Table of Contents
Besides the scientific expeditions in the Pacific, which were under way by the 1760s, issuing mainly from England and France, and the military-diplomatic expeditions, which began in the late 1830s, a whole fleet of whalers and trading vessels invaded Pacific waters from the end of the 18th century and during the first half of the 19th century. The whalers extracted oil from the harpooned whales by heating. The merchants were searching for sandalwood and bêche-de-mer (and furs in the North Pacific), which they took to Manila and Canton, and returned with tea. Soon after, the trade for coconut oil, first transported in its liquid form, later as copra (dried flesh of the nut), greatly increased shipping traffic. The Pacific thus suffered an invasion by these ships beginning in the late 1790s. But as we have seen, the Samoan archipelago remained relatively isolated for some time. Until the late 1820s and early 1830s, ships looked elsewhere for provisions of water and food during their whaling campaigns or their search for sandalwood. Kotzebue’s narrative of his visit in the mid-1820s, published in English only in 1830, was the first ‘discoverer’s’ narrative to inform captains that the contact could be pacific. Although Kotzebue still described the Samoans as the ‘most ferocious people’, he himself had never been attacked by them.
But even before the publication of Kotzebue’s account, tales from whalers had begun to change the reputation of Samoa. Thanks to the detailed study of Rhys Richards (1992), we know for certain that the traffic within Samoan waters remained very low until the mid-1830s. In the previous ten years there were less than a dozen visits. But those returning on these ships told that the reputation of Samoa was perhaps inaccurate and that, in any case, the islands there had much to offer in terms of provisions of wood, water and fresh food. In 1834 and 1835, the number of recorded visits suddenly jumped to forty-two . The first permanent establishment of missionaries in Samoa also occurred in the year 1836. This followed on from short visits by Methodists from Tonga in the late 1820s and the pioneering visit of John Williams for the London Missionary Society in 1830 and 1832, not to mention the presence of the small group of Tahitian and Rarotongan ‘teachers’ left in Samoa by the same Williams from 1830.
Ships brought beachcombers (seamen quitting their job or escaped convicts from Botany Bay); and the news that established adventurers were present brought new ships, because captains knew that they would find people who could act as interpreters and intermediaries with the local inhabitants. Beachcombers made their profit in two ways: by offering their services to captains of incoming ships; and living off the backs of the islanders by exploiting the prestige that accrued to them from their specialised knowledge (iron instruments, firearms) and activity (military adviser and firing man in local wars, blacksmith, carpenter) (Ralston 1977, Campbell 1998).
In Samoa, from 1836, missionaries posed a challenge to these adventurers, as they now themselves assumed the role of intermediaries and interpreters. From 1839, newly established ‘consuls’ from Great Britain or the United States also began to play their part. Britain initiated the trend in Samoa with a ‘vice-consul’, W.C. Cunningham, while the ‘consul’ (and former missionary) George Pritchard was based in Tahiti. Later, when Pritchard was expelled by the newly French colonial administration, he took up the position in Samoa.[1] From 1839, regular trading was active. Commercial exports from Samoa were taking place in 1842: J. C. Williams, the son of John Williams, the pioneer missionary, established himself as a trader and began to export coconut oil. The German firm Godeffroy and Son arrived in the late 1850s and started the copra-drying process. The commercial plantation system was established in the mid-1860s.
But let us return to the 1820s. The first commercial ship was a whaler, which apparently came in 1824 but no documentation is available (Richards 1992: 20). The second or third visit would have been in 1827. It was made by Captain Benjamin Vanderford on the Clay.
[1] And was briefly succeeded by his son William, the author of Polynesian Reminiscences, to whom we owe the second earliest first-person account of a Samoan marriage (see chapter 3, section 5).