Sea People

by Christina Thompson

  To many Europeans, the Marquesas have seemed indescribably romantic. With their peaks shrouded in mist, their folds buried in greenery, their flanks rising dramatically from the sea, they have a brooding prehistoric beauty. Visiting in 1888, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson found them at once magnificent and forbidding, with their great dark ridges and their towering crags. “At all hours of the day,” he wrote, “they strike the eye with some new beauty, and the mind with the same menacing gloom.”

  It is tempting to imagine that the first Polynesians might have had similarly mixed impressions when they arrived. The discovery of any high island in the Pacific must have been a triumph: here was land, water, safety, sources of food. But archaeological sites in the Marquesas reveal a surprising variety of types of fishhooks from the very earliest settlement period, suggesting, perhaps, a surge of experiment and innovation prompted by the realization that fishing techniques brought from islands with more coral would not work in the deep, rough waters of the Marquesan coast. Still, the animals that were imported thrived (except for, maybe, the dog), the breadfruit trees grew, and the people prospered—so much so that by the time the first Europeans arrived, the Marquesas were “thickly inhabited” by a population that came out to meet the strangers in droves.

  THE MARQUESAS WERE discovered in 1595 by the Spaniard Álvaro de Mendaña, who was en route with a shipload of colonists to the Solomon Islands. We say that Mendaña “discovered” the Marquesas, but of course this is not, strictly speaking, true. Indeed, the claim that any European explorer discovered anything in the Pacific—least of all the islands of Polynesia—is obviously problematic. As the Frenchman who later claimed the Marquesas for King Louis XV observed, it is hard to see how anyone could possess an island that is already possessed by the people who live there. And what is true for possession is even more true for discovery: In what sense can a land that is already inhabited be discovered? But what the word “discovered” means in the context of eighteenth-century Frenchmen or sixteenth-century Spaniards is not “discovered for the first time in human history” but something much more like “made known to people outside the region for the first time.”

  This was Mendaña’s second voyage across the Pacific. Nearly thirty years earlier, he had led another expedition in search of Terra Australis Incognita, managing to reach the Solomon Islands before returning, in some disarray, to Peru. Despite the hardships of the journey, cyclones, scurvy, insubordination, shortages of food and water—at one point the daily ration consisted of “half a pint of water, and half of that was crushed cockroaches”—Mendaña was determined to try again. For twenty-six years he pestered the Spanish crown, and in 1595 they finally gave in.

  The second expedition was, if possible, even more calamitous than the first. Confused and disorderly from the start, it was plagued by violence and dissension. Mendaña was on a zealot’s mission to bring the benighted heathen to God; his wife, an unlovable virago, caused trouble wherever she went; many of his soldiers were self-interested and cruel. Neither the commander nor any of his subordinates seem to have understood just how far away their destination was, despite—at least in Mendaña’s case—having been there before. In fact, they never did arrive. The colony, established instead on the island of Santa Cruz, was a disaster, with robberies, murders, ambushes, even a couple of beheadings. Mendaña, ill, broken, and “sunk in a religious stupor,” contracted a fever and died like something out of Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The rest of the expedition disbanded and sailed for the Philippines.

  We have the story from Mendaña’s pilot, Pedro Fernández de Quirós, who recorded that just five weeks after setting out from the coast of South America, they sighted their first body of land. Believing this to be the island he was seeking, Mendaña ordered his crew to their knees to chant the Te Deum laudamus, giving thanks to God for a voyage so swift and untroubled. This, of course, was ridiculous; the Solomons were still four thousand miles away, at a minimum another five weeks’ sailing. But it does illustrate just how poorly these early European navigators understood the size of the Pacific and how easily misled they could be. Eventually, Mendaña realized his mistake and after some consideration concluded that this was, in fact, an entirely new place.

  The island, which was known to its inhabitants as Fatu Hiva, was the southernmost of the Marquesas, and as the Spanish approached, a fleet of about seventy canoes pulled out from shore. Quirós noted that these vessels were fitted with outriggers, a novelty he carefully described as a kind of wooden structure attached to the hull that “pressed” on the water to keep the canoe from capsizing. This was something many Europeans had not seen, but the development of the outrigger, which can be traced back as far as the second millennium B.C. in the islands of Southeast Asia, was the key innovation that made it possible for long, narrow, comparatively shallow vessels (i.e., canoes) to sail safely on the open ocean.

  Each of the Marquesan canoes carried between three and ten people, and many more islanders were swimming and hanging on to the sides—altogether, thought Quirós, perhaps four hundred souls. They came, he wrote, “with much speed and fury,” paddling their canoes and pointing to the land and shouting something that sounded like “atalut.” The anthropologist Robert C. Suggs, who did fieldwork in the Marquesas in the 1950s, thinks they were telling Mendaña to bring his ships closer inshore—“a friendly bit of advice,” as he puts it, “from one group of navigators to another.” Or maybe it was a strategy to get them to a place where they could be more effectively contained.

  Quirós wrote that the islanders showed few signs of nervousness, paddling right up to the Spanish ships and offering coconuts, plantains, some kind of food rolled up in leaves (probably fermented breadfruit paste), and large joints of bamboo filled with water. “They looked at the ships, the people, and the women who had come out of the galley to see them . . . and laughed at the sight.” One of the men was persuaded to come aboard, and Mendaña dressed him in a shirt and hat, which greatly amused the others, who laughed and called out to their friends. After this, about forty more islanders clambered aboard and began to walk about the ship “with great boldness, taking hold of whatever was near them, and many of them tried the arms of the soldiers, touched them in several parts with their fingers, looked at their beards and faces.” They appeared confused by the Europeans’ clothing until some of the soldiers let down their stockings and tucked up their sleeves to show the color of their skin, after which, Quirós wrote, they “quieted down, and were much pleased.”

  Mendaña and some of his officers handed out shirts and hats and trinkets, which the Marquesans took and slung round their necks. They continued to sing and call out, and as their confidence increased, so did their boisterousness. This, in turn, annoyed the Spanish, who began gesturing for them to leave, but the islanders had no intention of leaving. Instead they grew bolder, picking up whatever they saw on deck, even using their bamboo knives to cut slices from a slab of the crew’s bacon. Finally, Mendaña ordered a gun to be fired, at which the islanders all leapt into the sea—all except one, a young man who remained clinging to the gunwale, refusing, either out of obstinance or terror, to let go until one of the Spaniards cut him with a sword.

  At this, the tenor of the encounter changed. An old man with a long beard stood up in his canoe and cried out, casting fierce glances in the direction of the ships. Others sounded their shell trumpets and beat with their paddles on the sides of their canoes. Some picked up their spears and shook them at the Spaniards, or fitted their slings with stones and began hurling them at the ship. The Spaniards aimed their arquebuses at the islanders, but the powder was damp and would not light. “It was a sight to behold,” wrote Quirós, “how the natives came on with noise and shouts.” At last, the Spanish soldiers managed to fire their guns, hitting a dozen or so of the islanders, including the old man, who was shot through the forehead and killed. When they saw this, the islanders immediately turned and fled back to shore. A little while later, a single canoe carryi
ng three men returned to the ships. One man held out a green branch and addressed the Spaniards at some length; to Quirós he seemed to be seeking peace. The Spanish made no response, and after a little while the islanders departed, leaving some coconuts behind.

  THE ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN the Marquesans and Mendaña’s people were filled with confusion, and many “evil things,” wrote Quirós, happened that “might have been avoided if there had been someone to make us understand each other.” In this, it was like many early encounters between Europeans and Polynesians: everything that happened made sense to someone, but much of it was baffling, offensive, or even deadly to those on the other side.

  In one incident, four “very daring” Marquesans made off with one of the ships’ dogs; in another, a Spanish soldier fired into a crowd of canoes, aiming at and killing a man with a small child. On shore, Mendaña ordered a Catholic mass to be held, at which the islanders knelt in imitation of the strangers. Two Marquesans were taught to make the sign of the cross and to say “Jesus, Maria”; maize was sown in the hope that it might take. Mendaña’s wife, Doña Isabel, tried to cut a few locks from the head of a woman with especially beautiful hair but was forced to desist when the woman objected—the head, being tapu, should not have been touched, as hair was known to be useful for sorcery.

  Three islanders were shot and their bodies hung up so that the Marquesans “might know what the Spaniards could do.” Mendaña envisioned establishing a colony, leaving behind thirty men along with some of their wives. But the soldiers adamantly refused this mission. Perhaps they understood, no doubt correctly, that it would have been more than their lives were worth, for by the time the Spanish finally departed, they had killed more than two hundred people, many, according to Quirós, for no reason at all.

  Quirós was distressed by the cruel and wanton behavior of Mendaña’s men. In the islanders, on the other hand, he found much to admire. Indeed, it is through Quirós’s eyes that we get our first glimpse of a people who would come to epitomize for many Europeans the pinnacle of human beauty. One later visitor described the Marquesans as “exquisite beyond description” and the “most beautiful people” he had ever seen. Even Cook, a man never given to exaggeration, called them “as fine a race of people as any in this Sea or perhaps any whatever.”

  The islanders, wrote Quirós, were graceful and well formed, with good legs, long fingers, and beautiful eyes and teeth. Their skin was clear and “almost white,” and they wore their hair long and loose “like that of women.” Many were naked when he first saw them—they were swimming at the time—and their faces and bodies were decorated with what Quirós at first took to be a kind of blue paint. This, of course, was tattooing, a practice common across Polynesia—the English word “tattoo” is derived from the Polynesian tatau—but carried to the peak of perfection in the Marquesas, where every inch of the body, including the eyelids, tongue, palms of the hands, even the insides of the nostrils, might be inscribed. Quirós found the Marquesan women, with their fine eyes, small waists, and beautiful hands, even more lovely “than the ladies of Lima, who are famed for their beauty,” and characterized the men as tall, handsome, and strong. Some were so large that they made the Spaniards look diminutive by comparison, and one made a great impression on the visitors by lifting a calf up by the ear.

  Ethnographically speaking—remembering that this is the earliest recorded description of any Polynesian society that we have—Quirós’s account is slim but interesting. The Marquesans, he wrote, had pigs and chickens (“fowls of Castille”), as well as plantains, coconuts, calabashes, nuts, and something the Europeans had never seen, which they described as a green fruit about the size of a boy’s head. This was breadfruit, a plant that would enter Pacific legend two centuries later as the cargo carried by Captain William Bligh of the Bounty when his crew mutinied off the island of Tahiti. (Bligh was carrying the breadfruit seedlings to the West Indies, where, it was envisioned, they would provide an economical means of feeding African slaves.) They lived in large communal houses with platforms and terraces of neatly fitted stone and worshipped what the Spanish referred to as an “oracle,” an enclosure containing carved wooden figures to whom they made offerings of food. Their tools were made of stone and shell; their primary weapons were spears and slings. Their most significant manufactures were canoes, which they made in a variety of sizes: small ones with outriggers for three to ten paddlers, and large ones, “very long and well-made,” with room for thirty or more. Of the latter wrote Quirós, “They gave us to understand, when they were asked, that they went in these large canoes to other lands.”

  What lands these might have been remained a mystery, however. In one curious incident, the Marquesans, seeing a black man on one of the Spanish ships, gestured toward the south, making signs “to say that in that direction there were men like him, and that they went there to fight, and that the others had arrows.” This is a baffling remark, and quite typical of the sort of misdirection that is rampant in these early accounts. While it might describe any number of people in the islands far to the west, the bow was never used as a weapon in Polynesia. The only places south of the Marquesas are the Tuamotu Archipelago, and, even farther away, Easter Island—all of whose inhabitants are culturally and physically quite similar to Marquesans. They might well have been perceived as enemies, but they were not archers and they were not black.

  But while we have no idea which islands Quirós was referring to, we do know that there were “other islands” in the Marquesans’ conceptual universe. Later visitors heard tell of “islands which are supposed by the natives to exist, and which are entirely unknown to us.” It was also reported that in times of drought, “canoes went out in search of other islands,” which may help explain why, when Cook reached the Marquesas in 1775, the islanders wondered whether he had come from “some country where provisions had failed.”

  MENDAÑA REMAINED IN the Marquesas for about two weeks, in the course of which he identified and named the four southernmost islands in the archipelago. (A second cluster of islands lay undiscovered to the north.) He called them, after his own fashion, Santa Magdalena, San Pedro, La Dominica, and Santa Cristina, names that have all long been replaced by the original Polynesian names: Fatu Hiva, Motane, Hiva Oa, and Tahuata. The archipelago as a whole he named in honor of his patron, Don García Hurtado de Mendoza, Marquis of Cañete and viceroy of Peru, and in all the years since 1595 the Marquesas have never been known as anything else. Except, of course, among the islanders themselves, who know their islands collectively as Te Fenua, meaning “the Land,” and themselves, the inhabitants of Te Fenua, as Te Enata, meaning simply “the People.”

  When Mendaña’s ships finally sailed away, the Marquesas were lost again to the European world for nearly two hundred years. They had been none too securely plotted to begin with, and their location was further suppressed by the Spanish in order to forestall competition in the search for Terra Australis Incognita. Privately, if the Spanish concluded anything, it was that the Marquesas, with their large, vigorous population of beautiful people, their pigs, their chickens, and their great canoes, proved the existence of a southern continent. Lacking “instruments of navigation and vessels of burthen,” Quirós concluded, the inhabitants of these islands could not possibly have made long-distance ocean crossings. This meant that somewhere in the vicinity there must be “other islands which lye in a chain, or a continent running along,” since there was no other place “whereby they who inhabit those islands could have entered them, unless by a miracle.” Thus the irony of first contact between Polynesia and Europe: that it served to reinforce a hallucinatory belief in the existence of an imaginary continent while obscuring the much more intriguing reality of the Marquesans themselves.

  Barely an Island at All

  Atolls of the Tuamotus

  Winds in the Pacific, based on “Map of the prevailing winds on earth,” in Het handboek voor de zeiler by H. C. Herreshoff, adapted by Rachel Ahearn.

  WIKIME
DIA COMMONS.

  MENDAÑA DISCOVERED THE Marquesas because he sailed west in roughly the right latitude from the port of Paita, in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru. But those who came after set sail from different ports and followed different routes and, thus, discovered different sets of islands. This was not so much a matter of intention: European explorers in the sixteenth and seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries did not have the freedom to go wherever they wished. On the contrary, for some centuries virtually all their discoveries were determined by the distinctive pattern of the winds and currents in the Pacific Ocean and by the limited points of entry into the region from other parts of the world.

  The weather in the Pacific is dominated by two great circles of wind, or gyres, one of which turns clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere, while the other turns counterclockwise in the Southern. Across wide bands from roughly 30 to 60 degrees in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the winds are predominantly westerly, that is, they blow from west to east. In the north, these winds sweep across the continents of Europe, Asia, and North America. But in the Southern Hemisphere, where there are few landmasses to impede them, they can reach fantastic speeds—hence the popular names for the far southern latitudes: the “roaring forties,” “furious fifties,” and “screaming sixties.”

  From the equator to about 30 degrees north and south—roughly across the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer—the winds predominantly blow the opposite way. These are known as the trade winds, a reliable pattern of strong, steady easterlies with a northeasterly slant in the Northern Hemisphere and a southeasterly slant in the Southern. In between, in the vicinity of the equator itself, is an area known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ, a region of light and variable winds and frequent thunderstorms more commonly known as the Doldrums and greatly feared by early European navigators for its deadly combination of stultifying heat and protracted calms. Anyone who has flown across the equator in the Pacific—say, from Los Angeles to Sydney—may remember a bumpy patch about halfway through the flight; that was the ITCZ.