Bounty from the Beach Cross-Cultural and Cross-Disciplinary Essays
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THE BOUNTY FROM THE BEACH CROSS-CULTURAL AND CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ESSAYS THE BOUNTY FROM THE BEACH CROSS-CULTURAL AND CROSS-DISCIPLINARY ESSAYS EDITED BY SYLVIE LARGEAUD-ORTEGA PACIFIC SERIES Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760462444 ISBN (online): 9781760462451 WorldCat (print): 1057900911 WorldCat (online): 1057900648 DOI: 10.22459/BB.10.2018 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press. Cover image: Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega, The Bounty from the Beach, 2018, watercolour. This edition © 2018 ANU Press Contents Acknowledgements . vii List of Illustrations . ix Introduction . 1 Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega 1 . Contextualising the Bounty in Pacific Maritime Culture . 21 Jean-Claude Teriierooiterai 2 . Pitcairn before the Mutineers: Revisiting the Isolation of a Polynesian Island . 67 Guillaume Molle and Aymeric Hermann 3 . Reading the Bodies of the Bounty Mutineers . 95 Rachael Utting 4 . Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty: A Piece of Colonial Historical Fiction . 125 Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega 5 . A Ship is Burning: Jack London’s ‘The Seed of McCoy’ (Tales of the Pacific, 1911), or Sailing Away from Pitcairn . 153 Jean-Pierre Naugrette 6 . Brando on the Bounty . 173 Roslyn Jolly and Simon Petch 7 . Bounty Relics: Trading in the Legacy of Myth and Mutiny . 207 Adrian Young Bibliography . 235 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the 2013–14 second-year undergraduate students in Anglophone Pacific Island Studies at the University of French Polynesia (UPF): their enthusiastic contributions to the first Bounty International Festival in Papeete, their keen interest in Pacific history, literature and culture, and their overwhelming kindness first inspired me with this project. I am also very grateful to the 2015–16 students for heartily taking up the torch at the second Bounty International Festival. This class was supported by the staff of the UPF Library, whom I also wish to thank. I am particularly grateful to UPF librarians Willy Saint-Albin, Rufin Yune and Vincent Deyris for having Bounty-related books and articles speedily shipped to Tahiti from around the world. I am sincerely thankful to the UPF Traditional and Contemporary Societies in Oceania Research team department (EA4241 EASTCO) for their generous financial support, which has allowed the manuscript to be copyedited. My heartfelt thanks to Meredith Wilson, Justine Molony and Emily Hazlewood for their exhaustive reviewing and copyediting. Each of this volume’s contributions has been meticulously peer- reviewed by at least two scholars. My very warm thanks to Robert Louis Abrahamson, Stephen Curley, John Gascoigne, Roslyn Jolly, Anaïs Maurer, Tillman Nechtman, Sandhya Patel, Nancy Saint Clair, Bruno Saura, Philip Steer and Jacques Vernaudon for their generous expertise. My thanks also go to my colleague Chris Ballard, who generously shared his vast scholarship on Pacific Island studies. vii THE BOUNTY FROM THE BEACH I am extremely grateful to Herb Ford, who runs the Pitcairn Island Study Center at Pacific Union College, for his in-depth reviewing of the complete manuscript, and his enriching and encouraging comments. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this volume for their thorough analysis and enlightening suggestions. I express my gratitude to Emmanuel Descleves, Frank Jacob, Véronique Larcade, Joshua Nash, Rebecca Nesvet and Nancy Saint Clair, who started contributing to this project but had to stop along the way – their insights were always illuminating. My very warm thanks to all this volume’s co-authors: Roslyn Jolly and Simon Petch, Guillaume Molle and Aymeric Hermann, Jean-Pierre Naugrette, Jean-Claude Teriierooiterai, Rachael Utting and Adrian Young. It has been a real pleasure working with them all along. Some contributors have kindly assisted me in the editing process: Nancy Saint Clair with her sensitive readings, Adrian Young with his information on Bounty experts, and above all Roslyn Jolly with her impeccable scholarship and outstanding reviews. Finally, māuruuru most of all to Pascal Ortega, and Anaïs and Jules Maurer, who have been subjected to prolonged exposure to Bounty-related topics. I cannot thank them enough for their loving support. Pascal has provided ever challenging intellectual debates; Anaïs, eye-opening discussions on postcolonial and Pacific Island studies; and Jules, healthy outdoor breaks – each according to their own expertise. Without the three of them, this volume would not have been what it is. viii List of Illustrations Figure 1.1. Geographic origin of the breadfruit and related species. The shaded areas correspond to the lands that emerged during the last glaciation about 10,000 years ago ..................38 Figure 1.2. In this painting, modern double canoes built on the model of the old double canoes, are visible in the foreground while, in the background, like ghosts of the past, the silhouette of the old double canoes is evident .......................41 Figure 2.1. Location of Pitcairn Islands in relation to the Gambier Islands. 68 Figure 2.2. Location of archaeological sites on Pitcairn ............76 Figure 2.3. Typical stone adze blades and a tiki from Pitcairn .......78 Figure 2.4. Patterns of interaction involving Pitcairn and the Gambier islands. 87 Figure 3.1. Detail from William Hodges, A View taken in the bay of Oaite Peha [Vaitepiha] Otaheite [Tahiti] (‘Tahiti Revisited’), 1776 ............................................106 Figure 3.2. Tahitian Gorget (taumi). Crescent-shaped breast ornament decorated with feathers, hair and shark’s teeth .....110 Figure 3.3. George Cruikshank, A Point of Honor ...............112 Figure 3.4. The triskelion emblem, on a Manx coin dating from 1733 ........................................115 ix Introduction Sylvie Largeaud-Ortega University of French Polynesia In recent decades, global attention has converged on the Pacific Region as a geopolitical strategic nexus. The vast inner expanse of Oceania was once considered ‘the hole in the doughnut’,1 as Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa ironically puts it, where nuclear tests were carried out virtually unimpeded. In the typical destruction–preservation logic of post-contact history, this region is now viewed as a unique ecological treasure-trove and the site of major climate change challenges. Given the historical and environmental stakes, a selection of cross-disciplinary essays that take the Bounty as their point of departure aims to offer readers an enriched understanding of the history and culture of the Polynesian Triangle – a vast region of Oceania made up of over 1,000 islands spanning from Hawai‘i in the north, to Rapa Nui/Easter Island in the east and Aotearoa/ New Zealand in the south-west. It seeks to provide nuanced perspectives on how the region and its people have been represented across a range of media, including literature, material culture and film. In a collective effort to think this world in its complexity, this volume aims to reorient the Bounty focus away from the West,2 where most Bounty narratives and studies have emerged, to the Pacific, where most of the original events unfolded. It delves into the history and culture of the Polynesian Islands touched by the Bounty events and it embraces them within a wider fold of their relation to the West. Engaging with ‘culturally patterned way 1 Epeli Hau‘ofa, ‘The Ocean in Us’, The Contemporary Pacific, vol 10, no 2, 1998, p 397. 2 Throughout the book, the West is meant as the ‘geographically imprecise but widely accepted cultural and ideological divide between rich and poor, colonizer and colonized, metropolitan and post-colonial’ (Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific: Colonial Discourse from Cook to Gauguin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p 16). 1 THE BOUNTY FROM THE BEACH or ways of experiencing and understanding history’,3 it examines Pacific Island histories and historicities and their representations in literature, films and culture. Far from abiding by narratives of the ‘vanishing native’, it celebrates Oceanic vitality. This volume therefore launches on a discursive journey across the Pacific Ocean, exploring those Polynesian Islands impacted by the Bounty, and navigating the reverberations of the Bounty events in the West and their backwash to the Polynesian Islands, from the late 18th century to the present time. It also largely shifts focus from famous Bounty figures, such as Sir Joseph Banks, Captain William Bligh and Fletcher Christian, who come to contemporary readers almost as dramatic actors having been reimagined in print, cinema and mythology for over two centuries. Instead, it pays more attention to the ‘little people on both sides of the beach’ as documented by historian Greg Dening: I wanted to write the history of people whom the world would esteem as ‘little’. I wanted to write history from below. Not of kings and queens. Not of heroes. Not of writers of constitutions, saviours of nations. ‘Little people’. Those on whom the forces of the world press most hardly. I wanted to celebrate their humanity, their freedoms, their creativity, the ways they crossed the boundaries around their lives, the way they crossed their beaches.4 Dening’s phrasing may seem to carry a whiff of condescension; yet it is well known to Pacific scholars that his ‘little people on both sides of the beach’ are as important as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘subalterns’.5 His expression best fits our purpose: to investigate the Bounty heritage from the standpoint of the beach. The beach is a metaphor for culture contact and conflict in the Pacific Islands. It is this liminal place that transforms Islanders and voyagers, islands and ships, each time it is crossed. Referring to the Bounty, we will analyse the way newcomers – however ‘little’ they may look – create new islands, and how these changes may occasionally impact the world.