PIRACY, SLAVERY, and the IMAGINATION of EMPIRE in STEVENSON's PACIFIC FICTION

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 Fiji 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 piracy 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 157 158 VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE 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 Samoa 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 “blackbirding,” “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.

Load more