Polynesian Origins and Destinations: Reading the Pacific with S Percy Smith Graeme Whimp A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University May 2014 ii This thesis is the original work of the author unless otherwise acknowledged. Graeme Whimp Department of Pacific and Asian History School of Culture, History and Language ANU College of Asia and the Pacific The Australian National University iii iv Abstract ______________________________________________________________________ Stephenson Percy Smith, militia member, surveyor, ethnologist and ethnographer, and founder of the Polynesian Society and its Journal, had a major impact on the New Zealand of his day and on a world-wide community of Polynesianist scholars. Whereas a good deal of attention and critique has been given to his work on Māori and the settlement of New Zealand, the purpose of this thesis is to explore those of his writings substantially devoted to the island Pacific outside New Zealand. To that end, I assemble a single Text comprising all of those writings and proceed to read it in terms of itself but also in the light of the period in which it was written and of its intellectual context. My method, largely based on elements of the approach proposed by Roland Barthes in the early 1970s, involves first presenting a representation of that Text and then reading within it a historical figure, the author of its components, as a character in that Text. Before doing so, in a Prologue I set out the broad current understanding of the patterns of settlement of the Pacific and some of the origins of Smith’s racial framing. In order to establish context, the early chapters outline his life and career and the intellectual framework, European and New Zealand, within which he thought and wrote as well as the early history of the Hawaiki that would come to absorb him. The following chapters set out my representation and reading of the Smith Text and open up new perspectives on aspects of Smith’s concepts of race, of relations among those he conceives as races, and of the settlement of the Pacific. My reading reveals Smith’s concern to separate his Polynesians from the other ‘races’ with which they came into contact in order to preserve their integrity and purity. In particular, in exploring the relationship between possible origins and a certain destination, it throws light on the nature of his quest for Hawaiki, the Polynesian homeland, and, in particular, his drive to locate it beyond and prior to Polynesian contact with those other ‘races’. I conclude that, at least in one sense, the real origin of Smith’s Polynesians lies in the racial classification of Oceania that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and still flourished in the twentieth. I end with a vignette of Smith’s presence in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand. v vi Table of Contents Preface ..........................................................................................................................xi Glossary ..................................................................................................................... xvii Prologue .............................................................................................................................1 Chapter One Reading the Pacific with S Percy Smith .............................................................................. 11 Chapter Two Life and Work of Percy Smith ........................................................................................... 39 Surveying .................................................................................................................. 48 The Polynesian Society .............................................................................................. 53 Reputation ................................................................................................................. 60 Chapter Three From the Study of Man to Anthropology ........................................................................... 67 The Enlightenment .................................................................................................... 70 Progress and Stages of Development ......................................................................... 72 Into the Nineteenth Century ....................................................................................... 75 Ethnologicals and Anthropologicals .......................................................................... 78 Evolutionism ............................................................................................................. 82 The Consolidation of Anthropology........................................................................... 88 Chapter Four From Tasman to Tregear .................................................................................................. 93 Early Voyagers .......................................................................................................... 93 Early Travellers ........................................................................................................100 Early Residents.........................................................................................................103 Early institutions ......................................................................................................105 First Settlement and Origins .....................................................................................108 Aryanism ..................................................................................................................110 Turn of the Century ..................................................................................................115 vii First Hawaiki Interlude .................................................................................................... 119 Chapter Five Percy Smith’s Pacific ........................................................................................................ 127 Early Ethnology ....................................................................................................... 129 Into the Pacific ........................................................................................................ 135 Ethnographic Turn ................................................................................................... 139 After the Pacific....................................................................................................... 148 Chapter Six Percy Smith’s Polynesians ................................................................................................ 153 Origins .................................................................................................................... 153 Departures ............................................................................................................... 160 Voyages .................................................................................................................. 162 Discoveries .............................................................................................................. 169 Migrations ............................................................................................................... 172 Sojourns .................................................................................................................. 180 Settlements .............................................................................................................. 183 Chapter Seven Reading Percy Smith........................................................................................................ 187 Races ....................................................................................................................... 190 Fiji ........................................................................................................................... 193 Races and Branches ................................................................................................. 195 Migrations ............................................................................................................... 196 Branches .................................................................................................................. 198 The Samoan Branch................................................................................................. 200 Tribes and Hekes ..................................................................................................... 201 The Polynesians ....................................................................................................... 202 ‘Our own race’ ........................................................................................................ 207 Smith’s Hawaiki ...................................................................................................... 208 Second Hawaiki Interlude ............................................................................................... 211 viii Chapter Eight Origins and Destinations ................................................................................................. 221 Afterword ........................................................................................................................ 235 The Smith Text ............................................................................................................... 239 References .....................................................................................................................