5. Uncertain Times: Sailors, Beachcombers and Castaways as “Missionaries” and Cultural Mediators in Tonga (Polynesia)

This chapter focuses on a particular period in the history of the first European contacts with Tonga, that is, between 1796 and 1826, a period which was unmarked by any events sufficiently important to have interested contemporary chroniclers or historians, which is why I refer to it as “uncertain times.” But in order to explain my choice of this phase of Tongan history, I would like to first describe the analytic framework within which I have situated my work on “first contacts.”

We may consider “first contacts” as a particular period in the history of cultural globalisation. From this perspective, we have to take into account the fact that this historical phase may vary considerably from one country to another and may be much longer and consequently more heterogeneous than was affirmed when academic interest in this topic began. For Tonga, the very first contact between the indigenous inhabitants and European sailors took place in the year 1616, when the Dutch vessel Eendracht, commanded by Captain Schouten, with the merchant Lemaire on board, visited the archipelago for purely economic reasons. If we agree that the period of first contacts came to an end with the first successful installation of the Christian mission in about 1826, the history of the first contacts in Tonga lasted more than two centuries. Of course, during these two hundred years, all European visitors were not of one type, did not share the same vision of the world and did not have the same intentions toward the populations they encountered. However, a lot of them, particularly those who narrated their adventures in the South Seas, did share, as we shall see, a kind of a common heritage, which appears to be a many-faceted representation of an imagined world of adventure.

The “beginnings” of a situation are always and by their very nature of interest to social scientists, as has been emphasised by Pierre Bourdieu and others. This is the case with these “first contacts.” Certain situations, however, are doubly “beginnings” and this is precisely the case for these “uncertain times” in Tonga. It is a time of “first contacts” in that for the first time the Tongans saw Europeans settle and live on their land; but it also coincides with the commencement of a particularly significant process, Christianisation. However, this period is not well known because, from a European point of view, no decisive events occurred and it was a time of total failure for the first “missionaries.” Accordingly, this period is rarely mentioned in books and articles dedicated to the history of Christian missions.^[1] However, these “uncertain times” are particularly crucial for the understanding of the whole history of “first contacts” in Tonga, because it was during this period that the first European communities settled in the islands. Ten young proselytes of the London Missionary Society and also a small group of white people – runaway sailors, castaways and escaped convicts – became the first white residents of the Tongan islands. For the first time, the indigenous people could observe white people as they really were.

If the European vision of the South Seas may be considered a long-lasting story which began in the sixteenth century, long before the Enlightenment, the representation of Pacific peoples may be considered more complex than the commonly quoted myth of the “noble savage.” As we know, the whole story of the myth of the “noble savage” began on the shores of America at the end of the fifteenth century. The discovery and the conquest of the Americas during the sixteenth century showed the Europeans that peoples existed who could not be confused with the concept of “savage” as it was perceived during the middle ages: a sort of wolf-man, a monster, directly born from the imagination and fears of the medieval age, and much closer to animals than to man. With the discovery of the populations of America, the “savage” became for Europeans a permanent subject of fascination, corresponding precisely to the slow birth of anthropology. Faced by these new peoples, navigators, princes, theologians and missionaries were confronted with the necessity of defining the nature of this new “savage”: those inhabitants of the New World could hardly be relegated to the extreme limits of humanity.^[2] Finally, the conquest of America constrained the pope to take a position.

The first text which speaks about the nature of the “savages” is the papal bull Sublimis deus, promulgated in 1537 by Pope Paul III. This text established the humanity and the divine origin of all the “savages” with whom the Europeans would come into contact. However, the colonisation of the New World led to the slaughter of the Indian populations and the ruin of the pre-Columbian empires, despite the efforts of some men, like Bartolomé de Las Casas, who drew up a veritable indictment of colonisation and pleaded for the defense of the Indian populations, presented as “noble savages.”^[3]

In other words, when the first European voyagers after Magellan sailed into the Pacific waters, they had already, and long before J.J. Rousseau, their vision of the “noble savage.” As it has been suggested by Eric Vibart (1987), it is probable that the European “bad conscience” following the tragic episodes of the American colonisation played a role in the idea that confrontation in the Pacific would not be as disastrous as was the case in America. Nothing echoes these preoccupations more than the myths and legends of the Terra Australis:

The Portuguese Pedro Fernandez de Quirós was, from the start of the exploration of the southern seas, one of the principal architects of the myth of a welcoming, beneficial land, perfect from all points of view as opposed to the violence and corruption of the Western world. Basing himself on the few islands discovered during his expedition, he launched into an a priori description of the Terra Australis. The riches of nature met the needs of all. The inhabitants, white-skinned natives, were represented as easy to approach, convert and civilise, and therefore superior to the American races by their physical and moral qualities. In fact, Quirós’ text prefigured later paintings of Polynesian Edens (cf. Jolly, this volume).

This vision was to be adopted and developed in the narratives called “philosophical odysseys,” which flourished on the eve of the eighteenth century. Among these narratives, we may cite L’Histoire des Sévarambes (Vairasse d’Alais 1715). In this book, originally published in 1675 in London, England, Denis Vairasse d’Alais, who claimed as authority Plato and Thomas More, presented an ideal city, where community law created perfect harmony between the individual and society (Vibart 1987, 28ff.), where everything – families, institutions, trade associations, groups – was in permanent osmosis. This ideal city was also a veiled criticism of the France of Louis XIV.^[4]

All these philosophical travellers’ tales preceded, and up to a point prepared for, the rapid development in the eighteenth century of the natural history of man. People turned away from their religious preoccupations and made man the centre of their literary and philosophical discourse. For natural philosophers, men were not united by a common genesis, but by their common – therefore universal – nature, source of both highly civilised societies and the most remote tribes. This natural history of man was born in England with Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651), then Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690). For the latter, we know that the state of nature was a state where all were free, equal and independent, the only obligation being to conform to the law of nature. The necessity of respecting this natural law imposed the creation of a civil society (Two Treatises of Government, 1690). These writers were the precursors of what will later be called “cultural primitivism.”

These examples are sufficient to show that Europeans had “invented” the South Seas and their inhabitants, even before they were “discovered”. We can say that the arrival of the Europeans in the Pacific, and particularly in Polynesia, fleshed out an imaginary preconception built up over nearly two centuries. European travellers would come to the South Seas at different times and with very different, even divergent, ideas. However, “all show a strong intellectual proclivity, based on three elements: the American heritage, the myth of the South Seas and the principles of the natural history of man” (Vibart 1987, 46).

To conclude this long introduction and before turning to my discussion on Tonga, I would like to add a brief remark about one of the items which was exchanged between Europeans and Pacific Islanders: writing. Writing is, of course, both a knowledge and skill, and in the relations between the Europeans and the Pacific Islanders it had a status equivalent to that of healing. Many accounts show that writing and healing were both considered by indigenous people as practices related to religious and cosmic forces. But we have also to take into account that, in these societies of oral culture, the discovery and learning of writing not only transformed the system of oral transmission but also had profound effects on cognitive processes and social organisation as a whole.^[5]