Authors of this volume assume that there is a possibility to read past European narratives “against the grain” and to there discern glimpses of what the people of the place thought when they first encountered newcomers, whom they called haole, papalagi, popa`a, waet man or salsaliri.^[4] If the potential of a dialogical use of later ethnography and early narratives is posited, it means that, in part, early European narratives can convey, at least sometimes, in some passages, even if in highly mediated form, indigenous insights.

This may seem a rather presumptuous or naïve assertion for two reasons. Firstly, how can we assume the possibility of interpreting what Oceanic people thought about the first Europeans and their strategies in relation to them when we are talking of the years 1606 or 1768, or even 1929? Is this not again succumbing to the Eurocentric view that exotic societies remain immobile, that their cultures are unchanging, frozen in eternal traditions (see Jolly 1992b) and that we can interpret events of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries through cultural schemes elaborated from ethnographic research in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries?

The answer to this first objection is difficult and complex. Oceanic societies have doubtless always been dynamic, but the velocity of transformation and the rhythms of sociocultural change may differ by epoch and social domain (Tcherkézoff 2005). So, in the Samoan case, the study of the chiefly system suggests marked discontinuity, with major ruptures during the nineteenth century, when “chief” became gradually equivalent to “family head,” during the German colonial period and then during the New Zealand mandate and, again, when chiefly suffrage was abolished in the 1990s (Tcherkézoff 2000). In contrast, Tcherkézoff contends that the material and symbolic structures of the Samoan house have remained virtually unchanged since the first European descriptions (in 1787 by La Pérouse) and the first Western graphic representations (in 1838 by Dumont d’Urville) until the 1980s at least. Thus, Tcherkézoff (this volume) felt authorised to use some contemporary clues about the house, derived from his own ethnography from the 1980s, to reinterpret one aspect of the La Pérouse narratives of the first sexual encounters with the French, as they transpired inside a Samoan house in 1787.

Moreover, sometimes, the “later ethnography” which is used to interpret voyage texts comes not from professional anthropologists but from traders, settlers or missionaries, who were resident shortly after the brief sojourns of the first “discoverers.” So, in the case of Tahiti and Tonga, Morrison and Mariner were Europeans who were there for a long time, mastered the language and were integrated into local society, only a few decades after the early French or British voyagers. In the Tahitian case, the knowledge derived from Morrison’s stay in 1789–91 allowed Tcherkézoff to critically evaluate assertions made by Wallis, Bougainville and Cook on their brief sojourns in 1767–69 (Tcherkézoff 2004a).

A second reason which seems to preclude the possibility of gaining any knowledge from past European narratives is of course their ideological and Eurocentric bias. No doubt, all of them were written in the service of an authority: the Spanish court who desired to find new lands filled with gold and unsaved souls (see Jolly, this volume); the French and British navigators, naturalists and naval officers, with their “enlightened” but proto-imperialist views (see Douglas, Jolly, Merle, and Tcherkézoff, this volume); and the more overtly colonial and racist agendas of the nineteenth-century fictions and expeditions in PNG (see Ballard, Mosko, Bonnemère and Lemonnier, this volume). Does this mean that these narratives are so biased that each sentence was determined by the Eurocentric agenda of the expedition? This is more or less what Gananath Obeyesekere has implied when, discussing the topic of “cannibalism in the South Seas,” he imputed (1998, 2003) that nothing factual could be sustained, since all such ethnographic information was derived from European narratives of voyagers, missionaries, administrators and, we might add, anthropologists.^[5]

But, as some of the chapters of this volume demonstrate, all such narratives yield ethnographic insights, albeit episodically and even if such “descriptions” are insinuated as curiosities, as exotic interludes. Moreover, we can discriminate between genres of writing, between the official, authorised narratives written for the King, the Navy, the colonial administration, the mission congregation or a learned public and those journals written without intention of publication, sometimes as intimate notes for friends and families, which often seem less burdened by preconceived agendas and more open to unfolding and expected events. There is much that can be done by comparing different or rival narratives (see Jolly 1992a; and Jolly, this volume, on Quirós’ 1606 voyage and Cook’s second voyage in Vanuatu); by comparing passages within the same text (as between the generalising depiction and the narration of specific events, for instance, in La Pérouse on Samoa mentioned above and Tcherkézoff, this volume) and by comparing representations between texts and images (see Jolly 1992a; Douglas 1999a and this volume). As Tcherkézoff suggests, often the most useful passages or images are those where the author or artist admits that he (it is almost always he) does not understand what is going on, and their textual and visual authority is suffused with, or even subverted by, greater reflexivity and uncertainty.

Many chapters in this volume demonstrate the potential of reading and looking “against the grain,” revealing through deconstructive exercises how “facts” are created from Oceanic experiences and how authorial positions are made authoritative. Such exercises do not entail a nihilistic rejection of the “truths” of such experiences, but the insistence on the partiality of any representation, as both incomplete and inclined to a certain view (see Thomas 1997b). The authors in this volume try to avoid the reinscription of the excessive power of Europeans by seeing Europeans as the authors of compelling illusions or mere fabulations. Such reinscriptions not only risk crediting Europeans with more power than they had but occlude the potent visions of Oceanic peoples, as Sahlins (1995) has argued so passionately in debate with Obeyesekere.

But what of Douglas’ argument about “indigenous countersigns” in colonial texts and images? She elaborates an argument long ago advanced by Smith (1985 [1960]) that the events of Oceanic encounters are central to emergent and changing European representations. She argues that whether the reception of Europeans was pacific or violent was crucial in determining the positive or negative evaluation of the morality and beauty of different peoples, and that indigenous countersigns are “camouflaged” in European representations. So the resistance of Kanak to Europeans (and their alleged cannibalism) is represented in Piron’s pencil drawing of “Man of Balade” and Copia’s re-presentation as “Savage of New Caledonia hurling a spear” (see figure 6.4). The confrontational pose of the warrior, his penis and testicles prominently displayed, is not just a sign of individual bellicosity but, for Douglas, represents a “countersign of confrontational collective agency,” surely an ideal type, though grounded in the facts of Kanak resistance. But although this was contrasted with the hospitality and sociality of the inhabitants of the “Friendly Islands” (Tonga), the open opposition of the Kanak was adjudged more favourably than the stealth and cunning of the Tongans (Douglas, this volume).

Douglas’ reading of d’Entrecasteaux’s voyage is almost solely derived from the primary voyage sources and contemporaneous metropolitan texts (with some allusions to later secondary sources). Unlike many other authors in this volume she does not articulate these with subsequent historical or ethnographic materials, authored by Europeans or indigenous peoples, since, as she argues, “[t]he details of indigenous motivations, the content of their strategies, the meanings of their words and actions reported in long-ago encounters with European voyagers are now difficult, if not impossible, to recover, even where rich local traditions subsist” (this volume).

Yet, other authors in this volume suggest that this task, though necessarily speculative, is not impossible, as Douglas’ argument about “countersigns” here and her attempts elsewhere to recuperate the indigenous agency of Pacific women surely suggests (Douglas 1999b). Tcherkézoff’s radically different reading of early sexual encounters in Samoa and Tahiti would not have been possible without the suggestive ethnographic insights of later missionaries and settlers and his own linguistic and cultural knowledge derived from decades of ethnographic research with Samoans. Moreover, it is important to stress that the difference is not just between the European archive and indigenous oral history, since from the nineteenth century, and primarily as part of the process of Christian conversion, Pacific people have also been the authors of written texts, both in Oceanic and introduced metropolitan languages. Noenoe Silva (2004) has recently rewritten the history of Hawaiian resistance to the overthrow of the monarchy in the 1890s on the basis of the rich local traditions of Hawaiian language newspapers, and Kame`eleihiwa (1992) earlier used Hawaiian language texts as well as European sources in her retelling of Hawaiian history and the dispossession of Hawaiian land.

Douaire-Marsaudon (this volume) explores the complicated ways in which Tongans embraced writing. Not only missionaries but also the beachcombers they deplored were central to the status that writing assumed. Not only the Christian message but also the medium of the Bible, written hymns and catechisms were appropriated and indigenised. Writing, with its power to communicate and control at a distance, was connected to the sacred power of the chiefs and, indeed, invested with a mystical status, as having the capacity to heal as well as reveal. Further west in the Pacific, others have observed how channelling the power of writing has been fundamental to anticolonial and millennial movements in Fiji and PNG (Kaplan 1995; Derlon 1997) and how suspicions that certain parts of texts have been withheld by Europeans or crucial documents have been lost is still a central tenet of many local movements for reparation for past colonial wrongs or restitution of imagined futures (Lattas 1998; Miyazaki 2004).