Trade and commerce in its various guises was the first and perhaps the major catalyst which brought Pacific Islanders and outsiders together. The port of Sydney was of singular importance in this regard, as the whaling and sealing industry in the Pacific began there as early as 1794. Between 1788, the date of the founding of the Colony of New South Wales, and 1840 there was extremely busy maritime traffic criss-crossing the Pacific (summarised in figure 2.2). Ships came to Sydney from London, via the Cape of Good Hope, bringing colonists, administrators and convicts. On the return journey they sailed north to Canton and Manila, via Fiji or Pohnpei (Ponape), to pick up cargoes of tea and silk. It was obviously unprofitable to sail empty from Sydney to Canton, so the British sought a lucrative cargo to sell to the Chinese. This took the form of sandalwood, beche-de-mer and mother-of-pearl, collected in the Pacific Islands and often brought back to Sydney for loading into larger ships for the voyage to China.

So it was that sandalwood was collected in large quantities in Fiji from the turn of the nineteenth century. As stands were exhausted there by 1811, the traders went as far as the Marquesas as early as 1817 in a rush to obtain this most lucrative commodity. The sandalwood trade was to become a major industry in Melanesia too, after the discovery of large stands on Erromango (Vanuatu) in 1826, its heyday being from approximately 1840–60, both in Vanuatu and New Caledonia (Shineberg 1967). Labourers came from Micronesia and Polynesia to cut and stack the wood ready for shipment, mixing and communicating with Island Melanesians. Apart from whaling and sealing, and the beche-de-mer trade mentioned above, another long distance trade connected Tahiti and Sydney: between 1804 and 1830 more than 3,000,000 pounds of salted pork were imported to Australia from curing plants in today’s French Polynesia.

One of the major ports of call in the Pacific was Pohnpei in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, a convenient lay-over stop between Sydney and Canton, and a very popular lay-over choice with the Pacific whaling fleet (Hezel 1979). Pohnpei was a real melting pot, with a large cosmopolitan population by 1840, consisting of maritime crewmen of many races and Pacific Islanders from all corners of Oceania (Tryon and Charpentier 2004). Communication was carried out mainly in a developing Pacific Pidgin English or South Seas English. There were many other commercial centres in the South Pacific, such as Kosrae, Nauru, Suva and Honolulu, for example.

Drawing courtesy ANU Cartographic Services, RSPAS, ANU, Canberra. Originally published in Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Origins, Growth and Development, co-edited by Darrell T. Tryon and Jean-Michel Charpentier. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, 80. Reproduced with permission of Mouton de Gruyter.

Of course the greatest movement of Pacific Islanders from their home islands occurred from 1863 until 1906, the so-called “blackbirding” period. This was occasioned first by the American Civil War, which created a severe cotton shortage in Europe. Melanesian recruits, first from southern Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) and the Loyalty Islands, went to work on the plantations in Queensland, Fiji, Samoa and New Caledonia. Once the Civil War was over, planters turned to sugarcane and plantations expanded rapidly, as far as remote North Queensland. Melanesian labourers were recruited for a contract period of three years, beginning in southern Vanuatu and slowly moving north to the Solomon Islands by 1870 and the Bismarck Archipelago of today’s Papua New Guinea by 1880. During the forty years of the recruiting period, some 100,000 Melanesians were displaced from their home islands, many for the duration of several contracts (Moore 1985; Shineberg 1999).

As we have seen above, Island Melanesia is characterised by a multiplicity of local distinct vernacular languages, with over one hundred spoken in Vanuatu alone. The recruiters were well aware of this and used to communicate with their charges in what was to become Pacific Pidgin English. They also had a policy of deliberately separating groups of same-language speakers and putting them with speakers of languages from other islands, on the well-known “divide and rule” principle. This had the effect of creating very favourable conditions for the growth and development of Pacific Pidgin, to such an extent that by the mid-1880s a generalised form of Pidgin was spoken across much of the Pacific.

Other vectors which resulted in contact between Pacific Islanders of different language backgrounds were indigenous voyages of exploration, settlement or even conquest. For archaeologists have told us, and linguistic evidence has demonstrated, that there were many deliberate voyages and quite a number of drift voyages around and across the Pacific, the most striking being the surprisingly high number of Polynesian languages spoken in Melanesia and Micronesia, often close to and interacting with existing populations.

Another major vector was the evangelisation of the Pacific, beginning with the arrival of the London Missionary Society clergy in Tahiti in 1797. The Christian message spread rapidly westward, reaching Island Melanesia in 1839. In addition to the European missionaries, Polynesian pastors or “teachers” played an important role in the islands of Melanesia.

Finally, and perhaps of greatest impact, was the colonisation process, whereby European powers, following the Christian missionaries, gradually annexed and colonised the islands of the Pacific, introducing major world languages, such as English, French, German and Spanish.