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Fare harbor, Huahine, by John Webber
“The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense.”
Robert Louis Stevenson. “In the South Seas.”
Volcanic islands, savage and exotic in form, rising precipitously out of a blue lagoon, coconut palms swaying gently under the Trade Winds, grass skirts, Tiki Huts and Maitai’s. Great tales of adventure: Mutiny on the Bounty, Cooks Voyages of Discovery, Thor Heyerdahl and Kon Tiki, evoke images of Polynesia that have never ceased to stir the imagination of the western mind. For westerners, returning to Paradise, to a state of innocence and nature, contrasts with the bustle, stress and anxiety of modern society. The clash of alien societies, Christian European and Pagan Polynesian, have inspired works from Sumerset Maugham’s "The Trembling of a Leaf" to Rogers and Hammerstein’s Broadway musical South Pacific. For many, paradise and Polynesia go together; it’s on everyones “bucket list”.
When we think of Polynesia, we encounter a very curious thing: Nearly all that we know about ancient Polynesians comes from the writings and observations of Europeans who first made contact with them in the late 18th century. The Polynesians had no written language and very few durable archeological remains to help us understand their culture. Consequently, it was at the moment of contact of two alien cultures, untainted by the other, that we get a very brief glimpse of the “real” Polynesians from the European explorers who first met them. And some of the most important and influential accounts of that first contact may be the writings of The Endeavor Journals in the late 1700's by Captain James Cook and the botanist who accompanied Cook on his first voyage, Sir Joseph Banks. As a master cartographer and explorer, Cook literally put Polynesia on the map of the European mind. As one writer has put it: “ In his life and in his death, Captain Cook brought the South Seas into exuberant and irresponsible popularity.”
Captain James Cook
Sir Joseph Banks
J.C. Beaglehole, The Life of Captain James Cook
Early accounts of the discovery of Polynesia both fascinated and shocked European sensibilities. On the one hand, was the Edenic image of man in his original state; men and women unclothed, living simply off of the land, no agriculture or industry, every thing at hand to live the life of Adam and Eve. But on the other hand, there was the savage and the brutal: Human sacrifice and cannibalism. And there was the sex. European sailors quickly learned that the sexual mores of the Polynesians were quite different from what they were accustomed to back home. Sailors from the HMS Dolphin, anchored off Tahiti in 1767, found that friendly relations between the sexes could be improved by trading sex for nails. Soon, so many nails were being removed from the ship’s planking as to put the structural integrity of the ship in peril!
Some were not amused however. The souls and not just the bodies of the Polynesians were the concern of Europeans. Missionaries were sent in the last decades of the 18th century to convert the Polynesians from what they considered pagan profligacy and savagery. An account of the London Missionary Society regarding their mission to the Marquesas in 1796 is illustrative of the initial contacts made between Polynesian and European cultures:
The ship Duff commanded by Captain Wilson arrived off of the Marquesas to establish a Wesleyan camp there. We are told the first visitors to the ship were “seven beautiful women, swimming quite naked, except for a few green leaves tied around their middle; nor did our mischievous goats even suffer them to keep their green leaves, but as they turned to avoid them they were attacked on each side alternately, and completely stripped naked.” The women then proceeded to help with the rigging; “ It was not a little affecting to see our own seamen repairing the rigging, attended by a group of the most beautiful of females, who were employed to pass the ball, or carry the tar bucket, etc.: and this they did with the greatest of assiduity, often besmearing themselves with tar in the execution of their office. No ships company, without great restraints from God’s grace, could have resisted such temptations.”
In the words of the literary historian, Raymond Weaver: “These women must have stirred up in more than one of the brethren a sense of the aching reality of the total depravity of man.”
One of the brethren, called Harris stayed behind in the Marquesas to further the mission there. But, before the Duff could sail back to Tahiti, Harris was found on the shore at four in the morning “in a most pitiable plight, and like one out of his senses.” It had happened that the chief of the place had gone off on an inland treck, leaving his wife with Harris as a form of Marquesian hospitality. She evidently was troubled at Harris’ reserve so, “finding herself treated with total neglect, became doubtful of his sex, and aquatinted some of the other females with her suspicion, who accordingly came in the night, when he slept, and satisfied themselves concerning that point, but not in such a peaceable way but that they awoke him. Discovering so many strangers, he was greatly terrified; and, perceiving what they were doing, was determined to leave a place where people were so abandoned and given up to wickedness; a cause which should have excited a contrary resolution.”
For Europeans in the late 18th century, the tales coming from Polynesia were a great read.
Princess Poedua, from a painting by John Webber
The read, however, was mostly prosaic. Cook and Banks, for instance,were engaged on a scientific mission. Their journals were descriptive, even laconic at times; mostly interested in the facts as they saw them.
Cook, calmly looking upon a human sacrifice!
Small Heading
The romance and myth of Polynesia in its full orbed form would have to wait another 70 years for one Herman Melville to write his novels Typee and Omoo. According to Raymond Weaver, Melville’s biographer and literary critic, Typee put Polynesia on the literary map. Typee was Melville’s most successful book in his lifetime, becoming a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. In this novel, Melville describes his adventures in the Marquesas after jumping ship with his shipmate Toby in the harbor of the island of Nuku Hiva. They subsequently stumble upon the Typee Valley with the tribe of the same name known for cannibalism. Instead of savages, they find a kind and gentle people who gave them shelter, food and servants. They were treated as royalty.
Melville describes daily life with the Typee tribe as an indolent affair. The Typee sleep late and often during the day. No real labor is needed as food is literally hanging from the trees all around them. The men seem to while away their time at the Ti, an elevated platform resembling a marae or sacred space available only for men and the gods. Melville's evenings are spent with the lovely Fayaway paddling in a canoe in the local lake. The picture given us is natural unspoiled human flourishing in contrast to Melville’s former life aboard ship with a humanity considerably less than flourishing. With Typee, Melville created the romantic account of the South Seas that would become the working narrative of the modern era; Polynesia as the uncorrupted romantic idyll subsequently corrupted by western colonialism and Christian missionaries:
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“[The] voluptuous Indian, with every desire supplied, whom Providence has bountifully provided with all the sources of pure and natural enjoyment, and from whom are removed so many of the ills and pains of life—what has he to desire at the hands of Civilization? Will he be the happier? Let the once smiling and populous Hawaiian islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible.” Ch4, Typee
Fayaway
Fayaway
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After Typee, others shared Melville’s template for the Polynesian experience: Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson had their South Sea Tales. Thor Heyerdahl recapitulated Melville’s experience in his book, Fatu Hiva. As newlyweds, he and his wife fled civilization, sailing “back to nature”, to the Marquasian island of Fatu Hiva in 1937. Their experience ended, like Melville's, with the return to civilization.
Many others have filled in Melville’s template. From Paul Gauguin to Margaret Mead in her Coming of Age in Samoa, to James Michener’s Tales of The South Pacific, reflecting in many cases more of the mores and desires of their own culture than the reality itself. The notion of free love and unspoiled nature in the South Seas, subsequently corrupted by western society and the repressive norms of Christianity, has been the controlling narrative since Melville. A more critical eye might also mention that human sacrifice, infanticide, continual internecine warfare and a rigid hierarchal society were also an integral part of Polynesian society.
Today, the Polynesian experience can be had by arriving at the Faaa Airport in Tahiti, putting on a lei and being wisked to your over-the-water bungalow in the all inclusive resort you never have to leave. Is this the real Polynesia?
In all of this, the Polynesians themselves have had very little voice, partly because they are totally dependent on billions in subsidies from France, as the French and others use their islands as a playground and partly from being conquered and colonized by the said French. However, there has been a renaissance of traditional Polynesian culture in recent years, which I think is very welcome. We made our first trip to Polynesia in 2004. Twelve years have passed since then and one can see many more tattoos on men and women. There appears to be more Tahitian spoken and written. Traditional boat building, racing and and the ancient art of Polynesian navigation are on the rise.
“Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.”
Robert Louis Stevenson. “In the South Seas.”
So, is there a real Polynesia or is the reality buried in the fertile imagination of expatriates like Robert Louis Stevenson? We must affirm both of these realities. We use our imagination to apprehend the things that we hold most true, and this is especially so when coming to grips with a culture. We hold nothing objective here. Without the imagination, without being stirred by the paradisal beauty of Polynesia or disturbed by the dark savagery of the marae and human sacrifice, or awed by the chthonic energy of the islands thrusting themselves up from the depths of an azure sea, the experience of The South Seas would be much diminished. I would like to think that there is more than a kernel of truth in the legend and myth that surrounds Polynesia. There were good reasons why the men on the Bounty set Captain Bligh adrift on an ocean waste and returned to Tahiti to start a new life, or why Stevenson ended his days in the South Seas, and there are good reasons why we return there today. There is something extraordinary about those islands. The following pages is a visual record our own journey to this beautiful and exotic place.
