Introduction

For the Pacific region, the sources regarding first contacts are essentially accounts written by European travellers. One can quite easily imagine the extent to which these accounts, especially those published in the form of a book which was intended for a large public, foreground interpretations based on prejudices and preconceptions. Their preconceived views blinded the authors themselves, these first voyagers, and prevented them from understanding the whole range of acts and behaviours of the indigenous population. In particular, several contexts were the occasion of gross misunderstandings. Let me immediately evoke the two principal contexts in which these occurred.

In the first context, the local inhabitants brought some objects to the visitors who understood this as a proposition to ‘barter’ goods. The visitors attempted to put a value on the goods presented in order to make a commensurate reply with their own ‘trinkets’ which they had intentionally brought with them to ‘impress the savages’. As soon as the exchange appeared to the Europeans to be unfair, or when the inhabitants dared to climb on board ship and then seized everything they could and jumped into the sea, the encounter became a ‘theft’ committed by savages whose ‘character’ was obviously ‘treacherous’.

The second context of misunderstanding was caused by the inevitably male-dominated view of the voyagers. The crew members were of course male and they always had their eyes on the ‘women’ of the island they were visiting. Their sole interest in the women was as possible sexual partners (with highly differing degrees of appreciation according to the ‘colour of the skin’ of different women as the voyagers saw and classified it). They made no distinction between adult and adolescent females. In particular, they saw in every ‘woman’ the sexual complement of a man, thus reducing all relationships of gender to one level. They were unaware of the fact that, in many societies, and certainly in Samoa, a man and a young woman who came forward in front of the visitors could more often than not be a brother and sister, or a father and daughter, rather than a husband and wife.

A complete misunderstanding about rules of ‘nakedness’, where European taboos of the time were projected indiscriminately onto the inhabitants, together with the close association between nakedness and sexuality that prevailed in European ideology, meant that the indigenous population was generally qualified as ‘lascivious, lewd’ and the females seen as engaging in ‘wanton behaviour’ (since in every presentation of women they were more or less ‘naked’). The European visitors were unaware that, on the contrary, such behaviours took their meaning as part of very formal dances where the fact of presenting oneself in the finale without clothing was a mark of ‘respect’ (see chapter 10) towards visitors who were compared to sacred chiefs and seen as envoys of the divine world (chapter 9). Moreover, as we shall see in a number of cases, the very specific occasions on which the indigenous adults proposed to the visitors that they take a woman (in fact an adolescent girl) in order to have sexual relations with her were reduced by our visitors simply to a question of sexual hospitality, when in fact it was certainly a matter of a sacred proposition of marriage. This followed a pattern in which a family offered one of its daughters to a high chief with a view to obtaining progeny and, through this, a tie of kinship to this illustrious lineage.

The project of arriving at a detailed history of the genesis and hardening of European prejudices, with regard to the colour of the skin, to the exchange of goods, and to sexuality among Pacific peoples, necessitates a wide re-evaluation of European ideology which is currently in progress.^[1] At the same time, it is necessary to rewrite or, often, to commence writing (where nothing has been done up until now) the history of the first contacts case by case and, as far as possible, to do so from the point of view of the indigenous peoples. Marshall Sahlins has already begun doing this for Hawaii, Anne Salmond and her team for Aotearoa-New-Zealand, Greg Dening for the Marquesas, Tahiti and Hawaii, and Jean-François Baré for Tahiti, while Nicholas Thomas has added numerous comparative remarks and has also worked on first contacts in the Marquesas Island(s).^[2] But, until now, only two articles had appeared in relation to Western Polynesia (Linnekin 1991, Grijp 1994). So the present study, which is centred on the first contacts made in Samoa, opens the door to research in this field.

How can one write or rewrite this history when our sources are biased accounts related by voyagers? My approach will be to combine the results of two different types of analysis which I shall term (i) the internal analysis (dealing with original documents such as sea captains’ journals) and (ii) the ethnographic analysis (integrating ethnographic data derived from a later period).

The internal analysis offered here is an examination of voyagers’ original accounts—a procedure that requires examining both published and unpublished materials such as logs and journals. More often than not, even published materials have yet to be scrutinised: some journals have been published in specialised editions which have remained largely unknown (or at least have not yet been carefully studied from this perspective), as is the case for the expeditions of Bougainville or Lapérouse. The internal analysis, then, consists of separating out that which, in an account of historical events and encounters, is a description and that which is already an interpretation. One could argue that a neutral description does not exist, that every description is already, de facto, an interpretation. This is only partially true. While this is certainly the case for any work—a book or journal—considered in its entirety, it does not necessarily hold true for a page—sometimes only a sentence—where one may find a few lines that simply describe a scene preceding an interpretative passage which contains an explanation of what took place. We shall see that this kind of distinction is possible regarding the material relating to Samoa, especially in the case of documents from Lapérouse’s expedition. This has also proved possible regarding the material relating to Bougainville’s visit to Tahiti in a study recently completed (Tcherkézoff in press-1).

The second type of analysis makes use of subsequent ethnographic work, both from the 19th century and from the contemporary period, in order to suggest possible reasons for the various actions carried out by the Polynesians during their 18^th-century encounters with Europeans. This reinterpretation obviously yields results that are very different from the interpretation of Polynesian behaviour made by these first Europeans. The voyagers usually only stayed for a few days, less often for a few weeks, and they did not speak the language of the inhabitants. But it is their accounts of these short sojourns which have underpinned the European tradition of interpreting ‘Polynesian customs’. This interpretative tradition took root in so-called science in Europe as early as 1775 with the regrettable consequence that it continues to inform/deform the anthropological interpretation even of data collected recently.^[3] Shortly after these early encounters, some of the first long-staying residents (beachcombers, then the first missionaries) left accounts that were now based on an intimate knowledge of the language and on observations made over periods that sometimes lasted for several years (Campbell 1998). Furthermore, in certain contexts, the continuity of the cosmological scheme and of some of the vocabulary is quite noticeable, persisting from the time of the early dispersal of first Polynesians, as proved from comparison of data collected from far-flung Polynesian regions (Kirch and Green 2001). Hence, in some cases, the recent work of professional ethnographers may be put to direct use to interpret ancient facts, once these latter have been extracted via the method of internal analysis from the original over-interpreted narratives of the voyagers.

These combined analyses, the internal and the ethnographic, will thus constitute my methodology in the quest to arrive at an anthropology or ethnohistory of the early encounters between Samoans and Europeans.

To this study of first contacts in Samoa, which forms Part One of this book, three shorter studies are added for comparative purposes in Part Two. The first of these takes up the whole question raised by the ‘Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate’ over the Hawaiian and pan-Polynesian interpretation of the nature of the first Europeans, and discusses the past Polynesian conception of chiefs and gods, with comparative examples from the Cook Islands, Tahiti and elsewhere. Polynesians had seen Europeans neither as ‘humans’ nor as ‘gods’ in the Western Judeo-Christian sense, but as material manifestations of spiritual beings sent by the gods-as-principles-of-sacredness, and who, just as these gods could do at will, took on whatever human appearances and attributes they chose. The central point is that, ontologically, Polynesian gods were an invisible principle that could take temporary visible forms (‘images’, ata) of all kinds, each of which was only a partial realisation of the underlying, substantive principle. Now it is the case that Europeans have been treated by Polynesians as if they were such images, temporary visible forms of the particular divine principle. Sahlins has rightly insisted on this point, but it has been missed by his critics who have thought, quite wrongly, that he had simply attributed to the Hawaiians a conception expressed by the bare equation: Cook=Lono=a god (in the Western sense).

Most of the early and recent Western misconceptions about the Polynesian interpretation of Europeans at the time of contact, and much of the recent misreading—among anthropologists (see below chapter 9) and linguists (chapter 11)—of Sahlins’s texts about Captain Cook, rest on a lack of understanding of the past Polynesian system of representing by ‘images’, ata, the world of ‘godly’, atua, entities. Material images of a ‘god’, atua, are themselves said to be ‘atua’, but they remain partial and temporary manifestations of the atua-as-a-principle. The clarification of this point is crucial to the precise formulation of the hypothesis about the Polynesian interpretation of the nature of the first Europeans who appeared in the Pacific in the 16^th to the 18^th centuries.

The second study presented in Part Two (chapter 10) considers the specific role of gifts of cloth (barkcloth, fine mats, etc.) in first contact situations, particularly in Tahiti. Europeans had no conception at all that what they saw merely as ‘cloth’ could, to the Polynesians, be the most ritually efficient and sacred object, specifically designed to attract and make visible the godly forces. They therefore entirely misunderstood the relation between this central role of cloth in ritual and acts of dressing/undressing in dances and formal presentations. When the Polynesians who were undressing themselves were females, the European visitors could only imagine that they were witnessing outbursts of ‘lascivious, lewd and wanton’ behaviour. In fact, the relation between sacred cloth and the body of the (young) female was of a very different kind. Much of the misunderstanding about clothing and nudity directly resulted in implanting or reinforcing the false idea that Polynesian cultures actively promoted sexual liberty.

Finally, the third study in Part Two (chapter 11) brings us back to Samoa. It discusses how Europeans—the missionaries initially—misinterpreted the etymology of the Samoan word Papālagi used to denote the Europeans. The point at issue is the European view—but one attributed to the Polynesians—of the European visitors as ‘sky-bursters’, the missionaries claiming that this was the etymology of the word Papālagi. Here, as would happen again later with Gananath Obeyesekere’s interpretation, a particular Eurocentric ideology based on Christian theological concepts produced a schema that was then projected onto a falsely constructed ‘Polynesian’ worldview, resulting in a gross ethnocentric misinterpretation. It is deeply ironic that it is in fact quite possible that the word Papālagi referred initially to ‘cloth’ and was coined in the context of the first exchanges of cloth, during the earliest encounters (between Tongans and the Dutch), as a recent study by two linguists has suggested (Geraghty and Tent 2001). And this etymological hypothesis refers us back to the theme of the preceding chapter: gifts of cloth, by both parties, played a central role in European/Polynesian first contacts.

The first exchanges of cloth and other goods produced a reciprocal illusion about the nature of the Other. For the Europeans, Polynesians were ‘treacherous partners in barter’; for the Polynesians, Europeans were linked to the spiritual world of ‘atua’ things and entities. Indeed, this book could have borrowed its title from a paper written years ago by the late French anthropologist Daniel de Coppet: ‘First barter, double illusion’.^[4] De Coppet’s article (1973) described the 16^th-century arrival of the Spaniards in the Solomon Islands, the first barter, and called for an anthropology of ceremonial exchanges in past and present Melanesian social organisations to be developed. May this book also pay homage to his memory.