The Loyalty Islands

THE LOYALTY ISLANDS A History of „ > | '* Culture Contacts \ 1840-1900 , ^ ri **; 'd K. R. Howe This book was published by ANU Press between 1965–1991. This republication is part of the digitisation project being carried out by Scholarly Information Services/Library and ANU Press. This project aims to make past scholarly works published by The Australian National University available to a global audience under its open-access policy. The Loyalty Islands A History of Culture Contacts 1840-1900 K.R. Howe Australian National University Press Canberra 1977 First published in Australia 1977 Printed in the United States of America for the Australian National University Press, Canberra ©K.R. Howe 1977 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Howe, Kerry Ross The Loyalty Islands: a history of culture contacts, 1840-1900/by K. R. Howe. - Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1977. Index. Based on the author’s thesis ‘Culture contacts in the Loyalty Islands, 1841-1895’ - Australian National University, 1973. Simultaneously published, Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii. Bibliography. ISBN 0 7081 1331 1. 1. Loyalty Islands - Relations (general) with Europe - History. 2. Europe - Relations (general) with Loyalty Islands - History. 301.2993304 Southeast Asia: Angus & Robertson (S.E. Asia) Pty Ltd, Singapore. Japan: United Publishers Services Ltd, Tokyo. for Merrilyn and Jam es Eliot Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Abbreviations xv PROTAGONISTS 1 Loyalty Islanders before 1840 3 2 New Strangers 13 rival chiefs, rival faiths 3 Mare 1841-1866 21 4 Lifu 1842-1864 35 5 Uvea 1842-1864 46 CHIEFS, CHURCH, AND STATE 6 Lifu 1864-1871 57 7 Uvea 1864-1875 65 8 Mare 1866-1895 71 Interlude: A Review of Political Change 79 ADVENTURE AND ADVANTAGE 9 Travel 86 10 Trade 101 11 Teaching 117 viii Contents THE QUESTION OF IMPACT 12 Firearms 134 13 Disease 145 14 Depopulation? 154 Conclusion 159 Notes 163 Bibliography 183 Index 197 Maps 1 New Caledonia and dependencies 5 2 Mare. Approximate tribal boundaries in the 1850s 23 3 Lifu 37 4 Uvea 48 5 Mare. Si Gwahnia control in the 1870s 74 Figure 1 Population of Loyalty Islands 156 Maps drawn by the Cartographic Office, Department of Human Geography, Australian National University. Preface European portrayal of South Pacific Islanders has long been coloured by various ideas and emotions. In the second half of the eighteenth century many philosophers, writers, and artists believed that the ‘newly discovered’ races in the South Seas were living examples of Rousseau’s Noble Savage. Early evangelical missionaries, seeing the world in narrow moral terms, and more in tune with the hardships of life in the Pacific, created instead the image of a savage who was ignoble, degraded, brutish. By the mid nineteenth century poets had again modified the stereotype by taking the freedom of the Noble Savage, combining it with the wildness of his de graded counterpart and fashioning a Romantic savage. The idea that Pa cific Islanders, whether they be Noble, brutish, or Romantic, were unable to cope with contact with ‘superior’ European culture pre-dated later nineteenth-century evolutionary theories which postulated the ‘survival of the fittest’. But such theories were seized upon as providing ‘scientific’ jus tification and popularised the view: in the second half of the nineteenth century the savage, then, was a mournful creature lying down to die, his race disappearing from the face of the earth as a consequence of losing the struggle for survival with all-powerful Europeans. The early decades of the twentieth century saw a proliferation of neo-Darwinian theories describing and accounting for the dying savage in the Pacific. 1 Today we naturally know that Pacific Island societies did not die out, indeed there is now quite serious overpopulation on some islands. Nevertheless the opinion that X Preface European entry into the Pacific had damaging and in many cases disas trous consequences for the Islanders and their way of life is still popular today. One of the more widely known though scarcely original expositions of this argument is Alan Moorehead’s aptly titled The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767-1840: the instant Is landers and Europeans first beheld each other is seen as ‘a fateful moment when a social capsule is broken open, when primitive creatures, beasts as well as men, are confronted for the first time with civilization’. Europeans who followed in the explorers’ wake —traders, missionaries, and administrators—were ‘intruders’ ruthlessly transforming island societies ‘by firearms, disease or alcohol . by imposing an alien code of laws and morals’ and so destroying the former ‘slow, natural rhythm of life’ in the Pacific.2 The end result, goes the argument, was massive depopulation and, for those Islanders fortunate or unfortunate to enough to find themselves still alive, utter depression and demoralisation in the face of ‘civilisation’. Such present day theories of a fatal impact in the Pacific are more often than not based on unsound historical, anthropological, and demographic scholarship, and, more significantly, on the explicit or implicit notion that ‘savages’ were witless, incapable of taking their own initiatives (except to lash out like sleeping dogs if kicked too hard by Europeans), and necessar ily took a defensive and passive role in their relationship with the suppos edly dominant, superior visitors to their shores. Furthermore, the belief that Europeans were vicious invaders is a burden commonly shouldered by ‘liberal’ writers to assuage feelings of guilt for either real or imagined harm done to Islanders at the hands of their forefathers—a case of inverted racism. Such writers thus frequently reveal more of their emotional and racial view of the world than of the culture contacts they purport to ana lyse. That the coming of the Europeans had detrimental consequences for some Pacific Islanders cannot be denied. But current research suggests that, as a generalisation, the ‘fatal impact’ theory is highly questionable to say the least. For modern Pacific historians and demographers are in the process of painting a very different picture of European impact: the phe nomenon of depopulation on a grand scale is now shown to be in large part a myth,3 and current detailed analyses of many of the Islanders’ so cial, economic, and political developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries indicate, in the words of J.W. Davidson, that ‘The indigenous cultures . were like islands whose coastal regions outsiders might penetrate but whose heartlands they could never conquer’.4 Preface xi The inhabitants of the Loyalty Islands are among those Pacific Islanders whose culture and way of life have been preserved to a remarkable degree in spite of some 130 years of fairly intensive contact with Europeans and their nearness to a major urban region, Noumea. The reasons why Loyalty Islands society has remained relatively undisturbed and unchanged while at the same time adapting to and utilising European presence, ideas, and technology are to be found in the nineteenth-century contact history of the islands and in the nature of the Islanders’ cultural system. This study ex amines the interaction among and between Loyalty Islanders and Euro peans during their first sixty-odd years of contact. Emphasis is placed on the nature of the Islanders’ responses and the consequences for their soci ety. It is among the contentions of this study that at least some Pacific Is landers were not basking in idyllic contemplation of their Arcadia before canvas sails appeared over the horizon; that in most of their responses to European presence Loyalty Islanders generally took their own initiatives in an enthusiastic, even aggressive manner such that any sociopolitical and economic changes, although inspired by Europeans and their technology, were frequently the result of the Islanders’ own actions; and that Loyalty Islands culture had great capacity to absorb innovation and change con structively and creatively: the processes of acculturation do not necessarily result in any form of social dislocation. Many current works which investigate culture contacts revolve around the activities of a single European ‘occupational group’—a missionary so ciety, a trading concern, a colonial government institution and so on. The approach adopted here is to place the Islanders firmly at the forefront and to describe and analyse their reactions to the various waves of Europeans reaching their islands. This book is not intended to be a history of traders, missionaries, and administrators on the Loyalty Islands; it is a history of the way in which Europeans and Loyalty Islanders reacted in the contact situation and the consequences for the Islanders. The Loyalty Islands are eminently suited to such an investigation. In one respect they are some thing of the Pacific in microcosm, for throughout the nineteenth century they were subjected to a constant stream of outsiders—sandalwood traders, beachcombers, whalers, labour recruiters, dealers in island pro duce, LMS Polynesian teachers, English Protestant and French Catholic missionaries, and French administrators. Furthermore the islands are small enough, and there is adequate documentation, to enable an analysis in some detail of aspects of culture contacts more often approached by his torians on a larger scale encompassing greater numbers of participants xii Preface and larger geographic areas; certain generalisations often made about European impact in the Pacific can thus be tested at a local level. Conclu sions drawn from the Loyalty' Islands must, however, remain specific, al though some parallels with other Pacific islands are apparent. One of the difficulties of writing about a little-known area of the Pacific is to strike a balance between a chronology and an analysis of events.

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