The Pacific

by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios

  When the Tahitians distracted the guards and made off with the quadrant, Cook was apoplectic – to fail in his duties thanks to common thievery? Preposterous!

  Joseph Banks set off in pursuit of the bandits with the astronomer Charles Green, a midshipman and Banks’ Tahitian friend, Te Pau. Te Pau was able to mediate the return of the quadrant, now dismembered and its parts shared amongst many so all could partake in the purloined mana.

  In the meantime, Cook had detained his taio, the chieftain Tutaha, and seized all the canoes in Matavai Bay until the quadrant was returned. Cook was dismayed to learn that Tutaha had attempted to escape, and that Cook’s men had pulled him from the water by his hair. There was no greater insult to a chieftain, whose head and hair, where his ancestors’ mana resided, were tapu: sacred and forbidden. That Tutaha was also Cook’s ceremonial friend made the transgression all the more ghastly. Cook apologised as best he could, but although Tutaha appeared to accept this in good grace, it was an exercise in saving face. When Tutaha told his people to stop supplying food to the Endeavour, Cook knew his men had made a big mistake.

  TINA NGATA, Ngāti Porou Tribe

  The Christian idea of God giving man dominion over the earth is the polar opposite of our ideas about our relationship to the environment. What stemmed from those two very different philosophies are two very different ways of interacting with our resources. The Western philosophy about dominion and hierarchy also impacted in a social sense of course, but it also manifested in an environmental sense and has had very harmful outcomes in terms of our relationship with the world around us.

  Cook and his men came from a society that believed humans were made in God’s image and that everything existed on earth to serve or benefit humankind. As Joseph Banks saw it, ‘the admirable chain of nature in which Man, alone endowed with reason, justly claims the highest rank’. In contrast, Polynesian society embraced a communalist approach that exercised collective ownership of resources regulated by redistribution and reciprocity. Western culture celebrated the individual, but to the Polynesians, human beings were just one spoke of a very big wheel. The traditional, or Mā’ohi, ways were holistic, acknowledging the interconnectivity of all life on earth, while Cook and the Europeans who followed him brought a new way of thinking that venerated science and rationalism. The Tahitians must have marvelled at men who came to their island with not much in the way of fresh food, no women, and lacking the most basic knowledge of the natural world. Somehow, the power of the priests did not affect the European sailors, who had no concept of the central tenets of Tahitian society, including the rites and customs of tapu. For their part, the British did not understand that here, wealth was equated with prestige, and status acquired by accumulating social debts and sharing surplus with the needy.

  For James Cook and his Enlightenment-era warriors, knowledge was the ultimate goal. There was a rational explanation for everything. They embarked on their voyages of exploration to map and measure, to classify and chart. Through the accumulation of knowledge, they would rule the world. So Cook was not one to miss an opportunity to learn more.

  After Cook instructed the men to prepare the Endeavour to depart Tahiti on the next leg of his first voyage, he and Banks decided to set out to circumnavigate the island’s coastline and trace its contours. It wasn’t a journey without peril. They had only one musket and a few pistols, no food and only a pocketful of tradeable goods. But aided by local guides, they were honoured wherever they went. The Tahitians didn’t realise that by drafting the outlines of their island, Cook was – in European terms, anyway – laying claim to their territory.

  Without adding British ambitions into the mix, Tahiti and its neighbouring islands were already knotted up in a very complex intertribal skirmish. Cook arrived on Tahiti at a time of grave political conflict. Purea, who had formed a taio alliance with Wallis after he’d arrived on the Dolphin, was lobbying fiercely to promote her son to the position of great chief. As an ’arioi, she had chosen to ignore her sacred obligation to kill her child when he was born – paradoxically for a fertility sect, ’arioi were not permitted to procreate. Purea and her husband, Amo, constructed a monumental marae – a pyramidal-form temple – to advance their son’s claims. Cook didn’t realise it at the time, but when his sails appeared on the horizon, Purea’s enemies assumed her taio had returned to avenge her, and all opposition to her rule disintegrated. Cook’s arrival saved the two Tahitians and their allies.

  Cook and his shipmates had no doubt about how they would be perceived when they put to shore. They knew Wallis’s brutal response to the confrontation he’d faced in Matavai Bay had made quite an impression on the locals.

  SIR JOSEPH BANKS

  We shall soon by our connections with the inhabitants of Georges Island (who already know our strength and if they do not love at least fear us) gain some knowledge of the customs of these savages.

  Cook’s presence in the Society Islands had a ripple effect that still resonates through the archipelago today. Cook, and the other Europeans who came after him, never really understood the complexity of the islands’ politics. There was no single ruling clan. And by a quirk of fate and the fact that it happened to be the anchorage that was most appealing to European ships, Matavai Bay assumed a new importance. At the time, it was ruled by a fairly insignificant clan, but by associating themselves with the British and then the French, they would become the dominant family on the island. By 1788, the founder of the Tahitian royal family, Chief Tu, had unified the island of Tahiti. After adopting the name, Pomare, Tu and his descendants would eventually bring all the Society Islands under its rule.

  In 1827, Queen Pomare assumed the throne of the Kingdom of Tahiti and became the fourth Pomare regent. She had, thanks to the efforts of the relentless Protestant missionaries, become a devout Christian who staunchly allied herself with the British. With their encouragement, she sent the Catholic missionaries packing. Needless to say, the French were less than enthused to see their keenest advocates drummed off the islands, so they arrived en force to compel Queen Pomare to reinstate the Papists. Pomare beseeched her fellow regent, Queen Victoria, to ‘lend us your powerful hand, take us under your protection; let your flag cover us, and your lion defend us’, but her pleas fell on deaf ears. Victoria had enough jewels in her Pacific crown already: Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong amongst them.

  The French, however, were keen to notch up a symbolic victory over their Anglo bêtes noires. They were trying desperately to forget the humiliation of the Napoleonic Wars, and the loss of Canada in 1754 still smarted. The opportunity to gain a foothold in the Pacific was far too tempting a proposition to ignore. And so, in 1842, a convoy of French ships and soldiers arrived and declared Tahiti a French possession, lumbering it with an unbelievably unwieldy and bureaucratic name: Etablissements des Français en Océanie, or ‘French Settlements in Oceania’. After seizing the Royal Palace, they sent Queen Pomare into exile on Ra’iatea Island. Not that the Tahitians gave up without a fight. In the War of Independence of 1844 to 1846 they defended Bora Bora and Huahine, and drove the French off the islands. But lacking guns and ammunition, local resistance was doomed. The Queen returned from exile and agreed to rule under the French ‘protectorate’. After her death in 1877, the monarchy was dissolved and, in 1880, Tahiti and its proximate islands were officially annexed as French Polynesia.

  It seems that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was the rule of thumb to the French colonisers. Tahiti was far enough removed from the Gallic motherland in a physical sense that it would prove to be quite the boon in the twentieth century.

  RICHARD ARIIHAU TUHEIAVA,

  Nohovao Tribe, Lawyer

  I am respectful of the past and of the relationship between our two countries. But we’ve been educated and conditioned to this lifestyle, and it’s like being trapped in a box. We don’t have any past and we don’t have any future. I’m forty-three years old, and I’ve been brought up in a very French lifestyle. So there was
a lot of pressure to never say anything against France. But as a Senator I now know the ambition of France throughout the region.

  In the late 1950s when the French started to build up their nuclear arsenal, they needed somewhere to test their new toys. Ideally, that would be somewhere as far removed from their own shores as possible. Geographically isolated and located on the opposite side of the planet, Tahiti was made to order.

  MOETAI BROTHERSON, Mā’ohi Tribe, French MP

  Thirty years and 193 testings . . . more than 5000 times the load of Hiroshima . . . we have a rate of specific cancers, that are sometimes fourteen times the national average. If you talk about cancers that are scientifically tied to radiation, we have rates that are staggering. It’s France’s legacy to us.

  The French nuclear tests in the South Pacific between 1960 and 1996 exposed Tahitians to five hundred times the acceptable amount of radiation. That was the point, really – it kept all that nasty stuff away from La Belle France.

  For Tahiti, the fallout has been both literal and figurative. Beyond the health repercussions, the high-handed manner in which Tahitians were treated by their French rulers and the lies they were told about the repercussions of nuclear testing on their wellbeing and environment were the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  MOETAI BROTHERSON

  Deep down, I believe most Tahitians want independence. But there’s this fear that has been instilled in our souls. But some of us haven’t forgotten who we are and what we want to be for the future, which is Polynesians. Yes, we have a local government. But it’s all farce. It’s what we call here a political sandbox. They define the borders of that sandbox, and tell us we can play in that sandbox. But we’re not allowed to forget this sandbox is painted with bleu, blanc and rouge – the colours of France.

  Today, the same determination and vision that inspired their ancestors to embark on one of the world’s greatest migrations is stirring in contemporary Tahitian hearts. Driven, in part, by a desire to address the whitewashing of their pagan past, a cultural revival has been ignited.

  JOSIANE TEAMOTUAITAU PhD

  Tahitian culture in 2017 is just a result of 250 years of influences. Thanks to the revival movement that occurred in the 1970s we know more today than our parents – maybe even more than our grandparents – because they were under the influence of a religion that really forbids this quest for the old times. Today we are more open-minded to our own culture, and we tend to accept what was, for our grandparents and parents, unacceptable – our pagan past. Most of us are no longer ashamed of that part of our history.

  Until very recently, speaking Tahitian was illegal on the French Polynesian islands – it has only been taught in schools since 2004.

  Over the past few decades, the independence movement has been gaining ground, and with it a return to the Mā’ohi ways of life that existed on Tahiti before the arrival of the British and French.

  MOETAI BROTHERSON

  We don’t even know about part of what was lost, because it was lost forever. Even our grandfathers, our elders – the ones who are living – don’t remember it. What we know was lost were the traditions, the religion, the cults, and also the way of living. All the knowledge about navigation was also erased. This all had to be rediscovered.

  MARGUERITE LAI, Dance Revivalist

  Our own memories were erased, replaced by European fantasy images of ourselves.

  In a most remarkable circular development, the journals and accounts that Cook and his fellow travellers carted back to Europe are today important sources of information for the Tahitian cultural renaissance. These records are being used by Tahitians to revive dormant forms of cultural expression. Cook was an anthropologist before the term even existed. He was motivated to observe and record what he saw in the expectation that it would be of use to his masters back in Old Blighty. But he could never have imagined how important his work would become for the people whose world would be dismantled in his wake.

  SAM NEILL

  Pacific culture is only just beginning to recover. The whole fiction of the Pacific that everyone was libertine and sex was freely available and so on drove the missionary zeal. The old customs were thrown out the window – old gods were literally thrown into the sea. People had to cover up and dancing, music . . . all the good stuff . . . was destroyed. All the stories, all the old knowledge was thrown away and language was lost in many cases. That’s one of the things that I saw on my own voyage – how Pacific people are recovering and reclaiming their languages, their old stories and their old religions.

  If only James Cook could see them now.

  THREE

  PEACEFUL SEA

  These days travel is mostly sitting in airports waiting for something to happen. I do wish I’d had more time at sea on my journey because this program has become as much as anything about the sea – about the Pacific – about this immense ocean. And I’d have liked to have been on the ocean more often rather than flying across it.

  SAM NEILL

  Testicles lashed to the ship’s rigging . . . Lugged along in the ship’s wake by a rope tied beneath the armpits . . . Forced to sit for hours in a tidal pool as the waves wash around – and over – you . . . Deprived of sleep for days on end.

  No, that’s not an account of a fishing trip gone bad. It’s not even a running list of medieval punishments meted out by brutal naval captains. Believe it or not, all of the above are reputed to be tried and true techniques for acquiring the skills required to become an exemplary navigator, Polynesian-style.

  What better way to observe the ebb and flow of the tides than to sit as a youngster in the rockpools as the tide advances and retreats around you? And if you suffer from chronic seasickness, grabbing on to a rope and floundering along behind the ship for a while is a sure-fire way to take your mind off throwing up. As for the testicles, well, if the family jewels are quite literally on the line, a trainee navigator will very quickly learn to anticipate a vessel’s movement through the waves and currents.

  No matter what you think of their training regime, the first Polynesians were the consummate masters of open ocean seafaring. European history makes much of the accomplishments of the Viking adventurer Leif Eriksson, who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1000AD and was most likely the first European to set foot on the North American continent. Eriksson may have earned his navigating stripes, but a poet he was not, naming the first place he saw ‘Stone Slab Land’. Compared to the Polynesians, though, the Viking adventurer was a Johnny-come-lately.

  SAM NEILL

  The Pacific is the centre of the world if you’re Polynesian. This is home base and everything beyond its shores is as exotic to its inhabitants as Polynesia was for eighteenth-century Europeans.

  When Cook sailed into the Pacific, to all intents and purposes he was exploring a well-populated continent, albeit one that was water-based. And the people who inhabited these islands were not recent arrivals.

  MATAHI TUTAVAI, Tahitian Voyaging Society

  Still today in our history books and in documentaries I always hear that Europeans ‘discovered’ Tahiti . . . that they discovered such and such. It really hurts me when I hear that, as if our ancestors didn’t exist or were just part of the flora and fauna. That’s why today we need to rewrite history. We will write it from our own perspective. But we’ve still got a lot of work to do to decolonise ourselves.

  Evidence drawn from linguistic, genetic and archaeological studies indicates that the Polynesians, who are classified as a subset of the Austronesian race, found their way to the Pacific via Taiwan from a point of origin on the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. About seven thousand years ago – the same time that some bright spark in Western Asia worked out that it’s much easier to move things around on vehicles that have wheels attached to them – the forebears of today’s Polynesian people left Taiwan and headed for Melanesia. In 1500BC they took to the sea and sailed further east, populating Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. Sometime in the first millennium
AD, Tahiti, the Cook Islands and the Marquesas were occupied, and after that, the outermost reaches of the Polynesian ‘Triangle’ – Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in the east; Hawai‘i in the north – had resident populations. The final great migration was to the south-west; somewhere between 1200 and 1300AD Polynesian culture arrived on the unpopulated islands of Aotearoa, or New Zealand, which was round about the time Leif Eriksson embarked upon his open ocean voyage to ‘Stone Slab Land’.

  RICHARD ARIIHAU TUHEIAVA,

  Nohovao Tribe, Lawyer

  We’re all one people. We are ocean people. We are the ocean.

  To set sail across daunting stretches of open water was not an easy or particularly safe undertaking. And yet, the Polynesians did it repeatedly. Why? ‘Fame and glory’ certainly came into it. Whenever a brave navigator embarked on a long voyage by sea, this brought great prestige to his clan. According to traditional beliefs, every Polynesian is descended from the first human – Tiki – who initiated a diaspora that emerged from the setting sun in the west. But the eastern ocean led to the underworld where human spirits departed their bodies and plunged into the sea. To sail east into the rising sun ranked high on the bravery charts.

  There was also a more pragmatic motivation. Polynesian society was rigidly hierarchical and inheritance tied to the ‘winner takes all’ principle of primogeniture, where to be the eldest child was to be the winner. So for those who were not firstborn and harboured a desire to accumulate wealth and gain status, their only option was to discover and settle a new world.