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The French round-the-world expedition led by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville was among the first to open up a new era of voyaging in wich discoveries were sought as much for mercantile profit as for the new scientific study of the ‘System of Nature’. This was the second opportunity that Samoans had to see European ships, apart from the supposedly few Samoans who had earlier seen European ships sailing in Tongan and Fijian waters. Nevertheless Bougainville, when he sighted the Samoan islands, thought he was the first European to do so. Behrens’s account, the only one published from the Dutch expedition of 1722, did not give any precise nautical information for the location of the islands that he described in his text. Because Bougainville admired the dexterity of the Samoans as they manoeuvred their canoes around the French ships, he called his island discovery l’Archipel des Navigateurs, the ‘Archipelago of the Navigators’.
The sources for the following discussion are Bougainville’s voyage narrative published in 1771 (an immediate success, and published in English as early as 1772), Bougainville’s journal, and also the various journals written by his companions, including the naturalist Philibert Commerson, the young volunteer Felix Fesche and Prince Nicolas de Siegen-Nassau.[2]
Bougainville’s journal indicates that on 3 May 1768, when he reached the Manu’a group (the three easterly islands of the Samoan archipelago: Ta’ū, Ofu, and Olosega) there were already a number of canoes visible in the distance. On 4 May Bougainville passed between Ta’ū on one side and Ofu-Olosega on the other when a canoe with five men on board approached his ship. The men held up coconuts and ‘roots’. Bougainville noted that the Tahitian navigator he took with him (after departing from Tahiti in mid-April), a man who could find his way among islands several days’ distance from Tahiti, found nothing he recognised in this archipelago and could not make himself understood by the Samoans. The Samoan canoe would not come near the ship, and when Bougainville had one of his small boats put to sea, with the intention of getting nearer to it, the Samoans turned back. Fesche’s journal records that, after this first attempt, Bougainville hotly pursued the Samoan canoe with one of his ships. The Samoans began to shout and jumped into the sea with their coconuts and fowls, also releasing a bird that they had with them (we know from later ethnographic accounts that chiefs were always accompanied by tame birds when they were journeying: the birds were the messengers of the gods).
[1] Where I cite the French text below the English the quotations are my translations from the French original (Bougainville 1771). Where only the English is cited, the quotations are taken from Johann Reinhold Forster’s very accurate translation, published in 1772 (Bougainville 1772b; the pages relating to Samoa are pp. 278-84).
[2] See Bougainville (1771, 1772b); Taillemite (ed. 1977: I: 334-35, for Bougainville’s journal; II: 98, 250-1, 333, 400, 476, for the journals written by Fesche, Vivès, Caro and Commerson).