Victorian Literature and Culture (2007), 35, 157–173. Printed in the United States of America. Copyright C 2007 Cambridge University Press. 1060-1503/07 $9.50

PIRACY, SLAVERY, AND THE IMAGINATION OF EMPIRE IN STEVENSON’s PACIFIC FICTION

By Roslyn Jolly

I.

OFFICIALLY, BRITAIN WAS a reluctant coloniser in the Pacific. Unwilling to take on the expense and responsibility of colonial administration, or to interfere with the imperial ambitions of other European powers in the region, successive British governments in the nineteenth century turned down offers of protectorates and other opportunities to colonize Pacific lands. But the energies and ambitions of individual British subjects were not similarly constrained, and the many who went to the Pacific to evangelize, to plant, and to trade established a strong unofficial British presence in the region. Acts of private colonization and a range of quasi-colonialist activities by Britons eventually forced their government to alter imperial policy and take on island protectorates and colonies, but except for the annexation of in 1874, this did not begin to happen until the late 1880s. For most of the century, Britain contented itself with passing a series of laws which attempted to control what its subjects did on the other side of the world, while minimizing responsibility for the administration of colonies.1 This tension between the expansive energies of individuals and the curbing power of law, which characterized British activity in the Pacific in the nineteenth century, is evident in R. L. Stevenson’s Pacific fiction. His novellas “The Beach of Falesa”´ (1892) and The Ebb-Tide (1894) depict the shadow empire created by traders and missionaries operating outside imperial boundaries. The realm of unofficial colonialism in the Pacific, as elsewhere, was marked by the practices of and slavery – twin spectres which also haunted the official British Empire and its claims to moral legitimacy. British policy in the Pacific became driven by the need to separate the empire proper from these practices, which government and public opinion disavowed, but which some renegade British subjects embraced. However, in Stevenson’s fiction, exploration of the moral and legal dubiety of the unofficial empire suggests a critique of imperialism itself. In both cases, the relation between piracy, slavery, and empire centred on the most highly charged topic in European relations with the nineteenth-century Pacific: labour. The problem of obtaining labour was the great problem in the economics of colonialism. It always confronted those who wished to exploit new territory economically but were faced

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either with virgin land whose resources had not yet been developed, or with a population deemed, in capitalist terms, to be unproductive. In the Pacific, the problem was to find the labour to harvest indigenous island products such as copra (coconut-meat) on a scale large enough for trade with Europe, or to produce newly-introduced tropical crops, such as sugar and coffee, that were not part of traditional island agriculture. It was axiomatic to nineteenth- century Europeans that white men could not endure physical labour in tropical climates (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 74; [Knatchbull-Hugessen] 434). Pacific islanders did not produce surpluses of their traditional crops large enough to trade on the scale Europeans wished, nor were they generally attracted by the idea of going to work for cash in foreign-run enterprises. As one contemporary observer expressed it, “Living in a tropical land, where Nature supplies unaided the few simple necessities of savage life, and not having acquired a sense of the dignity and importance of labour, it can hardly be supposed that [the Polynesian] would hasten at the first call to enrich with the sweat of his brow those who are to him only encroaching and tyrannical masters” (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 75). Some degree of enticement, deception, or compulsion was needed to get indigenous labourers in sufficient numbers to work where and under the conditions Europeans wanted. Thus emerged the nefarious “labour” or “kidnapping” trade, which moved islanders about the Pacific and its rim to work in commercial enterprises owned and controlled by whites. The trade began in the 1860s and 70s, reached its height in the 1880s, and continued until the early twentieth century. The British and Australians demanded labourers for their sugar plantations in Fiji and Queensland, the French for their nickel mines in New Caledonia, and the Germans for their coconut plantations in and Tonga. Peruvians and other South Americans also trafficked in island workers. Labour traders were first active among the islands of the central Pacific, such as the Tokelau and Ellice Island groups. Later the trade moved westwards, and by the 1890s (when Stevenson was writing his Pacific stories) it was concentrated in Melanesia. The practice was given many names: “the labour trade” and “recruiting” were euphemisms for what others called “,” “kidnapping,” or simply “slaving.” At its most benign the trade was a system for gathering indentured labour; at its worst, it was a virtual revival of the slave trade. Decoys and false contracts were often used, islanders were regularly tricked or forced aboard the labour ships, and some kidnapping raids devastated whole island communities (Palmer, Scarr, Maude). On their third Pacific cruise, a voyage through the central and western Pacific in 1890, the Stevensons heard many stories of the labour trade, and saw some of its effects for themselves. They contrasted the open, trusting manners of the people of Manihiki with the frightened and suspicious demeanour of those at Natau in the Ellice Islands, Fanny Stevenson recalling that the latter had been “a favourite recruiting place for slavers” (126). At Funafuti, also in the Ellice Islands, a local trader told Fanny that only four years earlier American slavers had come, distributing gifts and promising education to the local people; they lured two-thirds of the population on board their labour vessel, “and the entrapped islanders were never seen again” (121).2 Twenty years earlier, similar stories, and worse, from missionaries, naval officers, and other firsthand observers, had shocked and disgusted the British public, prompting debates in parliament and the press on the need to suppress or regulate the Pacific labour trade.3 Domestic opinion was galvanized by accounts of atrocities, “outrages which were a disgrace to humanity” (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 76), committed against Pacific people by recruiters both on board the slave-ships and ashore in the islands. The murder by islanders Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 159

of Bishop Patteson of Melanesia in 1871, generally believed to be in retaliation for abuses by labour traders, further shocked the British and prompted the introduction of the first of the two Pacific Islanders Protection Acts (1872, 1875) which sought to bring the labour trade under legislative control.4 The record of public discussion of the labour trade during the passage of these Acts in the 1870s shows how important it was to the Victorians, in imagining their empire, to oppose imperialism to slavery. Queen Victoria’s speech at the opening of Parliament in 1872 addressed this:

The slave-trade, and practices scarcely to be distinguished from slave-trading, still pursued in more than one quarter of the world, continue to attract the attention of my Government. In the South Sea Islands the name of the British Empire is even now dishonoured by the connexion of some of my subjects with these nefarious practices; and in one of them the murder of an exemplary Prelate has cast fresh light upon some of their baleful consequences. A Bill will be presented to you for the purpose of facilitating the trial of offences of this class in Australasia; and endeavours will be made to increase, in other forms, the means of counteraction. (qtd. in [Knatchbull-Hugessen] 432)

Introducing that Bill the MP Edward Knatchbull-Hugessen declared: “It was not to be tolerated that the British name should be dishonoured by such practices. England, which had incurred so much trouble and cost in putting down the Slave Trade, would not permit under any guise a slave trade to be carried on wherever its power was sufficient to interfere” (Hansard’s, 15 February 1872, 523). Various speakers in the parliamentary debate that followed likewise identified the labour trade as a new form of slavery which dishonoured the Empire and disgraced the flag.5 But, while the metropolitan consensus was that the British Empire could not be associated with slavery in any way, aligning rhetoric and reality was not so easy, as a writer in the Westminster Review in 1872 admitted:

Ever since the days of Wilberforce we have been waging war with slavery, and still the monster, scotched, not killed, lurks like Proteus among the rocks of ocean, and assuming all the forms of that fabled son of Poseidon, eludes again and again the vigilance of his pursuers. To appease the angry spirits of War and Pestilence he has evoked, we have sacrificed too often of our fairest on the deadly shores of Sierra Leone; but Vengeance arises to claim more, and blameless victims among the smiling islets of the Pacific. (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 73)

In truth, the abolition within the British empire of the slave trade in 1807, then of slavery itself in the 1830s, had not brought to an end the British complicity with and profit from an institution for which most Victorians professed moral abhorrence. In the early Victorian period Herman Merivale, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford University, warned that “by these public atonements, our state may have discharged its duties, but we, the people, have not earned the right of calling ourselves saints, and the rest of the world sinners. We cannot rid ourselves so easily of our liabilities” (303). Merivale pointed out that both Britain’s industrial edifice and its consumer culture (based on tropical products such as coffee and cotton) were deeply implicated in the continued existence of slavery in other parts of the world (302).6 His argument about the economic power and privilege that Victorian Britain derived from slavery provides a context in which to view later assertions such as Knatchbull- Hugessen’s that “British blood and British money [had] been freely lavished” in attempts to suppress slavery (429). Such an emphasis on the economic and human cost Britain incurred 160 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

in maintaining its role as a global policeman against slavery deflected attention from the (much greater) economic benefits Britain had long derived from the continued existence of slavery. Similarly, it was easier to tackle visible manifestations of slavery, such as the Pacific labour trade, than to admit the invisible hand of slavery at work in building the system of domestic and imperial prosperity sketched by Merivale. National self-image demanded that, with the emergence of the slave trade in the Pacific, Britain reiterate and act upon its avowed anti-slavery position; as the Westminster Review article suggests, this could involve some sense of paying for past sins. Although prompted specifically by the need to regulate the labour trade and prevent it from becoming a revival of the slave trade, the Pacific Islanders Protection Acts of 1872 and 1875 had a much broader impact, and indeed became the basis of all British legal relations with the uncolonized Pacific for the rest of the nineteenth century. Because of the need to extend government control over the labour-trading activities of British subjects in independent Pacific states, the 1875 Act provided that “It shall be lawful for Her Majesty to exercise power and jurisdiction over her subjects within any islands and places in the Pacific Ocean not being within Her Majesty’s dominions, nor within the jurisdiction of any civilized power, in the same and as ample a manner as if such power or jurisdiction had been acquired by the cession or conquest of territory” (clause 6). The same clause established the office of High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, with the power to punish not just slaving, but a much wider range of offences by British subjects against Pacific islanders. The purpose of the Acts was to extend the power of the British government over its renegade subjects, not over the indigenous people of the Pacific, for the new laws were “directed primarily to the repression of malpractices by British subjects against native Islanders” while “saving [the] rights of tribes.”7 Those drafting the legislation went out of their way to disavow imperialist designs on the Pacific islands: clause 7 of the 1875 Act states that nothing in the Act, or in Orders in Council derived from it, “shall extend or be construed to extend to invest Her Majesty, her heirs or successors, with any claim or title whatsoever to dominion or sovereignty over any such islands or places as aforesaid, or to derogate from the rights of the tribes or people inhabiting such islands or places, or of chiefs or rulers thereof, to such sovereignty or dominion.” The Acts and the Regulations and Orders in Council that followed from them therefore gave the British government some control over the unofficial empire that had been established in the Pacific by missionaries, planters, and traders, while maintaining the official line against imperial expansion in the Pacific. Not all Pacific traders were involved in the labour trade, either directly or indirectly, but all would be affected by the legislation that was devised to control it. A new jurisdiction had been created, covering every British resident in the region: “thenceforth I mean to be a subject of the High Commissioner,” Stevenson wrote when he made his decision to settle permanently in Samoa in 1890 (Letters 6: 353). He was less happy about his new political identity when he later became, or so he believed, the specific target of a regulation issued by the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, designed to curb the free speech of British subjects who criticised the Samoan government (Letters 8: 22–28). Writing to the Times in 1893 about the so-called Sedition Regulation, Stevenson commented on the strange political and legal status of “that singular limbo, the Western Pacific” (Letters 8: 24). It had already been a concern of his fiction, in “The Beach of Falesa”´ (1892), and would be again in The Ebb-Tide (1894). Both works explore the relation between official and unofficial British imperialism in the Pacific, “that singular limbo” in which British law recognized, Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 161

sometimes endorsed, more often sought to curb, the colonizing energies of its subjects, and in which British governments selectively intervened in island affairs, while maintaining “the semi-fiction of recognizing Pacific polities as independent states” (Campbell 142). In “The Beach of Falesa”´ and The Ebb-Tide, Stevenson’s major studies of inter-racial relations in the Pacific and his most important contributions to the literature of empire, the main white characters are traders. There are no authorized agents of British imperialism in these works: no colonial administrators, no settlers of legally constituted British colonies. “Imperialism” is materially present in the stories only in the form of the administrative and disciplinary structures of French Polynesia, glimpsed in The Ebb-Tide; but it is a powerful ideological presence in the form of symbols, discourses and institutions of the British Empire which are invoked, mimicked and manipulated by the traders in pursuit of power and profit. The traders in both stories clothe their commercial and, in some cases, political activities in an imperial garb to which they have no legitimate claim. This is not only because their islands are located outside the zones of official European colonization (“The Beach of Falesa”´ is set on a populous native-ruled island with only a few white residents, while The Ebb-Tide imagines an uninhabited island settled by a white trader and his transported native labourers), but also because the traders operate outside the laws that defined British imperial legitimacy. When viewed in relation to the body of legislation built up in the later nineteenth century to regulate the activities of British subjects in the region, the colonialist practices of Stevenson’s Pacific traders emerge as not only informal, but illegal. The relation between these practices and the British Empire is “only,” but deeply, imaginary; tracing this relation helps to chart the form of another imperial imaginary, the Victorian vision of empire created and expressed through law.

II.

THE PLOT OF “The Beach of Falesa”´ centres on the competition between two copra (coconut- meat) traders, Wiltshire and Case, for commercial supremacy in a Polynesian village. Soon after taking up his station Wiltshire learns that Case is plotting to put him out of business, just as he had eliminated every previous rival for the local trade. Case’s success in monopolizing trade and dominating the village stems from his ability to exploit the hybrid cultural conditions that prevail on an independent island still governed by native chiefs but heavily influenced by the imported practices of both traders and missionaries. Case manipulates all three cultures (native, trader, and missionary) for his own ends. He speaks the local language and works to have the indigenous sanction-system of taboos directed against his enemies. His control of desirable Western goods puts influential villagers, such as the native pastor, in his debt, while his trade goods also allow him to create a religious cult bringing him immense personal power through his access to technologically produced “wonders” (47). He even usurps the missionary function of conducting marriages, using the mystifying glamour of writing to persuade the native girl Uma that she is being legally married to Wiltshire. Combining the trader’s economic and technological prestige with mimicry of indigenous and missionary authority, Case gains a colonizing power, and many islanders live in a state of “subjection” to his will (40). Case’s domination of Falesa´ is sanctioned by no official imperial authority, and, indeed, his trading activities violate British laws of the time. On visiting his store, Wiltshire finds that it is stocked mainly with “contraband, firearms and liquor” (8). The sale of guns and alcohol 162 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

to Pacific islanders was forbidden by British law,8 and although it is uncertain whether Case is a British subject – “No man knew his country, beyond he was of English speech” (5)9 – the term “contraband” places his trading activities outside the law and divorces his power from imperial authorization. Yet Case associates himself with that authority through mimicry, just as he mimics indigenous and missionary forms of authority. He employs the discourse of imperialism when he offers to help Wiltshire find out why he has been tabooed: “‘Understand me, Wiltshire; I don’t count this your quarrel,’ he went on, with a great deal of resolution, ‘I count it all of our quarrel, I count it the White Man’s Quarrel, and I’ll stand to it through thick and thin, and there’s my hand on it.’” Wiltshire is “pretty well pleased with his attitude” (22), because Case pitches his performance to the key of Wiltshire’s own imperialist language, which the latter employs at the meeting with the chiefs: “‘You tell them who I am. I’m a white man, and a British subject, and no end of a big chief at home; and I’ve come here to do them good, and bring them civilization ...tell them plain that I demand the reason of this treatment as a white man and a British subject’” (23–24). The circularity of the rhetoric, even more than the outright lie (that he is “no end of a big chief at home”), signals the disconnection of this speech from reality. Indeed, British law in the Pacific was framed to confer not rights but responsibilities on British subjects. The thrust of the Acts was to make British subjects in the Pacific just that – subjects of British law, even when they were not on islands under British dominion. Wiltshire’s insistence on his status as a British subject is therefore ironic; intended as a claim to rights and powers in the village, it is actually, according to the law of the time and place, an insistence on his own subjection to British jurisdiction, and by law it cannot function as a claim to extend that jurisdiction over the inhabitants of Falesa.´ Wiltshire’s relation to the British empire – like Case’s – is largely imaginary. The difference between the two traders is that Case is aware of the fictional nature of his status as an imperialist, while Wiltshire never seems to grasp that his connection to the empire is little more than rhetorical. His expectations of commercial success in Falesa´ are ideologically grounded in his belief that nothing should stand in the way of “a white man, and a British subject” (23). Wiltshire tries to make his legal status as “a British subject” and his racial status as “a white man” mutually reinforcing, but the effect is of insecurity, as in this outburst to the missionary, Tarleton: “‘I’m just a trader; I’m just a common, low, God-damned white man and British subject, the sort you would like to wipe your boots on’” (35). This reveals that Wiltshire’s assertions of entitlement are attempts to mask a sense of non-entitlement, based on insecurities about his place in the British class system and about the legitimacy of his current activities in the Pacific, both of which are highlighted by comparison with the social, moral and legal security represented by the missionary. As the story progresses, Wiltshire finds that the rhetoric of imperial identity is of little relevance to his survival in Falesa.´ To combat Case’s plot he must acquire local knowledge. He finally overthrows Case’s trading monopoly and subjection of the village by making an alliance with a missionary (Tarleton) and a local chief (Maea), this political alliance being underwritten by a personal alliance, his marriage to a native woman, Uma. Yet Wiltshire never discards the rhetoric of white superiority, even at the end of the story identifying legitimacy with an imaginary community of white males to whom he would like to marry his daughters. Case, on the other hand, is well aware of the rhetorical nature of his connection to imperialism, and after the meeting at the Speak House he disowns his share of “the White Man’s Quarrel” (22). “‘[Y]ou’re a nice kind of a white man!’” is Wiltshire’s indignant response (27), but Case, having achieved his aim of isolating Wiltshire by making him Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 163

the object of a taboo, has no further need for the imperialist rhetoric that duped Wiltshire into regarding him as an ally. In divesting himself of the imperialist role, he points out its fictionality to Wiltshire, for white men have no legal foundation to encroach on native sovereignty in Falesa:´

“The Kanakas won’t go near you, that’s all. And who’s to make ‘em? We traders have a lot of gall, I must say; we make these poor Kanakas take back their laws, and take up their taboos, and that, whenever it happens to suit us. But you don’t mean to say you expect a law obliging people to deal in your store whether they want to or not? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve got the gall for that?” (26)

Case’s grasp of the legal situation in uncolonized territory such as Falesa´ is far clearer than Wiltshire’s, which is both self-contradictory, and at odds with historical fact. Case recognizes that the locals have their own laws, and that the white man’s power to override those laws, which is based purely on “gall,” is not unlimited. But Wiltshire pays only lip-service to the concept of native law, and does not accept its power to limit his actions. “‘Tell them I don’t mean to fly in the face of anything legal; and if what they want’s a present, I’ll do what’s fair’” (23). Aware of indigenous systems of gift-giving and reciprocity, Wiltshire directly acknowledges their “legal” force in his speech to the chiefs. But his private view is different: “They haven’t any real government or any real law, that’s what you’ve got to knock into their heads; and even if they had, it would be a good joke if it was to apply to a white man. It would be a strange thing if we came all this way and couldn’t do what we pleased” (24). Not only is this sentiment given the lie by the Acts of 1872 and 1875, which were expressly designed to prevent British subjects from doing “what [they] pleased” in the Pacific, but Wiltshire’s claim that the islanders lack their own government and law is also contradicted by the context in which it is made. During the meeting at the Speak House the chiefs, “easy and genteel, but solemn underneath” (24), display and exercise both their authority over the village and their political independence from the traders and missionaries who live amongst them. Case’s comments about the “gall” of the white man could apply equally to missionaries as to traders (indeed, it was the missionaries who made Pacific islanders take up their taboos and revoke indigenous legal systems in the nineteenth century). However, “The Beach of Falesa”´ confers an authority on the missionary that it denies to the traders, for all legitimating functions in the story devolve upon the missionary, Tarleton. While native authority in Falesa´ is embodied in speech (the Speak House), white power is represented by writing, and one of Tarleton’s major functions in the story is to displace Case’s fraudulent texts with legal documents. Among the most important expressions of Case’s unlawful power is the marriage certificate he produces for Wiltshire and Uma: “This is to certify that Uma daughter of Fa’avao of Falesa´ island of –, is illegally married to Mr John Wiltshire for one night, and Mr John Wiltshire is at liberty to send her to hell next morning” (11). This most notorious portion of Stevenson’s text, censored in the first serial and book publications,10 parodies legal authority, just as the ceremony performed by Case’s trading partner Black Jack travesties religious authority. Black Jack pretends to read, not from the bible, but from “an odd volume of a novel” (11), so that his authority to conduct the marriage is, literally, a fiction. Stevenson based this on a story he had heard in the Gilbert Islands and recounted in In the South Seas, of a native woman married to a trader “on a work of mine in a pirated edition” instead of a bible (200). There is no mention of a “pirated edition” in the version of the story Stevenson 164 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

gave some years later to Mary Elizabeth Braddon,11 so this may have been an embellishment used in his travel book to increase the effect of illegitimacy (not only has the sacred text been replaced by a work of fiction, but even the work of fiction is not legitimate); it shows Stevenson playing with the figure of piracy which becomes, in The Ebb-Tide, a key image for the white man’s illegal exercise of power in the uncolonized Pacific. The piracy image is not used in “The Beach of Falesa”´ in either the textual or the adventure sense, although it is suggested by Black Jack’s piratical name and his contempt for legal and civil institutions. Of the marriage certificate we learn “[i]t was Case that wrote it, signatures and all, in a leaf out of the ledger” (11), so it is continuous with the fraudulent commercial documents through which Case swindles his trading partners (5). As a false contract, it also parallels the fraudulent documents which were central to the conduct of the labour trade, and through which so many Pacific islanders were tricked into terms and conditions of service that they had not voluntarily and rationally accepted. As Palmer wrote in his angry, sarcastic summary of the accepted practices of recruiters before the Acts of the 1870s,

You may ...cook up agreements between yourself and the natives you may have the good fortune to cajole or kidnap, in which you may tell any number of lies you like. Dates are not of the slightest consequence; it is true they are on shore among white men, but when ignorant savages are concerned you may antedate them or leave the dates out altogether, just as suits your convenience. (162)

These contracts or “engagements” were the most effective means for labour traders to deceive both the natives they recruited and the legal authorities supposed to regulate them, allowing virtual slavery to be practised under the guise of the rule of law. In an age which made contract the cornerstone of its modern social and commercial relations (Petch “Walks of Life” 160), this threatened a sinister revival of more primitive institutions. Palmer’s book closes by quoting the Victorian jurist Sheldon Amos on this point:

The name “contract” may put men off their guard, and obstruct all investigation into the presence or absence of that unhampered exercise of the reason which contract, in truth, essentially implies. Services recklessly, imprudently, ignorantly, or compulsorily promised, if enforced after the alleged promise, by a severe and partial law of contract, this law being administered by interested or incompetent officials, may result, as was the case in early Rome, in the most intolerable, because the most plausible and unassailable, kind of slavery. (194–95)

The emphasis Stevenson places on Wiltshire’s and Uma’s marriage as a contract is in keeping with contemporary thinking, in that the Victorians increasingly regarded marriage as a contract rather than a sacrament. Both progressives and conservatives shared this view; they disagreed only about the nature of the contract.12 Wiltshire calls his marriage a “bargain” (11) – an agreement between two parties, a compact13 – but it is a bad bargain for Uma, whose sexual services have been engaged, like the labour of thousands of recruited islanders, on terms not explained to her, indeed deliberately concealed from her. Typically, Pacific labourers found that they were forced to serve their white masters much longer than they had anticipated; the deception practised on Uma is the opposite – were she to have the marriage contract translated to her (which never happens) she would learn that her husband was only obliged to keep her “for one night” and could “send her to hell next morning” (11). But in both cases the use of a false contract, embodied in a fraudulent document, is the same, and it Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 165

is possible to read Stevenson’s infamous marriage certificate not only as a comment on the inequalities of power in sexual relations between races, but also as a displaced expression of concern about the labour trade and the legal abuses it involved. Wiltshire repents of the deception and makes a new contract with Uma, one to which she can give her informed and rational consent. Having been “wrong married” by Case, the two are subsequently “married ...right” by Mr Tarleton (36), who issues a new, legitimate marriage certificate to replace Case’s illegal, blasphemous one.14 This foreshadows the missionary’s role as a figure of legal authority at the end of the story. The plot of the traders’ rivalry is resolved through adventure and violence, including a number of acts of dubious legality by Wiltshire, but the novella’s closure is achieved through the missionary’s ordering of texts as legal documents. After Case’s death, Wiltshire narrates, Tarleton “took down my evidence, and Uma’s, and Maea’s, wrote it all out fine, and had us sign it; and then he got the chiefs and marched over to Papa Randall’s to seize Case’s papers” (69). Tarleton’s deposition restores the legal order disrupted by Case’s marriage certificate and his displacement of the trader’s authority in the village is complete when, backed by the indigenous authority of the chiefs, he “seize[s]” the papers that embodied Case’s commercial power. One of Case’s texts is allowed to stand as a legal document, although it is actually based on fraud. Case “had made a will, like a Christian, and the widow got the lot: all his, they said, and all Black Jack’s, and the most of Billy Randall’s in the bargain, for it was Case that kept the books” (5). Through “the books of the business and the will,” Wiltshire explains, “the whole thing (stock, lock, and barrel) appeared to belong to the Samoa woman [Case’s wife]. It was I that bought her out at a mighty reasonable figure, for she was in a hurry to get home. As for Randall and the black, they had to tramp” (69–70). This selective legal recognition of Case’s texts – the fraudulent marriage certificate must be overthrown, but the fraudulent will is allowed to stand – gives Wiltshire undisturbed domestic and financial security in Falesa,´ extirpates the claims of the surviving rival traders, and removes all traces of Case’s regime. With Case gone there is no longer a white “master of the village” (40), for although Wiltshire insists on the “respect” due to him as a white man (27) he has no aspirations to political domination. The alliance between Wiltshire and Tarleton lends some of the missionary’s legitimating moral authority to the trader’s commercial endeavours and helps to ensure his relatively harmless interpellation into indigenous society. In his lecture “Missions in the South Seas” (1893) Stevenson argued the other side of the benefits of such a relationship, the assistance the trader could give the missionary. From different angles both lecture and story advocate the need for Pacific traders and missionaries to eliminate their long-standing, “envenomed” quarrel and find ways to work “more or less in unison,” for the good of the communities into which they had insinuated themselves (Balfour 2: 195). But Wiltshire remains a figure uneasily aligned with the law, as represented by the missionary. Tarleton extracts from Wiltshire a pledge to “deal fairly with the natives” in his copra trading, but the trader – who has always weighted the scales of trade in his own favour – does not fully honour his promise:

I used to be bothered about my balances, but I reasoned it out this way: We all have queerish balances, and the natives all know it, and water their copra in a proportion so that it’s fair all round; but the truth is, it did use to bother me, and, though I did well in Falesa,´ I was half glad when the firm moved me on to another station, where I was under no kind of a pledge and could look my balances in the face. (70) 166 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

In “Missions in the South Seas” Stevenson defended traders against their detractors, arguing that many of them were “fairly decent and more than fairly decent persons” and that indeed “these despised whites” represented a “reservoir of moral power” (Balfour 2: 194). And, commenting on “The Beach of Falesa,”´ he claimed that Wiltshire “had surely, under his beastly ignorant ways, right noble qualities” (Letters 7: 282). But these noble qualities are far more evident in his personal relationships than in his trading practices, which are unreformed by his contact with the missionary; Wiltshire’s “queerish balances,” which prevent him from dealing honestly with the natives, make him (in accordance with his nickname on the beach), a “Welsher” (35) on his promise to Tarleton. In this story the trader, whether relatively benign like Wiltshire or malevolent like Case, is never a fully legitimate figure and stands in a purely imaginary relation to the imperial power structures whose authority he tries to borrow.

III.

THIS IS ALSO true in The Ebb-Tide, which involves several traders, all engaged in illegal activities. A disgraced captain, Davis, and two unemployed clerks, Herrick and Huish, living in squalor “on the beach” in Papeete, are given the job of taking a smallpox-infected ship to Sydney. They decide to steal the ship and sell its cargo of champagne in Peru. “‘It’s nothing new,’ argues Davis; ‘it’s done every year in the Pacific. Stephens stole a schooner the other day, didn’t he? Hayes and Pease stole vessels all the time’” (148). Hayes and Pease were the most famous “pirates” of the nineteenth-century Pacific, as well as being notorious slavers: their mention strengthens the story’s presentation of Pacific traders as outlaws, and also foreshadows the labour trade theme developed later in the novella.15 The beachcombers’ social promotion to traders thus instantly mutates into a moral demotion to criminals. Shortly into their voyage the “adventurers,” as they are repeatedly called, discover that they have themselves been duped; the cargo of champagne is mostly empty bottles, part of an elaborate fraud by the ship’s owner and former mariners to “lose” the ship with its fictional cargo and claim the insurance. But the previous captain and mate died before the fraud could be carried out, and our three adventurers find themselves “their heirs” (179). It is what the Romans called a “universal succession”: “The notion was that, though the physical person of the deceased had perished, his legal personality survived and descended unimpaired on his Heir or Co-heirs, in whom his identity (so far as the law was concerned) was continued” (Maine 151).16 The “legal personality” inherited is that of piracy; and indeed two of the adventurers, Davis and Huish, become increasingly ingenious and diabolical in their criminal plots. Unable to sell the worthless cargo, the trio decide to carry out their predecessors’ plan to “lose” the ship, then blackmail its owner for the insurance money. But this scheme, too, is interrupted by circumstances before it can be carried out. Short of supplies, they head for the nearest land, an island under the rule of another trader, Attwater. The Cambridge-educated Attwater and his partner Dr Symonds are gentlemen-colonists. First seen in immaculate “white clothes, the full dress of the tropics” (191), Attwater appears to epitomise imperial legitimacy. Like Mr Tarleton, who is first seen “in his white clothes, reading in a book” (33), Attwater’s costume and manner proclaim an authority based on class and education, which Stevenson’s traders acknowledge but resent. Wiltshire says, “when I saw the missionary step out of this boat in the regular uniform, white duck clothes, pith helmet, white shirt and tie, and yellow boots to his feet, I could have bunged stones at him” (34), and Huish’s reaction to Attwater’s aristocratic bearing is even more bitter: “‘Aw! Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 167

don’t know ye, do I? God damn ye, did God make ye?’ No, that couldn’t be nothing but genuine; a man got to be born to that” (197). Attwater is secure in his gentlemanly status and anticipates a full reinsertion into the upper echelons of British society once his colonialist venture is wound up: “‘I may look to make an excellent marriage when I go home’” (210). Yet his relation to the ideology of British imperialism is not at all secure. The clear-cut ideological opposition between missionary (representing legitimate colonialist activity) and trader (operating outside the social and legal structures of imperial power) is confused by Attwater. He merges the roles of trader and missionary, and has made his island the site of “a business, and a colony, and a mission of [his] own” (204), thereby combining the three main modes of foreign interference in the Pacific (commercial, political, and religious). But in all three areas he acts without official sanction: he does not represent a trading firm, a Western government, or a church or missionary society. Attwater’s island has not entered the realm of imperial knowledge; it is not even marked on the map (184) and the entry in Davis’s sailing directory (quoted verbatim from the 1884 edition of Findlay’s Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean) states that there have been reports of such an island “which from private interests would remain unknown” but that its existence is “very doubtful, and totally disbelieved in by South Sea traders” (185).17 Davis, Herrick, and Huish realise that “[t]he island being undeclared, it was not possible [Attwater] could hold any office or be in a position to demand their papers” (191), and that, rather than embodying the law, he must be himself another kind of outlaw. Attwater’s and Symonds’s failure to declare their pearling island puts them on the wrong side of British law,18 but, more importantly, their engagement in the labour trade violates the most important law governing the activities of British subjects in the region, the Pacific Islanders Protection Acts. As their pearl fishery is secret, Attwater and Symonds cannot possibly have obtained licenses for or made legal contracts with the labourers they “collect” from all over the western Pacific and transport to their island (215). The contrast between the flawed, but relatively benign, Wiltshire in “The Beach of Falesa”´ and the diabolical Attwater is brought out by considering their different responses to the problem of obtaining labour. Unable to get anyone to work for him, because of the taboo engineered by Case, Wiltshire goes to work with his wife and her mother making copra. As Case says to him, tauntingly, “‘You haven’t got one pound of copra but what you made with your own hands, like a negro slave’” (56). Whereas Wiltshire takes on the position of a “slave” to solve his labour problem, Attwater becomes a slaver, and the horrors of the “blackbirding” process are grimly implied in this conversation with Davis:

“Where do you get your labour from anyway?” asked Davis. “Ah, where not?” answered Attwater. “Not much of a soft job, I suppose?” said the captain. “If you will tell me where getting labour is!” said Attwater with a shrug. “And of course, in our case, as we could name no destination, we had to go far and wide and do the best we could. We have gone as far west as the Kingsmills and as far south as Rapa-iti. Pity Symonds isn’t here! He is full of yarns. That was his part, to collect them. Then began mine, which was the educational.” (215)

If labour redeems Wiltshire,19 slaveholding damns Attwater. He has committed the murder of at least one islander in the pursuit of his personally determined “justice” (218–19), and it is clear that his system of discipline on the island allows his labourers no legal rights. He 168 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

even forces two of his workers to marry, against the woman’s will (210) and thus not only, like Case in “The Beach of Falesa,”´ usurps the missionary’s function of performing marriage ceremonies, but takes away the islanders’ rights to contract marriages freely. Davis, full of admiration for Attwater as a “driver” of men, contrasts the degree of personal authority, or daring, or cruelty, required by one acting outside the law, as Attwater does, with that needed by a legally authorized master of men, like a sea captain:

“I tell you, this racket of Mr Attwater’s takes the cake. In a ship, why, there ain’t nothing to it! You’ve got the law with you, that’s what does it. But put me down on this blame’ beach alone, with nothing but a whip and a mouthful of bad words, and ask me to ...no, sir! it’s not good enough! I haven’t got the sand for that!” cried Davis. “It’s the law behind,” he added; “it’s the law does it, every time!” ...“Well, one got the law after a fashion,” said Attwater. (216)

The “fashion” in which Attwater “got the law” is revealed to be, in true frontier style, at the point of a gun. Like Conrad’s Kurtz, whom he prefigures, Attwater has moved beyond official colonial structures to create a personal empire which serves a will to absolute power. However, Attwater’s savagery is more effectively disguised than Kurtz’s, as it works through a system of high order and apparent civility. His colony resembles the post-conversion pictures used in so many nineteenth-century Pacific missionary texts to illustrate the civilizing effects of commerce and Christianity:20

The appearance ...[was that] of a substantial country farm with its attendant hamlet: a long line of sheds and store-houses; apart, upon the one side, a deep-veranda’ed dwelling-house; on the other, perhaps a dozen native huts; a building with a belfry and some rude offer at architectural features that might be thought to mark it out for a chapel .... From a flagstaff at the pierhead, the red ensign of England was displayed. (189–90)

But according to many British politicians, the British flag was “disgraced” by traffic in labouring bodies of the kind conducted by Attwater and Symonds (Hansard’s, 22 April 1872, 1670; “Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 81). The activities of traders like Attwater defined for the Victorians what they imagined their empire was not, but also reminded them, uncomfortably, what it had once been, and to what, in large measure, it owed its existence. Under Attwater’s illegal rule, the island is a simulacrum of the British empire, an unlawful copy which at once both travesties and illuminates its original. As a labour trader Attwater transgresses the very basis of British law in the Pacific as well as offending the broader British ideology of the empire as a humane and civilizing power. A disciplinary figure who operates through force and fraud, he bypasses such legal institutions as trials and contracts, which were constitutive elements of British colonial practices. Yet his colony has deep imaginative links to the British empire. Scorning the prosaic name “New Island” given in the sailing directory, Attwater renames his settlement “nemorosa Zacynthos” (202). This naming, a quotation from Virgil, places the colony in the same imperial imaginary, or imaginary imperium, that connected the Roman Empire to the British Empire through the study of classical literature and underwrote the education of Britain’s imperial administrators (Vance 139–43, 222–46). The slaver Attwater’s upper-class background and his affiliation with high-cultural metropolitan institutions means that The Ebb-Tide does not follow the pattern of many Victorian texts, in which blame for the excesses and corruptions of imperialism is Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 169

displaced downwards socially, leaving intact a gentlemanly imperialist ethos of chivalry and fair play which transcends both the grubbiness of the marketplace and the violence that often accompanied the enforcement of imperial power (Edmond 158–59). Such a pattern both operates and is to a certain extent critiqued in “The Beach of Falesa,”´ where the working- class Wiltshire and the socially unclassable Case represent colonialism as exploitation, while the gentlemanly Tarleton embodies an imperial ideal of service; Wiltshire’s resentment of this social distribution of colonialist roles is palpable in his outburst to Tarleton (35), which reveals the socially defensive underside to his racially and nationalistically aggressive rhetoric. Attwater, on the other hand, is “the real article ...the real, first-rate, copper- bottomed aristocrat” (197). He confounds the distinction between gentleman and trader, as he does the larger opposition between metropolitan culture and peripheral savagery that was so necessary to the Victorians’ imagination of their empire, but was undone by the British involvement in the Pacific slave trade: “To our shame be it spoken, the ministers of this dreadful demon are too frequently our own sons, led astray to sell their own souls and their country’s honour for gold, and becoming thereby more sanguinary and ferocious than the savages they profess to regard as lower than the beasts of the field, whilst using them as the means of procuring their unlawful gains” (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 73–74). The idea of law was central to the way the Victorians thought about their empire. In Stevenson’s fiction, British traders invariably transgress British law in the Pacific and thus affront the Victorian ideology of imperialism. Fifty years before Stevenson wrote his Pacific stories, and thirty years before the Pacific Islanders Protection Acts, the colonial theorist Merivale had painted a picture of a humane imperial legislature thwarted by the actions of “lawless aliens” (504) operating geographically and legally outside the bounds of the British Empire:

Of what use are laws and regulations, however Christian and reasonable the spirit in which they are framed, when the trader, the backwoodsman, the pirate, the bushranger, have been beforehand with our legislators, poisoning the savage with spirits, inoculating him with loathsome diseases, brutalizing his mind, and exciting his passions for the sake of gain? Desolation goes before us, and civilization lags slowly and lamely behind. (489)

Unfortunately, all that government can do in repressing ...offences against the unhappy savage is the merest trifle when opposed to the enormous power for evil of the lawless aliens from all communities who roam the American deserts and the Pacific Ocean, the successors of the Paulistas and of past centuries. (504)

These descriptions clearly fit traders such as Case and Attwater (and to a lesser extent Wiltshire) who, according to Merivale’s rhetoric, should be seen as pirates, criminals acting without “a commission from an established civilized state.”21 In similar vein the Westminster Review wrote in 1875 of “the lawless trader, that foul blot upon our national honour, prostituting his knowledge to the vilest purposes and giving the lie to our boasted civilization” (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 102). Disowned by the empire, these traders yet seek to legitimate their activities through the signs and tokens of imperialism, such as Wiltshire’s rhetoric, or Attwater’s flag and quotations from Virgil. Whether deployed cynically or because of a need to identify imaginatively with powerful discourses and institutions, these signs create an imaginary empire, the outlaw simulation of the legally constituted body of colonial 170 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

power. In this, the traders become pirates in a second sense, engaged in the unauthorized reproduction of cultural material.22 Piracy as simulation was much more threatening, ideologically, to the empire proper than piracy as simple outlawry. Opponents of the Pacific labour trade were particularly incensed that the traffic had been carried on under the British flag, therefore appearing to have the imprimatur of the British government, and accounts of the atrocities that led to the death of Bishop Patteson included reference to an elaborate masquerade by the kidnappers in which “persons dressed in surplices paraded the deck of the slave-trading vessel in order the better to lull suspicion and entrap the intended victims” ([Knatchbull-Hugessen] 430).23 Such simulations of imperial authority not only dishonoured potent symbols such as the flag and the surplice, but disrupted the simple inside/outside logic by which a writer like Merivale distinguished piracy from legitimate colonialism. Most disturbingly, the illegal actions of traders, seemingly a dangerous supplement to imperialism, could come to appear not as excess to, but constitutive of, that structure of power. The traders in The Ebb-Tide steal ships, islands, and people; others in the nineteenth century, “holding a commission from an established civilized state,” also stole the land and sovereignty of native people. From contemplating the arbitrariness of the legal principles separating the pirate from the imperialist it is a short step to the argument that imperialism is piracy; just as from reading of the Victorians’ reaction to the Pacific labour trade it is a short step to the historical reflection that the anti-slavery British owed much of their prosperity and their empire to slavery. In prompting such reflections, Stevenson’s Pacific traders not only affront but threaten to collapse certain cherished distinctions in the Victorians’ imagination of their imperial identity. Pirating the cultural text of British imperialism, these traders invite us to consider the unstable relations between two kinds of colonialism, formal and informal, and two kinds of imperial imaginary, the lawful and the outlawed.

University of New South Wales

NOTES

I wish to thank my research assistant, Lorand Bartels, who located the British government texts discussed in this essay. 1. Campbell sums up the British position thus: “Britain remained till the end of the century wedded to the idea of native independence; but, in a series of ad hoc decisions, was obliged time after time by pressure from its own antipodean colonies, from its own officials, from its international peers, from its own adventurous citizens, and by its own declared altruistic concern for the ‘defenceless islanders,’ to reverse its policy until it ended up in the Pacific with heavier colonial responsibilities (liabilities would not be too strong a word) than any other nation” (147–48). See also Ward. Fieldhouse (chapter 8, “The Pacific”) analyses Britain’s reluctant Pacific involvement in terms of “peripheral factors making for imperial expansion and, more precisely, of political difficulties arising out of economic developments which could only be solved by imposing formal rule” (237). 2. If true, this would have been the island’s second labour trade catastrophe; in 1863 Peruvian slavers took over half the population (Maude 78–79). 3. Palmer’s Kidnapping in the South Seas is a good example of such testimony. Palmer was a British naval officer, ordered in 1869 “to sail for the South Sea Islands and make inquiry into the kidnapping Piracy, Slavery, and the Imagination of Empire in Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction 171

of natives alleged to be carried on by vessels flying the British flag” (1). His book recounts many instances of abuses and atrocities by labour traders among the islands of the New Hebrides and Fiji. 4. For contemporary comment see Hansard’s, 15 February 1872, 522; [Knatchbull-Hugessen] 430–32; “Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 75. For a historian’s assessment of the connection between the bishop’s death and the labour trade, see Hilliard 198–99. 5. See Hansard’s, 22 April 1872, 1666, 1670. Cf. Palmer 113. 6. In 1875 the argument for the regulation rather than abolition of the Pacific labour trade rested on the belief that “[c]otton and sugar are necessaries to civilized man” (“Pacific Islanders’ Protection Bill” 81); in the nineteenth century these goods were generally produced under systems of slave, indentured, or “coolie” labour. 7. Foreign Office 240; Pacific Islanders Protection Act, 1875, clause 7, marginal gloss. 8. See “The Arms Regulation, 1884” (British and Foreign State Papers, 75 [1883–84], 609–10). The Regulation was amended several times, but the prohibition remained essentially the same; see British and Foreign State Papers, 79 (1887–88), 1327–28; 85 (1893–94), 1276–77. In Butaritari Stevenson wrote a letter urging the United States “to imitate the legislation of Germany and Great Britain and make the sale of drink to natives of the independent islands a criminal offence” (Letters 6: 327). 9. A letter from the Law Officers to the Colonial Office (17 November 1892) discussed the problem of exactly who qualified as a British subject in the Pacific islands and whether foreigners could be made “justiciable” under the Orders in Council of Britain’s High Commissioner for the Western Pacific (FO 58/273: 243–44). 10. See Stevenson, Letters 7 : 230–31, 230 n.3, 281, and 281 n.14. 11. “I found a book of mine in Butaritari, and that copy really deserved fame, for the night before the mate had been married to a native wife with my novel by way of a Bible” (Letters 8: 379). 12. The conservative jurist James Fitzjames Stephen declared that “marriage is the most important of all contracts” (206; see also 195–96). John Stuart Mill offered a completely different analysis of the marriage contract in The Subjection of Women; see 157, 168–69. 13. OED, 2nd ed. (1989), “bargain,” 2.a. “An agreement between two parties settling how much each gives and takes, or what each performs and receives, in a transaction between them; a compact.” 14. Tarleton “made out the lines and packed off the witnesses” (37); in this context “lines” is the customary abbreviation of “marriage lines,” meaning the certificate of marriage; see OED, 2nd ed (1989), “line,” 23.f. I am indebted to Ernest Mehew for pointing this out to me. 15. On “Bully” Hayes and Ben Pease, see Fanny Stevenson 121, 126. 16. Stevenson had already explored this notion of inheritance in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Petch, “Sovereign Self” 403–05). 17. Findlay, Directory, 5th ed. 531. The island had lost reality over the previous twenty years. The second edition of Findlay (1863) includes the circumstantial detail that New Island “offers a very advantageous trade in hogs” and comments: “It will be important to ascertain the position and confirm the account of this island” (Findlay, Directory, 2nd ed. 391). The fifth edition leaves out the hogs and adds the disclaimer (quoted by Stevenson), “if such an island exists, which is very doubtful, and totally disbelieved in by South Sea traders” (531). The quoted material is marked with a pencil line in the margin of Stevenson’s much-annotated copy of Findlay, which is at the Stevenson House Museum at Monterey, California. Stevenson was clearly intrigued by the uncertain ontological status of parts of the still imperfectly mapped Pacific, which provided a perfect opportunity for a novelist to move smoothly from the realm of history to that of fantasy. 18. See Holdsworth 11: 231: “‘no colony can be settled without authority from the Crown.’ ... The Crown also has proprietary rights over territory acquired by settlement till he has made a grant of those rights.” “‘A pearling island the government don’t know about? That sounds like real estate,’” says Davis (185). 19. Linehan discusses “the chastening, humanizing reversal in roles occurring to Wiltshire as his loyalty to Uma subjects him to being cast in the part of the woman, the black, and the slave” (415). 172 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

20. For example, Gill 18–19: “A Village in Pukapuka, under Heathenism” and “The Same Village, under Christianity.” 21. OED 2nd ed (1989) “piracy” 1.a. “The practice or crime of robbery and depredation on the sea or navigable rivers, etc., or by descent from the sea upon the coasts, by persons not holding a commission from an established civilized state.” 22. OED 2nd ed (1989) “piracy” 2. fig. “The appropriation and reproduction of an invention or work of another for one’s own profit, without authority.” Other critics have also been interested in the relation between piracy, trade, and empire. In his analysis of nineteenth-century texts of Pacific trading and adventure Rod Edmond finds that Ballantyne’s The Coral Island presents trading as “essentially piracy” and that “Merivale also equated trading with piracy;” “This view of trading activities in the Pacific is well based historically, but it is also ideological, expressing a distaste for trade which was an important element in the gentlemanly capitalist formation” (158–59). Edmond is concerned with piracy as unlawful capture of goods; my argument is that piracy as unlawful reproduction of cultural material also needs to be included in analysis of traders’ quasi-colonialist activities in the Pacific contact zone. Vanessa Smith employs piracy as an organizing figure for her reading of Stevenson’s Pacific fiction, but she is concerned with authorial “anxieties about the material basis of literary production” at the colonial periphery (145). 23. Cf. Palmer 186–88. Stevenson was aware of the story, which he included in The Wrecker in his account of the labour trader Bostock, who once “got seventy-five head of volunteer labour on board, of whom not more than a dozen died of injuries. He had a hand, besides, in the amiable pleasantry which cost the life of Patteson; and when the sham bishop landed, prayed, and gave his benediction to the natives, Bostock, arrayed in a female chemise out of the traderoom, had stood at his right hand and boomed amens. This, when he was sure he was among good fellows, was his favourite yarn. ‘Two hundred head of labour for a hatful of amens,’ he used to name the tale; and its sequel, the death of the real bishop, struck him as a circumstance of extraordinary humour” (348).

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