists that Bougainville was projecting his own desires and/or anxieties onto the situation 6. Note that Bougainville glosses tayo as "friend," revealing what he no doubt imagined as a hospitable offer of welcome to provisions, safety, and fellowship—as European friends did. The quasi-kinship relationship aspects of tayo, that in the Tahitian mind would have included barter that entailed the sexual services of men's wives, seem to have largely escaped him. 7. Another consideration here is that the practice of female infanticide (Oliver 1974: 606) would have meant that women would have been in short supply, so one must be careful about assuming that they would have seen sex with other Tahitians as banal. Indeed, Oliver argues that "competition for the sexual services of these proficient and accessible young sex artists could quite well account for" the "relatively privileged statuses enjoyed by most young females" (1974: 1113). Whatever else might be said, desperation on the part of these young women can probably be ruled out as a motivation.

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and into the attributed motivations of the young Tahitian women. His elaboration on the perceived "uneasiness"— notwithstanding the innocent manner in which they were given; perhaps, because nature has every where embellished their sex with a natural timidity; or because even in those countries, where the ease of the golden age is still in use, women seem least to desire what they most wish for —does have something of a rationalizing defense-mechanism ring to it, at least to my ear. It also has a strong romanticist ("innocent," "nature," "natural," "golden age") element, one that shrouds the demeanor and motivations of the young women in Bougainville's ambiguous ("seem least to desire what they most wish for"?) prose. Back to the Events of 6-14 April In the days after that initial welcome, the Tahitians conducted themselves toward the French in a very hospitable manner, with trade, displays of friendship, and sexual encounters. 8 In these days, both Bougainville and Commercon report their observations about the island in idyllic terms. Bougainville, after a week, reflected that I have often, in company with only one or two of our people, been out walking in the interior parts of the isle. 1 thought 1 was transported into the garden of Eden; we crossed a turf, covered with fine fruit-trees, and intersected by little rivulets, which keep up a pleasant coolness in the air, without any of those inconveniences which humidity occasions. A numerous people there enjoy the blessing which nature showers liberally down upon them. We found companies of men and women sitting under the shade of their fruit-trees: they all greeted us with signs of friendship: those who met us upon the road stood aside to let us pass by; every where we found hospitality, ease, innocent joy, and every appearance of happiness amongst them. (Bougainville 1772a: 228-229) Commercon is even more taken with his hosts, to the degree that he defends both their morality and their bodies: 1 will not leave my dear Tahitians before I have absolved them from the atrocious accusa8. It is the Tahitian women's' reported lack of reticence about sex that fuels the lack of certainty about the motivation behind their behavior. An incident that occurred on or about 7 April is recorded by French pilot Fesche: [0]ne of us approached the proffered "victim" and gave her a false pearl, which he attached to her ear, and risked a kiss, which was returned with fervor. A bold hand, guided by love . . . [ellipsis in original] slipped as if by chance over breasts still hidden by a veil, which was soon removed by the girl herself, whom we now saw clad only in the clothes worn by Eve before her sin. She did more. She stretched herself out on the mat and struck the chest of her aggressor and made it clear that she was offering herself to him and spread apart the two obstacles which prevent the entrance into that temple to which so many men sacrifice their days. (Quoted in Ross 1978: 117). One wonders how much of this is French fantasy and how much good observation.

36 Pacific Romanticism tion that they are mere thieving pickpockets. It is true that they did take many things from us, and that with a light-fingered dexterity which would have done credit to the most expert Parisian rascal. But should they be called thieves for this? What constitutes robbery? It is the taking of something which is the property of another person. The latter can only justly complain of being robbed if his proprietary right in the thing stolen has been established. But, as to this proprietary right, doe it exist in a state of nature? No! it is a mere convention. Now, no convention can be considered binding unless it is generally known and recognized. But the Tahitian has no property of his own; he offers and generously presents anything as his own as he sees that some one wished for it, and therefore has never recognized any exclusive proprietary right. Therefore his action, in carrying off something belonging to you which has excited his curiosity, is only, in his eyes, an act of natural equity, by which he gives you to understand that you should behave towards him in the same way. I see no shadow of robbery in this! Our Tahitian chief was an amusing rogue. He would pick up anything—a nail, a glass, or a biscuit—but would at once give it to the first of his people whom he met, taking from them pigs, chickens, or bananas, which he brought to us. Once 1 saw an officer lift his stick to him when he had been stealing [sic] after this fashion, of which we knew the generous motive. I immediately threw myself indignantly between them, at the risk of receiving the blow myself. (Ross 1978: 121-122; all one paragraph in French in Buchet 1993:206-207) In the original French, a final clause is added after a colon that completes Commercon's self-congratulatory report of his own heroism: [TJelle est Tame dure de la plupart des marins, sur laquelle Jean-Jacques Rousseau place si plaisamment un point de doute et d'interrogation. (Such is the enduring heart of the majority of the sailors, on which Jean-Jacques Rousseau put so pleasantly a point of doubt and of question.) (Buchet 1993: 2079) It seems right to assume that / 'time dure that Commercon is referring to is the willingness of his compatriots to use violence against the Tahitians. The allusion to Rousseau is less clear. We can assume, however, that Commercon was not of the same mind of many of his shipmates, and it is worth keeping in mind that his descriptions of Tahitians were penned by someone who seems to have appointed himself as their defender. Looking past Commercon's paternalism, one can still see clearly that he believed that the people of the island welcomed him and the others with open arms. In light of other events that transpired, one marvels at Commercon's will to believe. There can be no mistake: the behavior of the Tahitians was not intended to be a warm reception.10 Bougainville reports on 7 April—a mere day after he had

9. 1 am grateful to Joan Hopkins for her help in rendering this passage. 10. One Pacific scholar states clearly his interpretation: "When Bougainville arrived . . . Tahitian leaders were careful to display what appeared to be a groveling servility, and

The French 37 set anchor—that he was asked how long he planned to stay. He responded that he wished to stay for eighteen days.11 He was requested to reduce that number by 50 percent—nine days, a request that Bougainville denied (Bougainville 1772a: 224). 12 On 12 April, Bougainville logs the fact that the anchor cable from the Boudeuse had been cut (Bougainville 1772a: 231-232). This was not the only incident of sabotage; later, he wrote that In proportion, as the danger became more pressing, our resources failed us; the two anchors of which the cables had just parted, were entirely lost to us; their buoys disappeared, being either sunk, or taken away during the night by the Indians. Thus we had already lost four anchors, in four and twenty hours. (Bougainville 1772a: 234) So, Commercon's beliefs notwithstanding, it would appear that the Tahitians were far from pleased to have the interlopers about. What stronger message could have been sent than to sever the ropes that fastened them there? Various incidents seem to have angered the Tahitians. One is described as Bougainville being "informed that three of the natives had been killed or wounded [in a dispute over the price of a pig (Ross 1978: 126)] with bayonets in their huts" (Bougainville 1772a: 232). A separate incident involved another murder of a Tahitian: On the 10th, an islander was killed, and the natives came to complain of this murder... it appeared very plain that the man had been killed by a fire-arm. However, none of our people had been suffered to go out of the camp [that had been established ashore], or to comefromthe ships with fire-arms.13 The most exact enquiries which I made to find out the author of this villainous action proved unsuccessful. The natives doubtless believed that their countryman had been in the wrong; for they continued to come to our quarters with their usual confidence. However, I received intelligence that many of the people had been seen carrying off their effects to the mountains. (Bougainville 1772a: 230) It seems that perhaps the Tahitians were concerned about a cannon fusillade at this point. Whence such a fear? There is no record that either the Boudeuse or L 'Etoile had fired its cannon to that point. As we will see, their fears were natural enough, and belied Bougainville's assertion that the Tahitians retained their "usual confidence" in the French. While it is possible that one Tahitian killed another with a stolen pistol (see footnote 13), a French perpetrator is much more consistent both with the flight to the bush as well as the three bayoneted victims. Nor was the tension unilateral. Bougainville brought an extra sixty armed men ashore that evening (Ross 1978: 126), and rather than staying any to make sure Tahitian women kept sailors happy. Hence the early appearance of naked maidens above opened hatchways" (Howe 1984: 88). 11. Communication on this matter was conducted through the use of eighteen pebbles (Ross 1978: 122). 12. We will find that, in fact, Bougainville remains for only another week. 13. It seems likely that Bougainville may have blamed the homicide on the missing pistol of Chevalier d'Oraifon, which was first reported to Bougainville as missing on 6 April (Bougainville 1772a: 222).

38 Pacific Romanticism longer, Bougainville cut short his visit to Tahiti by about two weeks. Upon departing, the French took with them a Tahitian named Aoutourou. Aoutourou spent about a year in Paris, learned only a little French (earning him the adjective "stupid" from Johann Forster, who translated Bougainville's account into English), and died in Madagascar of smallpox on the return trip to his homeland (Alexander 1977: 37). Initial Reflections In the final days of the French visit, interactions between the French and Tahitians continued along the lines of a seemingly hospitable principle: FrenchTahitian interactions were tranquil and pleasant, at least from the French point of view, and only if theft is overlooked or explained away. Indeed, to the end of the French stay, both Bougainville and Commercon seemed profoundly enchanted with Tahiti,14 and each spent a considerable number of pages describing its virtues. For each, romanticized depictions of the inhabitants of the island were always present. For example, Commercon noted that There neither shame nor modesty exercises its tyranny: the lightest veil floats away in the breeze and in accord with human desire: the act of procreation is a religious one. The prelude to it is encouraged by the wishes and the songs of all the people assembled, and its climax is celebrated by universal applause. Every foreigner is invited to participate in these happy mysteries; indeed, it is one of the duties of hospitality to invite strangers to attend to them, so that the good Utopian15 is constantly either enjoying his own pleasure or the spectacle of others'. Some censor with clerical bands may perhaps see in this only the breakdown of manners, horrible prostitution, and the most bald effrontery; but he will be profoundly mistaken in his conception of natural man, who is born essentially good, free of every prejudice, and who follows, without defiance and without remorse, the gentle impulses of instinct not yet corrupted by reason. (Buchet 1993: 202; quoted in English in Hammond 1970: 53) It is not just sexuality that evoked Commercon's paean to Tahiti. His was also enchanted by what he took to be Tahitian pacifism, justice, and industriousness: They were using iron before our visit; and how industriously they worked this metal, exceedingly precious to them, and which they employed only for really useful purposes! We ourselves have made it a villainous substance by manufacturing from it the ordinary weapons of murder and of despair. Did they not refuse, horrified, the knives and daggers which we offered them, seeming to divine instinctively the abuses that we had committed with such implements? . . . Then the simplicity of their moral code: the fairness of their treatment of women, who are in no way oppressed, as is the case with most savages; their

14. Smith notes that "the romantic savage became an epitome of the virtues treasured by the romantics" (1985: 326). For those who were predisposed to romanticism, the Tahitians could only be perceived differently with some difficulty. 15. Here and elsewhere, the French version has Tahitian rather than Utopian (Buchet 1993:202-203).

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brotherly love to each other; their horror at the shedding of man's blood; their deep veneration for the dead, who are supposed to be only sleeping; their hospitality to strangers. (Ross 1980: 120; in French in Buchet 1993: 203)16 That Commercon has idealized the Tahitians is quite plain. That he has not fully understood them is also obvious: Their mother tongue, very sonorous and full of harmony, is made up of some four or five hundred words, which can neither be parsed nor conjugated (that is to say, with no grammar); it yet suffices to explain every idea, and to express all their desires; this magnificent [noble in French] simplicity, which does not forbid either modulation in tone or the pantomime of passion, secures them against that unconscionable bathology17 described by us as "the richness of language," and which causes us to lose, in a labyrinth of phrases, clear neatness and recognition and promptness of judgment. (Ross 1978: 119; in French in Buchet 1993:202) Commercon falls prey here to a common European misperception, that nonEuropean languages fall far short of the elaborateness of French, English, Greek, and so on. What is striking, however, is his view that too much language is a bad thing. This claim parallels his assertion, cited earlier, that European notions of property get in the way of sharing. The twin institutions of an overly developed culture (although he would not have used this word) and language that beset European society are, to Commercon, seen as unnecessary to human existence, and indeed thwart the natural inclinations of humanity. ANALYSIS Most of the French descriptions of sexual relations between Tahitian women and French men are characterized by willing and eager young maidens. But there is also a hint that the Tahitians are less eager than the French, as in the following passage from Bougainville,18 who, for the most part, was also unequivocal in his praise of Tahiti (which he dubbed New Cythera [Venus]), and the Tahitians' lifestyle: Our people were daily walking in the isle without arms, either quite alone, or in little 16. It is possible that Commercon's idyllic version was not entirely the result of naTvete. There is some suggestion that this sort of report was a smokescreen to make the British believe that the French interest in the Pacific was limited to exotic oddities, rather than colonial expansion (Hammond 1970: 17-18). 17. The word bathology is not found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Ross leaves it unremarked upon. Buchet, in a footnote to his edited rendering of Commercon's account, explains the reference as "De Battos, roi de Cyrene, qui, etant begue, repetait souvent le meme mot: repetitions inutiles" ("From Battos, king of Cyrene [AD 630], who, being a stutterer, was often repeating the same word: useless repetitions.") (Buchet 1993: 202 fn2) 18. It is not altogether clear how much of what gets attributed to Bougainville is actually his own thoughts. Hammond (1970: 55) notes that there is "no complete or reliable" edition of his book, and there is the suggestion that Commercon may have influenced Bougainville's description.

40 Pacific Romanticism companies. They were invited to enter the houses, where the people gave them to eat; nor did the civility of their landlords stop at a slight collation, they offered them young girls; the hut was immediately filled with a curious crowd of men and women, who made a circle round the guest, and the young victim of hospitality. The ground was spread with leaves and flowers, and their musicians sung an hymeneal song to the tune of their flutes. Here Venus is the goddess of hospitality, her worship does not admit of any mysteries, and every tribute paid to her is a feast for the whole nation. (Bougainville 1772a: 227228; emphasis added) Why did Bougainville refer to the girl as a victim? As in his response to the appearance of the denuded young women on 6 April, does this tell us more about the thoughts and emotions of the young women, or about Bougainville himself? Perhaps he could not help but think of a French girl in the same milieu, and this affected his perception. Bougainville's praise of Tahiti, as in the above quotation, is full of interpretations leading to speculations about the inner states of Tahitians. More-or-less disinterested accounts of behavior are seldom found, and descriptions of Tahitian behavior as prostitution or a sex-for-iron trade do not appear in the French accounts, in large part because Commercon and Bougainville were seemingly unable to view sex being utilized by the Tahitians as part of an exchange. The fact that this utilization does appear in the analyses of other European visitors (which I shall address later) strongly suggests that the French either ignored or missed it. CONCLUSION Not surprisingly, Bougainville's account of the treatment accorded members of his expedition by the people of Tahiti "greatly titillated" Europe (Wilson 1972: 588). Recall that this was a Europe that eagerly awaited reports of new and unusual people and places, and that these reports were, for many people, important forms of entertainment. Bougainville's (and his crew's) Tahitian experiences can easily be seen to have been stunning to an audience already expecting the extraordinary. Although Bougainville was the first Frenchman to circumnavigate the globe, this accomplishment was overshadowed by what he had discovered in terms of human experience. He had, in a matter of weeks, experienced and recorded things that provided Europe with a description of peoples and places that must have satisfied the most jaded imaginations. Even today, Bougainville is associated far more with Tahiti than he is with circumnavigation, to say nothing of the plant or island that bear his name. Add to Bougainville's measured if exhilarated tone the unrestrained excitement of Commercon, and Paris—and by extension, literate Europe—became the focus of a questions that, until Bougainville's Tahiti, might otherwise have been pondered endlessly: What is the Natural State of Man? How different are Europeans from Natural Man? What makes Europeans different from Natural Man? What do Europeans lack that Natural Man has? What is it that besets Europeans that Natural Man has escaped? Can a European return to being a Natural Man?

The French 41 In the next two chapters, I explore the intellectual results of France's, and later some of the rest of the world's, grappling with these kinds of questions in light of the news from Tahiti.

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4 Interpreting Tahiti Under Bougainville's command, the Boudeuse and L Etoile returned to France on the afternoon of 16 March, 1769.1 Less than three weeks earlier, Commercon had completed his report on Tahiti in the form of a letter. This document, "Lettre de M. Commerson, docteur en medicine, et medecin botaniste du Roi a l'ile de France, le 25 fevrier 1769. Sur la decouverte de la nouvelle ile de Cythere ou Tarn" (Buchet 1993), hit Paris with an immediate splash. Bougainville's more measured and balanced, but by no means contradictory, account was published in 1771. There was another description of Tahiti that emerged prior to that of Bougainville's. It is an eighteen-page essay written as a "Notice" in a book by Nicholas Bricaire de La Dixmerie about Aoutourou written in 1770. We will see below that much of Dixmerie's essay seems inspired by Commercon's "Letter." But for at least a year, the Tahiti known in the salons was the Tahiti of Commercon. And what a Tahiti it was. "LETTER OF M. COMMERCON" I have already cited parts of this document in the previous chapter. Those passages show that Commercon had a remarkably sanguine view of life on Tahiti. In fact, "remarkably sanguine" may be too mild; others use stronger language, such as referring to his Tahitian memoirs as being "weird raptures" (Calder, Lamb, and Orr 1999: 11), and the "strange ramblings of a mind collapsed by some sort of sexual narcosis" (Mackay 1999: 108). Commercon's projections aside, as this document was the primary written source of information about Tahiti available until the publication of Bougainville's account, I wish to look at it in some detail because I believe that it shaped subsequent information 1. Inexplicably, d'Aragon gives 16 May as the date of Bougainville's return (1893: 14).

44 Pacific Romanticism about Tahiti and Tahitians. Let us begin the analysis of the letter by looking at its conclusion. At the end of Commercon's description of Tahiti, he leaves the reader with a lengthy Latin sentence that captures his sentiments: Bona sua fortuna, Gallorum navigantium duae cohortes, A clarissimo Buginvillaeo ductae, Septimestri terrarum Americanarum recessu Penitus exhaustae, Siti scilicet ac fame consumptae: Irari Neptuni omnes jam casus expertae, Viribusque corporis tantum fere deficientes Quantum animis erectae, In Hanc-ce tandem Insulam appulere Omni beatae vitae suppelectili ditissimam, Rex nomine Utopiam nuncupandam, Qua nempe Themis, Astraea, Venus, Et omnium rerum pretiosissima libertas, Procul a reliquorum Mortalium vitiis ac dissentionibus Aeternam inconcussamque posuere sedem: Qua inviolata interest habitantibus pax Sanctissimaque Philadelphia; Nee aliud sentitur nisi patriarchale regimen; Qua demum integerrima debetur & persolvitur Advenis, ut ingratis! Fides, hospitalitas, Gratuitaque omnigenarum terrae divitiarum profusio. Haec gratitudinis & admirationis sua testimonia Tabellis plumbeis undequaque per insulam disjectis Properante manu exaravit Philibertus Commerson, Castellionensis Doctor Medicus, in naturalibus rebus Observator A Rege Christianissimo delegatus. (Buchet 1993: 207-208) (By their good fortune Two crews of Gallic sailors, Led by the renowned Bougainville, Being internally exhausted From the wasteland of the American terrain for seven months, Inevitably wasting away from thirst and hunger: Having just recently experienced all the destructive forces of angry Neptune [i.e., the arduous fifty-two day passage through the Strait of Magellan], Almost bereft as much in strength of body As they were in spirit, By their good fortune, Pulled their vessels up to this island, Which was very far removed from every physical comfort of a happy life, An island that a King had to call by the name Utopia,

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In which Themis [i.e., justice and order], Astraea [i.e., innocence and purity], Venus2 [i.e., love and desire], And a most precious freedom from things Have surely placed an eternal and unbreakable throne, Far from the vices and disagreements of the rest of Mortals: In which there is present an indestructible peace for its inhabitants, And a most holy Brotherly Love; Nor is any other thing seen there except a domestic rule; By which a most wholesome Trust, hospitality, And a gratuitous overflow of all kinds of the riches of the land, Is indeed due and rendered to strangers, however ungrateful they might be! Philibert Commercon of Chatillon-les-Dombes [his natal place], A Medical Doctor, an Examiner in natural matters, Appointed by the most Christian King [Louis XV], Has with a skillful hand written these his testimonies of gratitude and admiration, On leaden tablets that were distributed everywhere throughout the island.)3 In some respects one gets the sense from reading this passage that one learns more about Commercon than about Tahiti. His self-congratulatory signatory paragraph and his allusion to a rather obscure Greek goddess (Astraea) let his readers know that he imagines himself (a belief probably not without some substance) to be a person of significant intellectual vitality. Clearly, he was, by this description, unaware of or chose to ignore certain aspects of Tahitian life, not the least of which would have been social stratification and human sacrifice. With regard to social stratification he writes, "Under the loveliest of skies, they [Tahitians] are supported by the fruits of a soil so fertile that cultivation is scarcely required, and they are governed rather by a sort of family father than by a monarch" (Ross 1978: 118; in French in Buchet 1993: 202). And Bougainville's biographer Ross claims that Commercon was "unaware" of human sacrifice (1978: 121). Given his intellect, what are we to make of his description? Can so bright a person have had observational skills so poor? Did he "see through" sacrifice and stratification, not knowing what it was that he was seeing? We are left with an ethnographic account that is not only quite wrong in terms of its facts, but also quite romanticized in its description. We can only speculate on the causal relationship between these two phenomena, but it seems quite reasonable to imagine that young Commercon's beliefs profoundly shaped his perceptions and subsequent descriptions. I have already reproduced part of the following document in Chapter 3 as examples of Commercon's perceptions of Tahiti. Here, I provide an English translation of the entirety his letter:4 The voyage that I undertook with M. de Bougainville, around the world, for the furtherance of natural history, furnished me with matter for an immense number of observations: But among the noteworthy things which will most interest the public, nothing is more 2. Commercon's shift from Greek deities to a Roman one here is puzzling. 3. I am profoundly grateful for the translation help of Rev. Paschal Honner, O.S.B., and Rev. David Turner, O.S.B. 4.1 am indebted to Axel Aubrun for his help with this translation.

46 Pacific Romanticism remarkable than the discovery of a new island in the South Seas, from whence M. de Bougainville brought one of the principal inhabitants.5 This island seemed such to me, that I had already given it the name Utopia or Fortunate, the name which Thomas More had given to his ideal Republic: I didn't know at the time that M. de Bougainville had named it the New Cythere, and it was only later yet that one of the princes of this nation (the one who was brought back to Europe) told us that it was called TAITI [small caps in original] by its own inhabitants. The name that I intended for it was a good fit for a country, perhaps the only one on earth, inhabited by men without vices, without prejudices, without needs, without dissent. Born under the most beautiful sky, nourished by the fruits of a land that is fertile without needing to be cultivated, administered by [father] heads of households, rather than by kings, they know no other god than love; each day is dedicated to her, the whole island is her temple, every woman is her idol, every man is her worshipper. And what women! The rivals of Georgians6 for beauty, and the sisters of the Graces without sails. There neither shame nor modesty exercises its tyranny: the lightest veil floats away in the breeze and in accord with human desire: the act of procreation is a religious one. The prelude to it is encouraged by the wishes and the songs of all the people assembled, and its climax is celebrated by universal applause. Every foreigner is invited to participate in these happy mysteries; indeed, it is one of the duties of hospitality to invite strangers to attend to them, so that the good Utopian7 is constantly either enjoying his own pleasure or the spectacle of others'.8 Some censor with clerical bands may perhaps see in this only the breakdown of manners, horrible prostitution, and the most bald effrontery; but he will be profoundly mistaken in his conception of natural man, who is born essentially good, free of every prejudice, and who follows, without defiance and without remorse, the gentle impulses of instinct not yet corrupted by reason. Their mother tongue, very sonorous and full of harmony, is made up of some four or five hundred words, which can neither be parsed nor conjugated (that is to say, with no grammar); it yet suffices to explain every idea, and to express all their desires; this magnificent [noble in French] simplicity, which does not forbid either modulation in tone or the pantomime of passion, secures them against that unconscionable bathology9 described by us as "the richness of language," and which causes us to lose, in a labyrinth of phrases, clear neatness and recognition and promptness of judgment. The Utopian, on the contrary, will name anything as soon as he observes it, and the very tone with which he pronounces it already explains the way in which it impresses him; few words produce rapid 5. An allusion to the Tahitian Ahu-Toru [Aoutourou] whom Bougainville brought back to France, and who was examined by the "more exclusive audiences" (Fox 1995: 12) of Parisian salons. 6. Georgians or Circassians had then the reputation of great beauty. They were prized by the Turks, who stocked their harems with them [footnote in original]. 7. Here and elsewhere, the French version has "Tahitian" rather than "Utopian" (Buchet 1993: 202-203). 8. The references to public copulation indicate that the French were integrated into arioi rituals—by virtue of their assumed supernatural prowess—an assumption based on their assumed technological and military superiority. 9. The word bathology is not found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Ross leaves it unremarked upon. Buchet, in a footnote to his edited rendering of Commercon's account, explains the reference as "De Battos, roi de Cyrene, qui, etant begue, repetait souvent le meme mot: repetitions inutiles" ("From Battos, king of Cyrene [630 B.C.], who, being a stutterer, was often repeating the same word: useless repetitions.") (Buchet 1993: 202 fn2).

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conversation; the soul's instincts, the heart's emotions, keep pace with the movements of the lips: speaker and hearer are always in accord with one another. Our Tahitian prince, who for the seven or eight months he had been with us had yet to learn more than ten of our words, usually taken aback by their volubility, had no other resource but to stop up his ears, and to laugh in our faces. One must be careful not to entertain such a suspicion as that one is dealing only with a horde of gross and stupid savages. Everything in their homes manifests the greatest intelligence: as regards their canoes, they are constructed on entirely unknown lines; their navigation is directed by the observation of the stars; their houses are large, elegant in shape, both comfortable and symmetrical; they have the art, not of weaving their cloth thread by thread, but of suddenly producing the fabric, entirely finished, simply by the blows of a mallet. Their fruit trees are so planted at judicious intervals that they have not the tiresome monotony of our orchards, though retaining all that is agreeable and pleasant in the latter; the dangers of the coastline are marked by beacons, and are lighted at night for the sake of those at sea; they know all their plants, distinguishing them by names, and these names even explain their affinities and relationships; although the various tools employed in their arts are made of raw materials, yet, so far as regards the shape selected a certainty in operation, they can be compared even with our own. For these things they surely deserve our respect, although our intercourse with them endured but for a short period. They were using iron before our visit; and how industriously they worked this metal, exceedingly precious to them, and which they employed only for really useful purposes! We ourselves have made it a villainous substance by manufacturing from it the ordinary weapons of murder and of despair. Did they not refuse, horrified, the knives and daggers which we offered them, seeming to divine instinctively the abuses that we had committed with such implements? On the contrary, how eagerly they came to examine and to take the dimensions of boats, sails, tents, barrels, and indeed of everything which they supposed could be imitated with advantage to themselves! Then the simplicity of their moral code: the fairness of their treatment of women, who are in no way oppressed, as is the case with most savages; their brotherly love to each other; their horror at the shedding of man's blood; their deep veneration for the dead, who are supposed to be only sleeping; their hospitality to strangers. As regards all these virtues, one must allow the journals the privilege of description, but only in such terms as our gratitude and our admiration should require of them. Their chiefs were admitted to our tables. Everything that appeared there excited their curiosity: they wanted an explanation of every dish; if any vegetable seemed good, they asked for the seed of it, and, on receiving some, wanted to know where and how it should be planted, and when it would be ready for use. Our bread seemed excellent to them, but we had to show them the grain of which it was made, the way in which it was ground, and also our methods of fermenting and of baking. They followed and understood all the details of these matters. Indeed, often it was only necessary to tell them the half of it, for they understood or divined the rest. They had an invincible aversion to wine and spirits. Prudent in all matters, they accept with faith both meat and drink straight from the hands of Nature; neither fermented liquors nor cooking-pots are to be found in their houses, and so nobody ever saw such beautiful teeth or lips of so rich a red. It is a pity that the only man we are able to show from this country is perhaps its ugliest; we should not judge from this example: But if I am obliged to depreciate him on this point, I must give him the due he deserves to be studied and known; a truly interesting person, worthy of all of the Ministry's attentions, and to whom is even owed, in the name

48 Pacific Romanticism of justice, much in the way of compensation for all of the voluntary sacrifices he has made on our behalf, in the enthusiasm of his attachment to us. One will no doubt ask from which continent and which people came these islanders? As though it was only from emigration to emigration that continents and islands could people themselves. As though we couldn't, within the emigration hypothesis, allow the possibility that preexisting aboriginal (and primitive) populations might have received and assimilated the immigrant population, or alternatively have been displaced or destroyed by the immigrants. In my view, and considering the question as a naturalist, I would admit the existence of these aboriginal peoples, which despite the physical revolutions which have occurred on the different parts of the globe. I would say that at least one pair of these individuals on each of these inhabited areas has persisted, and I see, in fact, very different races of men. These races mixed together might very well have produced various shades or nuances; but only a mythologist can explain how the whole lot could have derived from the same stock: thus I cannot see why the good Tahitians shouldn't be the original sons of their land, by which I mean descended from their Tahitian ancestors, going back as far as the race that might be proudest of its antiquity, i see even less to which people we would accord the honor of being the source of the Tahitian people, remaining as it has in its simple state. A society of men, once corrupted, cannot regenerate itself completely. Colonies everywhere inherit the vices of the colonizing state. Where can we find the analog in language, in customs, in the habits of a people near or far from Tahiti? I would have no answer, and the question would be theoretical and unresolved. I simply form a conjecture which I am pleased to submit to those who enjoy discussing this sort of topic. I can identify in the Tahitian language four or five words which derive from the Spanish, among others haoun, which comes evidently from hierro, iron, and mattar, matte, which means to kill or killed.10 Might these be some Spaniards wrecked in their first navigations in the South Seas, who taught them these words, while acquainting them for the first time with the phenomena in question? Could the Tahitian language be as glorious, lacking until then a word designed to express the act of killing, as the ancient laws of Laecedaemon11 which did not provide a punishment against parricide, not having imagined that possibility. If I am allowed that supposition by which I would nonetheless not want to offend a nation that I respect [i.e., by comparing the Tahitians to livestock], I would be able to explain of certain usages, and the origin of certain animals which seem borrowed from the Europeans. It would thus be that a bitch and a sow, pregnant, could have provided this island with the race of pigs, and of little European dogs. It would thus be that the art of weaving large fishing nets, and to practice as we do the art of bleeding by means of lancets made of sharpened mother-ofpearl, the resemblance of their seats with those which our carpenters make, very low on four legs and without a back for their children, their ropes, their lines made of vegetable fibers, their pig-tails, their baskets, their axes made in the shape of an adze, the men's clothing, their passion for earrings and bracelets, and certain other habits which, considered individually would indicate nothing, but taken collectively suggest a series of imitations of European practices. Finally, the small amount of iron salvaged from the shipwreck would have long since rusted away, so that it is no surprise that we have found no 10. Ross reports Tahitian matao as "kill" (1978: 121). Oliver (1974: 590) notes that the Tahitian mata \i may be defined as "fear, dread; to fear; to be in terror, or dread." In the era before sophisticated phonological analysis, Europeans often misunderstood words and their meanings (see Bolyanatz 1998), so it is not clear what Commercon heard, nor are his inferences in the area of historical linguistics all that likely to be correct. 11. Allusion to the rigorous customary laws of Sparta established by the legislator Lycurgias [footnote in original].

Interpreting Tahiti 49 trace of it; but the tradition and the name, 'tho a bit corrupted, would have been preserved; unless we prefer to suppose that an island of around one or two hundred leagues' distance, with whom the Tahitian prince assured us they communicated, gave them these notions without their ever having had any direct communication with Europeans. I will not leave my dear Tahitians before I have absolved them from the atrocious accusation that they are mere thieving pickpockets. It is true that they did take many things from us, and that with a lightfmgered dexterity which would have done credit to the most expert Parisian rascal. But should they be called thieves for this? What constitutes robbery? It is the taking of something that is the property of another person. The latter can only justly complain of being robbed if his proprietary right in the thing stolen has been established. But, as to this proprietary right, does it exist in a state of nature? No! It is a mere convention. Now, no convention can be considered binding unless it is generally known and recognized. But the Tahitian has no property of his own; he offers and generously presents anything of his own as he sees that some one wished for it, and therefore has never recognized any exclusive proprietary right. Therefore his action, in carrying off something belonging to you that has excited his curiosity, is only, in his eyes, an act of natural equity, by which he gives you to understand that you should behave towards him in the same way. I see no shadow of robbery in this! Our Tahitian chief was an amusing rogue. He would pick up anything—a nail, a glass, or a biscuit—but would at once give it to the first of his people whom he met, taking from them pigs, chickens, or bananas, which he brought to us. Once I saw an officer lift his stick to him when he had been stealing [sic] after this fashion, of which we knew the generous motive. 1 immediately threw myself indignantly between them, at the risk of receiving the blow myself: thus is the hard soul of most sailors, on which Jean-Jacques Rousseau so easily puts doubt and uncertainty. I include here a copy of the inscription that I left, inscribed on some lead medals, on the island of Tahiti: Do not examine it, Sir, with the scrupulous rigor that one brings to appreciations of lapidary style. If the simple expression of a grateful and moved soul can be recognized there, I will have accomplished the goal I had set for myself, (from Buchet 1993:204-207) The preceding is the description of Tahiti that was prepared for presentation to Paris even before the ships returned. It was an early and lasting image, and was picked up by others. As I note above, one author, Dixmerie (1731-1791), selected his favorite parts of Commercon's "Letter" and put them in the prefatory pages of his book. This book, Le Sauvage de Ta'iti aux Francais; avec Un Envoi au Philosophe Ami des Sauvages (The Tahitian Savage to the French: With a Notice to the Philosopher Friend of the Savages) begins: The island discovered by M. de Bougainville has captured the attention of the French. One of its inhabitants has aroused the curiosity of Parisians. There was a time when all that would have interested us was whether the island produced much gold; it is possible that today that question had not even been asked. I hope so for the sake of Philosophy. We need a moral code even more than riches. It is true that Tahitian customs are not very rigid; but they are simple and true; their pleasures are vivid and peaceful. These savages, in many ways so limited, have taken the shortest road to happiness. The island of Tahiti is located in the South Sea, and is a part of South America. The excessive heat that renders much of that region uninhabitable is not experienced there. The sky is pure without being burning. The earth provides a yield in each season, and

50 Pacific Romanticism does not demand any care for its production: It spares its inhabitants even the care of working it. They have a fruit instead of bread. Their other foods are equally simple. They are ignorant of sauces and stews, and even of cooking pots. They know neither wine nor any fermented liquors: they never multiply their needs or desires, and satisfy all those which they experience. Love is their most frequent need, and this costs them no more than the rest. No inhibitions prevent its realization. One might say that this island is devoted to the cult of love. Its pleasures are never shrouded in the shadow of mystery. One proceeds in public with what custom renders secret in so many other nations. The act is crowned with applause by spectators, and by the concert of various instruments. This act is among the Tahitians a religious act. And so is that of allowing a foreigner to take part. He is treated in all respects as a native, and even obtains (as a stranger) certain preferences which make him appreciate/love Tahitian courtesy. The beauty of the women of this island makes this privilege even more flattering. They could compete with all the Asiatic beauties. The freedom that they enjoy gives them, further, the easy grace which slavery would render timid and artificial. Their clothes are light and transparent, devised in such a way that the eye is never fooled. [Page xiii is missing.] They respect humankind unto their death, or rather they consider the dead as people who have fallen asleep, and spare nothing to preserve the bodies whole. They would no doubt have imagined the art of embalming, if this art did not demand an operation that offends their sensibility. Fear alone has introduced an act of fanaticism, from which no people has been exempt. They sacrifice to the malevolent Spirit of human victims. The name they have given to this false divinity gives us an idea of the idea they have of such a sacrifice. Their language is limited, but harmonious and intelligible. It consists of four or five hundred words, which are neither declined nor conjugated. Each term depicts or expresses its object. The tone in which it is pronounced, the gesture that accompanies it, supplement, by habit, the syntax. Many nations, more famous than the Tahitians, have never had a more complete language. They have no writers, but they have poets. These may be compared to our ancient troubadours. They sing verses that they have composed, and are accompanied by musicians, who can also be compared to our ancient minstrels. Detractors of music and poetry must be surprised to discover these two arts in all nations; even in those which pride themselves in never having had intercourse with any others. We know that the Caribs had songs before they had any notion of the most practical arts. Tahitians are not so poor. They also have their mechanical arts. Their houses, or huts, are clean, sufficiently large, and covered in leafage, as most houses of Brie (in France) are covered with thatch. They build four-legged stools. They also produce cloth, not by weaving, but by beating. Another equally simple operation decorates and colors with drops of indigo. The instruments of their arts are as practical as efficacious. In general, we can see that the taste of Tahitians runs to simplifying, while making use of everything. Their navigation is based on observing the stars. Their canoes have a unique construction; they are quite different from those of other nations. At night they take care to light their coasts for the sake of those at sea; a laudable attention, and which is lacking in better-policed peoples. The object of Tahitian navigation is especially fishing. They use knotted nets, arranged more or less like our own. The material is not very different; as with that which makes up their lines and ropes. They are thus able to cross a space of 200 leagues which separates them from another island, which they have only known recently. The Phoenicians, so famous for their maritime journeys, would perhaps, have never risked so long a trip on the open sea.

Interpreting Tahiti 51 The agriculture of the Tahitians is limited to planting of trees, and lightly cultivating other plants. Their soil yields much and demands little. They rely almost entirely on its generosity; but they are familiar with all of its productions, and even the uses that they may make of it, either to feed or to relieve themselves. The defenders of the art of bleeding among us would be flattered to find it established among the Tahitians. It seems to have been shown them by Nature. But how does Nature show? Whatever the answer, they do practice bleeding. Their lancets are not steel, which they do not know. They are made of shards of mother-of-pearl, sharpened sufficiently for the operation. It is unfortunate that Tahitians do not know the period of their own origin. If it be as ancient as they presume, the progress of their knowledge has not been very rapid. Would it be any more in any society that lived in isolation? Probably not. Only the communication of ideas can spread them and perfect them. The lights of the mind resemble the light of day. The more it can spread, and the more it shines forth. We might have given these remarks more scope; but what follows will serve to supplement it. But the Tahitian author is eager to be read. It seems to him that in France, long works are little-read. (Dixmerie 1770: vii-xxiv) It matters little whether Dixmerie borrowed directly from Commercon's written "Letter" or whether he received his information in face-to-face communications. What is clear is that the information about Tahitian customs, values, and language—just to name a few—that Commercon composed at sea ends up being the only authoritative image of Tahiti and Tahitians available to Europe for two years, and the basis for subsequent descriptions. Bougainville's account published in 1771 did little to effect a fundamental change in the credibility of the Commercon version since it did not deny the more salacious components of the latter's. In the previous chapter, I showed a number of passages from Bougainville's account that indicate that the edenic parallels were not lost on him. So while it may be said that Bougainville's account may be more "balanced" in that it does not ignore some aspects of Tahitian society that he finds repugnant (such as cannibalism), his reports do not belie Commercon's. Comment: The British Version The English version of Bougainville's journal was translated and edited by Johann Forster, who had subsequent notoriety because of his connections to Captain Cook, and who himself later sailed to Tahiti. Forster notes that Though Mr. de Bougainville is a man of undoubted veracity and abilities, he has, however, in a few instances, been misled by false reports, or prejudiced in favour of his nation: we have, in some additional notes, corrected as far as it was in our power these mistakes, and impartially vindicated the British nation, where we thought the author had been unjustly partial; for the love of one's country is, in our opinion, very consistent with common justice and good breeding; qualities which never should be wanting in a philosopher. (Bougainville 1772a: 4-5) Forster's jingoism is, presumably, limited to footnotes and comments like this one rather than a pandemic presence. But this cannot be assumed, nor can he be assumed to be without factual error. For example, elsewhere, he mistakenly asserts that it was the Spaniards who "first made the inhabitants of these

52 Pacific Romanticism islands acquainted with iron" (Forster 1778: 367). Perhaps this is because Bougainville suggested that to those that get the "credit" for introducing iron must also go the blame for introducing venereal disease (1772a: 273-274), a view about which Forster is silent. By saying nothing, Forster may imagine that he acquits his own countrymen. Perhaps consciously intending to differ further with Bougainville, Forster offers a rather de-sexualized opinion about the women of the Pacific: For the more women are esteemed in a nation, and enjoy an equality of rights with men, the more it appears that the original harshness of manners is softened, the more the people are capable of tender feelings, mutual attachment, and social virtues, which naturally lead them towards the blessings of civilization. (Forster 1778: 421^22) One of the difficulties of relying on the British sources is that the accounts were conflated and redacted by the publisher John Hawkesworth (Smith 1957: II, 150-151). Besides the obvious result that one should treat the Hawkesworth version with some caution, the implicit conclusion is that Hawkesworth seems to have been responding to a sense that tales of Tahiti were worth more as entertainment than as data. Of course, in this regard, Hawkesworth is little different from Diderot, who, as we will see shortly, fabricated entire conversations between Tahitians and Frenchmen. THE ROMANTIC NEEDS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT In Orientalism, Edward Said notes that the second half of the seventeenth century in Europe was an era of a "revisionist" and "reconstructive" Zeitgeist in which a particular European set of visions of the non-European was used by Europeans for their own purposes (Said 1979: 113-120). He notes Bougainville's contribution to this European agenda (1979: 117) but does not mention the British. This omission can be seen as a reflexive demonstration of Said's reminder of the "hubris" (1979: 115) involved here: just as it is not actual living and breathing Tahitians (to use the salient example), but a "filtered" mental image that Europeans are looking to as a template or influence or guideline for "revising" or "reconstructing" Europe, so also Said has "filtered out" the British response to Tahiti. This is not necessarily to be seen as a shortcoming of Said, since Tahitians and other Pacific peoples can be seen as "fringe-dwellers" (Smith 1992: 175; 189-190) along the edges of the orientalist stereotype that Said elucidates in his argument. Indeed, the very utility of orientalism is subject to debate, since it connotes a monolith (and a monolithic antithesis in "Occidentalism") that almost certainly never existed (Thomas 1999: 2-5). But it cannot be doubted that Said has put a finger on the attractions of the Other for those with primitivist and/or romanticist inclinations. And even if Tahitians are not the archetypal "orientals," the point here is simply that there are no perceptions that come in a vacuum; our perceptions are, to some degree, editorials. It is, then, Europeans' editorial choices—all of which are culturally and socially shaped—about what is observed at Tahiti by the officers and sailors, what gets recorded, and whose versions get read (to name a few of the obvious ones)

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that are used as fodder for their own purposes. Put into other words, it means that Commercon's and, later, Bougainville's accounts fit rather well indeed into an intellectual space that had a particular configuration. In a dissatisfied, frustrated, and thwarted Europe, an account of a society with the sexual freedom of the Tahitians could hardly have arrived at a better historical moment. And the preferential "choice" of Bougainville's (and, presumably, other French accounts of) Tahiti over those of the English (with perhaps the exception of Johann Forster, a Scot raised in Germany) has had intellectual consequences through, and beyond, the twentieth century. It is, however, worth noting that English responses were certainly not absent. While the French Tahiti may have been the first to reach European eyes and ears, it was not the only one. The voyages of Cook in the 1770s provided much more information to work with for a Europe already awakened to a promiscuous Polynesia, such that "the island became notorious throughout Europe in the popular mind as a land of free-love" (Smith 1985: 47). But it was more than "free-love" that captured the European imagination. Sir Joseph Banks, who accompanied Cook on his first voyage aboard the H.M.S. Endeavor to Tahiti, used Greek imagery in describing the Tahitians, a representation that was not unique to him (recall both Bougainville and Commercon; Smith 1985: 42, 170), and a way of thinking that set Tahitian society on a plane distinct from—and in some ways above—Europe. If there was ever a prototypical "Other" to the average European of the 1770s, it was the people of Tahiti.12 Smith notes that the "Otherness" and general cachet of Tahitians and other Pacific Islanders was informed by four distinct guiding European assumptions: (1) the belief in an ideal southern realm; (2) the transience of earthly happiness; (3) the Great Chain of Being; and (4) antipodal inversion (that is, the idea that things are reversed south of the Equator) (Smith 1985: 48ff). In saying that these European assumptions guided the everyday response to Tahiti, I do not mean to claim that Tahiti was seen as the fulfillment of these assumptions. Rather, the confluence of the news from Tahiti and the prior existence of these ideas provided a particular historical moment in which each was seen to enhance the salience of the other. But Tahiti had somewhat different meanings depending on whether you were north or south of the English Channel. While the English certainly did enjoy the ribald and bawdy elements of what they knew about Tahiti, the "temper of English thought in the third quarter of the century was not of a kind likely to take to tales about an earthly paradise without question" (Smith 1985: 49). Even the worldly Captain Cook ordered that in his later account of Tahitian life, "nothing indecent should appear" (Cook 1961: cxlvi).13 In other words, "Tahiti certainly was not the cultured Englishman's spiritual homeland." South of the Channel, however, such tales found much more fertile ground: "[Tahiti] hinted, rather, at the licentious opinions of that French radical Rousseau (Smith 1992: 132). 12. Even when not mentioned by name, allusions to freedom usually left "little doubt" that Tahiti was implicit (Smith 1985: 43). 13. This English prudishness is in fact not unique to Cook, but characterizes the censorship of things considered "indelicate" (Douglas 1999: 75).

54 Pacific Romanticism The Response to Bougainville in France: Denis Diderot In Paris, philosophe Denis Diderot (1713-1784), among others, 14 finds Commercon's and Bougainville's accounts of Tahiti to be uplifting examples of the condition of people prior to, or in the absence of, (European) sociostructural forms: church, state, class, capital. The concept of "Natural Man" and the "state of nature" are nurtured by these accounts. 15 Parallel, albeit less erotic, romanticized images of some of the indigenous peoples of North America also enjoy a kind of efflorescence in the European imagination at this time. The result is that as the eighteenth century drew to a close, Diderot and other European intellectuals had established the idea that at least some non-European peoples have (or had) a certain purity. This feature can be found to this day in Western thinking about indigenous peoples of the world. As I noted at the outset of the book, imagining non-Western peoples to be profoundly different from Westerners fueled much work in anthropology during the twentieth century, and I will return to this theme at the conclusion of the book. Diderot was considered to be one of the "brightest lights of the Age of Reason" (Ingrao 1990: 228), and "one of the great leaders of the Enlightenment—in some respects the greatest of them all" (Wilson 1972: 8). He is described as "versatile, volatile, erotic, experimental, profoundly original," and "openly sensual" (Gay 1973: 287, 392), and as a person who "left indelible marks in the pattern of modern intellectual history" (Vyverberg 1989: 3). Modern thought in anthropology, sociology, psychology, 16 education, and legislation can be seen in Diderot's liberalism and antiauthoritarianism (Vyverberg 1989: 4-5). Indeed, in addition to the usual Enlightenment concerns of morality, the Church, and the State, Diderot was equally fascinated by the irrational and the rational, sanity and madness, talent and genius. He added substantially to the order and disorder of aesthetics. He gave new dimensions to time and distance, to psychopathology and to art criticism. (Fellows 1977: 170) It was a person of this sort of intellectual vigor who crafted a lengthy review of Bougainville's A Voyage Around the World after its publication in Paris in 1771, two years after the return of the Boudeuse and L Etoile. For reasons that 14. One such other person is Edouard Taitbout de Marigny, whose replication (1779) of others' work places him in the tradition of Bougainville and Diderot in seeing Tahitians as "soft primitives" (Smith 1985: 87). 15. It is worth noting that it was the first edition (there were three: Bougainville 1771, 1772b, 1775) of the account of Bougainville's voyage that captured the attention of the Paris salons. In subsequent editions, he made corrections to the first such as, "1 am mistaken . . . 1 am inclined to believe [that the nobles] have the same barbarous prerogatives [of the power of life and death] over the common people" (Bougainville 1772b: 269, cited in Marshall and Williams 1982: 267). This repudiation of his earlier claims about equality seems to have been overlooked by the philosophes. 16. Wilson argues that Freud, for example, was influenced by Diderot (Wilson 1972: 580). Freud's claim that "primitive man was better off in knowing no restrictions of instinct" (Freud 1961: 62) is consistent with this assertion.

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are not entirely clear,17 Diderot's review, entitled A Supplement to Bougainville's 'Voyage' (Diderot 1955b), did not appear until 1796, more than ten years after Diderot's death. But between early 1772 and 1796, the unpublished manuscript was circulated around salons in Paris (Fellows 1977: 120). For all of Diderot's interest in Bougainville's account, he was anticolonial and opposed to the French elite that Bougainville personified.18 Nor was Diderot an unabashed primitivist19 who thought that the Tahitians were superior to the French in every way, noting that: M. de Bougainville's book several times portrays the savage man as a being who is generally so stupid that a masterpiece of human industry makes no more impression on him than the great phenomena of nature; he no longer marvels at them; and he lacks the necessary fund of elementary ideas that would lead him to a true estimation of the great works of art. (Diderot 1964: 178) Tahitians' ostensible inability to appreciate art notwithstanding, Diderot certainly does see much about the Tahitians to emulate. He sees them in terms of a "soft primitivism," a perspective that Horigan argues to have been around for over 2000 years (1988: 51-64). This "soft primitivism" is contrasted with "hard primitivism," the latter being characterized by a substantial degree of physical hardship. Theirs is a spartan existence with few, if any, of the cultural and material trappings of civilization. Always on guard against predatory animals, and usually in a hash, unfavourable climate with barren soil, the "hard" primitives eke out a meagre existence in a constant war against nature. (Horigan 1988: 52) Horigan documents the existence of the concept of "hard primitivism" as early as Homer's description of the Ethiopians and in Tacitus's Germania. He contrasts this with "soft primitivism," which made its most compelling appearance in accounts of the South Pacific (Horigan 1988: 53; see also Smith 1985: 5): Free from the pernicious ties and constraints of civilization, they live in harmony with nature, freely expressing their impulses and emotions untrammeled by social rules and regulations. Never wanting for food, which is always plentiful, they live their lives in a state of idleness and self-indulgence. (Horigan 1988: 52)

17. One suggestion is that the Supplement remained unpublished for so long because Friedrich Grimm, the publisher of Correspondance Litteraire, a venue for much of Diderot's work, had an ongoing feud with Bougainville, and was unwilling to put anything into print that was not highly critical of Bougainville (Diderot 1964: 177). If this is so, then Grimm's hatred for Bougainville must have been intense, since Diderot's Supplement is unflattering to Bougainville in some ways. 18. In fact, Diderot and Bougainville clashed over the latter's having "torn" Aoutouru from his home (Ross 1978: 130-131. 19. Diderot's attitudes are not entirely clear; Marshall and Williams, for example, say that "Diderot has little doubt of the superiority of the savage state over the civilized" (1982:268).

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Quite clearly, this is the lens through which Bougainville and Commercon viewed their week on Tahiti. For my purposes, "soft primitivism" and "romanticism" are synonymous, and it is also the stance from which Diderot wrote. Diderot's Supplement includes a hypothetical soliloquy of an old man 20 mentioned by Bougainville upon landing: The chief of this district conducted and introduced us into his house, in which we found five or six women, and a venerable old man. The women saluted us, by laying their hands on their breasts, and saying several times tayo. The old man was the father of our host. He had no other character of old age, than that respectable one which is imprinted on a fine figure. His head adorned with white hair, and a long beard; all his body, nervous and fleshy, had neither wrinkles, nor shewed any marks of decrepitude. This venerable man seemed to be rather displeased with our arrival; he even retired without answering our civilities, without giving any signs of fear, astonishment, or curiosity; very far from taking part in the rapture all this people was in at our sight, his thoughtful and suspicious air seemed to show that he feared the arrival of a new race of men would trouble those happy days which he had spent in peace. (Bougainville 1772a: 220-21) Bougainville seems to be struck by the anomalous treatment accorded him by the old man. Rather than a greeting of open arms, the old man seems to be truculent and withdrawn. The section of Diderot's Supplement entitled "The Old Man's Farewell" begins where Bougainville left off: He was the father of a numerous family. At the time of the Europeans' arrival, he cast upon them a look that was filled with scorn, though it revealed no surprise, no alarm and no curiosity. They approached him; he turned his back on them and retired into his hut. His thoughts were only too well revealed by his silence and his air of concern, for in the privacy of his thoughts he groaned inwardly over the happy days of his people now gone forever. (Diderot 1964: 187) The old man then speaks to his fellows in a jeremiad—"Weep, wretched Tahitians, weep!" (Diderot 1964: 187)—as he describes the beginning of the end of life on Tahiti as all knew it.21 The bulk of the old man's soliloquy is, however, aimed at Bougainville: 'And you, leader of these brigands who obey you, take your vessel swiftly from our shores. We are innocent and happy, and you can only spoil our happiness. We follow the pure instinct of nature, and you have tried to efface the imprint from our hearts. Here all things are for all, and you have preached to us I know not what distinctions between mine and thine. Our women and girls we possess in common; you have shared this privilege with us, and your coming has awakened in them a frenzy they have never known before. They have become mad in your arms; you have become ferocious in theirs. They 20. Hammond (1970: 54) wrongly states that the old man is an "imagined" character. Diderot's words are imagined, but the man himself was quite real, as the ensuing quote from Bougainville shows. 21. This attention to the ways in which Europeans might "corrupt" Tahitian life occurs much earlier in France than in England, where attention to the "evil effects" of Europe on Tahiti appear later (Smith 1985: 85).

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have begun to hate one another; you have cut one another's throats for them, and they have come to us stained with your blood." (Diderot 1964: 187-188) The idealized Tahitian that emerges from Diderot's pen is a person perfectly happy with her or his circumstances—and why not, since every need or wish is instantly gratified? The stark difference between the Tahitian status quo ante and the post-Bougainville Tahiti that is proposed by Diderot may seem naive today, but consider the romanticist Zeitgeist. To have been able even to get only a momentary glimpse—even if that glimpse was in large part a projection of their own fantasies, and even if in a sort of Heisenberg Effect the glimpse puts an end to the phenomenon—of the pristine human condition must have been a profoundly exciting intellectual moment for the philosophes. Diderot uses the old man's anguish to castigate: The French claim upon Tahiti: "We are free—but see where you have driven into our earth the symbol of our future servitude," and "What right do you have over [a Tahitian] that he does not have over you?" (Diderot 1964: 188); French ethnocentrism: "Leave us our own customs, which are wiser and more decent than yours. . . . We possess already all that is good or necessary for our existence. . . . You have been in our huts—what is lacking there, in your opinion?" Diderot 1964: 188— 189); French-borne sexually transmitted diseases: "We used to know but one disease—the one to which all men, all animals, and all plants are subject—old age. But you have brought us a new one" Diderot 1964: 189); and French mores: "That [cleric] in black, who stands near to you and listens to me, has spoken to our young men, and I know not what he has said to our young girls, but our youths are hesitant and our girls blush" Diderot 1964: 190). Much of this critique of French mores—especially those to do with sex and marriage—is found in an invented conversation between the expedition's chaplain and a Tahitian named Orou. It is too long to reproduce in its entirety, but a few exchanges give a sense of the libertine and "rabid" (Carrithers 1995: 237) anticlerical sentiments championed by Diderot. When the members of Bougainville's expedition were shared out among the native families, the ship's chaplain fell to the lot of Orou. The Tahitian and the chaplain were men of about the same age, that is, about thirty-five years old. At that time, Orou's family consisted of his wife and three daughters, who were called Asto, Palli and Thia. The women undressed their guest, washed his face, hands and feet, and put before him a wholesome though frugal meal. When he was about to go to bed, Orou, who had stepped outside with his family, reappeared and presented to him his wife and three girls—all naked as Eve—and said to him: "You are young and healthy and you have just had a good supper. He who sleeps alone, sleeps badly; at night a man needs a woman at his side. Here is my wife and here are my daughters. Choose whichever one pleases you most, but if you would like to do me a favor, you will give your preference to my youngest girl, who has not yet had any children." The mother said: "Poor girl! I don't hold it against her. It's no fault of hers." The chaplain replied that his religion, his holy orders, his moral standards and his sense of decency all prevented him from accepting Orou's invitation.

58 Pacific Romanticism Orou answered: "I don't know what this thing is that you call 'religion,' but I can only have a low opinion of it because it forbids you to partake of an innocent pleasure to which Nature, the sovereign mistress of us all, invites everybody. It seems to prevent you from bringing one of your fellow creatures into the world, from doing a favor asked of you by a father, a mother and their children, from repaying the kindness of a host, and from enriching a nation by giving it an additional citizen. I don't know what it is that you call 'holy orders,' but your chief duty is to be a man and to show gratitude. J am not asking you to take my moral standards back with you to your own country, but Orou, your host and your friend, begs you merely to lend yourself to the morality of Tahiti. Is our moral code a better or a worse one than your own? This is an easy question to answer. Does the country you were born in have more people than it can support? If it does, then your morals are neither better nor worse than ours. Or can it feed more people than it now has? Then our morals are better than yours. As for the sense of propriety that leads you to object to my proposal, that I understand, and I freely admit that I am in the wrong. 1 ask your pardon. I cannot ask you to do anything that might harm your health; if you are too tired, you should by all means go to sleep at once. But I hope that you will not persist in disappointing us. (Diderot 1964: 194-195) This is the very beginning of the "conversation." Immediately Diderot makes clear his belief that morality could not be out of harmony with the human body and, contra others of his era, he imagined that higher moral systems were in accord with, not set against, human passions (Wokler 1995: 46, Smith 1995: 102). In other words, a society's ethics can be measured by the degree to which they nurture, rather than thwart, the desires of its members. Eventually, Orou— as well as the chaplain's own drives—persuade him to accede to the family's wishes, and after breakfast the following morning, Orou and the chaplain continue their discussion. Orou notes that the God spoken of by the chaplain seems rather like an old man. THE CHAPLAIN. No, he never grows old. He spoke to our ancestors and gave them laws; he prescribed to them the way in which he wishes to be honored; he ordained that certain actions are good and others he forbade them to do as being evil. OROU. I see. And one of these evil actions which he has forbidden is that of a man who goes to bed with a woman or girl. But in that case, why did he make two sexes? THE CHAPLAIN. In order that they might come together—but only when certain conditions are satisfied and only after certain initial ceremonies have been performed. By virtue of these ceremonies one man belongs to one woman and only to her; one woman belongs to one man and only to him. OROU. For their whole lives? . . . I find these strange precepts contrary to nature, and contrary to reason. I think they are admirably calculated to increase the number of crimes and to give endless annoyance to the old workman [God]—who made everything without hands, head or tools, who is everywhere but can be seen nowhere, who exists today and tomorrow but grows not a day older, who gives commands and is not obeyed, who can prevent what he dislikes but fails to do so. His commands are contrary to nature because they assume that a thinking being, one that has feelings and a sense of freedom, can be the property of another being like himself. On what could such a right of ownership be founded? Do you not see that in your country you have confused things that have no feelings, thoughts, desires or wills—things one takes or leaves, keeps or sells, without them suffering or complaining—with things that can neither be bought nor sold, which have freedom, volition, and desires of their own, which have the ability to give or to

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withhold themselves for a moment or forever, which suffer and complain? These latter things can never be treated like a trader's stock of goods unless one forgets what their true character is and does violence to nature. Furthermore, your laws seem to me to be contrary to the general order of things. For in truth is there anything so senseless as a precept that forbids us to heed the changing impulses that are inherent in our being, or commands that require a degree of constancy which is not possible, that violate the liberty of both male and female by chaining them perpetually to one another? Is there anything more unreasonable than this perfect fidelity that would restrict us, for the enjoyment of pleasures so capricious, to a single partner—than an oath of immutability taken by two individuals made of flesh and blood under a sky that is not the same for a moment, in a cavern that threatens to collapse upon them, at the foot of a cliff that is crumbling into dust, under a tree that is withering, on a bench of stone that is being worn away? Take my word for it, you have reduced human beings to a worse condition than that of the animals. I don't know what your great workman is, but I am very happy that he never spoke to our forefathers, and I hope that he never speaks to our children, for if he does, he many tell them the same foolishness, and they may be foolish enough to believe it. Yesterday, as we were having supper, you told us all about your "magistrates" and "priests." I do not know who these characters are whom you call Magistrates and Priests and who have the authority to govern your conduct—but tell me, are they really masters of good and evil? Can they transform justice into injustice and contrariwise? Is it within their power to attach the name of "good" to harmful actions or the name of "evil" to harmless or useful deeds? One can hardly think so because in that case there would no longer be any difference between true and false, between good and bad, between beautiful and ugly—only such differences as it pleased your great workman, your magistrates or your priests to define as such." (Diderot 1964: 197-199) Nothing escapes Diderot's criticism; all authority, religious and civil, is challenged. In doing so, Diderot shows that he is little different from many other philosophes, but his use of Tahiti is ingenious and penetrating. Diderot, who is clearly the ventriloquist for the Orou dummy, continues his diatribe by noting that regard for the authorities cited by the chaplain can have only one set of outcomes: [Y]ou will be at odds with all the authorities, at odds with yourself, malicious, disturbed by your own conscience, persecuted by your witless masters, and miserable, as you were yesterday evening when I offered you my wife and daughters and you could only wail: "What about my religion? What about my holy orders?" Would you like to know what is good and what is bad in all times and places? Pay close attention to the nature of things and actions, to your relations with your fellow creatures, to the effect of your behavior on your own well-being and on the general welfare. You are mad if you believe that there is anything in the universe, high or low, that can add or subtract from the laws of nature. (Diderot 1964: 200) The discussion moves toward its conclusion as Orou continues to berate the chaplain for holding to his silly notions. Orou notes the lack of sexual jealousy,22 which the chaplain infers to mean a lack of ardor and commitment between women and men. Orou responds to this inference: 22. That the same claim should be salient for Mead on Samoa generations later is striking.

60 Pacific Romanticism OROU. We have put in their place another impulse, which is more universal, powerful and lasting—self-interest. Examine your conscience in all candor, put aside the hypocritical parade of virtue which is always on the lips of your companions, though not in their hearts, and tell me, if there is anywhere on the face of the earth a man who, if he were not held back by shame, would not prefer to lose his child—a husband who would not prefer to lose his wife—rather than lose his fortune and all the amenities of life? You may be sure that if ever a man can be led to care as much about his fellow men as he does about his own bed, his own health, his leisure, his house, his harvests or his fields, he can be depended upon to do his utmost to look out for the well-being of other people. Then you will see him shedding tears over the bed of a sick child or taking care of a mother when she is ill. Then you will find fruitful women, nubile girls and handsome young men highly regarded. Then you will find a great deal of attention paid to the education of the young, because the nation grows stronger with their growth, and suffers a material loss if their well-being is impaired. THE CHAPLAIN [as an aside]. 1 am afraid there is some reason in what this savage says. The poor peasant of our European lands wears out his wife in order to spare his horse, lets his child die without help, and calls the veterinary to look after his ox. (Diderot 1964:210-211) Orou/Diderot must win, of course. The chaplain, and everything for which he serves as proxy, must lose. And he must lose in two ways. The first is, as this just-cited passage represents, that the chaplain must lose the battle of rationality: Orou's world must make more sense than Europe's. The second victory is more visceral, more sensate; the end of the conversation mocks the chaplain's original resistance to sleeping with the women of Orou's family on that first night: OROU. What is the significance of the long robe that covers you from head to foot, and what is that pointed bag that you let hang over your shoulders and sometimes draw up around your ears? THE CHAPLAIN. The reason I dress as J do is that I am a member of a society of men who are called monks in my country. The most sacred of their vows is never to have intercourse with any woman and never to beget any children. OROU. Then what kind of work do you do? THE CHAPLAIN. None.

OROU. And your magistrates allow that sort of idleness—the worst of all? THE CHAPLAIN. They more than allow it: they honor it and make others do the same. OROU. My first thought was that nature, or some accident, or some cruel form of sorcery, had deprived you of the ability to reproduce your kind, and that out of pity they had let you go on living instead of killing you. But my daughter tells me that you are a man as robust as any Tahitian and that she has high hopes of getting good results from your repeated caresses. Well, at last 1 know why you kept mumbling yesterday evening, "But there's my religion, my holy order!" Could you explain to me why it is that your magistrates show you such favor and treat you with so much respect? THE CHAPLAIN. I don't know. OROU. Still, you must know why it was that, although you are a man, you have condemned yourself of your own free will to be one no longer? THE CHAPLAIN. That's hard to explain, and it would take too long. OROU. Are the monks faithful to their vows of sterility? THE CHAPLAIN. N o .

OROU. I was sure of it. Do you also have female monks?

Interpreting Tahiti 61 THECHAPLArN. Y e s .

OROU. AS well behaved as the male monks? THE CHAPLAIN. They are kept more strictly in seclusion, they dry up from unhappiness and die of boredom. OROU. So nature is avenged for the injury done to her! Ugh! What a country! If everything is managed the way you say, you are more barbarous than we are. The good chaplain tells us that he spent the rest of the day wandering about the island, visiting a number of huts, and that in the evening, after supper, the father and mother begged him to go to bed with Palli, the second eldest daughter. She offered herself in the same undress as Thia's, and he tells us that several times during the night he cried out, "My religion! My holy orders!" The third night he suffered the same guilty torments in the arms of Asto, the eldest, and the fourth night, not to be unfair, he devoted to his hostess. (Diderot 1964: 212-213) The chaplain, the Church, France, and Europe thus emerge from Diderot's pen as hypocritical, irrational, and barbarous. A more complete indictment of one's own society is difficult to imagine, and Diderot paints the entire wretched portrait on the canvas that we know as Tahiti.23 While Diderot may have been one of the "giants of the ideological upheaval of his day" (Niklaus 1970: 123), it seems as though the Supplement did not play a particularly large part in Diderot's stature. Indeed, Gay claims that Diderot's Supplement "did not have any impact" on the Enlightenment (1973: 392). Narrowly speaking, this is quite the case; one does not find subsequent writers referring in significant ways to the idealized Tahiti that Diderot constructed. Of course, given the fact that it was not published until 1796, this is no surprise; by then, after the horrors of the Revolution and the more dispassionate subsequent descriptions of Tahiti from Cook and other English voyagers, Diderot's version was "old news." Furthermore, the exciting new ideas that abounded in the 1760s were not as new or exciting by the last few years of the century. But taken as a part of a larger intellectual agenda, it is clear that the unpublished but widely read Supplement, along with the account of Commercon (not to mention the presumably countless borrowings such as Dixmerie's), was consistent with the libertine anticlericalism that was so importantly foundational for many of the Enlightenment romanticists. Although there are also other ways to view it, Gay calls the Supplement a "defense of lust" (Gay 1969: 200), and cites Diderot's private disclosure of his own motivations behind many of his thoughts in a revealing letter from Diderot to Damilaville dated 3 November 1760: "There is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime sentiments and most refined tenderness" (Diderot 1955a: 216; cited in Gay 1969: 189-190). That Diderot's writings were an important component of the Enlightenment affection for the notion of Natural Man—a 23. I use the painting metaphor here intentionally. Diderot does with words what Rooker—who produced an engraving depicting the British Dolphin at Tahiti's Matavai Bay (in Hawkesworth 1773)—does with the engraver's tool: he produces an image of Tahiti that comes entirely from someone else's description of it. We must therefore keep in mind the synthesis of illustration, invention, and documentation that all such work is (Smith 1992: 54).

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notion that was "in the air" in Europe at the time 24 (Langdon 1959: 10)—can scarcely be doubted. And to the degree that (1) his writings are a lusty result of his reading of Commercon and Bougainville's reports of "sexual freedom" on Tahiti, and to the degree that (2) this freedom was the French interpretation of what I claim in Chapter 6 to be a desperate attempt on the part of the Tahitians to avoid cannon fusillades on the one hand and to acquire iron on the other, then it is the case that over 200 years of European intellectual history has been influenced by a mistaken interpretation.

24. Hammond (1970: 3) compares the popular interest in accounts of the Pacific voyages of the 1760s and 1770s to the interest in the accounts of moon landings 200 years later. Marshall and Williams concur, noting: "Between the ending of the Seven Years War in 1763 and the outbreak of the French revolutionary wars thirty years later, Britain and France in particular experienced a 'Pacific craze,' in which a new type of national hero emerged in the shape of naval explorers and itinerant scientists" (1982: 258).

5 Pacific Romanticism in Anthropology My concern in this chapter is to link romanticism in twentieth-century anthropology with the romantic naturalism of the Enlightenment. More specifically, I am interested in how a particular, Continental, version of Pacific sexuality serves as a conductor for that link. "Proto-social scientists" (Frost 1976: 811) of the nineteenth century are the channel through which the accounts and interpretations of Tahiti and other Pacific societies flow into modern anthropology. Although this chapter is primarily a selective overview of the history of antliropology in the 1800s, a reader with no particular interest in anthropology will, I think, still find it useful as a contribution to the intellectual history of Europe. WHY ANTHROPOLOGY? Accounts of Pacific peoples and their lands "gave poets images to work into the fabric of magical dreams; it contributed to the development of modern ideas concerning man and his societies; and it played a decisive part in the emergence of the modern, scientific, world view" (Frost 1976: 803). Commercon and Diderot were the dreamweavers, but the "modern ideas" applied to these accounts were, in large part, those belonging to people that we today call anthropologists. In the "division of labor" of intellectual activity, anthropology is the field that bears the responsibility of stewardship of the data about people who do not live in European or European-derived societies. It is anthropology that, for better or for worse, serves as a repository for reports of Others, as well as efforts to "translate" those same Others. Making "them" more understandable to "us" has been fundamentally an anthropological responsibility. Given this state of events, it means that European thinking about non-European peoples will rely mostly on the data and often the insights of anthropologists. It has been primarily anthropologists, for more than a century, who have been telling the academic world what it means and why it matters that, for example, residence patterns,

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kinship categories, and sexual mores vary around the world. In short, the study of the understanding of non-European peoples is a study of the intellectual history of anthropology. One problem that confronts anyone seeking the roots of anthropological thought in the eighteenth century, and their connections to the twentieth, is that one has to attend to the lean years of the first half of the nineteenth century, what antliropology's preeminent historian George Stocking refers to as the "dark ages" of the history of anthropology (1973: xii). Conspicuous links between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do not always exist—in part, as we shall see below, because of the deliberately censorious choices of at least one important writer. Conspicuous or not, that such a link exists I take to be axiomatic, as does Stocking, who notes that From the time that Captain Cook [and in fact, before that, Bougainville] returned from Tahiti, the focal ganglion in the world geography of European primitivistic longing was the islands of the "South Seas," where handsome brown-skinned natives led untroubled lives, finding ready sustenance in the fruit of palm trees under which they made a free and easy love. (Stocking 1989a: 235) This passage comes from a section that prefaces a discussion of Margaret Mead's work on Samoa. The romanticism of Mead and her mentor Franz Boas (Barnard 2000: 107), and romanticism's avatars within contemporary anthropology ("'reflexive,' iiermeneutic,' 'interpretive,' 'deconstructive' etc." anthropology [Stocking 1989b: 7]), are not umelated. Shweder captures the essence of romanticism in anthropology: From [the] romanticist tenet flows the concept of arbitrariness and culture, the subordination of deep structure to surface content, the celebration of local context, the idea of paradigm, cultural frames, and constitutive presuppositions, the view that action is expressive, symbolic, or semiotic, and a strong anti-normative, anti-developmental presumption culminating in the view that the primitive and modern are coequal and that the history of ideas is a history of a sequence of entrenched ideological fashions. (Shweder 1984: 28) At the outset of the book, I claimed that romanticism in anthropology has done more harm than good. This seems like a good place to elaborate on that claim. The focus on "coequality" that Shweder mentions creates the possibility of a moral conundrum that threatens anthropology. "Moral models" in anthropology misleadingly suggest that dispassionate "nonromanticist" anthropologists are uninterested in advocacy (D'Andrade 1995). "Nonromanticist" anthropologists can be, in fact, strong advocates, as shown by the following passages: To marshal post-modernist relativising arguments in defence of cultural nationalist causes we happen to believe are just, valorising mythic histories as equally valid alternative narratives of the past, is to abandon whatever firm ground we might stand on and whatever principled stances we might adopt in regard to truth. We cannot then re-establish our credibility to speak out when we would condemn Hitlerian myths of racial supremacy or genocidal nationalist narratives of blood, homeland and purity. Truth, however elu-

Anthropology 65 sive, is too precious a quality to be so easily and cheaply abandoned by academics, entrusted by their societies with unique opportunities and responsibilities to seek after it as evenhandedly as they can. (Keesing 1993: 587) The notion that ethnographic representations are to be treated as arbitrary "texts" or "fictions" simply privileging certain capricious positions has a certain rhetorical appeal, particularly when treating quaint folkloristic phenomena like the cockfight or folk poetry. . . . When turning to death camps, rape camps, and torture camps, the idea of treating events—and their representations—as "fictions" becomes instantly repulsive. . . . As cultural anthropology continues its affair with "subjectivity" . . . and righteously renounces any "scientific" pretensions, it is becoming a storyteller's craft. . . . [But] how can such an anthropology be of use to our understanding—and dismantling—of ethnic cleansings, rape camps, and torture camps? (Suarez-Orozco 1994: 36-37, cited in Spiro 1996:776) This "relativising subjectivity," to conflate Keesing and Suarez-Orozco, is one of the contemporary manifestations of romanticism. It is the conundrum of the Boasian tradition in which relativism can be used to exculpate or rationalize one's own behavior. Like the ten-year-old at the family dinner who excuses his belch with "Gee Mom, in some cultures, that's a compliment!" romanticists (both inside anthropology as well as outside it) can find in cross-cultural comparison a source of moral absolution. It is easy to see the similarities between Boas, Mead, and romanticism in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century anthropology; as Stocking has noted. And the intellectual comiections between the principles of the Enlightenment and the writings of Rousseau, Diderot, and other philosophes with that romanticism are equally visible. And while specific bibliographic evidence linking Diderot to Boas via Tahiti is not to be found, it is clear that these links exist. One problem with finding these links is that an important—perhaps the most important, if we are to take the view of Stocking—early-nineteenth-century ethnological writer deliberately chose to ignore French accounts of Tahiti. James Cowles Prichard, writing in 1813, "did not cite anyone whom we might identify as philosophe or encyclopediste or ideologue, or who can be tied to the intellectual tradition of the French revolution. There is no hint of French materialist psychology or religious skepticism . . . no Rousseau, no Turgot, no Condorcet, no Demeunier" (Stocking 1973: xliv). To this list, we might add that there is also no Bougainville, no Dixmerie, no Commercon, no Diderot. Prichard, who is seen by Stocking as profoundly important to the shaping of the development of British anthropology, knew French, and wrote of the physical traits of the inhabitants of Tahiti (based on the accounts from Cook's voyages), but avoided anything French that might be seen "to lead toward skepticism or [religious] infidelity" (Stocking 1973: xlvii). Alas, we must work our way through the implications of French reports of Tahiti during the nineteenth century by inference. North of the Channel, however, the data are more plentiful. Frost attributes some of the shape of British literary romanticism in the nineteenth century to the fact that many of the figures of that era—William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-

66 Pacific Romanticism 1843), and John Keats (1795-1821)—were brought up on the stories of Captain Cook and/or Tahiti (Frost 1976: 803-809). Smith (1985, 1992) also provides outstanding histories of the impact of the Pacific on art and, to a lesser degree, literature. But British literary figures and painters are not the path that gets us to Boas; that link is much more perceptibly to be found on the Continent even if there is no explicit Tahitian connection between, say, Diderot and Boas. The similarities of thought simply cannot be missed. The connection is thus either a projective act on the part of the readers of Diderot and Boas (and, of course, nearly countless others), or the connection is tacit, oblique, and implicit. I believe that the latter circumstances obtain and because of their indirect nature, the argument in support of the view that Boas's romanticism is grounded in a French idea of Tahiti cannot rest on a straightforward empirical demonstration, but rather on the compelling nature of the logic of the claim and its corroborating support. I turn now to making that claim. As I suggest above, an effort to account for the dearth of specific connections between eighteenth century philosophe Diderot and early-twentieth-century anthropologist Boas is not intended to be the only support that Boas was influenced by the Enlightenment. It is only that there is a problem with seeing clear comiections. Nationalistic jingoism is the most common culprit for this lack of clarity. Modern anthropology's nineteenth-century roots are grounded most deeply in Britain and Germany, certainly the two places in a post-Napoleon Europe where the works of French explorers, philosophers, and literary figures would have been relatively unwelcome. For various reasons, nineteenth-century French anthropology never really got much traction, with something of a hiatus between Comte and Durkheim,' so we seek in vain for explicit British and German attention to French Tahiti—Bougainville's as well as Diderot's. As a result, most nineteenth-century anthropological attention to Tahiti is subsumed under the "South Seas" aggregate rubric, and while we might quite reasonably assume that those who use that term intend it as a trope for Tahiti, that assumption cannot be demonstrated. Nationalism, then, may be the single most heavily weighted variable in the equation explaining the absence of explicit references to French descriptions of Tahiti. Scholars of one country tended to have their prejudices, and seem to have preferred not to acknowledge the work of anyone other than their own compatriots; this means that, for the English-speaking anthropological world, the accounts from the voyages of Cook trumped other accounts. In addition, there is the fact that scholars of the nineteenth century were more interested in general questions and concocting grand unifying theories, and ethnographic detail simply increased the noise-to-signal ratio. Finally, the cultural milieu in 1. This gap is all the more ironic since Montesquieu is often seen as the originator of the social sciences. But the sociological tradition begun by Montesquieu and continued by Saint-Simon and Comte found itself less concerned with what would have been seen as anomalous codes of morality (certainly the focus of French descriptions of Tahiti)— what we would today call culture—and more interested in how entire societies are put together and function, akin to a biological organism (Barnard 2000: 22-26).

Anthropology 67 Western Europe and the fledgling United States—including, importantly, challenges to conventional sexual morality—had changed from the heyday of the Enlightenment. The romanticist vision was retained—although in a somewhat different manifestation—on the Continent in the nineteenth century, although it was different enough from Diderot's that it did not need constant reassurances from Tahiti and the reminder that a moral relativism inspired by cultural variability, so central to eighteenth-century romanticism, was viable. Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Tahiti was "old news," supplanted by new discoveries, and besides: Tahiti after generations of European contact was not the Tahiti of the explorers anyway, so it is not as if such a place (i.e., the Tahiti of the 1760s) actually still existed. It merely served as an entry in the sterile catalogue of the range of possible human behaviors, joining a very long list. But as I say, this does not mean that romanticism was dead, nor even that it was dying. Ironically, the romanticist mantle in Europe was picked up by German intellectuals as part of the debate that eventually resulted in the coalescence of the German nation-state in 1871. The romantic inclination found German intellectual soil to be quite fertile; and it was soil that helped produce the person that many consider the founder of American anthropology: Franz Boas. Romanticism and Boas Isolating the intellectual influences on Boas has proven to be "elusive" for some who have tried (Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959: 4-5). Evidence of an Enlightenment-to-Boas link is seen easily enough simply by looking at relevant instances of Boas's thought. Consider, for example, this passage, given in the context of the claim that "Franz Boas hated authority" (Kardiner and Preble 1961: 139): One of the "unforgettable moments" of his life occurred when, as a student, a theologically-minded friend of his "declared his belief in the authority of tradition and his conviction that one had not the right to doubt what the past had transmitted to us." Boas was shocked, and years later he cited this conversation as having had a permanent influence on his life. In the same reminiscence he refers again to his abhorrence of authority: "The psychological origin of the implicit belief in the authority of religion, which was so foreign to my mind and which had shocked me at an earlier time, became a problem that engaged my thoughts for many years. In fact, my whole outlook upon social life is determined by the question: How can we recognize the shackles that tradition had laid upon us? For when we recognize them, we are also able to break them." (Kardiner and Preble 1961: 139; also, Stocking 1974: 42) One can almost hear the echoes of Diderot's conversation between Orou and the priest in this report of an incident from Boas's life. Perhaps the best way to establish the romanticist roots of Boas's thought is to consider those who strongly influenced him. Lowie invokes Rudolf Virchow,

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Edward Tylor, and Adolph Bastian2 as profound influences on Boas (1937: 129). Schrempp sees also in Boas the influence of Johann Herder (1989: 3 2 33), a contemporary of Diderot's (Herder was forty years old at Diderot's death, and claims to have met him [Zammito 2002: 330]), giving us four strands (three of which are German) to work with as a means of understanding the roots of Boas's romanticism as well as that of later anthropology—and of European thought in general. Johann Herder (1744-1803) Herder, born in East Prussia, studied with Kant, and had a reputation as a bright intellect. He was an autodidact known for his work in medicine, theology, and philosophy, and is seen as an important figure in the formation of what have come to be known as the social sciences. More significantly for our purposes, Herder was perhaps the beginning of the German romanticism that took over from the French in the wake of Napoleon. Herder was influenced by the work of Johann Forster (as well as Forster's son George [Smith 1992: 220]), who sailed with Cook to Tahiti, and whose published Observations (1778) caused Herder to refer to him as the "Ulysses" of the South Pacific (Herder 1791: 275; cited in Smith 1985: 87). Schrempp claims that the romanticism of Boas can be found in Herder's participation in the romanticist counterrevolution to the rationalists of the Enlightenment. Kluckhohn and Pmfer mention that Boas purchased forty volumes of Herder in the late 1870s, but do not indicate which volumes they were (1959: 8). While again noting the difficulty of tracing the influences upon Boas, Kluckhohn and Prufer are, on balance, convinced of Boas's debt to Herder: There are many tantalizing gaps in the data, but we shall mention only two. Boas owned a set of Herder, but how much did he read? It is tempting to infer a linkage. Herder stressed the social nature of man, and adhering to observation as opposed to speculation, he attempted to "show what man was on the earth in general and in every region in particular" (Penniman 1935: 48). In one place Boas writes: "Herder's 'Ideen zur Geshicte der Menschheit"'|7te/fecf/ofl£ on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind] in which perhaps for the first time the fundamental thought of the culture of mankind as a whole is clearly expressed (1904: 514)." (Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959: 10) Opposed to isolating, mechanistic ways of understanding humanity, the romanticists of the second half of the eighteenth century (Shweder mentions Voltaire, Diderot, and Condorcet as the anthropologically relevant among them [1984: 27]) would have been in one accord with Herder's claim that "It is far too little, to compare [man] to the absorbing sponge, the sparkling tinder: he is a multitudinous harmony, a living self, on whom the harmony of all the powers that surround him operates" (Manuel 1968: 4; cited in Schrempp 1989: 32 as Herder 1791: 293-294). Although for Schrempp it is the notion of a permeable rather than bounded self that he links most strongly with Boas, certainly Boas's 2. Shore (1996: 20) even refers to Bastian as Boas's "old mentor."

Anthropology 69 panglossian approach to ethnography is also foreshadowed in the sentence preceding the one just referred to above: "[Man] is connected with all the elements of nature; living by inspiration of the air, and deriving nutriment from the most opposite productions of the Earth, in his meats and drinks; consuming fire, while he absorbs light, and contaminates the air he breathes; awake or asleep, in motion or at rest, contributing to the change of the universe; shall not he also be changed by it?" (Manuel 1968: 4; cited in Schrempp 1989: 32 as Herder 1791: 293-294). It is not difficult to find within the work of Herder statements that one could easily imagine being penned by Boas. Two examples here will suffice. First, Herder notes that, "Hunter or fisherman, shepherd, husbandman, or citizen, in every state man has learned to discriminate food, and construct habitations for himself and his family; to clothe and adorn either sex, and regulate his domestic economy" (Manuel 1968: 83). Boas writes along these lines, "Even in the simplest stages of culture man does not obtain his living . . . without the help of some simple utensils, and nowhere is he without some kind of protection against the inclement weather and without some sort of ornament" (Boas 1938: 238). And again, Herder: "Endowed with these gifts [of reason and justice], and making proper application of them, the Negro may form his society as well as the Greek, the troglodyte as well as the Chinese" (Manuel 1968: 103). Boas similarly writes, "It would seem, therefore, that the weight of evidence is, on the whole, in favor of an essential similarity of mental endowment in different races," and, after noting behavioral differences between a "Russian peasant," a "native Australian," an "educated Chinaman," and an "educated American," accounts for these differences "by the habitual reactions of the society to which the individual in question belongs" (Stocking 1974: 244). Of perhaps even greater interest to us here in understanding the connection between Commercon, Diderot, and Bougainville and the romanticists of his time with twentieth-century anthropology is Herder's reference to Tahiti, or, as he refers to it, "the Society and other islands [in which] the female sex appeared to be wholly dedicated to the rites of Cytherea" (Manuel 1968: 62). His reference to Tahiti is not a particularly laudatory one. Was Herder's knowledge of Tahiti influenced by Diderot? Diderot's biographer Wilson argues that although there is no direct evidence, there are strong suggestions that the two did meet in 1769 (1972: 573). This, of course, was prior to the appearance of the Supplement (but was it also prior to a famliarity with Commercon's account?), so Diderot would have had to have made enough of an impression on Herder that the latter would have been interested, in principle, in whatever Diderot produced since their meeting—or perhaps Diderot later gave him one of the copies of the Supplement floating around Paris. (There is also, of course, the influence of J. Forster's work, as noted above, but it paid relatively little attention to the matters of sexual behavior that were so prominent in the French accounts.) Just before Herder's reference to Tahiti, where he notes that a woman "not only refuses nothing for a nail, an ornament, a feather, but even her husband was ready to barter his wife for any trifle he wished to possess" (Manuel 1968: 62), he gives his reason for discussing the matter. He notes that "the manner in

70 Pacific Romanticism which women are treated must be the first critical point of distinction in the history of our species" (Manuel 1968: 62). In other words, human depravity (and here one must keep in mind Herder's Protestant theological predilections, as well as his "personal rebellion against 'Gallomania' [Stocking 1987: 21], and that he "was very hostile to the French culture of his day" [Wilson 1972: 573] in a way that is reminiscent of Prichard) is measured along a continuum marked by signposts such as monogamy, harems, and male tyranny (Manuel 1968: 63-64). So, Herder thinks that the Tahitian men ought to have treated their women better, and he has an ideal in mind (and here one must keep in mind Herder's German Volk ideology): The ancient German, in his wild forests, understood the worth of the female sex, and enjoyed in them the noblest qualities of man, fidelity, prudence, courage, and chastity. . . . He and his wife grew, like their oaks, slowly, unexhausted, and strong: the stimulus of seduction his country did not supply; and both the general condition and necessity included each sex to virtue. (Manuel 1968: 64) Herder's condescension toward the Tahitians' behavior with European mariners has to be seen in the context of his climatic determinism and his belief in the superiority of the German Volk. In other words, the Tahitians can't really help themselves: they live on a tropical island and they're not German. The fact that Tahiti came to Herder via (at least) the French does not put them in a particularly positive light as far as he was concerned. It is not clear whether Herder disapproved of the French because of Tahiti, or that he disapproved of Tahiti because of the French. That he knew of the Tahiti of the French seems, however, indisputable. Herder, in rejecting his teacher Kant, preferred Bacon, in a way that one can speak of a "line from Bacon through Diderot to Herder" (Zammito 2002: 321). While this is an epistemological predilection rather more than anything else, Herder's highest regard for Diderot cannot be doubted when Herder refers to Diderot as "the greatest philosopher in France" (Wisbert 1985: 956; cited in Zammito 2002: 330) in 1769. And while Herder does not refer much to post1770 works by Diderot, he does not recant his praise for him. It seems reasonable, then, to imagine that Herder knew of the Supplement, and probably was not quite sure of what to do with it and its implications. Corroborating this inference is Zammito's claim that the German anthropological tradition that was grounded in the work of Herder eventually became more influenced by British than French (specifically anthropological or ethnological) thinkers by the second half of the eighteenth century (2002: 237). There is no evidence that this connection between Diderot and Herder was particularly meaningful to Boas, but he almost certainly knew from his reading of Herder that sexual mores in the South Pacific were beyond the pale of those of European society. Put into nineteenth-century context, the competing paradigms for the emerging field of ethnology were climatic/geographical determinism (more popular earlier in the century) and evolutionary schemes such as those of Morgan and Tylor (see below). The Tahitians served as evidence for proponents of each model, and by the end of the nineteenth century, Boas's anti-

Anthropology 71 evolutionism—as manifested in historical particularism—was a much better fit with Herder's (and Forster's) climatic determinism. That attention to local conditions, along with the romanticism of German idealism and its links to what we have come to know as cultural relativism, are part of what Herder brought to Boas (cf. Smith 1995: 104). Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) Virchow grew up in rural Pomerania. He developed radical political views, and acted on them, participating in riots and barricade fighting in Berlin in 1848. By that time, he had already established some renown as a physician and translated that renown into a platform from which to battle anti-Semitism and to keep democratic pressure on the autocratic Hohenzollerns. But he had other interests, including accompanying Schliemann in his excavations of Troy and writing a monograph on the Veddahs of what is now Sri Lanka. As a polymath with passionate political interests, it is no surprise that he attracted the devotion of a twenty-tliree-year-old geography student interested in anthropometry. Virchow had a no-nonsense severity about him that, interestingly, Boas's students also recall of Boas (e.g., Mead 1959: 30-31). But Boas was not put off by him and he "felt close personally, as well as intellectually, to Virchow" (Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959: 23-24). Kluckhohn and Prufer view Virchow as representative of a kind of scholar interested in "abstractive" approaches, the goal of which was "generalizations," and who were "'isolative,' less concerned with phenomena in their totality" (1959: 11). Others besides Virchow who are referred to in this grouping are Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) and, less categorically, psychologists Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) and Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920). Central to this approach is the idea that generalizations actually exist in the world, a notion articulated nicely by Boas: "Certain laws exist which govern the growth of culture, and it is our endeavor to discover these laws" (1896: 5). In this view, facts plus inference produced laws. Research provided the first requirement, and a keen mind the second. The result was simply a matter of seeing what processes were really "out there." Over thirty years later, in the Foreword to Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa (1961), Boas writes very much along the same lines, "Through a comparative study of. . . data and through information that tells us of their growth and development, we endeavour to reconstruct, as well as may be, the history of each particular culture" (Boas 1961: nno). This was also the approach of Virchow, who noted that "anthropology studies the whence and the whither of humanity" (Virchow 1880: 3; cited in Ackerknecht 1953: 208). Indeed, Virchow was dedicated to an empirical approach to the study of humanity, believing that such a study could be the basis for ethical action (Dowd 1999: 18-25). By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Virchow's ideas had been attacked by the romanticists (such as Dilthey) who argued that an approach such as Virchow's "destroyed intellectual creativity" (Dowd 1999: 23). It is an indication of the breadth of Boas's interests that one can see in his work both romanticist as well as empirical emphases. This holis-

72 Pacific Romanticism tic approach to the study of humanity was something that Boas brought with him as he crossed the Atlantic: "A historical orientation dominated in Virchow's time, at least in Germany, in all three branches of antliropology—cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, and archaeology—and gave antliropology a relatively greater spiritual unity than it has today" (Ackerknecht 1953: 208). It is difficult to overstate Virchow's influence upon Boas, given claims such as "Rudolf Virchow . . . according to Kroeber, influenced him [Boas] more than any other scientist" (Kardiner and Preble 1961: 145); and "It seems evident that one of the many things that made Virchow as much of an 'idol' as Boas ever permitted himself was Virchow's stalwart opposition to all forms of antiSemitism" (Kluckhohn and Prufer 1959: 10). If it is so that "[Boas] swings back and forth between 'embracive' and 'isolative' tendencies" (Kluckhohn and Pmfer 1959: 20), then it is easy to see that what Boas picked up from Virchow was a balanced, evenhanded view of humanity and the human condition. Given that anthropology has traditionally viewed itself as a Janus-faced hybrid of the humanities and social sciences, this would certainly be an example of the "enduring epistemological antinomies that characterize anthropological inquiry generally" (Stocking 1974: 1). The Boasian tradition of anthropology being the most humanistic of sciences, and simultaneously the most scientific of the humanities, almost certainly has its basis in the influence of Virchow. Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) Bastian was a very prominent figure in nineteenth-century German antliropology. He founded the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory and the journal Zeitschrift fur Ethnologic He also founded Berlin's Museum of Ethnology in 1886. His theoretical perspective was a composite of the "psychic unity of mankind," and a geographic determinism. Kluckhohn and Prufer view Bastian as representative of a kind of scholar interested in "embracive" approaches, which concerned themselves with a "holistic" "particularism" in which in-depth analysis of a system or entity was the goal, eschewing generalizations (1959: 11). Others besides Bastian who are referred to in this grouping are Alexander Humboldt (1769-1859), Karl Ritter (1779-1859), and Theobald Fischer (1846-1910). Bastian's writings (in his native German) have been described as "confused, obscure, ornate, bombastic, and untranslatable" (Malefijt 1974: 135). Barnard says Bastian's style is "absurdly metaphorical" (2000: 49). Lowie offers an example translated into English: "He [an individual] would perish without society, without that unifying community of spirits that, swelled by the billowing thoughts of the past, roars along in the current of history and in foaming spray surges around the barriers" ([Bastian 1881: 135] Lowie 1937: 33). But Lowie sees the glass as half full, noting Bastian's stylistic "double life" (1937: 35), and arguing that Bastian, in other, clearer prose, presaged many later anthropological ideas, including a demand for empirical criteria rather than assumptions and guesswork when it came to social evolutionary claims that were later championed by Boas.

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The single most identifiable contribution of Bastian to Boas, however, is the particularism that dominated Boas's belief in the raison d'etre of anthropology: "[N]ot so much a field for a knowledge of others, but a means of selfknowledge, a self-knowledge that should instill humility. In examining the shackles of tradition in other cultures, ethnology could serve to break the shackles of one's own" (Cole 1999: 132). Edward Tylor (1832-1917) Tylor was born in London of reasonably well-to-do Quaker parents. He worked in the family business as a young man, but developed health problems, the cure for which was seen to be travel out of England. Tylor spent almost a year traveling in the United States, and in the spring of 1856 was in Cuba. Here his Quaker affiliations provided the chance opportunity that so often gives direction to a man's life. While on a Havana bus he overheard a passenger use the pronoun "thou," which at that time identified the speaker as a Quaker. Tylor approached the stranger and introduced himself as a fellow Quaker. The man happened to be Henry Christy, a prosperous businessman, who had become an archaeologist and ethnologist of considerable reputation. . . . The two men took an immediate liking to each other, and Christy persuaded Tylor to accompany him on an archaeological expedition to Mexico. (Kardiner and Preble 1961: 57) This created within Tylor an interest in anthropology that never wavered, and he became one of the mainstays of British anthropology in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tylor was more of a "lumper" than a "splitter," and created an evolutionary typology of development. Tylor notes, for example, that "few would dispute that the following races are arranged rightly in order of culture:— Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian" (1958: I, 27), primarily based on "the absence or presence, high or low development, of the industrial arts, especially metal-working, manufacture of implements and vessels, agriculture, architecture, & c , the extent of scientific knowledge, the definiteness of moral principles, the condition of religious belief and ceremony, the degree of social and political organization, and so forth" (1958: 26-27). After mentioning the "wild-beast-like cunning of Papuans," the Esquimaux propensity to be "foul and brutal," the "malignant ferocity" of the Caribs, and the "cruel and treacherous malignity" of North American Indians (Tylor 1958:1, 30-31), Tylor moves to his point that The ideal savage of the eighteenth century may be held up as a living reproof to vicious and frivolous London; but in sober fact, a Londoner who should attempt to lead the atrocious life which the real savage may lead with impunity and even respect, would be a criminal only allowed to follow his savage models during his short intervals out of gaol. Savage moral standards are real enough, but they are far looser and weaker than ours. We may, I think, apply the often-repeated comparison of savages to children as fairly to their moral as to their intellectual condition. The better savage social life seems in but unstable equilibrium, liable to be easily upset by a touch of distress, temptation, or violence, and then it becomes the worse savage life, which we know by so many dismal

74 Pacific Romanticism examples. Altogether, it may be admitted that some rude tribes lead a life to be envied by some barbarous races, and even by the outcasts of higher nations. But that any known savage tribe would not be improved by judicious civilization, is a proposition which no moralist would dare to make; while the general tenour of the evidence goes far to justify the view that on the whole the civilized man is not only wider and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier. (Tylor 1958: 1, 31) This paragraph comes shortly after placing Tahiti toward the low end of cultural development. Is Tahiti on his mind as he writes of the "savage life" here? More to the point, are the accounts of Tahiti from Commercon and/or Bougainville (and filtered through Diderot?) what Tylor has in mind when he refers to "moral standards" that are "far looser and weaker than ours"? Finally, was Tylor ignorant of, or was he simply ignoring, Commercon and others with the claim that "any known savage tribe would not be improved by judicious civilization"? These questions are probably unanswerable, since specific references to Tahiti are absent for Tylor's next few hundred pages. Given the ethnographic detail of Primitive Culture, it is difficult to imagine that Tylor was utterly unaware of Bougainville and Commercon, so their invisibility suggests something of an intellectual black hole: the fact that nothing is seen indicates that something is there, but what? My answer to this is that his Quaker position allowed—and, indeed, may have even obliged—him to dismiss the romanticized Tahiti of Commercon, Bougainville, Diderot and, to a lesser degree, others such as Forster, who sailed with Cook. It is not a coincidence that almost every reference to Tahiti in Primitive Culture comes from the work of William Ellis, of the London Missionary Society, who lived on Tahiti from 1816 to 1822—and, conspicuously, none come from a French source. In over 900 pages of Primitive Culture, Tylor's references to Tahiti itself are rare and are from Cook (1958: II, 64 fnl), Forster (1958: II, 261 fnl; 432 fnl), and Ellis (1958: II, 176 fnl; 214 fn2; 220 fnl; 248 fn5; 261 fnl; 335 fn4; 354 fnl; 392 fn3; 432 fnl). 3 If we follow Lowie in seeing Tylor as influential on Boas, we must see that influence in Boas's high regard for Tylor's concern for ethnographic detail, rather than his moralizing, including what may have been his moralizing about Tahiti. Recap: Pacific Romanticism in Anthropology So, Herder and Tylor mention Tahiti, but only in passing, really, and without much detail. Their purpose is to use Tahiti as a less developed place in their particular overall scheme of things. Virchow and Bastian seem to provide a somewhat less pejorative way of seeing Tahitians—although Tahitians are not mentioned specifically—by providing explanations for human behavior that do not devolve to a moral or cultural backwardness. There is clearly a tension here; and while it is tempting to hint that this tension is part of the reason for Boas's silence about Tahiti, I will stop short of making the suggestion. It may be enough to observe that accounts of Tahiti and other Pacific sites undermined the 3. The references here are to Cook 1961, Forster 1778, and Ellis 1829.

Anthropology 75 integrity of the concept of a universal human nature—a concept for which Boas and many others had little use (Sloan 1995: 114). It is also enough to know that the Pacific has long been the area of the world that is most likely to be seen as the locus of "primitive man" (Cole 1999: 815-816). What we do know is that the confluence of a number of factors contributed to a research interest in the South Pacific that is grounded in the Boasian tradition (however that may be defined), and which took over where Bougainville, Commercon, and Diderot left off: providing European (Enlightenment ox fin de siecle Victorian, take your pick) society with images of islanders treating sex and sexuality with a nonchalance that could only be envied by those who were not from there. I will resume the discussion of Pacific romanticism in anthropology in the concluding chapter. My aim in this chapter and the one before it has been to show how powerful the images of Tahiti were for Europeans—especially those on the Continent—in the years after 1768. Those images served certain needs and were salient for different reasons. In anthropology, an empirical basis for moral relativism could be seen by those who needed, for their own reasons, to have one; a basis that included images of Tahitian sexuality, whether explicitly or not. But what if those images were mistaken? What if Tahitian women offered to the French in 1768 were not, to use Commercon's word, "hospitality," but something else? What if it was not a lighthearted and easygoing devil-maycare nonchalance about sex, but a calculated survival stratagem? Did Commercon, Diderot, and others get it utterly wrong? And did their wrongness, while welcome in some quarters, have a long-lasting impact on European thinking, especially with regard to non-Europeans? And finally, are the consequences of that wrongness still with us today? My answers to those last three questions are Yes, Yes, and Yes, as I show in the remainder of the book.

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6 The British The stir in France and the rest of Europe caused by Bougainville's account of his "discovery" of Tahiti overlooked the fact that Captain Samuel Wallis, aboard the H.M.S. Dolphin, had landed off the northern tip of Tahiti as Bougainville was still off the east coast of South America. This chapter chronicles the phenomenon of British-Tahitian "first contact," with special attention given to the way the British were received, which is remarkably at odds with—and profoundly shaped the nature of—the reception given to Bougainville less than a year later. WALLIS AND THE DOLPHIN Samuel Wallis in the H.M.S. Dolphin, and Philip Carteret in the Swallow, departed England in August of 1766, in search of Terra Australis. Separated by a storm going through the Strait of Magellan, Carteret and Wallis ended up on different trajectories across the Pacific. Carteret sailed to Pitcairn Island, the Solomons chain, New Britain, and New Ireland. Wallis's voyage took him to Uvea, Guam, and Tahiti. 19-24 June 1767 On 19 June 1767, the Dolphin, under the command of the thirty-nine-yearold Wallis, sighted Tahiti. The ship made for Matavai Bay on the north coast of Tahiti Nui, the largest island of the Windward Group, that, together with the Leeward Group, are known as the Society Islands. As the ship anchored at the well-protected bay (a bay upon which the town of Papeete later emerged), canoes from the island paddled out to the large vessel. Some initial reluctance on

78 Pacific Romanticism the part of both British and Tahitians soon evaporated and a few islanders climbed aboard the Dolphin. Curiosity was the order of the day on both sides, but we can surmise that it was greater on the part of the Tahitians; the British sailors had, after all, expected to see unfamiliar kinds of people. The ship's master aboard the Dolphin, George Robertson, records the minutes after Tahitians came aboard: Some went [back] to their canoes, but the rest began to pull and haul at the iron stanchions and Iron1 ring-balls in order to carry them off, and seemed greatly surprised that they could not Break them. We showed them some nails, which they appeared very fond of; in short they were very fond of everything which they saw made of Iron, and began to be unwilling to go out of the ship without some iron-work. At this time there was a great number of their canoes alongside, and they began to be a Little surley. This made us fire a nine-pound shot over their heads in order to frighten them in their Boats. (Warner 1955: 21-22) Hawkesworth's rendition of Wallis's record is similar: One of the midshipmen happened to come where [the Tahitians] were standing, with a new laced hat upon his head, and began to talk to one of them by signs: while he was thus engaged, another of them came behind him, and suddenly snatching off the hat, leaped over the taffarel in the the sea, and swam away with it. (Hawkesworth 1773: 434-435) The account of this initial encounter between Europeans and Tahitians represents a harbinger of the nature of the relationship between the two groups. We see, for example, the Tahitian fascination with—and strong wish to acquire— iron, the British reluctance to part with iron, and the willingness to use guns to emphasize and reinforce that reluctance. It is also worthwhile to attend to the British officer's appraisal of the Tahitian mindset, viz., "surley." Whether accurately or not, Robertson imagined that the Tahitians' inability to acquire iron carried with it the potential for violence. In any event, the discharge of the cannon was enough to startle and frighten the Tahitians into abandoning their attempts to get iron, and they returned to shore. One of the reasons for the Dolphin's remaining at Matavai Bay was that many of its crew suffered from scurvy. In addition, the ship was low on supplies, especially fresh water. Perhaps it would have been better to keep sailing, but who knew when they would sight land again? In the end, "[t]hey really had no choice. Their bruised bodies, their suppurating gums, their swollen faces told them that. They had to stop their own rot with fresh food and get water in quantity before they went on. Matavai was their saving" (Dening 2000: 116). Given these circumstances, on the following day, 20 June, a cutter under the command of George Gore, the master's mate of the Dolphin, was sent ashore to record soundings in order to see how close the ship could come to shore. Such a foray was the conventional method when seeking anchorage at an unfamiliar I. As in previous chapters, i have, in the interest of retaining something of the ambience of the accounts that I quote, not made corrections of spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or grammar.

The British 79 site. Gore's experience was uneventful until he tried to return to the Dolphin. At that time, a handful of canoes attempted to intercept the boat. Hawkesworth gives this account from Wallis2: The boats were sent to found [an anchorage], and while they were thus employed, 1 observed a great number of canoes gather round them. I suspected that the Indians had a design to attck them, and as I was very desirous to prevent mischief, I made the signal for the boats to come aboard, and at the same time, to intimidate the Indians, I fired a ninepounder over their heads. As soon as the cutter began to stand towards the ship, the Indians in their canoes, though they had been startled by the thunder of our nine pounder, endeavoured to cut her off. The boat, however, sailing faster than the canoes could paddle, soon got clear of those that were about her; but some others, that were full of men, way-laid her in her course, and threw several stones into her, which wounded some of the people. Upon this, the officer on board fired a musquet, loaded with buck-shot, at the man who threw the first stone, and wounded him in the shoulder. (Hawkesworth 1773: 435-436) Robertson's version is that Gore got soon clear of the most of them, but a few which was full of men way-laid the cutter and threw some stones, which hurt some of the cutter's hands. Mr. Gore then seeing their intention, fired at the Man he saw throw the first stone and wounded him in the Right shoulder, which prevented him from throwing any more stones. (Warner 1955: 23) Robertson and the rest aboard the Dolphin were in somewhat of a quandary. A number of men were ill, including Captain Wallis and other officers. Wallis's condition especially was not improving. Water and food were in short supply. Rest, food, and water awaited them ashore, but these islanders seemed to have become more and more "surly": after their thwarted efforts3 to get iron on one day, they had attacked a ship's boat on the next. There can be little doubt that there was British anxiety about the escalating nature of Tahitian violence—and of their own needs for supplies. Robertson noted that the rest of the 20th and also the morning of the 21st were spent in considering whether to try to make some efforts to get what they wanted from Tahiti or to quit Matavai Bay and look elsewhere for rest, food, and water (Warner 1955: 27). Early in the twentieth century, renowned writer Victor Segalen tried to represent the Tahitian perspective of the event: This great canoe with neither outrigger nor oarsmen, whose chief was called Vari [i.e., Wallis] looked heavy and shaggy. The men from Matavai thought a floating island had some in. . . . As the shore people were paddling towards the high canoe to cast their leaves of peace, a noise of thunder was heard: a man fell on the reef. 2. This event is recorded as occurring on the following day by Robertson. Given that Wallis was quite ill at the time, I give Robertson's dates the benefit of the doubt. 3. Not all Tahitian efforts to get iron were in vain. Warner notes an entry under 20 June in the journal of the ship's carpenter, one Mr. Douglas, which reads, "An Indian snatched a cleat that had a nail in it and jumped overboard and swam off (1955: 25n).

80 Pacific Romanticism No stone had touched him, nor had any lance pierced his body. When people supported his back, he sagged like a corpse. (Segalen 1995 [1907]: 60)4 It was decided to stay and make another attempt to land, but the two boats sent out on 21 June to look for a close anchorage brought a crowd of Tahitians to the beach who "waved us off and seemed Greatly emaged when we stood in for the shore" (Warner 1955:28). It is not known what became of the man shot by Robertson's assistant Gore on the 20th, but the Tahitian response on the 21st is reasonable: sending canoes to intercept the smaller, undermanned boats was dangerous; standing on the beach would keep one from being shot. This reluctance to chase the Dolphin's boats constitutes a second shift in Tahitian strategy: when initial efforts to leave the Dolphin with iron were rebuffed by the British, an attack was made on the cutter. When that strategy failed, hostility was expressed verbally from the beach. To the occupants of the two boats, not having been shot at nor having to shoot represents a small measure of cessation of hostilities. It seems, in light of later events that day, that the nonviolent encounter of the two boats may have encouraged yet another Tahitian stratagem:5 trade. To this end, a number of Tahitian canoes paddled out to the Dolphin loaded with coconuts, fruit, and pigs. Robertson notes that all the country people behaved very insolently, none of them would trust any of our men with any of their things until they got nails or toys from them; then several of them would push off and keep all: and others carried their insolence so high that they struck several of our men. This our seamen was very unwilling to put up with, but the Captain having given strict orders, that no man should hurt or molest them, until we tried our tempers, this made our men put up with their ill behaviour for a short time. (Warner 1955:28-29) That the Tahitians were quite angry seems clear from this incident, and their efforts at "trade" must have seemed intended to provoke rather than an effort at genuine rapprochement. And the British were not without their own anger; a greater level of violence was likely averted equally by the word of the Captain and the Tahitian fear of firearms. The Tahitian efforts at "trade" seem, in light of what followed later that day, to have been a probe of some sort—an effort to discover just how willing the British were to fight, as well as to scout out the ship. Wallis was reported by Robertson to have been still quite ill, and desperate for some solution to the current problem. As a result, he ordered Robertson to find water (Warner 1955: 30). After all, a close anchorage for the Dolphin was 4. Segalen's work is represented as an "ethnographic novel" by the translator (1995: 7). There is evidence that Segalen, who did spend time on Tahiti interviewing people, was at least as interested in the integrity of his ethnographic depiction as he was in selling books (1995: 8-11). 5. There is no way to know whether, or to what degree, some Tahitians would have willingly relinquished any attempts to get iron if they could only be rid of the interlopers. Whatever stratagems were employed by the Tahitians probably had two goals: the acquisition of iron and minimal military losses.

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not required for fresh water to have been brought aboard. Robertson attempted to comply with the order, and boarded a cutter with some empty water barrels. He also took armed men with him along with his own pistol. His cutter was intercepted by Tahitians in canoes who rammed and attempted to board Robertson's vessel. He eventually gave up and returned to the Dolphin, imagining (probably rightly) that the Tahitians seemed emboldened by the fact that they had kept him from landing. This boldness was most likely enhanced by the fact that a musket had been fired over their heads: the Tahitians had survived a discharged gun with no losses (Warner 1955: 30). Perhaps Robertson was becoming more frustrated with Wallis's orders to use extreme restraint; at any rate, his account of this encounter includes something of his views about using firepower against the islanders: Had there been a nine-pound shot fired over their heads, perhaps it may have frightened them from hurting us. But this not being done, 1 thought myself under a necessity of using violent means, 1 therefore ordered the Serjeant and one of the Marines, to wound the two most resolute like fellows, that was in the boat which first Boarded us. This order was Complied with, and the one was killed which the serjeant fired at, and the other was wounded in the thigh, and both fell over-board. (Warner 1955: 30-31) Thus ended the 21st of June. After more than fifty hours at Matavai Bay, the Dolphin had shot three Tahitians, killing (as we later discover) two of them. The British had had some men hurt by hurled stones and had been shoved during that day's "trading" encounter. It seems safe to infer that tempers were running hot on both sides. The British seemed no closer to water, although they did gain some foodstuffs during the "trading." The Tahitians, for their part, had been victimized by the guns, but there was a lot more iron to be had. Each side wanted something that the other was unwilling, albeit certainly not unable, to give. And unless the Dolphin sailed away, or something changed, there seemed no resolution to the impasse. The 22nd of June brought a much more pleasant trading experience than the previous day. There were, however, some ominous undercurrents, as noted by Robertson: The most of the natives traded very honestly—but a few of them was very great Rogues, and frequently attempted to defraud our men, by going off with the nail or toys without paying for them; but pointing a musket or even a spy-Glass at them, they would return the nails etc. or give Value for them. They now understood the use of Musketry and made signs that we had killed two of their partners. (Warner 1955: 32) The British at this point had something of an advantage: the Tahitian fear of guns could be exploited during onboard trade. Fresh fruit and meat was now available. But a close anchorage for the Dolphin, fresh water, and some time off the ship for the sick, including, still, Captain Wallis as well as First Lieutenant

82 Pacific Romanticism William Clarke, yet eluded the British.6 Nevertheless, one thing had been established by this point: the British could, by use of guns, force the Tahitians to accede to their wishes. For the men aboard the Dolphin, the equation was brutally simple: British wishes plus British firepower should equal Tahitian acquiescence. For their part, the Tahitians had also learned something. Their model of the British mind must have seemed awfully familiar: use military might to get what you want. The British must have looked—in terms of their behavior—more and more like just another competitor in the Society Islands politico-military system. To be sure, the Europeans were quite beyond the pale in terms of their weaponry, but their use of that weaponry was quite understandable and rational. (I will return to the subject of Tahitian rationality in the final chapter.) The next day, there was yet another change. Tahitian canoes that approached the ship on the morning of 23 June carried some young women along with the usual contingent of men. Robertson records that the canoes brought a good many fine young Girls down of different colours. Some were a light copper color others a mulatto and some almost if not altogether White. This new sight Attracted our men's fancy a good deal, and the natives observed it, and made the Young Girls play a great many droll wanton tricks. (Warner 1955: 32) The Tahitians made a dual discovery here. The first is that the display of options of skin color seems to matter little to the British. Although perhaps important to the Tahitians, the British are not reported to show (or were perhaps not in a position to show) any sort of preference:7 what they clearly enjoyed was the attractiveness of the women. The second Tahitian discovery was that the interest shown by the crew of the Dolphin was profound; this is the reason that the women are made to perform "many droll wanton tricks." 8 The Tahitians had 6. Dening notes that the British also had some concern about their vulnerability to firebrands (2000: 118). 7. The British do seem to notice, since their reports of the women often include descriptions of skin color. There are, however, no indications in journals that skin color is considered when sexual liaisons become the order of the day. Wheeler notes that skin color became a salient feature of social marking in the 1750s and 1760s (2000: 9), so the references to skin color may largely be simply a sign of the times. 8. It may be unwise to speculate overly much here on just what behaviors Robertson is referring to at this point. That the women were making some gestures with copulatory suggestions seems almost certain, but precisely what these initial gestures might have been cannot be known, although later, Robertson reports that "girls make signals which was this, she heald up her right hand and first finger of the right hand streight, then laid hould of her right wrist with the left hand, and heald the Right hand and first finger up streight and smiled then crooked all her fingers and kept playing with them and Laughed very hearty" (Carrington 1948: 184, cited in Porter 1990: 125). An excerpt from the journal of Able Seaman Francis Wilkinson written about a similar incident on the following day offers little help here: "[T]he women were Directed by the Men to stand in the Prow of their Canoes and Expose their Bodies Naked to our view." (Warner 1955: 44). That Seaman Wilkinson's account does not include the

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thus shifted to yet another stratagem for obtaining iron: distraction with sex. This approach promised to be quite successful. The remainder of the 23rd of June (now four days after the initial contact) was much less enjoyable for Robertson. With Captain Wallis still quite ill, and in need of fresh water and time ashore, First Lieutenant Clarke ordered Robertson to find a close anchorage in spite of the fact that they had not had a chance to make a proper series of soundings at Matavai Bay. The results were predictable: the Dolphin ran aground upon a reef and was stuck fast. Hawkesworth provides this record: Our condition was now very alarming, the ship continued beating against the rock with great force, and we were surrounded by many hundred canoes, full of men: they did not, however, attempt to come on board us, but seemed to wait in expectation of our shipwreck. In the anxiety and terror of such a situation we continued near an hour, without being able to do any thing for our deliverance, except staving some water casks in the fore-hold, when a breeze happily springing up for the shore, the ship's head swung off [thereby freeing her]. (Hawkesworth 1773: 441) Roberson notes that upon seeing the turmoil of the Dolphin, several Tahitian canoes made for the ship, only to be repelled when the crew pointed muskets at them. There is no way to know with certainty whether the Tahitians were swarming to the Dolphin to help her or to overpower her in her moments of vulnerability; clearly, the British were taking no chances. Three muskets were actually fired over the heads of the canoes, and the ship's large guns were also fired in a successful effort to scare off the Tahitians (Warner 1955: 38-39). After the Dolphin was freed, she was able to find an anchorage near the shore at Matavai Bay, four days after arriving. This proximity brought the British nearer to their goals of food, water, and rest, but this new state of affairs was anything but pleasing to the Tahitians. That the British were not simply going to go away could not have been made more clear by their anchoring so close. So, on 24 June, the fifth day, the Tahitians made their move. The day began with an abundance of trade—mostly nails and toys in exchange for pigs and fruit. Robertson notes that, as the morning wore on, there was upwards of five hundred canoes round the ship, and at a Moderate Computation there was near four thousand men. The most of the trading canoes which lay round the ship, and dealt with our people, had a fair young Girl in Each Canoe, who played a great many droll wanton tricks, which drew all our people upon the Gunwales to see them. When they seemed to be most merry and friendly some of our people observed great numbers of stones in every canoe. (Warner 1955: 40) A close look at the Tahitian activity on the morning of the 24th shows that it was a combination of the courteous (or at least without noteworthy incident) trade like that of the 22nd and the display of women from the previous day, the hand/arm gesture could be due either to its absence, his reticence in reporting it, or his rather austere, detail-omitting mode of writing.

84 Pacific Romanticism 23rd, 9 but on a much larger scale: thousands of men, each of whom is in a canoe armed with stones, are on or around the ship, and the ship's crew is distracted by the display of the Tahitian young women. At some point during the midst of this chaos, a large canoe some distance off gave some sort of signal, and "[t]he very instant that this signal was made all trade broke up, and in a few seconds of time all our Decks was full of Great and small stones, and several of our men cut and Bruised" (Warner 1955: 41). The Dolphin responded to this volley of what must have been thousands of stones by firing grapeshot into clusters of canoes, "which struck such terror amongst the poor unhappy crowd that it would require the pen of Milton to Describe, therefore too much for mine" (Warner 1955: 41). A couple of members of the crew then identified the large distant canoe 10 as having been the one that gave the signal for the attack11 to begin. It was shelled "which drove her in two and I believe few that was in her Escaped with life" (Warner 1955: 42). And again, we let [other canoes] come within about three or four hundred Yards of the ship, then fired a three-pounder Loaded with seventy Musket Balls amongst the thickest of them; this made them all sheer off, not without a considerable Loss, and to add the more to the terror they were in we fired two round shot amongst them. (Warner 1955: 42-43) Hawkesworth offers this version of Wallis's perspective: A great number of the canoes that had been dispersed, soon drew together again, and lay some time on their paddles, looking at the ship from the distance of about a quarter of a mile, and then suddenly hoisting white streamers, pulled towards the ship's stern, and began again to throw stones, with great force and dexterity, by the help of things, from a considerable distance: each of these stones weighed about two pounds, and many of them wounded the people on board, who would have suffered much more, if an awning had not been spread over the whole deck to keep out the sun, and the hammocks placed in the nettings, At the same time several canoes, well manned, were making toward the ship's bow, having probably taken notice that no shot had been fired from this part, i therefore ordered some guns forward, to be well pointed and fired at these canoes; at the same time running out two guns abast [sic], and pointing them well at the canoes that were making the attack. Among the canoes that were coming toward the bow, there was one which appeared to have some Chief on board, as it was by signals made from her that the others had been called together; it happened that a shot, fired from the guns forward, hit this canoe so full as to cut it asunder. As soon as this was observed by the rest, they dispersed 9. Seaman Wilkinson adds that, "In this posture they stood for a quarter of an Hour until they Judged our men were wholly exposed on the Gangways and Booms and Forecastle" (Warner 1955: 44). 10. It seems quite reasonable to assume that this large canoe was Rainbow, and held a laputaputea, an abode of 'Oro (see Chapter 2), and that aro tarai, or "battle shapers," were aboard. 11. That the hurling of stones was an attack rather than something else can hardly be doubted. Still, Howarth suggests that "perhaps the Tahitians' stone-throwing was only an expression of bewilderment and fear, and could not possibly have put the ship in danger" (Howarth 1984: 13). See my treatment of this idea below.

The British 85 with such haste that in half an hour there was not a single canoe to be seen. (Hawkesworth 1773:445). Thus ended the battle at Matavai Bay, the Tahitians having been routed, with what must have been extremely heavy casualties. An important question is the matter of just what the Tahitians' intentions were on that late morning. Was the presence of trade and women a subterfuge, part of a master battle plan, or was the whole incident a terrible misunderstanding, with many Tahitian deaths occurring as a result of British failure to read peaceful intentions? I address these questions in detail toward the end of the chapter; as we resume the account of the Dolphin's time at Tahiti, we see a shift in the nature of Tahitian comportment. 25 June-28 July 1767 After their defeat, the Tahitian approach to the British was significantly different. It was significant in that it was a sudden and dramatic shift, from antagonism to acquiescence. The British could not be forced out; now it was a matter of making the best of a bad situation. On the day after the battle, the Tahitians were very circumspect in trade (Warner 1955: 46-47); there was no wish to provoke the British guns. There was even a silver lining: iron was to be had for the right price in pigs and produce. The British were, however, still largely without water. So on the following day, 26 June, a watering party was sent ashore in some small boats. This attracted a large number of Tahitian men in canoes who headed for the boats, "until," as Robertson recorded, "we was obliged to fire a few round and Grapeshot among the thickest of them" (Warner 1955: 52). This was most likely not what the Tahitians expected. The battle was over; their manner of trade the previous day had signaled as much. But Robertson continued the deadly barrage: [T]his soon put them to flight, and the most of them ran their canoes ashore, and ran into the Woods thinking themselves safe there, but we soon convinced them that the woods was not able to protect them from our round and Double-headed shot, as the shot brought down several of the trees, and great numbers of Branches about their Heads. (Warner 1955:53) The boats' crews were able to obtain fresh water and rowed back to the Dolphin. They had gotten what they had been wanting for nearly a week; now all they needed to do was to make sure that they had access to water whenever they wished. To this end, Wallis ordered the ship's carpenters to destroy as many canoes as they were able. This they did, rowing ashore and sawing in half some eighty canoes under an armed guard. One group of Tahitians approached the area in order to see the destruction, but they were fired upon by members of the guard, and then fled to a nearby hill. The hill was then shelled from the Dolphin. Tahitian losses by this time camiot be estimated, but a very large number of people must have been injured or killed in the week since the Dolphin first ar-

86 Pacific Romanticism rived. They could not afford to do anything but try to make the British imagine that they were most welcome to the water and food ashore; mere curiosity could be fatal. By the next day, 27 June, the Tahitians behaved in an extremely fearful manner. When one of the Dolphin's boats approached a small number of beached, but intact, canoes, "they seemed Greatly afraid, and made all the signs of friendliness that they could think o f (Warner 1955: 55). The Tahitians were in a set of circumstances that left a capitulated cordiality as the only way to secure some semblance of safety. And there was always trade: since the battle, trade had been carried on without incident, and iron could be had for the right price. While it may be an overstatement to say the Tahitians were desperate, given the injuries and deaths that they had sustained in the previous week, it may not be inappropriate to suggest that the Tahitians were in a situation that demanded an extreme show of friendliness in order to mitigate against further losses while at the same time enhancing the trade for iron. The display/offer of Tahitian women on the part of Tahitian men to the crew of the Dolphin was consistent with these twin motivations: hostilities were less likely, and iron could be obtained without surrendering too much of the finite supply of pigs and produce. On the 27th (a day that was one of Wallis's worst, such that he spent the entire day in bed [Hawkesworth 1773: 456]), a boat from the Dolphin made for shore under the command of Second Lieutenant Tobias Furneaux to get water. Landing without incident, Furneaux named the island "King George's Land," and claimed it for England.12 As or just after this happened, the men from the cutter noticed some of the women among the crowd on the beach. Robertson reports that the men could not help feasting their Eyes with so agreeable a sight. This was observed by some of the Elderly men, and several of the young Girls was drawn out, some a light copper colour, others a mulatto, and some almost White. The old men made them stand in Rank, and made signs for our people to take which they like best, and as many as liked—and for fear our men had been Ignorant and not known how to use the poor young Girls, the old men made signs how we should behave to the Young women. This all the boat's crew seemed to understand perfectly well. (Warner 1955: 56) That sooner or later there were going to be sexual encounters between the men of the Dolphin and the women of Tahiti was obvious. The ship's gunner, John Gore (who, by the way, returned to Tahiti with Cook in 1769), was put in charge of all interactions between the ship's crew and the islanders. He was the "point man," through which trade took place. The next week was spent with members of the Dolphin's crew moving back and forth between ship and shore at will, for water and food, as well as for free time. It is not known whether any sexual activity had taken place in the week following the 27th of June. Each group had its own set of motivations for engaging in sexual activity, and the 12. Furneaux was later (1772) named Captain of the Adventure, which accompanied Cook aboard the Resolution on the latter's second Pacific voyage. It was Furneaux who brought the Tahitian Omai to England in 1774.

The British

87

only deterrent seems to have been the arrangement of using Gore established by Robertson and other officers aboard the Dolphin. Eventually, however, the gunner was unable—or unwilling—to control and oversee every last interaction between Tahitians and British. Wallis notes that nails were being taken from the ship (Hawkesworth 1773: 450). From Robertson's journal on 5 July: This day some of the Young Girls ventured over to the Liberty men, and our honesthearted tars received them with great cheerfulness, and made them some little presents which gained the hearts of the Young Girls, and made them give our men a signal, which they would have willingly obeyed, had they not been immediately ordered on board. (Warner 1955:69) Eventually, sexual encounters between the British and Tahitians came to the attention of the ships' officers. Robertson's journal entry of 6 July gives an account of what may have been the first such activity: I was told by one of the Young Gentlemen that a new sort of trade took up most of their attention this day, but it might be more properly called the old trade. He says a Dear Irish boy, one of our Marines, was the first that began the trade, for which he got a very severe thrashing from the Liberty men for not beginning in a more decent manner, in Some house, or at the back of some bush or tree. Paddy's Excuse was the fear of losing the Honour of having the first. (Warner 1955: 73) This young man, "Paddy," was not anomalous, as the crews of these vessels are said, perhaps not surprisingly, to have been "neither refined nor prudish" (Masefield 1925: 202). Once precipitated, "the old trade went on merrily," as Robertson records on 7 July (Warner 1955: 73). 13 It is not clear why the officers of the Dolphin gave up in their efforts to prevent sex between their crew and the local women. It seems likely that they assumed that they could not successfully prevent such liaisons. Or, perhaps more to the point, the officers themselves wished to participate. Furneaux, who had been ill when the Dolphin first arrived at Matavai Bay, was himself the recipient of a "peace offering" (Langdon 1959: 11). And what of the Tahitian men? Robertson's journal entry for 9 July notes that, "Our Liberty men and the Natives is now turned so friendly that they walk Arm-in-Arm" (Warner 1955: 76). Friendly may be something of an overinterpretation here. Having been shelled two weeks earlier, these men were probably looking to mollify the interlopers. From the Tahitian perspective, if iron could be gotten via trade, and trade could be enhanced by "turning friendly," then so much the better. In exchange for iron, Tahitians were reciprocating with foodstuffs for a while, and later forced or encouraged or allowed sexual relations on the part of women—pigs and produce were limited, while the sexuality of 13. Two days later, Robertson, concerned about venereal disease, asked the ship's doctor about the health of the crew. The doctor "affirmed upon his Honour that no man on board was affected with any sort of disorder, that they could communicate to the Natives of this beautiful Island" (Warner 1955: 79). It is probable that the doctor may have missed some cases.

88 Pacific Romanticism women was unlimited. This fact, along with most sailors' apparent preference for women over supplies, created the problem that pigs and produce were no longer in much demand as long as sex was available. Robertson relates one conversation with Gore: the price of the old trade, is now fixed at a thirty-penny nail each time, and he told me that the Liberty men dealt so largely in that way—that he was much afraid of losing his trade of Hogs, Pigs, fowls and fruit. (Warner 1955: 78) Still, for the Tahitians, any efforts at appeasement were certain to pay off, not only in iron, but also in safety. As the days went by, those who were ill aboard the Dolphin improved, and relationships with the Tahitians remained, at least on the surface, amicable. Ironically, the Tahitians were able to proceed indirectly with what they had failed to do militarily: the dismemberment of the Dolphin. It seems that many of the ship's crew, in an effort to have sexual relations ashore, were stripping the ship of its iron fixtures: cleats, spikes, and nails. This was reported to Robertson by the ship's carpenter who, on 21 July, came and told me every cleat in the Ship was drawn, and all the Nails carried off. At the same time the Boatswain informed me that most of the hammocknails were drawn and two-thirds of the men obliged to lie on the deck for want of nails to hang their Hammocks. (Warner 1955: 104) The sailors' appetites led to counterfeiting: lead was molded in the form of nails in an attempt to hoodwink the Tahitians (Alexander 1977: 18). Perhaps in response, the cost of copulation began to increase, and the Young Girls . . . now raised their price . . . from a twenty or thirty-penny nail, to a forty-penny, and some was so extravagant as to demand a Seven or nine inch Spike. (Warner 1955: 104) In addition, tempers were flaring aboard the Dolphin. Wallis seems to have had particular trouble with seaman James Proctor, who was punished for "insolence" and "striking an officer" (Hawkesworth 1773: 460) when ordered to restrict himself from the sex-for-nails trade. Robertson reports the events in the galley one evening: At last there was a trial amongst them, and six was condemned for spoiling the old trade by giving large Spike nails, when others had only a Hammock-nail, which three declared was refused, they being much smaller [than] the Spikes. But two cleared themselves by proving that they got double value for the Spikes. (Warner 1955: 105)14 14. The rate of inflation was such that during Cook's second visit to Tahiti in 1773, Johann Forster (one of Cook's officers and the translator into English of Bougainville's account of Tahiti) disputed the existence of the sex-for-nails trade since he consistently saw sailors turned down (Forster 1778: 392). On the other hand, Smith is so struck by the sex-for-iron trade under Cook's watch that he does not even mention the role of the

The British 89 What "double value" might have meant will never be known, but it is clear that the ship and its crew had had some negative effects as a result of being at Matavai Bay. Between the animosity among the crew, the shortage of iron, the improved health of the officers, and the replenishment of supplies, there was little reason for the British to remain at Tahiti, so a week after the galley incident, the Dolphin set sail on 28 July.15 I argued above that the proffering of young Tahitian women to the crew of the Dolphin is best seen not as a Tahitian "welcome" but as an exploitation of the British sexual desires on behalf of getting iron and security. Below, I summarize other reasons for seeing the behavior of the Tahitians as a defensive stratagem. These are important because it is necessary to keep the encounter with Wallis in mind when considering the Tahitian response to Bougainville some eight months later. ANALYSIS It would be a mistake to imagine that ancient Tahitian ideas about sexuality and sex can be known well enough to be able to articulate precisely what the Tahitians had in mind when some young girls were proffered to the crew of the Dolphin on 27 June (Oliver 1974: 350). We can, however, be certain that the understandings about sex and sexuality held by Tahitians were not the same as those held by those on board the Dolphin. And we can infer some things based on more recent investigations of Tahitian sexual behavior. Levy, for example, notes that sexual activity begins in early adolescence (1973: 122).16 There is no reason to imagine that the same was not true over 200 years earlier, which means that the young women who had sexual encounters with the crew of the Dolphin were not sexual novices. Indeed, sex for trade was not an uncommon Tahitian practice (Oliver 1974: 354-355). What Levy calls "the overtness of sexual behavior in various aspects of the life of Tahiti (1973: 126) and a "craftlike emphasis on sex (1973: 500) together suggest that for the Tahitians encountered by Wallis and his men, sex was a rather ordinary, albeit pleasurable, component of human experience. Quite peculiarly from the perspective of those aboard the Dolphin, Tahitian sexual behavior seems to have been present in other aspects of life such as economics and politics. There was, then, if not a crew of the Dolphin, noting that "the market in sex . . . was rapidly established in the Pacific as a result of Cook's voyages [and] made it possible for the people of the Pacific to move from the Stone into the Iron Age" (Smith 1992: 41). Smith does, however, recognize that "Cook's friendly relationships with the Tahitians depended in no small measure upon Wallis's brutal use of force" (1992: 94). 15. Although it bears little on the Bougainville and Commercon and, later, Diderot renditions of Tahiti, I should mention that on 11 July, Wallis encountered the noblewoman Purea ("Queen Oborea") about whom much was made by both Hawkesworth (1773: 461ff.) as well as readers of his account in England (Smith 1985: 46-49, 116117). 16. Oliver suggests that before European contact, sexual activity began for Tahitian children around the age of seven or eight (1974: 353-354).

90 Pacific Romanticism sexual "welcome" offered by the Tahitians to the British, certainly the unfamiliar, from the British viewpoint, use of sex for other functions, such as trade 17 and appeasement. Oliver suggests that Tahitian interactions with social others fell into one of three categories: If one wished to emphasize this way of looking at social relationships one might separate those of the Maohis into three major categories: one containing those deriving from descent, a second made up of those established by mutual contract, and a third containing those imposed by force of one sort or another. A reexamination of the data might turn up some other features shared distinctively by the kinds of relationships in each of these categories, and some probing into Maohi history might uncover, say, that contractual relationships increased relative to numerical size of population, and so forth. (Oliver 1974: 1115; italics in original) Let us consider each of these three possibilities. It could be the case that the Tahitians perceived Wallis and his compatriots as having a descent-based connection with them. As we will see shortly, Dening argues that the British may have been perceived as supernatural entities. For the Tahitians of 1767, there is a close connection between descent-based relationships, and the supernatural domain via the groups that Oliver calls "kin-congregations" centered on the marae, those loci of (what we would call) religious activities (1974: 622-632). A second, and not necessarily exclusive, possibility is that the Tahitians saw the British as people with whom exchange relationships might be entered into. Affinal relationships were grounded in significant exchanges (Oliver 1974: 806807), and although there is no report of the term tayo being used toward the British, it is quite possible that the concept was there (perhaps the term was as well, but it went unrecorded). As I noted in Chapter 3, tayo was probably a term used to connote brother/friend and carried with it an extension of the speaker's rights—including sexual—to the hearer. The third (and again, not necessarily exclusive of the other two) possible way to understand the Tahitian response to the Dolphin is to see it in terms of force. This approach sees Tahitian behavior as efforts to exert control for their own purposes over the British. Let us look at each of these in a bit more detail. Descent. It seems quite easy to dismiss the idea that the Tahitians did not view the British as a set of long-lost consanguines. A more complex view of the descent possibility comes from Dening, who claims that the presence of the women in the canoes indicates a religious, rather than military, event. He believes that "what the Tahitians saw on the Dolphin were Tahitian gods, divine in the Tahitian way" (2000: 119). He buttresses his claim by noting that since traditional Tahitian warfare did not utilize women in this way, why should we in17. There can be little doubt that the ship's crew was familiar with prostitution, so sex as a commodity was not unknown. But it seems quite clear that for the crew, sex for nails and other iron implements was quite a new concept. Furthermore, as will be seen shortly, unlike the women who provided sexual services for trade in England, not all of the women with whom the British interacted at Matavai Bay were in the lowest-prestige social statuses.

The British 91 terpret women in the canoes just prior to the attack as part of the military strategy? Dening's "god hospitality" hypothesis has more merit than the "'arioi hospitality" argument evaluated below. Now the difference between hospitality to mariners and hospitality to deities may be a distinction present in our minds, but perhaps not in the Tahitians'; or perhaps so. Mind-reading is difficult under the best circumstances, but there are two facts that make the Z)o/p/zw-crew-as-gods explanation for the presence—not to mention the behavior—of the women in the canoes problematic. The first is timing. If the Dolphin really was seen as transport for supernatural beings, why was the religious response delayed? The second is the stones in the canoes. Dening casually refers to the stones as "ballast" that became handy ammunition at the opportune but unanticipated moment (2000: 118). (As a matter of interest, Bougainville records that during his visit, he saw no stones in canoes (1772a: 214), which considerably weakens the "ballast hypothesis.") My reading of the description of the battle makes the volley of stones sound like a concerted effort rather than the result of sporadic moments of inspiration. Furthermore, Dening claims that "the Tahitians had no experience of cannon and were not necessarily convinced of the power of the musket" (2000: 119). In fact, the Tahitians had been subjected to cannon fire prior to the day of the battle (24 June) on 19 and 23 June. Finally, Robertson's description of Tahitians acquiescing to British wishes having "a musket or even a spy-Glass [pointed] at them" (Warner 1955: 32) is strongly indicative that the Tahitians were quite convinced of the power of the musket. Another angle to look at the Tahitians' understandings of and concomitant behavior toward the British might be to construe the pilferage that occurred on board the Dolphin those first days as prima facie evidence for the Tahitians' behaving along the lines of generalized reciprocity, which could only be based on a common heritage—supernatural or not. In other words, the Tahitians imagined that the British were in some profound way connected to them, and the goods aboard the Dolphin were for all—indigene as well as interloper—to enjoy. This strikes me as, at best, a rationalization for exploitative actions on the part of the Tahitians. I can find no other such aggressive exchanges of goods— save for the blatantly exploitative taking with no intention of reciprocating—in accounts of traditional Tahitian society. And even if the "what's mine is yours and what's yours is mine" motivation was initially part of the Tahitian interest in clambering aboard the Dolphin, certainly the sailors' immediate and unambiguous resistance to what they saw as pure thievery would have been enough to alert the Tahitians that the British were not playing by the same rules. There is, then, little basis for assuming that the Tahitians interacted with the British along lines of some sort of perceived or assumed commonality, at least beyond the initial moments of contact on 19 June 1767. Contract. Along the lines of the second possibility, namely, that the Tahitians were engaging in a great day of exchange among equals when the canoes surrounded the Dolphin, Howarth argues that the presence of the women and

92 Pacific Romanticism their behavior "was certainly not a tactical ruse . . . it was a Tahitian welcome" (Howarth 1984: 13). He goes on: What turned [the episode] from a fair to a fight remains a mystery, it could not have been a signal: the Tahitians were quite incapable of feigning merriment then abruptly starting a battle when they were told. Perhaps something suddenly frightened them, or perhaps the warlike party started it and it spread in a panic. But anyhow, they provoked a much more terrible retaliation than they had ever dreamed of, and whoever had favoured war was discredited. With one accord, they set about showing they were sorry. (Howarth 1984: 19)18 I think this view is quite wrong, as do others. Seaman Wilkinson (see footnote 9) suggests that the display of women had a strategic purpose. David Henry, who compiled an eighteenth-century collection of descriptions of English circumnavigators, had little doubt about the purpose of the Tahitian women at Matavai Bay on 24 June 1767: "Almost all of them were naked, the old men and women having taken previous care to divest them of those coverings, which might otherwise have prevented their charms from taking the wished [distracting] effect" (Henry 1773: 228; emphasis added). Furthermore, as the result of a series of late-nineteenth-century interviews with members of the ari 7 Teva descent group, the historian Henry Adams notes that on 24 June "occurred the well-known battle, which was renewed June 26" (Adams 1968: 47). There is no mention of mistaken intentions or a greeting gone tragically wrong. As we saw in Chapter 2, special visitors like the 'arioi did enjoy hospitality that included the sexual services of local women. And if Wallis (and Bougainville) were somehow seen as 'arioi -like (which is not entirely unwarranted, since their ship, attire, and firepower might easily have connoted an otherworldliness), then women offered to them would have been roughly along the same lines as women who were proffered to the 'arioi. And the "hospitality hypothesis" would have to be given some serious consideration. There are, however, two problems with the notion that Wallis and, later, Bougainville were seen, in at least some ways, as 'arioi -like. The first problem is logical. Simply put, the fact that women were offered both to visiting 'arioi as well as to the previously unknown Europeans does not mean that they were offered for the same reason (i.e., that the Europeans might have been seen as a kind of 'arioi). In other words, the offering of women was a necessary, but not sufficient condition for "hospitality." The second problem is ethnographic. The cited passage in Chapter 2 that refers to the women proffered to visiting 'arioi also makes mention of "a place where [the 'arioi] would be fed, they would stay in the house." The women offered were then part of a larger set of hospitable offerings, none of which seem to have been made available to European visitors in the first parts of their visits, when hospitality would have been the order of the day. 18. Howarth's view recalls that of Sahlins's discussion of Hawai'i (1985, 1995): "[The Tahitians] did not make the mistake—or not for long—that . . . the Haitians [sic] [did] with Cook, of treating the ship's leaders as gods" (Howarth 1984: 19).

The British 93 But the strongest argument against the "Tahitian hospitality" idea comes from the Tahitian Aoutourou, who was taken to Europe by Bougainville several months after Wallis's departure. Bougainville writes in his journal that I learned from Aoutourou, that about eight months before our arrival on his island, an English ship had touched there. It is the same which was commanded by Mr. Wallace [sic]. . . . They stayed there a month . . . [there was] one attack of the islanders, who had conceived hopes of taking the ship.19 (Bougainville 1772a: 273; emphasis added) What were the women doing naked in the canoes just before an attack if they were not part of the Tahitian military strategy? If there were such a thing as a "Tahitian welcome," why would it have taken so long for the welcome to be offered? Why did Aoutourou refer to the event as an "attack"? These questions beset the "contract" explanation with so many drawbacks as to make it highly unlikely. It is important to note, however, that after that attack, Tahitian behavior quite clearly shifted to actions that are very well explained by the notion of "contract." Force. Anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, in his book War Before Civilization, puts to rest the mistaken idea that people in traditional societies live in harmony with each other. He does this by presenting data that tell of gruesome behaviors prior to European contact. In areas such as the mutilation of corpses (1996: 99) and atrocities involving children (1996: 87), Keeley singles out the Tahitians for special mention, and notes that, "On Tahiti . . . warfare was especially brutal and merciless" (1996: 146). Given a bellicosity and penchant for aggression that is used as an example of how horribly humans can treat each other, it seems prudent to imagine that what appeared to be an assault was, in fact, an assault, and the presence of women in the canoes can only have been part of military strategy. Therefore, the most compelling conclusion is that the sexuality of Tahitian women was presented to the crew of the Dolphin as an effort to divert the attention of the men and allow the Tahitians (who by that point knew they had inferior weapons) the advantage of surprise. In making this claim, I do not mean to suggest that I know precisely what sexuality and sexual behavior meant for the women who were displayed to the Dolphin and then later had sexual relations with her crew, or that the women who were stripped as the British sailors gawked from the gunwales were the same women who had sexual relations with Paddy and his mates. As I noted in Chapter 3, women may have been offered to the French by their husbands in exchange for goods. One very important question to ask is: Did the Tahitians, at the outset of the Battle of Matavai Bay, have in mind sexual relations between their young women and the British sailors in the aftermath of the battle? If one imagines that the whole incident was an episode of exchange or hospitality that went horribly wrong, then one must answer 19. Whence such a hope? Newbury suggests that the Tahitians may have heard of the loss of Roggeveen's Afrikaanische Galei in 1722 in the Tuamotus (some 450 miles to the northeast of Tahiti) and imagined that the Dolphin was similarly vulnerable (Newbury 1980:5).

94 Pacific Romanticism yes; the Tahitians planned on sexual relations between their women and these strangers all along. If, on the other hand, one answers no, then one must see the subsequent sexual relations as a second, backup-contingency means of successfully interacting with the British that was used when the initial efforts to control the British through military force failed. In reading the nature of the first days, and the shift in Tahitian comportment and demeanor after the battle, it seems that the second, negative, answer is by far the most compelling. In short, the best conclusion is that Tahitian strategy shifted from, using Oliver's terms, a relationship based on force to one based on contract after the battle. CONCLUSION In comparing the Tahitian behavior to the French and to the English, a number of differences are quite noticeable. These differences include the following: 1. Aggressive and even belligerent efforts to acquire goods from the British immediately versus reserve when it came to going aboard the French vessels. 2. The display of women immediately to the French, but to the British only after a number of days had passed 3. Proclamations of "7ayo/" ("brother'V'friend") to the French upon their arrival. The British were not initially greeted in this way. 4. The power of cannon and musket required something of a learning curve at the beginning of the British visit. The French never had a need to display their firepower. 5. A significant military event against the British; no such activity occurred against the French. These differences seem most likely to be the result of the past experience of the Tahitians; that is, what they learned from the visit of the English they applied to the visit of the French. Indeed, given the lethal brutality of the British, there was every incentive for the inhabitants of Tahiti to mollify, placate, and avoid provoking the French. There is, furthermore, no reason to imagine that the differences above could be due to the geographic difference between the landing sites or the Tahitians somehow knowing the difference between the British and French flags. In the next chapter, I discuss these differences and their implications in more detail.

7 Other Voyages The landing by the Dolphin at Matavai Bay was a catastrophe for those who lived there, since they suffered serious loss of life and property. But beyond the devastation, what other outcomes were there? There can be little doubt that, as far as the Tahitians were concerned, the weeks spent by the Dolphin at Matavai Bay constituted a "crash course" in dealing with Europeans. There are probably innumerable "lessons" taken to heart by the local people, but there are three in particular that I am almost certain cannot have but been "learned." Whatever other conclusions the Tahitians arrived at during the stay and after the departure of the Dolphin, the following three conclusions must most certainly have been arrived at. 1. Any delay in the offer of women could be extremely dangerous. The Dolphin first anchored off Tahiti on 19 June. As noted in the previous chapter, any sign of women-as-hospitality would have taken place immediately, but women were not even displayed to the British crew until four days later, on the 23rd, and sexual activity did not commence until several days after the battle of 24 June (recall that the Irish marine's encounter was recorded on 6 July). The Tahitians were fired upon no less than twenty-one times with substantial casualties and had suffered the loss of some eighty canoes before sex between Tahitian women and British men began. They were not fired upon at all, nor were any canoes destroyed after the commencement of what Robertson referred to as the "old trade." If anything, the battle precipitated the sexual encounters, meaning that the Tahitians could not have offered young women to the sailors as hospitality, but rather as appeasement or, perhaps, even a form of tribute. The lesson of British firepower cannot have been lost on any Tahitian. 2. Make overt displays offriendship. Brash and, to use Robertson's terms, "surly" and "insolent," Tahitians before the battle of the 23rd seemed to have a healthy respect for the British and their guns—although not enough to forestall an attack. After the attack, Tahitian demeanor was much more cooperative and

96 Pacific Romanticism much less antagonistic. The failure of a military solution to the problem of the interlopers strongly suggested a new approach to dealing with such intruders. Walking arm in arm and other overt displays of friendship on the part of Tahitian men was the result of the same sort of thinking as the offering of women. The correlation between such overtures and peace was too profound to be missed. 3. Reticence and refusals on the part of the women are to be avoided. Reluctant women would have been, from the perspective of Tahitian men, the Achilles Heel of any strategy that utilized women's sexuality. There could be no show of reticence on the part of the women if the use of their sexuality was to be successful. Furthermore, inflation worked on behalf of the Tahitians. The availability of women's sexuality was, in theory, infinite and there were no negative outcomes apparent to the Tahitians. The inflationary pressure was on how much iron for a sexual encounter could be gotten without antagonizing the interlopers into returning to the use of cannon or musket. Refusal to engage in sex was possible, but carried with it the risk of reprisal. And in the end, refusal that turned to acquiescence resulted in a greater return in terms of both iron and being confident of not being attacked. Men seem to have orchestrated the display of women prior to the battle of 23 June and it was men who got women to present themselves to Lieutenant Furneaux's boat's crew on the beach on 27 June. The apparent reluctance on the part of the women suggests that their involvement with the British may have been a form of exploitation in which Tahitian men obtained iron and peace through the sexuality of some of their society's younger women. While hospitality and exploitation are not necessarily in complementary distribution, the nature of the interaction between British men and Tahitian women has much more the flavor of manipulation than of a warm welcome. Furthermore, hospitable behavior does not normally have an inflationary component to it. The fact that what once required a twenty-penny nail took, within twelve days, a nine-inch spike not only undermines the hospitality hypothesis, but makes the entire set of interactions look very much like an economic market in nature. (By the way, the fact that some sailors were refused sex is a very compelling reason not to see Tahitian women's sexual behavior as hospitality, but as, for lack of a better expression, the negotiation of price. As there were no other apparent reasons, such as prestige, for refusal, the explanation is that those who were refused did not have enough iron to exchange.) The fact that these lessons are consistent with the comportment toward the French strongly suggests, but cannot, of course, unequivocally demonstrate, that Tahitian sexual behavior toward both the British and the French was a calculated stratagem rather than "hospitality." WHO WERE THESE YOUNG WOMEN? REVISITED In Chapter 3,1 digressed from my description of the first days of French contact with Tahitians to ponder aloud over the identity of the women proffered to Bougainville's crew. The same question can be asked again as we consider

Other Voyages 97 those events in the context of Wallis's visit eight months earlier. Were these women the exploited Lumpenfrauen of their society, forced by their (primarily) male masters to be raped by British sailors so that they themselves might, by force, gain British goods, or, at the very least, keep from getting shelled? Or were they brilliant political strategists, using their sexuality in a more-or-less conventional Society Islands way to get what they wanted? It is all too easy to see things in terms of the former viewpoint, given the fact that women so frequently are exploited around the world. Furthermore, the descriptions that we have are written by European males—who, like anyone else, were not always able to imagine others' behavior in non-European terms (recall Bougainville's reference to a young woman as "victim"). We should, I think, be very careful in imagining that the young women in question were merely passive, docile implements of male politico-economic scheming. On the other hand, it is probably not the case that these young women were the vanguard of the response to the British. Perhaps it was a young woman's idea originally to distract the British with a sexual display; but one is then left with interpreting the actions of the older women who stripped the younger ones for the sailors' eyes. Both extremes seem wrong. These young women were no doubt more than objects to be manipulated in male machinations, but neither were they likely, in stratified Tahitian society, to have been where the buck stopped in terms of deciding how to cope with the threat entailed by the Dolphin, We may never know exactly where the truth is, but we can keep ourselves alerted to the possibility of drifting too much to one or the other of the extreme positions. Perhaps the best view is this one: Such goings-on were hardly conducive to thinking of Tahitian girls as anything better than ladies of the night, and their fathers and other male relatives who generously proffered them as somewhat lower than commercial pimps. However, in terms of Tahitian custom and tradition, there was nothing particularly immoral about the situation. Needless to say, though, there is certainly no doubt that the Tahitians capitalized on what, to them, was no more of an indecency than a British pub owner's hiring exceptionally pretty barmaids to entice the [male, presumably] customers into staying a bit longer and thus leaving a few bob more on the counter. (Ferndon 1981: 151-152) In other words, my claim that the French got Tahitian sexual morality wrong and as very different from European sexual morality does not mean that I am saying that the Tahitians were then pretty much the way we are now with regard to sexual morality. As this passage shows, while there is a recognizable aspect of Tahitian thinking, it is still quite clearly not a traditional European view. Tahitians did use young, commoner women for their own purposes; they just weren't the uses that the French believed they were. BRITISH AND FRENCH EXPERIENCES COMPARED When the French first arrive, we see none of the belligerence that the Dolphin's crew experienced in their initial contacts with Tahitians. There was, rather, something of the acquiescence to European power that was seen by the

98 Pacific Romanticism British only after the battle. The most parsimonious explanation is that the Tahitians were clearly mindful of what had happened some eight months earlier. When the French arrived at Meetia, the local people wished to trade for "trifles" (Bougainville 1772a: 213). The first day at Tahiti Nui, however, the local people sought iron. Recall that the Tahitians had no way of knowing that Bougainville did not know Wallis, let alone know that Bougainville would not have known of Wallis's visit to Tahiti some months earlier. Bougainville and Commercon seem untroubled by the Tahitian desire for iron; perhaps after the difficulties of their previous stop, they were simply satisfied that there was nothing in the way of theft in their initial encounters. The straightforward trading and reticence to board the Boudeuse suggests that the Tahitians were trying to be very circumspect, but what were they afraid of? Wallis had come looking for supplies, not women, so it is natural to expect that it was supplies, not women (noted in Bougainville 1772a: 214), that the Tahitians first proffered to Bougainville. Again, the most parsimonious explanation is that until there were strong indications to the contrary, Bougainville and his crew were going to be treated according to the lessons gleaned from the deadly British visit. Recall that Wallis and the other officers aboard the Dolphin had only allowed a limited number of men ashore at any one time, the remainder being ready to repel attacks and to provide artillery cover for those ashore. The Tahitians make every effort to lure as many Frenchmen as possible away from the ships. This is an ingenious economic-military use of female sexuality. At best, the ships might be abandoned and could be attacked and destroyed; at worst, the Tahitians would be able to enjoy freedom from the fear of bombardment while carrying on trade for iron ashore. As discussed above, the image of Tahiti that one gets varies considerably depending on whether one's source is French or British.1 While it is clear that access to food and sex operated very differently on Tahiti than it did in Europe—and that these differences were particularly salient for Europeans, French and English visions of Tahiti diverged in noteworthy ways. Early British understandings of Tahitian comportment and exchanges of food and sex were the expected tributary outcomes of military defeat. French understandings, on the other hand, recognized no such cause-and-effect relationship between the way they were treated, and could only assume that their welcome occurred in vacuo. Two years of circulating reports by Commercon, Dixmerie, and their ilk, followed by Bougainville in 1771, leave us puzzling over whether the French and English depictions of Tahiti tell us more about the French and English, respectively, than they tell us about the Tahitians. One solution to the conundrum is to consider further voyages and, while recognizing that these subsequent voyages have to be understood in the context of the preceding ones, try to determine whether the experience of other European explorers can tell us whether the EngI. Recall that the earliest published sources on Tahiti were French. An account based on Wallis's journal was not published until 1773 (Hawkesworth 1773). By that time, the account of Bougainville's voyage had already been published in both French (1771) and English (translated by Johann Forster, 1772a).

Other Voyages 99 lish of 1767 or the French of 1768 suggest the more accurate assessment of Tahitian beliefs and motivations. After Bougainville's departure in April of 1768, the Tahitians saw no Europeans until Captain James Cook landed there a year later on the first of his three exploratory voyages. His stay of three months was followed by a hiatus of more than three years, when Spanish commander Don Domingo Boenechea arrived in November 1772. Boenechea took two Tahitian men with him on his return to Peru. These men were repatriated three years later when Jose" de Andia y Varela landed there.

AFTER WALLIS AND BOUGAINVILLE: COOK, BOENECHEA, AND DE ANDIA Y VARELA Within seven years of Bougainville's departure, three other European seafarers made their way to Tahiti—one English and two Spanish. The English expedition was led by James Cook, whose three voyages to the Pacific in the 1770s were the zenith of Pacific exploration; a zenith matched by a commensurate popular interest back home in England. Indeed, after Cook, there was only the circumnavigation of Australia by Matthew Flinders aboard the Investigator, and then nothing of this type of voyage until Darwin's Beagle in the 1830s. The importance of Cook's voyages cannot be overstated: "the successful scientific voyaging [Cook] inaugurated may best be seen and understood as a major achievement of the European Enlightenment as a whole, just as the discovery of the New World is best seen as one of the major results of Renaissance science" (Smith 1992: 49). Smith goes on to claim—in a passage that evokes Tahiti— that Cook was not unaware of his role: Cook on this third voyage grew more and more aware in his grand role as Enlightenment Man that he was involved in contradictions that he could not resolve. He had come to the Pacific to spread the blessings and advantages of civilized Europe. What the locals most wanted was the ironware that for so many centuries had made Europe powerful; what Cook's young sailors wanted even more than they wanted fresh food was the bodies of the native women, and it was the one universal product most often offered, most readily available. (Smith 1992: 209) Cook arrived at Tahiti on his first voyage, aboard the Endeavor, on 13 April and stayed until 13 July of 1769, having been assigned to observe the transit of Venus between the earth and sun, thereby providing better measurements of longitude. The arrival of the Endeavor occurred exactly one year after the last full day of Bougainville's visit. There are indications that Cook's crew received the same treatment accorded to the later Wallis's and the immediate Bougainville's: a month after landing at Matavai Bay, some of Cook's crew—who had been checked in March, were showing symptoms of venereal disease (Beaglehole 1974: 187-188). To be sure, it is almost certainly not the case that these men arrived at Tahiti without having had prior sexual contacts. Indeed, in addition to having his men checked, Cook showed prescience by having drafted a set of rules (in Cook's journal en-

100 Pacific Romanticism try for 13 April) that were to guide his crew's interactions with Tahitians. The fifth and final rule states that "No Sort of Iron, or any thing that is made of Iron, or any sort of Cloth or other usefull or necessary articles are to be given in exchange for any thing but provisions" (Price 1958: 26). Cook left Plymouth on 26 August 1768, four months after Bougainville departed Tahiti, so it seems quite certain that Cook was unaware of the French descriptions. Equally certain is the expectation that Cook had seen Wallis's account; besides, some of the crew of the Endeavor had been aboard the Dolphin in 1767. Cook's descriptions of the Tahitians were quite a bit different from those of Bougainville's, claiming a number of "mistakes" in the Frenchman's account (Cook 1961: 235). Porter claims that Cook pointed out Bougainville's mistakes as a way of de-exoticizing the Tahitians, and making them more recognizably human and less patently "savage" (Porter 1990: 123). That; and perhaps the usual Anglo-French enmity of that day. The Account of Sydney Parkinson: 13 April-3 May 1769 Cook was accompanied by twenty-five-year-old naturalist Joseph Banks on this first of three voyages of exploration of the Pacific. Banks had in his employ as an artist another young man, Sydney Parkinson, who was twenty-three when the Endeavor sailed. Parkinson's journal (1984[1784]), published thirteen years after his untimely death of dysentery on the way back to England, provides some of the best descriptions of Tahitian comportment—and therefore excellent bases for making inferences about Tahitian motives—in the months immediately after the visits of Wallis and Bougainville. Parkinson reports that the Endeavor, upon anchoring at Matavai Bay, is swarmed by islanders who barter and steal. Later in the day, Banks and Cook go ashore, but cannot find the "principal inhabitants," whose houses had been taken down (Parkinson 1984: 14). On the next day, the 14th of April, the Endeavor is visited by more of these "troublesome" Tahitians, but also by "some people of distinction in double canoes" (no doubt members of the ari 'i class) who "expressed some uneasiness at the conduct of the rest" (Parkinson 1984: 14). In the three months the Endeavor spent at Tahiti, there were six incidents recorded by Parkinson that reveal the tension between Tahitians and British, and which, by my lights, strongly suggest that the relationship between Tahitian and European had become one of mutual distrust and suspicion rather than open and friendly mutuality. Incident #/. On the 15th, in the morning, several of the chiefs, one of which was very corpulent, came on board from the other point, and brought us some hogs; we presented them with a sheet and some trinkets in return; but some of them took the liberty of stealing the top of the lightening-chain. We went ashore, and pitched the markee [tent]: Mr. Banks, the captain, and myself, took a walk in the woods. And were afterwards joined by Mr. Hicks, and Mr. Green. While we were walking, and enjoying the urual scene, we heard the report of some fire-arms, and presently saw the natives fleeing into the woods like frighted fawns, carrying with them their little moveables. Alarmed at this unex-

Other Voyages 101 pected event, we immediately quitted the wood, and made to the side of the river, where we saw several of our men, who had been left to guard the tent, pursuing the natives, who were terrified to the last degree; some of them skulked behind the bushes, and others leaped into the river. Hearing the shot rattle armongst the branches of the trees over my head, I thought it not safe to continue there any longer, and fled to the tent, where 1 soon learned the cause of the catastrophe. A centinel being off his guard, one of the natives snatched a musket out of his hand, which occasioned the fray. A boy, a midshipman, was the commanding officer, and, giving orders to fire, they obeyed with the greatest glee imaginable, as if they had been shooting at wild ducks, killed one stout man, and wounded many others. What a pity, that such brutality should be exercised by civilized people upon unarmed ignorant Indians! When Mr. Banks heard of the affair, he was highly displeased, saying, "If we quarreled with those Indians, we should not agree with angels"; and he did all he could to accommodate the difference, going across the river, and through the mediation of an old man, prevailed on many of the natives to come over to us, bearing plantain-trees, which is a signal of peace amongst them; and, clapping their hands to their breasts, cried Tyau [tayo], which signifies friendship. They sat down by us; sent for cocoa nuts, and we drank the milk with them. They laughed heartily, and were very social, more so than could have been expected, considering what they had suffered in the late skirmish.— Have we not reason to conclude, that their dispositions are very flexible; and that resentment, with them, is a short-lived passion? (Parkinson 1984: 14-15) Incident #2. On the 2d of May, we missed the astronomical quadrant, it having been brought on shore the day before, in order to make observation of the transit of Venus: several men were immediately dispatched into the country to search for it; and they were informed, by some of the natives, that it had been carried through the woods to the eastward. The captain, Mr. Banks, and Mr. Green, with some other of our men, Tubora Tumaida, and a few of the natives, all armed, set out in pursuit of it. Toothahau, the king, and several canoes, were detained till they returned. While they were on this expedition, I walked out to the east, in the evening, and was almost stunned with the noise of the grasshoppers, with which this island abounds. At length 1 came to a large open place, on the side of which I saw a long house; and in the area many of the natives assembled, having brought with them large baskets of breadfruit: some of them were employed in dividing them, and others carried away whole baskets full; so that it had the appearance of a market of breadfruit. Near to this opening, there was another long house, where, it seems, they coloured their cloth, of which I bought a few pieces, and returned o the fort. About eight o'clock in the evening, the party, that went out in quest of the quadrant, came back, having happily obtained it by the assistance of Tubora Tumaida. Some of the natives had taken it to pieces, and divided it amongst them, but had done it no material damage. It was stolen by a man named Moroemeah, servant to Titaboreah, one of their chiefs. They also found a pistol, which one of the natives had stolen some time before. Tootahau wept while the parts was absent, and was much alarmed on the occasion, apprehending that he should be killed if the quadrant could not be found; and had sent for two hogs to appease us. Oboreah, the queen, fled from us; nor would any of the natives come to market. When Tubora Tumaida, and his party, who accompanied Mr. Banks, returned and saw Tootahou confined, they set up the most doleful lamentation imaginable; but they were soon pacified by the assurances made them that we designed them no injury. (Parkinson 1984: 21-22)

102 Pacific Romanticism Incident #3. On the 17th [of May], the centinel fired at one of the natives, who came before it was light with an intent to steal some of the casks, which was the second offence; but the powder flashed in the pan, and the man escaped with this life. (Parkinson 1984:27) Incident #4. On the third of June . . . Dr. Solander, Mr. Banks, and several others, went to visit Tootahau, to see if they could obtain any hogs; and, after going much farther than where he usually resides, the met with him, and queen Oboreah: they treated them with fair promises, and invited them to stay the night with them, which they accepted; but, in the morning, some missed their stockings, others their jackets and waistcoats; amongst the rest, Mr. Banks lost his white jacket and waistcoat, with silver frogs [loops]; in the pockets of which were a pair of pistols, and other things: they enquired for them, but could get no account of them; and they came away greatly dissatisfied, having obtained but one pig. (Parkinson 1984: 28, 31) Incident #5. On the 15th [June], the oven-rake was stolen, which, joined to the other things that had been pilfered from us by some of the natives, and the insolent treatment Mr. Monkhouse met with, determined the captain to seek redress; he seized twenty-seven double canoes, with sails, which happened to be at the point, in the morning, some of which came from another island; and he threatened to burn them if the stolen things should not be returned. Before noon, they brought back the rake, but we had no account of the rest; and the canoes were still kept in custody. Tootahau was much displeased, and would not suffer any of the natives to supply us with breadfruit, cocoa-nuts, or apples. At this time the weather was very wet; P. Briscoe, one of Mr. Banks's servants, was very bad of a nervous fever, and we had but little hopes of his recovery, having been, by a long course of sickness, reduced to very great weakness; and, in this hot climate, it is a long time before an European recovers his strength, as I have known by experience. On the 19th, in the evening, after dark, Oboreah, the queen, and several of her attendants, came from Opare, Tootahau's palace, in a double canoe, laden with plantains, breadfruit, and a hog; but brought none of the stolen things with them, pleading, that Obade, her gallant, had stolen them, and was gone off with them. Mr. Banks received her very coolly; nor would suffer them to lie in the markee, he being already engaged; and the captain refused their presents, at which the queen appeared very sorrowful. Mr. Banks and the rest, went to bed; and the whole tribe of the natives would have lain in the bell tent, but i would not suffer them, and sent them away. The next morning they returned to the tent, and captain Cook altered his resolution, and bought some of their fruit. The queen behaved very haughtily, yet Mr. Banks agreed they should lie in his markee in the daytime. Two of her attendants were very assiduous in getting themselves husbands, in which attempt they, at length, succeeded. The surgeon took one, and one of the lieutenants the other: they seemed agreeable enough till bedtime, and then they determined to lie in Mr. Banks's tent, which they did accordingly: but one of the engaged coming out, the surgeon insisted that she should not sleep there, and thrust her out, and the rest followed her, except Otea Tea, who whined and cried for a considerable time, till Mr. Banks led her out also. Mr. Monkhouse and Mr. Banks came to an eclaircissement [understanding] some time after; had very high words, and 1 expected they would have decided it by a duel, which however, they prudently avoided. Oboreah, and her retinue, had gone to their canoe, and would not return; but Mr. Banks went and stayed with them all night. This day, the princess Tetroah Mituah's canoes were taken, laden with presents for us; but, as captain Cook knew she was innocent, he let her have her canoes again. (Parkinson 1984:31-32)

Other Voyages 103 Incident #6. On the 9th [July], two of our marines being enamoured with a girl, one of the natives deserted from the fort, and fled to the west part of the island, and intended to have stayed there. On the same day one of the natives stole a knife from one of our sailors, and wounded him with it in the forehead, almost through his skull;—a fray ensued, and the Indians ran away.. . On the 10th, hearing no tidings of the two men who deserted us, we resolved to seize several of the principal people, and detain them till we could recover them: we also sent a party in the pinnace who apprehended Tootahau, and brought him to the ship; upon which Oboreah, and several other of the chiefs, sent out their servants, who returned in the evening with one of them, and reported that the Indians had detained one of our officers who commanded the party sent out after him; also one of the men who accompanied him, and having seized their arms, used them very roughly; upon which the marines were dispatched in the longboat after them, taking with them some of the natives. In the meantime, the natives, whom we had made prisoners, not knowing what would be their fate, were much alarmed; but the next morning the marines returned with the men that had been detained, with the others that had deserted; and the natives, whom we had imprisoned, were released. After making strong professions of friendship, they left us; and, as soon as they reached the shore, bent their course, as fast as possible, to Opare, shewing tokens of displeasure as they went along. (Parkinson 1984: 35-36) Analysis Six incidents in three months—an average of one every fortnight. Clearly, the visit of the Endeavor was a tension-filled time for everyone, and recalling the "thievery" of the first day, 13 April, it was a tension that was present from the very onset of the Cook's visit. It seems only too reasonable to imagine that, if Banks has accurately assessed the Tahitian "uneasiness" toward their comrades on the 14th, the ari'i are concerned to avoid the shellings of 1767. Did the Tahitians know that Cook came from the land of Wallis and not that of Bougainville? Was it a difference that made a difference to them? What accounts for the initial-day theft that Wallis and Cook experienced but that Bougainville does not mention? The fact that theft was not absent from Bougainville's experiences with the Tahitians suggests that the Tahitians never did generate a "do not steal" rule with regard to Europeans. Indeed, the facts fit an explanation that suggests that once the Tahitians learned from Bougainville's visit that they could control European aggression with the exchange of sex and food, it was only a matter of fine-tuning their efforts; in other words, how far could the Europeans be pushed before they start firing? The answer came quickly, as we see in the first incident, which took place just forty-eight hours after the arrival of the Endeavor. That the order to fire came from a junior officer may or may not have made much difference to the Tahitians; the result was the same: one "stout man" killed, and "many others" wounded. The lesson was not lost a few weeks later, especially on the members of the ari 'i who are mentioned: Tubora Tumaida (who helped chase down the stolen quadrant in the second incident), Oboreah (who fled), and Tootahau (who wept, fearing that he might be killed).

104 Pacific Romanticism A month later, in the middle of June, more theft increases tensions (incidents #4 and #5). Oboreah tried to mollify the British by bringing foodstuffs but not the stolen items. By this time, it must have been clear to the British that the ari 'i were doing whatever they could to keep the British from using firepower, but that the ari 'i were not always able to control their subordinates. Oboreah offers her attendants to satisfy Banks and the unnamed surgeon. Certainly, if this were simply a component of Tahitian hospitality, we would have expected to see this offer much earlier in the visit. Furthermore, the circumstances of this offer, on the heels of the theft of the officers' clothing in incident #4, seem much more intended to appease than to please. Finally, four days before the Endeavor left Tahiti, we have, in incident #6, the seemingly umelated cases of two marines deserting, and a sailor who is very nearly killed with his own knife. Members of the ari 'i class are detained in order to recruit assistance in the recovery of the deserters. Is this strategy influenced by the sailor wounded in the head? We are not told, but both events are certainly consistent with a condition of heightened animus. Once the deserters were recovered, the prisoners were released, and wasted little time getting safely away. The Endeavor sailed from Tahiti on 13 July.2 The experience of the Endeavor at Matavai Bay provided little in the way of corroboration of the idyllic image presented by Commercon and others. There is nothing in Cook's description of the behavior of the Tahitians to suggest that sexual relations between his crew and Tahitian women were based on anything other than exchange, just as they had been for Wallis two years prior. Cook's crew engaged in sexual activity with Tahitian women seemingly little restraint, even though, as previously noted, there were refusals (Forster 1778: 392). In addition, Tahitian displays of friendship, as in incident #6, seem to have been merely obsequious efforts to avoid trouble, while "tokens of displeasure" (Parkinson 1984: 36) are more likely to be accurate indices of Tahitian sentiment toward the British. It is worthwhile to note that Cook departed England on 26 August 1768, three months after Wallis returned, and just four months after Bougainville weighed anchor at Tahiti (and eight months before Bougainville returned to France). Cook and those with him would have been entirely unaware of—and uninfluenced by—the romanticist overindulgences of the French accounts floating around Europe in 1769 and 1770. While I cannot demonstrate that it is so, I remain convinced that had Parkinson had access to Commercon's record, he would have offered a forceful refutation. My view on this is, I think, reasonable because while Parkinson addresses many of the same topics as Commercon, there is no direct reference to him—only to some "celebrated writer" in the following passage from the midst of his description of the Endeavor's visit. Commercon probably does not qualify as "celebrated," and Parkinson does not shy away from addressing the implications of Tahiti for "civilization": 2. Cook's scientist, Joseph Banks, was able to convince a Tahitian, Tupia, and a young attendant named Tayeto to go to England. Unfortunately, like Aoutourou, neither ever saw his homeland again, dying while the ship anchored at Java on the way back to England.

Other Voyages 105 They must be very honest amongst themselves, as every house is without any fastening. Locks, bolts, and bars, are peculiar to civilized countries, where their moral theory is the best, and their moral practices too generally of the worst; which might induce a celebrated writer to conclude, through erroneously, that mankind, upon the whole, are necessarily rendered worse, and less happy, by civilization, and the cultivation of the arts and sciences. Nature's wants, it is true, are but few, and the uncivilized part of mankind, in general, seem contented if they can acquire those few. Ambition, and the love of luxurious banquets, and other superfluities, are but little known in the barbarous nations; they have, in general, less anxious thought for the morrow, than civilized; and therefore feel more enjoyment while they partake of heaven's bounty in the present day. Unaccustomed to indulgences in clothing and diet, which Europeans have carried to an extreme, they are less subject to diseases; are more robust; feel less from the inclemencies of the seasons; and are, in constitution, what the ancient Britons were before their civilization. Unhappily for us, being enervated by excesses of various kinds; while diseases, the effect of intemperance and debaucheries, contaminate our blood, and render them hereditary amongst our offspring. (Parkinson 1984:36) Parkinson's Lamarckian wistfulness and passing shot at the "celebrated writer" (no doubt either Voltaire or Rousseau) to one side, this passage shows that the young and "most sympathetic" (Smith 1992: 93) Parkinson was able to view and comment upon those aspects of Tahitian society that seemed to him to be charming without losing himself in ecstatic overstatement, as Commercon did. Boenechea In 1772 Captain Domingo Boenechea left Peru in the frigate Aguila, and first sighted Tahiti on 8 November. Boenechea's journal notes that on the 12th, after anchoring, they were greeted "by a great multitude of Indians who had collected together, evincing many signs of delight, and without arms of any kind" (Corney 1913: 298). Boenechea seems unaware of accounts of any earlier European contacts with Tahitians, finding out from the Tahitians that they were not the first Europeans to visit (Corney 1913: 308). Indeed, had Boenechea known what to expect, his visit to Tahiti might have been different. As it was, there is no report of sexual activity between his crew and young Tahitian women—although the Tahitians seemed to wish it. If such behavior were a form of hospitality, we should expect to see reports of it in Boenechea's account. If, on the other hand, the Spanish fell into the habit of trading nails and other forms of iron for provisions rather than sex, then we can infer that Tahitian sexual activity was a commodity to be traded, rather than an obliging accommodation. And this is just what Boenechea records: As soon as I came into [one chiefs] presence he welcomed me with the word taio of which they customarily make use to express friendly intent: 1 replied with the same, whereupon he immediately embraced me and kissed me on the temples, and divesting himself of a shawl or wrap of native cloth with which he was draped, flesh tinted on one surface and butt-coloured on the other, he placed it around my shoulders. The ladies he had by his side then greeted me in the same affectionate fashion, to which 1 made similar

106 Pacific Romanticism response. They too, took off the wraps they were wearing and presented them to me; so, producing the trinkets 1 had brought with me for such occasions, 1 handed them to him and to the ladies, who made much show of appreciation of them. (Corney 1913: 317) Toward the end of the account of his six-week visit to Tahiti (which lasted until 20 December), Boenechea noted that [The Tahitians] are very voracious in regard to food, and wanton in the matter of sexual license, to which the many realistically carved figures they have in all their domains in the Island bear witness. The women carry the upper hand in everything, and whatever articles were obtained from us on board this Frigate were got for them: the others begged with exceedingly importunity in the names of the women for whatever we had, so much so that they became a great nuisance to us. They tendered their women to us quite freely, and showed much surprise at our non-acceptance of such offers. (Corney 1913: 333) Three aspects of the above paragraph are especially relevant: (1) Boenechea's notion of the importance of sex to Tahitians comes from carvings, rather than behavior; (2) it was only after all other efforts at trade failed that Tahitian men offered Tahitian women sexually to the Spaniards, a set of supply-and-demand circumstances; and (3) Boenechea's phrase that the Tahitian (men) "tendered their women to us quite freely." Since Boenechea seems to have been ignorant of the earlier English and French encounters with the Tahitians (recall that he discovered from the Tahitians that he was not the first European to visit), his account of their behavior cannot be assumed to have been influenced by what he expected to see. Rather, what we see are Tahitians behaving toward him with the memories of Wallis, et alia, in mind. It is quite clear that what he saw was not sex as South Pacific greeting, but as tradable commodity. The record of a subsequent Spanish visit to Tahiti in 1774 under Captain Jose de Andia y Varela briefly mentions Tahitian sexual mores; speaking of Tahitian women, de Andia y Varela notes that "although there are among them some dissolute harlots, as everywhere, those who are not of this type are modest in their clothing, appearance, and demeanor" (de Andia y Varela 1947: 45; my translation). In a lengthier passage, de Andia y Varela records an event that evokes Wallis's original visit: A sailor of mine named Jose Navarro was ashore washing the clothes of some officers. Some Indians approached him on the pretext of seeing how he washed clothes, and stole some shirts. He abandoned the rest of the clothes, and pursued the Indian that he believed to be the thief. He broke into a run, with Navarro in his footsteps, and in the middle of the road, with unbelievable quickness, the Indian grabbed a rock and, turning toward Navarro, launched it with such strength and dexterity that it shattered his skull— which would most certainly have killed him if we had not had such an excellent surgeon on board the frigate. He operated with the result that (although I jailed the sailor during the rest of the voyage, where he spent the majority of his time on the frigate) Navarro emerged healthy and sane. The Indians were afraid that for this deed, we were going to kill one of them, since for less incentive the English had killed many of them, leaving others badly wounded, with scars such as I saw on one who had the good fortune of escaping with his life, (de Andia y Varela 1947: 69; my translation)

Other Voyages 107 De Andia y Varela's account returns us to Wallis's initial visit in 1767, and the principles that, I argue, guided subsequent Tahitian behavior toward Europeans. The Tahitians still recalled their treatment at the hands of Wallis and his men—not to mention Cook, a treatment that left them sorely in need of some way to placate the English and other European visitors. These subsequent voyages show that the French experience—at least as they describe it—was in at least one way unlike any other early contact with Tahitians. And yet it was this outlier French experience—bluntly put, a higher sexto-shooting ratio—that seemed to be the most gratifying to hear about for European audiences (and in England, recall that it was Hawkesworth's edited and more salacious version of Wallis's and Cook's voyages that captured most attention). EARLY PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION ON TAHITI As Diderot's "Supplement" was making its way around Paris, a more ethnographic account of immediate postcontact Tahiti was being produced by Bounty mutineer James Morrison. 3 Morrison spent 1789-1791 on Tahiti and offered a description of Tahitian attitudes toward adultery quite at odds with Commercon: If a man finds his neighbor, or one who is not his adopted Friend in the Act of Adultery with his Wife he has the Law in His own Hands and may if He thinks proper put One or both of them to Death with impunity or punish His wife with Stripes, and Plunder the House of the Offender. (Morrison 1935: 185) Likewise Morrison's comments about Tahitian modesty are not consistent with French accounts: It being deemd shameful for either Sex to expose themselves Naked even to each other and they are more remarkable for hiding their Nakedness in Bathing than many Europeans, always supplying the place of Cloaths with leaves at going and coming out of the Water and the Weomen Never uncover their Breasts at any other time. (Morrison 1935: 225) Morrison is quite explicit about the nature of Tahitian European sexual activity. Contra Forster, it was sex-for-nails; contra Bougainville and Commercon, it was not hospitality: Their Actions might possibly be for the sake of Gain—brought to a stile of what we call indecency, but where are the Countrys that do not produce Weomen of the Same description—Iron is to them More Valuable than Gold to us, for the possession of which some of our own Country weomen would not stick at acts of indecency nor even horrid Crimes 3. Well before Morrison, a Peruvian by the name of Maximo Rodriguez spent nine months on Tahiti in 1774-1775. He learned the Tahitian language from two Tahitians brought to Peru by Boenchea in 1772. Unfortunately, a document purported to describe much of Tahitian culture and society mentioned by Rodriguez has never been found (Ferndon 1981: 8).

108 Pacific Romanticism which these People would tremble to think of Nay, they Challenge us with the Verry Crime and say we are ashamed of Nothing using these things which we knew they were so fond of to perswade them to commit such acts as their innocence had taught them to be ashamed of. If they can purchase Iron at the expence of their Beauty, or are able to get it by theft, then will Neither of which Methods I hold to be a Crime in them. They know its value and think no price too great for it. (Morrison 1935: 236) Morrison's Tahiti is not the Tahiti of Bougainville, Commercon, and Diderot. And it is clear from Morrison's description that sexual interest on the part of Tahitian women has little in common with a romanticized "default human being." There is, in short, little that is particularly edenic, outside of French accounts, that comes to us from the early history of European and Tahitian contact, from Wallis's first day to the emergent European fantasy. In this regard, the Tahitians of the 1760s were just as human as anyone else: those in power exploited those whom they could in order to maximize safety and acquire what they wanted—in this case, iron. The data clearly require that a romanticized idea of Tahitians—and, by extension, anyone else—be discarded once and for all.

8 Conclusion I began this book by referring to one of humanity's "charming follies." Let me be clear about what I think this folly is. It is the belief—generally labeled romanticism—that "we" (however this is construed) are somehow flawed and that "they" (however construed) are not. "Our" flaw is seen in two ways: either "we" have been infected by some sort of malady that "they" have managed to avoid, or else "we" have lost something to be cherished that "they" still have. And of course, these are not mutually exclusive. Depending on one's own values, the disease besetting "us" might be Christianity or capitalism (to name a couple of popular lightning rods). Or again, depending on one's own values, "they" might be understood to have retained traits that are long gone, such as innocence or happiness (to name two commonly heard concepts). Note that this romanticist way of seeing things has changed very little between, say, 1767 and 2004. I think this is unfortunate, and as I said in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 5, it is my own discipline, anthropology, that is primarily responsible for such a view—a view that, to my way of thinking, keeps us from doing good social science. One historian of anthropology asks, rhetorically, "Can anthropology provide objective insights into alien cultures and their social action, or is the discipline forever doomed to implicit subjectivity which ought to be made explicit?" (Barnard 2000: 97). I am hopeful for the former, knowing that there is serious disagreement among anthropologists on the question, and it is to one wellknown disagreement that I now turn: the debate over the death of Captain Cook in 1779 conducted by two renowned anthropologists, Marshal Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere (see Sahlins 1985, 1995; Obeyesekere 1992).

SAHLINS AND OBEYESEKERE ON THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN COOK Alan Barnard, who posed the question above, did so in the context of a discussion of the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate, calling the controversy "the anthro-

110 Pacific Romanticism pological debate of all time" (Barnard 2000: 97; emphasis in original). To make such a claim—one with which I am inclined to agree—means that this is more relevant than a number of other extremely important questions about humans and humanity over which anthropologists have disagreed. It means that the debates surrounding Mead's Samoan adolescence and Chambri gender roles, Whorf s Hopi language and world view, and Malinowski's Matrilineal Complex—all profoundly central to an understanding of our species—are, in some ways, peripheral. What makes them secondary is captured nicely in Sahlins's claim that when it comes to understanding human beings, we must keep in mind the aphorism "Different cultures, different rationalities" (1995: 14). The implications of agreement or disagreement with this phrase—pithy and easy to remember as it is—are the fault lines within contemporary anthropology, and, by extension, much of Western thinking about humans and humanity. Sahlins makes the "different cultures, different rationalities" claim as a rejoinder to Obeyesekere (1992) in their debate over the reasoning and motives of the Hawaiians in killing Captain Cook in 1779. It should, then, come as no surprise that Obeyesekere, who regards a universal human nature as a "muddy bottom"—present even if not entirely solid and stable (1990: 90-91, 101)—finds the extreme relativism of Sahlins unpalatable. At the center of the controversy is the epidemiology of the fate of Captain James Cook, stabbed to death by local people on Hawai'i in 1779. Sahlins argues that through a series of coincidences, Cook was taken by the Hawaiians to be an avatar of the god Lono. Cook's death was to Sahlins a ritual execution, and was fundamentally an act of, to use an English expression, religious piety. Obeyesekere, on the other hand, claims that Cook was killed because the Hawaiians had become intolerant of his belligerence and his oppressive way of interacting with them. I should note here that one does not have to reject Sahlins's claim that Cook was seen as something beyond the merely human in order to recognize that it was Cook's own actions that really were responsible for his death. Smith, for example, says about Cook on his third voyage that Cook "was a sick man, and it began to show more and more as the voyage progressed. His increasing practice of taking hostages to regain stolen goods or escaping crew members led ultimately to his own death" (1992: 46); yet he notes that he is in accord with Sahlins's claim that Cook was equated, at some level, with the deity Lono (1992: 212, 218, 225). Ironically, both Sahlins and Obeyesekere believe the other to be guilty of ethnocentrism: Obeyesekere sees Sahlins as ethnocentric in his "exoticizing" the Hawaiians and their religious views. Sahlins, on the other hand, claims that Obeyesekere is ethnocentric when he makes the case that the Hawaiians acted according to a Western rationality. My sense is that most anthropologists are more sympathetic to Sahlins on the matter, even if not all would agree with the more extreme claim that Obeyesekere engages in a "terrifying obscurantism" (Calder, Lamb, and Orr 1999: 9). As I say, this controversy reflects a major cleavage in antliropology today, and has implications for how anthropology ought to be conducted and how anthropologists ought to see human beings.

Conclusion

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Borofsky, in his excellent overview of this "cause cetebre" (2000: 420), claims that the "real" issue is how we—anthropologists and others—can learn to dialogue with each other even though we hold positions that are profoundly different. It is not a matter, according to Borofsky, of "how deep cultural differences go" (2000: 440), perhaps because that issue is beset by too many unanswerable questions: "How does a postulated pragmatic transcultural tendency work itself out in a specific island environment? What seems to be culturalspecific? What might be viewed as transcultural?" (2000: 429). In my view, however, the matter of just how deep cultural differences go is precisely the issue to which we need to attend. Tahiti and Sahlins versus Obeyesekere Can the debate over the death of Captain Cook shed any light on what the Tahitians (women and men) purposed with sex (however they construed it) with the crews of the British and French vessels in 1767 and 1768? To use the language of that debate, what kind of rationality among Tahitians made sex with European sailors a reasonable thing to do? The disagreement between Sahlins and Obeyesekere uses the issue of native constructions of the "first contact" phenomenon as the basis for a discussion that ultimately has to do with the boundaries of human nature. If one were to argue that the Tahitians used young women as political tribute to keep from being shelled, or as economic capital in an effort to acquire iron, one might be accused of a commonsense bourgeois realism, [which] when taken as a historiographic conceit, is a kind of symbolic violence done to other times and other customs. . . . [0]ne cannot do good history, nor even contemporary history, without regard for ideas, actions, and ontologies that are not and never were our own. (Sahlins 1995: 14) In other words, "different cultures, different rationalities." At first blush, my presentation of 230-year-old observations make Tahitian rationality seemingly quite recognizable. But this recognizability is, for those who hold Sahlins's view, the damning evidence of its erroneousness: if / (a non-Tahitian) believe that I can understand the Tahitians' motivations, then I must be mistaken, and any sense that / make of Tahitian motivations means that those motivations must not, by definition, have been Tahitian. Then there is the opposite quandary. If one assumes, instead, a substrate of universal human rationality—that is, assumes that the Tahitians were just like us we face the possibility of missing important differences. Both Obeyesekere's and Sahlins's positions have the same problem: one necessarily ends up concluding what one has already assumed;1 1. One anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of some of this material indicted me for "concluding what I assume," viz., that the Tahitians were not engaging in hospitality (to natural, supernatural, or somewhere-in-between beings) in their behavior toward the French in 1768. Guilty as charged, I suppose. But no less guilty than Dening when it comes to Wallis, or Sahlins's treatment of the death of Cook. The events in question happened long enough ago (and that is only the beginning of the list of problems in trying

112 Pacific Romanticism that is, if one assumes Obeyesekere's perspective, it is easy to see the Tahitians' behavior as coldly calculating. If one assumes Sahlins's, it is easy to see the Tahitians' behavior as utterly unfamiliar. If the question has to do with how "natives" think, then we are limited to inferring (a) rationality from behavior. As I noted above, the issue that confronts anthropologists, and anyone else interested in anthropological questions—the matter of just how deep cultural differences go—is precisely the issue to which we need to attend. In representing this matter as a question of "depth" (following Borosky), I do not mean to imply that we take soundings through the cultural brine in order to know how much of it there is before hitting human nature seabed. While the metaphor of the "depth" of culture—that is, the degree to which culture can explain human behavior—is convenient,2 it masks the fact that culture and that which is not culture, usually thought of as (human) nature, do not exist in a zero-sum relationship as explanations, that is, explanations for human behavior in which "culture" gains at the expense of "nature." The nature/culture dichotomy dies hard, however: The opposition between nature and culture has been used as one attempt to "ground" the human sciences, to legitimize and justify their existence as autonomous disciplines. On the one hand the distinction provides the human sciences with their own object and justification—culture. On the other hand it provides a principle of demarcation, of what is not culture and of what, therefore, does not fall within the human sciences. This has been done by marking out culture as a self-enclosed and unified realm of phenomena set apart from, and opposed to, natural/biological phenomena: a separate "level" of reality. Culture becomes definitive of the human species: that is to say, the possession of culture sets humans apart from animals. (Horigan 1988: 4) Horigan claims that the uneasy dualism of culture and nature in thinking about human beings is maintained, at least in part, by a need for social scientists to have some "turf from which to offer explanations for human behavior. The problem of "turf is therefore solved in the social sciences by turning the study of humanity into the study of culture and other acquired phenomena such as language. Making culture (and/or language) the sine qua non of humanity has two consequences. The first is that it produces what amounts to an artificial boundary between human and nonhuman primates. This leads to sterile questions about such things as, for example, whether or not chimpanzees have culture. Obviously, the answer depends on how culture is defined. The second, and by my lights, much more serious, consequence of making the study of humanity into the study of culture is that it neglects the noncultural aspects of huto figure out "what was really going on"), so neither Dening, Sahlins, nor i can have the confidence in our analyses that we might like. All anyone can do in these circumstances is to demonstrate the relative likelihoods of various possible mindsets. 2. indeed, J find it useful to talk about not only the "depth," but also the "breadth," of culture, the former a measure of one's commitment to cultural determinism, and the latter an index of one's appreciation of the plasticity of human thought and behavior. Spiro (1984) cogently addresses the relationship between these two dimensions in our thinking about culture and human behavior.

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inanity. Now, if one imagines that the noncultural variables of humanity are inconsequential in the equation of human experience and behavior, then this is not a problem: to understand culture is to understand humanity. But if one rejects such a view—what Tooby and Cosmides (1992) refer to as the Standard Social Science view—and recognizes that there are, in fact, very significant noncultural parts of a human being, and aspects of human experience, then there can be no other conclusion but to reject the "study of culture = study of humanity" assumption. Perhaps another way to say this is that understanding culture cannot be done without also understanding the physiological locus of culture— the brain.3 Shore locates an analogous bifurcation in American cultural anthropology when he notes that "culture is conceived as one of the contents of mind rather than as a defining attribute of mind" (Shore 1996: 22; emphases in original). In other words, American anthropology became the effort to understand the information housed in people's heads rather than people's heads themselves. The former attends to abstractions such as symbols and meanings; the latter would have meant attention not only to these things, but to the biology of mind as well. It is probably not an overstatement to say that for much of the twentieth century, American cultural anthropology was characterized by literally disembodied— that is, taking little account of the human soma—analyses of abstractions. The result has been, among other things, descriptions of cultural systems that emphasize difference rather than similarity, particulars rather than universals, and which strike Western audiences as Other rather than Another. This is, of course, the romanticist program, an agenda that gives us a claim such as "different cultures, different rationalities." Perhaps so, to a limited degree; but only if one bears in mind a paradigm grounded on a premise along the lines of "comparable frontal cortices, comparable motives." A ROMANTICIST VIEW OF THE DOLPHIN AT TAHITI What if Sahlins were to have turned his attention to Wallis's experiences at Matavai Bay in 1767? What might he say? Fortunately, we do not have to rely on mere speculation; Pacific scholar Greg Dening provides a very likely answer to the question. In Chapter 6, I reconstructed the Battle of Matavai Bay in terms of two opposing sides, with each side having more-or-less conmiensurate perceptions of and understandings about the situation, behaving by recognizably similar rules, and with essentially the same goals. As I indicated at the time, this may be a somewhat hasty conclusion according to Dening, who sees violence by Pacific people as having more to it than meets the eye. More to the point, Dening claims that what I construe as a battle is in fact an episode of gods being "tested and contested" (2000: 119). 3. The brain, as "the ultimate organ of adaptation" (Shonkoff and Phillips 2000: 182), is being given increasingly more attention by anthropologists, as evidenced by the rise of "biocultural" approaches in anthropology (see Hinton 1999: 10-20).

114 Pacific Romanticism For Dening, the enemy is common sense. In short, Dening's argument is along the lines of "the fact that it looks like a battle to a Westerner is a good indication that it was not a battle to the Tahitians": No doubt it is commonsensical on our part to read the hurled pebbles and the signaled attack as ordinary ambush. A keen perception by the Tahitians of the lust in the seamen's eyes might have led to a strategy of subterfuge in staging the women's dancing. . . . Native greed, Strangers' callousness, and misread signs have their play, but the "king of the island" was likely to have been an arioi master of a lodge or a priest of 'Oro. His double canoe was not a battleship. It was likely to have been Rainbow. The awning he stood under was likely to have covered the ark of 'Oro's accoutrements, and who knows, the maro ura. (Dening 2000: 119) Dening's argument that the ambush was not really an ambush is a circuitous one. It begins with the patronizing comments about common sense just noted, such that one might feel embarrassed about using the concept, not to mention the words, in an argument. It moves to a reminder of the Rashomon effect with regard to supernatural entities—our gods are not like their gods: "Tahitians were adept at seeing the divine in the human, whatever the contradictions" (2000: 119). The juxtaposition of these two premises, the untrustworthiness of common sense and the partial and relative nature of knowledge, implies a corollary: if it looks like an ambush and a subsequent battle to a Westerner, then that must not be what it is. Add a dose of reminder of Western ethnocentrism: "What always embarrasses the Stranger's [i.e., Westerner's] effort to understand the native is the Stranger's insistence that the Native perceptions should be literal, while the Stranger's own perceptions are allowed to be metaphoric" (2000: 120), and the resulting implication is that not only are you factually wrong if you see the stones pounding the Dolphin as an attack, but there is the suggestion that you are morally wrong as well. Dening's summary paragraph on the matter is worth citing in its entirety: The Dolphin sailed into Matavai by what might always have been—but certainly by her entry became—a sacred passage off the marae Tarahoi. She was, by any measure the Tahitians had, a special ship, of the quality of the Rainbow, even perhaps of the quality prophesied when the news of similar vessels that had visited other islands reached Tahiti. She streamed with the magnificent decoration of white sail and bunting and flag. The Tahitians offered her, from the moment they saw her, 'Oro's token human sacrifice. The plantain branches they offered her, the inducement of naked dance and sexual gesture by which 'Oro's presence was attracted to his sacred marae, spoke the metaphors by which they grasped the novelty of her arrival. Slain pigs, the bunched red and yellow feathers, which no doubt meant that at some Taputapuatea a human sacrifice was lying, made the novelty familiar. If the tone and direction of myths of 'Oro collected later are any indication, the Dolphin came like the marvelous canoes of old from afar, and Tahitian expectancy would have that she would make a landing, be the center of sacrifice, be the occasion for reinstatement and investiture of the arrii rahi, be the circumstance for alliance and treaty and the establishment in them of some hegemony. The arrival at Matavai was true to the myth of how 'Oro would arrive to colonize a new place, it had happened at Tairapu long ago and more recently at Ata-Huru. The novelties did not matter, nor even

Conclusion 115 the contradictions. The Tahitians were entertained by its simple meaning.4 (Dening 2000: 121) Note the parallels with Sahlins's argument about the death of Cook. Substitute "Cook" for "Wallis," and "Lono" for "'Oro," and we have what are fundamentally the same claims. Of course, this coincidence does not make either argument wrong, nor does it make either one right. But I find shortcomings in a willingness to believe that two separate violent incidents on two Polynesian islands involving two British naval expeditions boil down to Polynesian religious ideas. This does not.even take into account the fact that in each of these representations of the events, those who see the violence in "commonsensical" ways are implicitly indicted for being somehow shortsighted or, worse, guilty of a moral faux pas in seeming to have forgotten the great lesson of Boas and failing to treat the Polynesian perspective (with little allowance for the idea that the Polynesian perspective might overlap with a Western one) with the dignity that it deserves. The Tahiti case, with the Sahlins-Obeyesekere controversy as background, allows for certain deductions to be made. Siding with Obeyesekere, I claim that anthropology has for too long emphasized human particulars at the cost of overlooking human similarities. I see early-twenty-first-century anthropology as moving in a direction that recaptures an emphasis in human universals, and the case of Tahiti shows that an uncritical willingness to imagine profound differences among the peoples of the world—grounded in an eighteenth-century misunderstanding—can continue to have results in twenty-first-century anthropology. Another Example, and a Lesson: "Wallis" and "Bougainville" among the Huli? Bougainville believed that he was the first European to have encountered the people of Tahiti when he landed there in 1768. He could not have known that the response to him was profoundly influenced by the Tahitians' experiences with Wallis. I have argued that one profound aspect of that influence was that post-Wallis Europeans received treatment that was calculated to obtain iron and not get shot. Is this warranted? It is, of course, impossible to know with certainty, but we are fortunate to have Schieffelin and Crittenden's (1991) remarkable account of the 1935 Hides-O'Malley patrol through southern New Guinea that includes an analogous set of events among the Huli of the Southern Highlands region. 4. Although I am critical of Dening's reading of the events of June 1767,1 recognize the difficulty of trying to recapture events and motivations of hundreds of years earlier. Dening's phrases such as "might have been," "perhaps," and "no doubt meant" must be seen as evidences of trying to "do history" with small scraps of data rather than indices of sloppy detective work. I discovered this the hard way in my own efforts at trying to come to grips with a violent episode between Dutch traders off the coast of New Ireland that took place in 1616 (Bolyanatz 1998), in which such phrases occur frequently.

116 Pacific Romanticism First, a bit about Schieffelin and Crittenden's project. The authors use the records of the Hides-O'Malley expedition into "unexplored Papua" to form the framework of a chronological narrative. These accounts are juxtaposed with the accounts gathered by anthropologists who work in the area. In some cases, eyewitnesses have been interviewed, and in many cases, the perceptions of the meaning of events—and sometimes even the perceptions of the events of the expedition itself—were profoundly different. At one point, the Hides-O'Malley patrol camped less than two miles away from the route of a Fox brothers expedition less than six months earlier (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 124). This near overlap of the two expeditions along the western slopes of Mount Ne suggests some interesting insights. The Fox brothers' expedition seems to have been characterized by violent encounters. Although the Fox's deny that any deaths occurred by their hands (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 98-99), Schieffelin and Crittenden believe that enough reasonable doubt exists that they see the local version of the Fox brothers patrol as more accurate: The Hulis, however, tell a different story [from the Fox's]: "They came, killing men as they came," Panguma Lomoko of Piango hameigini ["clan"] told [anthropologist Bryant] Allen in 1986. He described how the two Europeans and their black-skinned companions (who were dressed differently from the police who came in later years [and therefore could not have been the Hides-O'Malley patrol]) appeared from the west, traversed the South Basin from west to east and crossed the Tagari-Waga divide through what is now known as the Tari Gap, about 2 km north of where Hides and O'Malley were later to cross. Panguma claimed that over two days of repeated clashes, they killed more than ten Huli warriors, including Panguma's brother-in-law. One can trace the route of the expedition described by Panguma as far west as Koroba, a path strewn with accounts of shootings, deaths, and near misses. The Fox party apparently traveled much of its way across the valley through the network of fighting ditches. . . . The Fox brothers apparently referred to such violent contacts with the Huli through veiled remarks in the diary like: "the natives were frisky today." The detailed descriptions of bullet wounds, visits to the sites where the fights took place, and confirmation of the names of most of those said to have been killed by independent informants leave little doubt of the veracity of the Huli accounts." (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 99) I take it as unproblematic to assume that the news of the Fox brothers and their comrades was able to travel 3000 yards in 180 days, and that the Huli people first encountered by Hides and O'Malley knew well of the encounters with the Fox brothers. Indeed, there is every reason to assume that one or more persons may have been present for the entrances of both sets of interlopers. What we do know is that the Huli response to the Hides-O'Malley patrol was not a welcoming one. A year after the patrol, Hides wrote of his entrance into Huli country: They looked at us queerly, with their heads to one side, and appeared to be whispering excitedly amongst themselves; then they started to call in pretty yodeling tones, and soon we saw women and children hurrying away across the fields towards the top of the can-

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yon. The men stayed, however, and for about an hour we endeavored to induce them in, but they appeared afraid. (Hides 1936: 79; cited in Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 100) To be sure, this was not the first time that Hides and O'Malley had had this kind of reception. They had surprised other groups (Etoro and Onabasulu) with their arrival and had created very fearful responses (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 73-80). The flight of women and children is consistent, however, with the expectation of armed conflict. The account by Schieffelin and Crittenden goes on to say that Eventually they [i.e., the Huli men present] signaled that Hides and O'Malley could take what food they wanted from the gardens but continued to keep their distance. "Towards evening three men approached us to within a hundred yards, and waving their arms to us several times, indicated we must go back whence we came. When 1 showed them a bright steel tomahawk, called in friendly tones and indicated they come up to us, they shook their heads vigorously." ([Hides 1936: 80] Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 100) The adamant refusal to engage in trade for a steel ax strongly suggests that the Huli were expecting trouble. Schieffelin and Crittenden argue that steel axes were not absent from the Highlands at this time (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 53-54), noting that steel axes could be found deeper into the Highlands than where the Huli lived (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 132-133). Elsewhere, however, they state that steel axes were "unfamiliar" to Highlanders (Schieffelin and Crittenden 2000: 136), and suggest that the negative Huli response to the axes was based on the idea that "the strange (metal) objects would somehow be harmful" (Schieffelin and Crittenden 2000: 138). The issue of whether the Huli knew what Hides was proffering is helpful, but not critical, to understanding Huli wariness. While it seems quite plausible that the appearance of the implement strongly suggests its function, it seems clear that the ax heads themselves were not the problem, but those who offered them. The unwillingness to have any truck at all with the expedition, along with the military readiness, can only have been a result of the recent encounter with the Fox's. Indeed, Schieffelin and Crittenden note that "it was not Hides' and O'Malley's patrol but [the Fox's] expedition that had visited the region a few months before that had the major impact" (Scieffelin and Crittenden 2000: 145). The Huli refusal to trade with the Hides-O'Malley expedition had lethal consequences. Hides took it as prima facie evidence of a lack of cooperation. Fearful reticence on the part of the Huli was taken by Hides to be evasiveness shielding treacherous intentions (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 106-107), which eventually escalated into a skirmish that left a number of people dead (Schieffelin and Crittenden 1991: 115-119). Since history has no rewind button, there is no way to know what would have happened if the Fox brothers had never made it to anywhere near Huli territory. One might imagine a different outcome, in which the Huli and the HidesO'Malley patrol engage in a robust food-for-axes trade, and the patrol continues well fed and with optimistic expectations for its encounters with new groups.

118 Pacific Romanticism

Unfortunately, this did not happen, and Huli were not the only Papuans to die from the guns of the Hides-O'Malley expedition. Can all of the deaths from the Hides-O'Malley patrol be laid at the feet of the Fox's? Almost certainly not. But I think that the troubles encountered by and perpetrated by the Hides-O'Malley expedition cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the effects of the Fox's on local attitudes and expectations. I also think that it cannot be assumed that those effects were not salient in Huli minds. As I first wrote this section, the tragedies of 11 September 2001 were about 28 months old. Two months after (12 November) the events of that day, American Airlines flight 587 bound for the Dominican Republic crashed in Queens. The immediate response on the part of many was to assume terrorism. Of course it wasn't; the sad fact is that airliners do crash for other reasons from time to time. But the catastrophic experience of 11 September creates new perspectives on similar events, constituting what Bohannon calls a "cultural cusp": a cultural understanding that ensures that things are never seen in quite the same way as before (Bohannon 1995: 111-116). There were enough things known about flight 587 that made terrorism leap to mind, such as a New York City departure and a crash in a populated area. It seems implausible to imagine that the Huli in the middle of 1935 were any different from Americans in the fall of 2001. Or Tahitians in 1768. The easy conclusion is that, grounded in the profundity of events—events made profound by the cataclysmic grief they cause— human beings can never again see things as they once saw them. This means that instead of the Fox brothers being a footnote to the Hides-O'Malley patrol, or Wallis being rarely recalled as the first European to visit Tahiti, we need to understand the way(s) in which local understandings of past events predispose social actors to certain patterns of behavior in the present, or to use Sahlins's phrase, we need to apprehend the "structure of the conjuncture." By the phrase, Sahlins means "the practical realization of the cultural categories in a specific historical context, as expressed in the interested action of the historic agents, including the microsociology of their interaction" (1985: xiv); or "a situational set of relations, crystallized from the operative cultural categories and actors' interests" (1985: 125n). By the concept, Sahlins means to have explained the death of Captain James Cook on Hawai'i in 1779 as religious ritual. But he discounts the possibility that Other "cultural categories" and "interests" might look very much like ours. And when he also imagines that his is the paradigm for understanding human behavior in general, we end up with a misleading romanticism that unnecessarily distances us from Huli, Hawai'ians, and Tahitians. CONCLUSION Stocking suggests that the post-World War I era of "cultural criticism, moral questioning, and sexual experimentation" led anthropological interest to the South Pacific (1989: 235-236), most notably in the person of Boas's student Margaret Mead. And why not, since an analogous Zeitgeist was the context of the salons of Paris in which Commercon's, Bougainville's, and Diderot's visions

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of Tahiti made their rounds? As the above cases show, the Pacific retains its romanticist pride of place even now in the early days of the twenty-first century. Both Sahlins (1995: 14) and Dening (2000: 119) are skeptical of "common sense." What is so wrong with common sense, anyway? To note that sensibility is not as common as one might like, or that "sense" is a little more complicated than we normally realize, is the subject of aphorisms, not to mention the attention of Clifford Geertz (1983). But is this what Dening and Sahlins really mean by their disdain for what need not be an ignoble concept? To imagine that common sense be a default starting point when it comes to explaining the behavior of Polynesians seems reasonable enough. And if Dening and Sahlins—and Geertz—only mean to remind us that, often enough, these default explanations are not always adequate, then yes; I share their skepticism. But if such explanations are rejected a priori, then I begin to suspect that romanticist ideology has supplanted social science rigor. I have made the claim that the French accounts of Tahiti that circulated in the 1770s had a lasting—and deeply misleading—influence on the ways some Europeans saw non-Europeans in the years since then, including today. As a final effort in support of this claim, I invite the reader to conduct a thought experiment. Imagine, for a moment, that Tahiti were discovered in 7667. Then imagine that it were discovered in 7567. 1667. The Pacific is crisscrossed by Dutch and English vessels. On occasion a Spanish galleon makes its way from Peru to the Philippines, but the riskiness of such a venture keeps it from happening very often. Let us imagine that a Dutch or English vessel makes the discovery of Tahiti. Both nations were in the Pacific primarily as a means of maintaining their "East India" trading companies; island exploration and discovery as well as searches for a great southern continent were relatively insignificant and unintended consequences of trading voyages. Vast expanses of North and South America are still largely unexplored; any serious exploration-and-discovery efforts will be made there. In Europe, news in 1667 of a remote island in which sailors are offered local women after a battle is likely to create at least a small stir, but as the Renaissance gave way to the Enlightenment, there would have been little else to do with that datum, and events on Tahiti would probably have ended up largely forgotten. 1867. Yankee whalers dominate the seas, especially the Pacific. Piracy is largely a thing of the past. In the event of an American discovery of Tahiti— again, as in 1667, an unintended consequence of the pursuit of an economic goal—the most probable outcome is a territorial claim, followed by efforts at economic exploitation and then general disregard (consider the attention given to American Pacific holdings over the past century). Reports of women made readily available to the Yankees most likely become interpreted in the context of current American concerns with Native American populations, who may suffer more for being unflatteringly compared to Pacific Islanders. The growing United States will have as its priorities post-Civil War resolution and competition with Europe for markets and resources. Nationalism is regnant, and the mores of these newly claimed territories are merely interesting footnotes.

120 Pacific Romanticism It is easy to imagine that a century earlier or later, the reports from Tahiti are relatively ignored. They were anything but ignored in eighteenth century Enlightenment France—and elsewhere. Here we see the serendipitous capriciousness of history: a set of mistaken interpretations, recorded in a particular way; plus a Europe hungry for exotic, even historic, news, equal one momentous "charming folly"—a romanticist naivete that is still with us to this day.

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Index Ackerknecht, Erwin H., 71, 72 Adventure, 86 n Alexander, Michael, 28, 38, 88 Allen, Bryant, 116 American Airlines flight 587, 118 Anderson, Robin, 34 Andia y Varela, Jos6 de, 99, 106, 107 Anthropology, 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 54, 63-72, 73,75, 109, 110, 113, 115 Anticlericalism, 12, 30, 38, 46, 57, 61 Anti-Semitism, 71, 72 Aoutourou, 38, 43, 46 n.5, 55 n.18, 93, 104 Ari'i, 15,18,19,92,100, 103,104 Arioi, 18,21 Aro tarai, 18 Aubrun, Axel, xiii, 45 n.3 Banks, Sir Joseph, 53, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 n Barnard, Alan, 64, 66, 72, 109 Bastian, Adolph, 68 n, 72-73, 74 Beagle, 99 Beaglehole, John C, 12, 13, 99 Boas, Franz, 4 n.l, 64, 65, 66, 67-75, 115, 118; and historical particularlism, 71, 72 Boenechea, Domingo, 99, 105, 106, 107 n Bohannon, Paul, 118 Borofsky, Robert, xii, 111,112 Boudeuse, 26, 30, 37, 43, 54, 98

Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, xii, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 24, 25, 26-30, 30-38, 39, 40, 43, 46 n.5, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54 n.l5, 55, 56, 57, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 74,75,77,88,89,91,92,93,96, 97, 98 n, 99, 100, 103, 104, 107, 108, 115, 118; response to JeanJacques Rousseau, 29 Brunt, Peter, 3 Buchet, Christian, 36, 38 n, 39 n.17, 43, 44, 45, 46 nn.7, 9, 49 Buffon, Comte de (Georges-Louis Leclerc), 26 Calder, Alex, xii, 43, 110 Carrington, Hugh, 82 n.8 Carrithers, David, 57 Carteret, Philip, 13,77 Christy, Henry, 73 Cole, Douglas, 73, 75 Coleridge, Samuel, 65 Colonialism, 7, 13, 55 Commercon, Philibert de, 27-28, 30, 35-40,43,44,51,53,54,56,61, 62, 63, 65, 69, 74, 75, 89, 98, 104, 105, 107, 108, 118; letter describing Tahiti of, 45-49 Connolly, Rob, 34 Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, The, 4 n.l Cook, Captain James, 13, 20, 21, 51, 53, 61, 64, 65, 66, 68, 74 n, 86 n,

132 Index 88,89n.l4,92,99, 100,102, 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 111, 115, 118 Corney, Bolton Glanvill, 105, 106 Cosmides, Leda, 113 Crittenden, Robert, 115, 116 Cultural variability, 7 Cuvier, Georges, 27 D'Andrade, Roy, 64 D'Aragon, Louis Albert, 28, 43 n Dalrymple, Alexander, 13 n. 1 Dampier, William, 25 De Bovis, Edmond, 5 n.4 Darwin, Charles, 99 Dening, Greg, 19, 78, 82 n.6, 90, 91, l l l n , 112,113,114, U5n, 119 Diderot, Denis, 6, 7, 26 n 30, 52, 54, 55 n.l7, 56, 63, 65-70, 74, 75, 89, 107, 108, 118; Supplement of, 56, 5761,61, 107 Dixmerie, Nicholas Bricaire de la, 43, 49,51,61,65,98 Dolphin, 13, 24, 61 n, 77- 88, 89, 90, 91,93,95,97,98, 100, 114 Douglas, Bronwen, 6, 53 n.l3 Dowd, Patrick Schilling, 71 Dryden, John, 4 n. 1 Durkheim, Emile, 66 Edgerton, Robert, 4 n. 1 Ellingson, Ter, xii, 4 n.l, 5, 7, 31 n Ellis, William, 74 n Endeavor, 53, 99, 100, 103, 104 Enlightenment, The, xii-xiii, 4-8, 10, 11, 12,26,28,29,31,52,54,61, 63,65-68,75,99, 119, 120; German, 12; Scottish, 12, 28 Etoro, 117 Fairchild, Hoxie, 5 Falkland Islands. See Isles Malouines Fellows, Otis, 54, 55 Ferguson, Adam, 12, 28 Ferndon, Edwin N., 15, 21, 34, 97, 107 n Fischer, Michael M. J., 5 Flinders, Matthew, 99 Forster, George, 20 Forster, Johann R., 14, 38, 51, 52, 53, 68, 69, 74 n, 88 n, 98 n Fox brothers, 116, 117, 118

Fox, Christopher, 46 n.5 French Revolution, 61, 62 n, 65 Freud, Sigmund, 54 n.l6 Frost, Alan, 13, 14 n.l, 63, 66 Furneaux, Tobias, 86 n, 87, 96 Gay, Peter, 11,54,61 Geertz, Clifford, 119 Gender and sexuality, Tahitian, 19-21 Giraudais, Francois Chenard de la, 26 Grattan, C. Hartley, 1 Great Southern Continent. See Terra Australis Greek imagery, 6, 33, 40, 45, 48, 53, 68,69 Grimm, Friedrich, 55 n.l7 Hamilton, Peter, 12, 30 Hammond, L. Davis, 26, 27, 31, 38, 39 nn.16, 18,56 n.20, 62 n Hanson, F. Allan, 18 Hawai'i, 92, 110, 118 Hawkesworth, John, 14, 52, 61 n, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 n.l5, 98 n, 107 Herder, Johann, 68-71, 74; Volk ideology of, 70 Hides, Jack, 117 Hides-O'Malley patrol, 115, 116, 117, 118 Hinton, Alexander Laban, 113 n Honner, Rev. Paschal, O. S. B., xiii, 45 n.3 Hopkins, Joan, xiii, 28 n, 36 n.9 Horigan, Stephen, 4 n.l, 55, 112 Hospitality, Tahitian, 7, 21 Howarth, David, 26, 84 n.l 1, 92 n Howe,K.R., 12, 37n.l0 Huli, 115-118; and Hides-O'Malley patrol, 118 Human nature, 7 Human sacrifice, 45, 50, 114 Human universals, 3 Humboldt, Alexander, 72 Infanticide, 18, 19,34 Ingrao, Charles, 54 Isles Malouines, 26, 30 Keats, John, 65 Keeley, Lawrence H., 22

Index 133 Keesing, Roger, 65 Kiernan, V. G., 7 n Kimbrough, Mary, 26, 27, 28, 29 Kirch, Patrick, 15 Kluckhohn, Clyde, 67, 68, 71, 72 Lamb, Jonathan, xii, 43, 110 Langdon, Robert, 62, 87 Lescarbot, Marc, 4 L 'Etoile, 26, 27, 28, 30, 37, 43, 54 Levy, Robert, 89 Linnaeus, 27 London Missionary Society, 74 Lono, 110, 115 Losche, Diane, xii Lovejoy, Arthur O., 4 n.l Lowie, Robert H., 67, 72, 74 Mackay, David, 43 Malefijt, Annemarie de Waal, 72 Manahune, 15 Manuel, Frank, 68, 69, 70 Marcus, George E., 5 Marigny, Edouard Taitbout de, 54 Marshall, P. J., xii, 7 n, 26, 27, 54, 55 n.l9,62n Matavai Bay, 16, 61 n, 77, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 90 n, 92, 93, 95, 99, 100, 104, 113 Matrilineal descent, 23 Maurepas, Jean-Fr6denc, 28 Mead, Margaret, 59 n, 64, 65, 71, 110, 118 Meetia, 30, 31, 33, 98 Mi'kmaq, 4 Moerenhout, Jacques Antoine, 23 Montesquieu, Baron de (Charles de Secondat), 26, 66 More, Thomas, 46 Morrison, James, 107, 108 Napoleon, 66, 68 Nassau-Siegen, Prince of (Charles Henri Nicholas Othan), 28, 33 Natural Law, 25 Natural Man, xii-xiii, 6, 7, 12, 25, 28, 30,40,54,61 New Guinea highlands, 34, 115, 117 New Ireland, 2, 8, 23, 115 n Newbury, Colin, 93 n Niklaus, Robert, 61

Noble Savage, xiii, 4-6, 7, 31 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 109, 110, 111, 112,115 Oborea, 16, 89 n.l5, 102, 103 Oliver, Douglas, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32 n.4, 33, 34 n.7, 48 n.l0,89n.l6,90,94 Omai, 86 n Onabasulu, 117 'Oro, 18, 19,84 n.10, 114, 115 Orr, Bridget, xii, 43, 110 Orsmond, John, 21 Other, the, 3,4, 5, 8, 52, 53, 63 Papua New Guinea, 2 Parkinson, Sydney, 20, 22, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105; account of Tahiti by, 103 P6charais, 28, 29 Penniman, Thomas K., 68 Phillips, Deborah A., 113 n Philosophes. See Enlightenment Pomponius Mela, 13 Porter, Roy, 6, 29, 82 n, 100 Prichard, James Cowles, 65, 70 Primitivism, 55 Pmfer, Olaf, 67, 68, 71, 72 Ptolemy, 13 Purea. See Oborea Ra'atira, 15 Rainbow, 19, 84 n.l0, 114 Relations, Tahitian-European, 7, 35, 40, 90, 91, 98, 103, 105; friendly, 23,30,32,35,86,87, 103, 104, 105; hostile, 37, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 85,93,95,101,103, 106; sexual, 20,21,34,40,86,87,88,89,90, 93, 94, 96, 98, 104, 107, 111; trade, 31,33,35,40,80,81,83,85,86, 87, 98, 100, 106 Relativism, moral, 65, 67, 75 Relativism, cultural, 71, 110 Religion, Tahitian, 18-19 Resolution, 86 n Robertson, George, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87 n, 88, 91, 95 Rodriguez, Maximo, 107 n Romantic naturalism, 27, 30, 63; see also Romanticism

134 Index Romanticism, xii-xiii, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6-7, 8, 28, 38, 52, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 6768, 71, 75, 109, 118, 119; equated with soft primitivism, 56 Ross, Michael, 13, 27, 33 n, 35 n, 36, 37 n i l , 39, 45, 46, 48 n.10, 55 n.18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 5, 12, 26, 27,28,29,36,49,53,65, 105 Sahlins, Marshal, 92 n, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 118, 119 Said, Edward, 8, 52 Samoa, 3,59 n, 64, 71, 110 Schieffelin, Edward L., 115, 116, 117 Schrempp, Gregory, 68, 69 Secularism, 12,29,30,54,59 Segalen, Victor, 80 n.4 September 11, 118 Seven Years' War, 12, 13, 25, 27, 62 Sex as commodity, 20, 21, 33, 105, 106 Sexuality, 5, 11, 14, 18, 19, 21, 32, 38, 67, 75, 87, 89, 93, 96, 97, 98; and morality, 6, 7, 20, 36, 54, 57, 58, 63, 67,70,73,97, 106, 118 Shonkoff, Jack P., 113 n Shore, Bradd, 68 n Shweder, Richard, 5 n.5, 64, 68 Sloan, Phillip, 75 Smith, Adam, 28 Smith, Bernard, xii, 6, 8, 38 n.14, 52, 53n.l2, 54n.l4, 55, 56n.21,61 n, 66,68, 89 nn. 14, 15,99, 105, 110 Smith, Preserved, 52 Smith, Roger, 58, 71 Social stratfication, Tahitian, 15-18, 20,45 Southey, Robert, 65 Spain, Spaniards, 26, 48, 51, 106 Spiro, Melford E., 65, 112n.2 Stocking, George, 64, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 118 Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo, 65 Sursurunga, 23 Swallow, 13, 77

Tahiti, traditional, 14-24 Tahitians' interest in iron, 7, 31, 32, 38, 40,47,48,52,62,78,79,80,81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 96, 98, 105, 108, 111,115 Taipahia Bay, 16,32,33,34 Taputapuatea, 19, 84 n.l0, 114 Tayo, 32, 33, 34, 56, 90, 101, 105 Terra Australis, 12, 13, 25, 77, 119 Thiery, Maurice, 28,29, 31 Thomas, Nicholas, xii Tooby, John, 113 Tuamotus, 31 Turner, Rev. David, O. S. B., 45 n.3 Tylor, Edward, 68, 70, 73-74 Virchow, Rudolph, 71-72, 74 Voltaire, 12,26,68,105 Vyverberg, Henry, 54 Wallis, Samuel, xii, 13, 14, 15, 16, 7781, 83-90, 92, 93, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 113, 115, 118 Warner, Oliver, 79 n.3, 82 n.8, 84 n.9, 87 n Warfare, Tahitian, 22 Wheeler, Roxann, 82 n.7 Williams, Glyndwr, xii, 7 n, 26, 27, 55 n.!9,62n Wilson, Arthur M., 40, 54 n.16, 69, 70 Wisbert, Reiner, 70 Wokler, Robert, 58 Women, New Guinea highlands, 116 Women, Tahitian, 7, 19, 20, 21, 23, 3335,75,83,86,88,89,91,92,93, 94,95,96-97,99,104, 105, 108, 111; European descriptions of, 28, 31,32,35,38,39,46,47,50,52, 56, 82, 86, 106, 107 Wordsworth, William, 65 Wundt, Wilhelm, 71 Zammito, John H., 68, 70

About the Author ALEXANDER H. BOLYANATZ is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Benedictine University.