SAILORS and TRADERS

SAILORS and TRADERS ".BSJUJNF)JTUPSZ PGUIF1BDJ¹D1FPQMFT Alastair Couper Sailors and Traders Sailors and A Maritime History of Traders the Pacific Peoples Alastair Couper University of Hawai‘i Press honolulu © 2009 University of Hawai‘i Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Couper, A. D. Sailors and traders: a maritime history of the Pacific peoples / by Alastair Couper. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3239-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Pacific Islanders—History. 2. Sea Peoples—Pacific Area—History. 3. Sailors—Pacific Area—History. 4. Shipping—Pacific Area—History. I. Title. GN662.C68 2009 995—dc22 2008038710 An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access ISBN for this book is 9780824887650 (PDF). More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. The open access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. For Callum, Rona, Katrina, and Roddy Contents acknowledgments ix nautical glossary and abbreviations xi Introduction: A Seafaring Perspective 1 1 Sailors, Myths, and Traditions 6 2 The First Pacific Seafarers 22 3 Settlements, Territories, and Trade 43 4 The Arrival of Foreign Ships 60 5 Pacific Commercial Shipowners 75 6 Under Foreign Sail 100 7 Dangers, Mutinies, and the Law 118 8 Companies, Colonies, and Crewing 136 9 Island Protests and Enterprises 150 10 Contemporary Local and Regional Shipping 165 11 The Global Pacific Seafarer 186 Epilogue: Some Contemporary Resonances 207 notes 209 bibliography 237 index 253 vii Acknowledgments I was fortunate in being a research scholar at the Australian National University, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, in the halcyon days of the 1960s. It was highly stimulating intellectually and socially to be alongside so many of the greats in Pacific Studies, including Harold Brookfield, Jim Davidson, Jack Golson, Harry Maude, Oskar Spate, and Gerry Ward. Their influences will be evident in this volume. More recent acknowledgments are due to my academic friends and colleagues—Dr. Hance Smith of Cardiff University; Professor Sarah Palmer of the Greenwich Maritime Institute, University of Greenwich, London; and Professor Glyn Williams of Queen Mary, University of London—who read and commented on early drafts, as did Dr. Ronald Hope, former director of the Marine Society. I have drawn also on some of the work by former colleagues at the Seafarers International Research Centre (SIRC) at Cardiff University on the medical aspects of the health of seafarers. I thank also Dr. Paul D’Arcy of the Australian National University for his kind and valuable comments on the draft manuscript, and I appreciate the helpful reviews by an anonymous appraiser from the University of Hawai‘i Press, as well as the professional attention of copy editor Rose- mary Wetherold, who greatly improved the work. I wish to thank Phillipa Grimstone of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge, for arranging the reproduction of the sixteenth- century painting from the Schouten voyage, and Elaine Greig of the Writ- ers’ Museum, Edinburgh, for all her help in providing photographs and notes. These and my own series of photographs were reproduced by Alun Rogers of Cardiff University, who also drafted the maps of the Pacific. I am very grateful to him for this and for much valuable advice, and also to Tim Robinson for photographic assistance. I particularly wish to thank Louise Deeley of SIRC, who helped in so many invaluable ways from start to finish in the production of the book. ix x Acknowledgments There are many friends in the maritime community of the Pacific ashore and as shipmates to whom I have been indebted over the years. I can acknowledge here only the more recent. During 2001, I was welcomed as a visiting colleague by Professor G. Robin Smith and Dr. Joeli Veitayaki to the University of the South Pacific. I thank Captain Carol Dunlop for discussion at her home in Suva, and Captain Tomasi Cama Kete of Fiji for our meetings and the arrangements he made with seafaring colleagues. Also important was the cooperation of Captain John Hogan, Maritime Programme manager, Secretariat of the Pacific Community; Toloa Kaitece and Norate Anteriea of the Seafarers’ Union of Kiribati; Julia Wakolo, Seafarers Union of Fiji; and Dave Morgan of the New Zealand Seafarers Union. Likewise, I am grateful for interviews and correspondence with R. Weiss of the South Pacific Marine Services and Hamburg Süd Line and with John MacLennan, chief executive of the Pacific Forum Line. Finally, my thanks to David Cockroft of the International Transport Workers’ Federation, who assisted in my travel to Kiribati, and Professor Helen Sampson for use of facilities at SIRC. Not least, I am, as always, grateful to my wife, Norma, who carried out work in the islands, sailed the Pacific, and helped in so many ways in the production of this book. Nautical Glossary and Abbreviations altitude The angle between a celestial body and the sea horizon below it. azimuth The magnetic compass bearing of a celestial body, when compared with the true azimuth (bearing) derived from the annual Nautical Almanac, gives the error of the magnetic compass for the course being steered. BIMCO Baltic and International Maritime Council. boatsteerer/harpooner The crewman who first harpoons a whale and then takes over steering the boat while the mate does the killing with a lance. fathom 6 feet (1.829 meters). furling Taking in sails and securing them to the yards by line gaskets. ISF International Shipping Federation. ITF International Transport Workers’ Federation. master The captain of a merchant ship; in the eighteenth century a noncommissioned officer in the British Royal Navy. missed stays Failure to go from one tack to another, when the head hangs and falls back on the previous tack. Dangerous when there is little sea room or when tacking away from a lee shore. xi xii Nautical Glossary and Abbreviations nautical mile 6,080 feet (1.853 km). Unless otherwise stated, all sea distances in this book are in nautical miles. navigator Taken as synonymous with the “captain” of an indigenous vessel, e.g., tia borau (Kiri- bati), rimedo (Marshalls), pelu (elsewhere in Micronesia), and tou tai and variations (Polynesia). ratings Usually there are three departments on a cargo vessel: deck, engine, and catering. Each has three levels of crewing: officers, petty officers, and ratings. On-deck ratings comprise mainly ordinary seamen (OS) and able-bodied seamen (AB); in the engine room they are mainly motormen (MM), firemen, and greasers; and in catering, various assistants. Some of these designa- tions have changed with technology and minimal crewing, but AB and MM have been retained. reefing Shortening sail by gathering it up and tying it with line reef points. scudding Running before a gale when the speed of the vessel equals the speed of the following sea. Creates the danger of losing steering and of a heavy sea coming on board astern (pooping). SPC Secretariat of the Pacific Community. Has consultative and advisory roles in maritime affairs. stability Ability of a vessel to return to an upright position when it heels over. Determined by a righting lever, which is a function of the relationship between the center of gravity and the center of buoyancy. The distributions of cargo, passengers, and free water surfaces can be crucial. Nautical Glossary and Abbreviations xiii supercargo The superintendent of the cargo and the trade room. Knows products and customs of the trading areas (Fijian: vunivola ni waqa). tonnage Before the late eighteenth century the tonnage of merchant ships was usually expressed as the weight of the cargo and stores carried (tons burden). For warships the weight of the ship was added to the total contents (tons displacement), as it still is. The tonnage of modern bulk-carrying ships is expressed by the weight of the cargo, fuel, and stores carried (tons deadweight). The tonnage of the general cargo and passenger ships is, at its basic, expressed as the gross tonnage (GT)—the volume of the total enclosed space of the ship in cubic meters, multiplied by a constant. Introduction A SEAFARING PERSPECTIVE Writing in the American Historical Review of June 2006, Kären Wigen reminds readers that the sea is “swinging into view” and is “being given a history, even as the history of the world is being retold from the perspective of the sea.” 1 When we consider the millennia of exploration and settlement of the islands of the Pacific, and the continuum of maritime activities in the region, it would not be much of an exaggeration to define the history of the Pacific as “a history of seafaring.” It is the role of indigenous seafarers and related traders in Pacific history that is the main theme of this book. Centuries before the Pacific was revealed to Europeans, flotillas of ves- sels carried thousands of men, women, and children, together with plants and animals, to virtually every island in a vast ocean that covers about one-third of the surface of the globe. They settled in homelands with con- siderable diversity, ranging from the high islands of Papua New Guinea to small volcanic peaks that rise from the deep seabed, and a myriad of coral atolls and reef islands.

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