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Europeans have been labelled ‘Papālangi’ in Western Polynesia (written Papālangi in Tongan, Papālagi in Samoan), apparently since the early contacts. The word is already mentioned in Cook’s narrative. When James Cook was in Tonga in 1777, he noted that this word was used to refer to his expedition as well as to the coming of European boats long before him (this could only have been the Dutch expeditions of the 17th century, the last being Tasman’s expedition more than a century before, in 1643). The Tongans said: (Cook’s transcription) ko e vaka no papalangi ‘the boats of/from the papalangi’ (we shall return to the discussion of the translation). In the Samoan context, the earliest published recording of the word seems to date from a book written in 1837 by the first missionary to Samoa, John Williams. In that text Williams recalled that he heard the word when he arrived for the first time in Samoa in 1830. Before arriving in Samoa, Williams had met in Tonga a Samoan man named Fauea. This man, who had been away from Samoa for some years, was happy to board Williams’s ship. When the party landed in Samoa (Savai’i Island), Fauea addressed his fellows with a speech mentioning the great powers of the ‘papalangis’ (Williams 1841: 282, who adds in a note: ‘Foreigners’). In some cases, Europeans are still dubbed Papālagi in contemporary Pacific languages. Certainly in Samoan this is an absolutely common, everyday word, not in any way a metaphoric ceremonial expression used in special circumstances, nor is it used with either laudatory or derogatory intent.
The word thus predates Cook’s arrival and must have been coined when the inhabitants of the region saw Europeans for the first time: at least when they saw Tasman in 1643 and, perhaps, at the arrival of LeMaire’s expedition in 1616. The latter was the first recorded European encounter, the first experience that Polynesians had of being shot by European muskets and the first occasion when European goods were acquired in the northern islands of the Tongan archipelago—islands that were places of regular passage for Tongans and Samoans. If another word had been coined in 1616, why would it have been replaced in 1643? LeMaire’s actions had, even more than Tasman’s, all the ingredients that dramatically forced the Polynesians to attribute a non-human nature to Europeans.
[1] The sections on the ‘sky-burster’ hypothesis have been published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 108, n°4, 1999 (‘Who said that the 17th-18th centuries Papālagi (‘Europeans’) were ‘sky-bursters’? A Eurocentric projection onto Polynesia’) and are reproduced here (with minor changes) with kind permission of the Society.