At the end of July 1792, a false rumour about a possible relic of La Pérouse’s passage sent d’Entrecasteaux on a long detour through the Admiralty Islands, north of the island of New Guinea, where the expedition had its first significant interactions with indigenous people (d’Entrecasteaux 1808, 1: 133–42; La Billardière 1800a, 1: 249–69). The negative precedent set by Hawkesworth’s account of the “perfidy of the inhabitants of the southern Admiralty Islands towards [the English navigator] Carteret” in 1767 had inspired “misgivings” in the French, who did not land (Hawkesworth 1773, 1: 382–5; La Billardière 1800a, 1: 251). In the event, however, they were generally impressed by the behaviour of the men who came out to the boats or the ships seeking nails, axes or “bits of iron” in exchange for their foodstuffs, weapons, ornaments and implements. “Only iron,” said d’Entrecasteaux, “seemed to have some value in their eyes” (1808, 1: 138, see also 134–5). The naturalist La Billardière enthused that, by and large, “the exchanges took place with the greatest good faith imaginable,” notwithstanding some early instances of theft (1800a, 1: 260–1, 252–4).

For the naturalist, the only shadow on this idyllic setting of “a fine climate in a fertile island” was the affront dealt to his republican and primitivist sensibilities by acts of violence and cupidity committed by supposed “chiefs” toward their underlings: “We did not expect to see man treated in this way in a tribe which had seemed to us to be so close to the state of nature” (1800a, 1: 255, 252–3, see also 262).^[7] Forty years later, Dumont d’Urville, a republican of far more conservative hue, appropriated this story approvingly in his popular semi-fictional work, Voyage pittoresque autour du monde, as a sign that “a certain social hierarchy existed on these islands” (1834–35, 2: 171). By this stage, the relative level of hierarchy was taken as an unproblematic index of the “degree of [political] perfection” achieved and was one of the complex of “numerous and essential traits … as much moral as physical” by which “races” were presumptively characterised (1832, 3). Each of these judgements is a version of the “uniformitarianism” that has variously but consistently informed European evaluations of alien mores since classical times, but together they exemplify the different moral valences with which such judgments were historically inflected (Porter 1990; Rousseau and Porter 1990, 2). The complacent, racially-based assumption of European superiority evident in the nineteenth-century equation contrasts with the more circumstantial and ambiguous – if no less ethnocentric – eighteenth-century linkages, as will be seen again with respect to Tonga.

I have previously identified a common motif in first-hand Oceanic voyage texts: a rhetorical sequence from relief at approved indigenous conduct or demeanour to positive depictions not only of the character of local people but also of their physical appearance, notwithstanding skin colour or hair type that was often seen as unappealing (Douglas 1999a: 70–3, 2003). These textual elements are indigenous countersigns, oblique reflexes of indigenous strategies and behaviour that have infiltrated voyagers’ representations after being processed in European perception via the unstable dialectic between discourse and experience: “This arduous voyage,” as La Billardière put it, “through seas strewn with reefs, and amongst Savages against whom we had to be continually on guard” (1800a, 1:x). The rhetorical sequence recurs in the d’Entrecasteaux voyage literature, beginning in the Admiralty Islands. It is explicit in La Billardière’s declaration: “If we can judge the character of these inhabitants by their conduct towards us they are extremely mild: a look of goodness was stamped on their features” (1800a, 1: 262). Somewhat earlier in the Relation, the following verbal portrait succeeds several pages of mostly positive description of Islanders’ actions: “These islanders have skin of a not very deep black: their physiognomy is agreeable and differs little from that of Europeans. … they seem happy, if one is to judge by the air of satisfaction imprinted on all their features: they have frizzy hair” (255).

The sequence is equally clear in d’Entrecasteaux’s Voyage: his report of the initially pacific reception received by the French in the Admiralty Islands is followed by the pronouncement that “all displayed an assured air, an open, confident countenance which betokened nothing sinister.” He recounted a similar series of reactions by de Rossel, a lieutenant on the Recherche, who had taken a boat close inshore and been surrounded by a crowd of apparently well-disposed men: “He thought they had a trusting nature; their faces seemed agreeable to him; there is nothing hard in their features; they have a fine stature” (1808, 1: 134–5). Both authors maintained the comforting fiction of welcome by configuring thefts committed during the initial encounter as individual acts of opportunism by certain older men who lacked the “honesty and candour” of the young (d’Entrecasteaux 1808, 1: 135; La Billardière 1800a, 1: 254–6). However, La Billardière’s idealism was consistently more empirical and pragmatic than that of d’Entrecasteaux (see Douglas 1999a, 73–83). His delight in the “marks of great probity” subsequently shown to the French by men at another island in the group was doubly qualified: by astonishment “at encountering so great a difference in the manners of Savages so little separated from each other and with the same arts”; and by a realistic acknowledgment that variations in indigenous conduct might have been strategic since the men the French met initially “had had to deal only with ship’s boats, whereas the others dealt with ships which inspired respect” (1800a, 1: 262).

The overt moral and physical approval of the word portraits was implicitly rehearsed in Piron’s flattering rendition of a Man of the Admiralty Islands in the neoclassical guise of a Greek warrior.^[8] Piron’s drawing was engraved by Copia (figure 6.2) and published in La Billardière’s Atlas as Savage of the Admiralty Islands (La Billardière 1800b, pl. 3; Smith 1960, 110–1). In the introduction to his Relation, La Billardière assured his readers that Piron’s drawings were “strikingly truthful.” The apparent lack of naturalism of this and Piron’s other portraits might sit oddly with the author’s assertion, except that the compliment referred directly to “drawings of costumes … made in the course of the campaign” (1800a, 1:x; my emphasis). Piron’s Admiralty Islander, then, is an example of the venerable classical mode of portraying foreigners that Smith labelled the “ethnographic convention,” which “defines by means of costume and adornment” and represents people “as type specimens, accompanied by detailed verbal descriptions” (Smith 1992, 80–1; Joppien and Smith 1985–87, 1: 8). Indigenous dress and accoutrements, rather than actual physiognomies, were the prime objects of Piron’s artistic endeavours and were understood as such by his shipmates, but so too was his generalised compliment to these particular indigenous subjects.

Artist, Piron; Engraver, Jacques-Louis Copia. Source: La Billardière 1800b: pl. 3. Photograph: Bronwen Douglas.

The “Man/Savage of the Admiralty Islands” is undoubtedly objectified by a Eurocentric aesthetic – a “spirit of heroic humanism,” Smith called it (1960, 111). Yet neither Piron’s picture nor the accompanying text is demeaning to Islanders, racially or otherwise. In sharp contrast, racial preoccupations suffused Dumont d’Urville’s reinscription of La Billardière’s text in Voyage pittoresque to characterise the Admiralty Islanders whom he had not personally seen. “Assuredly,” Dumont d’Urville concluded, “they are one of the finest varieties of the Melanesian race” (1834–35, 2: 171). But this was faint praise given his opinion and ranking of “the Melanesians.” As citizens of Papua New Guinea, Admiralty Islanders are today often classed collectively as Melanesians and identify themselves as such regionally. In these modern indigenised usages, the term has largely shed (or sometimes reversed) the racialised connotations of its ugly history. The term Espèce Mélanienne “Melanian species” was invented in 1825 by the polygenist French soldier-biologist Jean-Baptiste- Geneviève-Marcellin Bory de Saint-Vincent (1778–1846) to designate the “penultimate” of the fifteen separate species into which he divided the human genus (1827 [1825], 1: 82; 2: 104–13). Dumont d’Urville (1826) adopted Mélaniens, “from the dark colour of their skin,” to label one of the “three great divisions” into which he initially classified Oceanian people.^[9] He subsequently reworked Mélaniens into Mélanésiens to name the so-called “black Oceanian race” and characterised them in highly derogatory terms: “disagreeable features”; “often very thin and rarely well-shaped limbs”; “women … hideous”; “far more debased toward the state of Barbarism than the Polynesians and the Micronesians”; “institutions … still in their infancy”; “dispositions and intelligence … very inferior to those of the copper-coloured race”; “natural enemies of the whites” (1832, 6, 11).